The world has changed in the last two years, and the one thing everyone agrees on is that it’s not going back to how it was anytime soon. In a paper only just published, McKinsey has called it “The New Normal” – a fundamentally different business environment.

This watershed moment has left many B2B marketers high and dry, so we’ve decided to take an in-depth look at what has really happened, what the new world order means for marketers, and what you should be doing about it. Over the coming months, this blog will feature 5 major articles, with accompanying downloads, to help you to adapt to this brave new world:

1. What happened? What’s wrong with what we used to do? Why isn’t it working any more? There’s a growing call for a new style of marketing, and the impetus to make a change for good, but where’s this coming from?
2. What’s still working in this post-watershed marketing environment? Which marketing models and techniques are bearing fruit? From provocation propositions to adaptive campaigning models, we separate the babies from the bathwater.
3. What’s new? A look at the trends that will shape our industry over the coming year. We’ll be looking at the best B2B examples out there and taking inspiration from some unexpected places.
4. Working with sales. In the post-watershed world, a closer relationship with sales is imperative. How can you integrate with them, