Chris wrote recently about some parallels between Spanish bank BBVA’s deal with Google and The Marketing Practice’s own experience of running IT in the cloud. There are a few marketing lessons that are worth taking as well from the story (Google’s largest enterprise software deal, covered here by the BBC).

It’s interesting that a lot of the commentary in the BBC’s article is from BBVA’s Director of Innovation. Not a job role commonly considered in broad-brush “target the IT Director” or “sell to the Business” marketing campaigns. And certainly missed by anyone concentrating only on “c-level”. But this is exactly the kind of person that makes an ideal target for marketing activities – someone with a vested interest in bringing new ideas into the business and who presumably isn’t bombarded with speculative sales messages.

So next time you’re considering data requirements for a marketing programme, consider if you should be looking for the equivalent. Heads of Sales Operations (for CRM projects) and Finance Directors within the IT department (for projects designed to take cost out of IT) are a couple of other examples that spring to mind of roles that are less obvious but often more relevant for campaigns. And then there are the “special project directors” and their equivalents who you only tend to find through deeper company research, on-going campaigning or (in the longer term) through smart inbound marketing activities.

Aside from that, other parts of the article highlight interesting messages/consequences of this kind of deal:

“BBVA stressed that customer data and key systems would “stay in our own data centres” and be completely separate from the cloud solution.” – Risk aversion is clearly here to stay.

“A bigger worry will be whether BBVA’s computer network will be able to cope with the sharp rise in network traffic that cloud-computing solutions demand.” – Highlights the comms infrastructure opportunities driven by cloud computing and high-bandwith activities like video conferencing.

“The biggest challenge for BBVA and other firms switching to cloud computing could indeed be cultural issues.” – Suppliers marketing ‘revolutionary’ cloud solutions often forget the wider organisational change barriers facing their clients; these are ripe topics for content to demonstrate how a supplier can share advice and offer support.

“Also driving the change was the increasing mobility of the bank’s workforce. A lot of the bank’s computing needs had moved to smartphones, tablets, laptops and computers at home.” – Mobility and consumerisation are starting to live up to the hype!

John Crane, former CIO of National Australia Bank, spoke at The Marketing Practice’s Sales & Marketing Forum about how suppliers could more effectively reach decision-makers in his position.

The slides give an overview of what suppliers need to know about the role of a CIO in a retail bank, how they work as part of an exec team, how they interact with the rest of the business, and how their department may be structured.

There are also some prompts for suppliers looking for closer sales and marketing relationships with CIOs (including the question of whether the CIO is the right target in the first place…).

Obviously John’s just a market of one, but in some ways this detailed ‘day in the life’ info is more useful than a thousand surveys about key issues/priorities…

The answer is in the cloud…

Last month Spanish bank BBVA announced it was switching its 110,000 staff to use Google’s range of enterprise software for internal comms. The deal is the largest Google has signed for its web-based productivity services and, with the deal in an industry widely regarded as being one of the most conservative due to its high security requirements and strict regulations, it re-opens the question about cloud solutions (For more detail on the deal check out the BBC News website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16486796).

TMP has some experience with Cloud solutions. Last September we moved to a hosted email system from an in-house system. Our experience so far has been very positive: there hasn’t been any downtime, we’ve all got more mailbox storage (good for those of us who use Outlook as a filing system) and we can work from anywhere without using a clumsy VPN connection to connect to the office.

But, there are a few other sides to the cloud story. As BBVA were keen to explain, they made the decision to go cloud not to save costs but to increase flexibility. The cost-saving argument is an interesting one to try to measure. In our case, we moved from an on-site Exchange server that was fully paid for a licenced to a per-user cost paid monthly and hence saw a cost increase – somewhat different from the 50% and 70% saving Google reckons its customer saves.

Flexibility is much easier to recognise, though. As BBVA CIO Jose Olla remarked, when workers have access to the information they need on-demand from any internet-connected device, they be able to be more flexible, make more accurate decisions and, most importantly, eliminate waste – which eventually circles back as a cost saving.

In practice, there are lots of things to weigh up when considering a move to the cloud, not least of which is what happens if something goes wrong. Cloud systems achieve their cost savings by working more efficiently than in-house computing. Firms like Amazon Web Services run their servers at 90% capacity where most enterprises leave 80% of their IT idle (as necessity dictates – they require burst capacity in the event of a peak in usage).

BBVA intends to use Google for their internal comms, leaving other parts of the business untouched. While it will be interesting to see how successful this is (it shouldn’t take a complex Google search to find stories of adoption failures) it does minimise risk of a crippling failure. In the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons (the baddies) were able to defeat the Colonial fleet (the goodies) by hacking their integrated systems. The old and ready-to-be-retired Galactica, which had no integrated systems but was based on slower, manual processes, was immune to their attacks and so survived. Which is a geeky analogy to illustrate that Cloud services do present a point of failure.

Any company putting all their eggs into one basket must weigh up the inherent risk of that basket being dropped and their business having downtime – and when a supplier is at fault it’s not like you can just shout at your internal IT to fix it. The good news, of course, is that the supplier will probably have lots of people shouting at them to fix it so the incentive to repair the problem will be pretty high.

When we talk about objectives for marketing, it’s easy to overlook ’speed to market’. But a few times in the last couple of weeks it’s come up as a big opportunity – something that is relatively easy to improve and which can have a fundamental affect on business results. Three ways it can help you:

1. Being the first to talk to customers and prospects about a new proposition (topics like consumerisation or the cloud lose their shine slightly by the 5th time you hear about them!).
2. Generating early interest so that you have some opportunities ready and waiting when sales need them (rather than waiting for sales to ask and then having a further wait of weeks/months before a campaign delivers results).
3. Responding to something in the news or something that’s happened to a prospect within a timeframe that’s still relevant. PR is very good at this of course – but marketing often struggles. Some of our most successful campaigns have happened when we’ve got it right and responded to news or an announcement in ‘near-real-time’.

I remember a few years ago when an RBS manager defrauded the bank of £21m (it’s an interesting story – http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-389418/The-bank-boss-21m-fraud.html – including the irony that he was named business manager of the year 3 times). One day after the news broke, we contacted risk/anti-fraud/anti-money laundering contacts in financial services to explain how a client’s software could have detected and prevented the fraud. One of the most successful campaigns we’ve ever run.

So if we bear these advantages in mind (more relevant to the audience, ahead of sales demand, ahead of the competition), maybe we can make a stronger case for streamlining the process when it really counts.

On the other hand, it did take me a week from having a conversation about this to writing a post on it, so maybe we’re doomed to remain behind the times…

At a strategic level, aligning sales and marketing can mean embarking on a major organisational change programme. Sometimes it only happens when there’s a change in personnel at the top. Waiting and hoping for that to happen can be very frustrating for professional marketers ‘stuck’ in a company that doesn’t give them scope to make a difference to business results.

But I think there’s a ‘ground-up’ approach that can be more effective, simpler – and certainly more fulfilling – than waiting for some seismic organisational change to happen.

Every campaign can be aligned with sales at a more practical level to create the kind of programme we can all be proud of.

You often hear marketers complaining that ‘we hand leads over to sales and nothing happens with them’. Assuming that these are good opportunities in the right organisations, the difference can come down to how well engaged sales were with the campaign. Does the number/quality of leads match up to what sales need to hit their targets? Do they know how the leads were generated and qualified? Do they know what content converted these leads? Do they have the relevant materials to help them run meetings or follow up with the leads?

It’s also important from the perspective of your prospects. Does the handover to your sales team feel like a natural continuation of the journey that your marketing campaign took them on? Does the sales meeting or call live up to the promises that your marketing made in terms of the value they would get from taking this next step?

The six steps to getting your sales team fully on board

1.     Make sure that marketing is pitching what sales are selling – and vice versa

There’s often tension between marketing’s desire to campaign around strategic business issues and big ‘solutions’ that shift the audience’s perception of a company’s offerings, and sales’ need to be out pitching things that they know people can buy, the company can deliver and they are comfortable selling. In reality, both sides can learn from each other and there is usually a happy medium where elements of the campaign can be pitching the big vision and providing sales with materials to be more comfortable in strategic conversations, while also creating ‘point’ sales opportunities around specific products/solutions. But unless you work with sales upfront to agree this ‘happy medium’, don’t expect sales to be effortlessly engaged by the ‘opportunities’ that your campaigns deliver.

It’s about mixing an ‘outside-in’ approach (aligning campaigns to audience needs) with the best elements of the traditional ‘inside-out’ approach (running campaigns around what your business is best at and where you have a track record).

2.     Use the sales team as a source of messaging and content

Marketing often turns to product teams, customers or even external analysts for input when creating content and messaging plans. But running sessions with sales can also be highly productive – both in terms of ideas for content and messages, and also in ensuring that sales feel part of the campaign from the start. Here are some good questions to ask your salespeople:

• Who is your best customer? What makes them unique?
• Can you talk through some recent deals that you’ve won? How did they come in as a prospect? Why did we win?
• And some deals that you’ve lost – why did we lose? Who/what did they go with instead?
• What alternatives do prospects have? What solutions do they typically have in place, what are the consequences of doing nothing, what’s the competitive landscape?
• Are there any specific elements of the overall solution that you use as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to open up wider deals?
• What kind of questions/issues are buyers typically struggling with in the first sales meetings?
• What do you typically talk through in your first sales meetings?
• If you were approaching someone ‘cold’ and making the case about why they should meet you, what would you say?
• Are there any resources/presentations that you think work best as leave-behinds/prompts that move people along the sales process?

3.     Properly define what makes a ‘lead’ relevant to sales and how many they need

It’s not just about handing over BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timescale) qualified leads to sales. Sales may actually want something completely different – a smaller number of earlier stage opportunities with named accounts, coupled with better market intelligence and relationships for the future.

Try to:

• Uncover potential opportunities within named accounts that sales weren’t actively working;
• Build intelligence across all named accounts and strengthen relationships with decision-makers;
• Nurture the wider addressable market with the goals of building a long-term reputation and mapping the potential for future years to support a re-alignment of the sales team.

Marketers also need to be confident setting the right targets, which involves asking some tough questions (it’s surprising how many sales teams may not readily know the answers!). What’s the business target? How many deals are needed? What’s the typical conversion rate (and what will the conversion rate be for the type of lead defined above)?

4.     Understand what resources sales are really using

We need to understand what assets and resources sales will find most useful both to generate their own meetings and use during/after the meetings that are booked.

We researched ten salespeople from one of our clients and these waere their top four requests:

• More proactive content about where the company is going in the future – a video or one sheet summary;
• Fewer, more targeted presentations with standard templates;
• Information on competitors and how they are better (supported with examples);
• More case studies and creative examples.

5.     Brief sales on the campaign plan, calls to action and content.

And keep briefing them as the rollout happens. Include links to relevant campaigns/content with leads that are handed over so they can see the materials that prospects have already received. Also, supply ideas of presentations they can use for their next steps.

On a recent European campaign we even included a tool that helped Sales search for relevant content or tools according to the kind of meeting they were going to.

6.     And, of course, your sales and account teams are also a channel to market

Leverage the social media profile of the sales team; they can pull through blogs and SlideShare presentations to their LinkedIn profiles, and you can prompt them with ideas of content/views to share on twitter or in LinkedIn groups. If sales are fully engaged with a campaign, they’ll also be taking the proposition direct to their best prospects. One of the big wins of your campaign could be how well educated sales are on the proposition and audience issues it solves.

In summary, for every external campaign there’s an equivalent internal programme to engage sales that is just as important. You can generate all the leads in the world, but if sales aren’t engaged or equipped to follow them up then it can easily come to nothing.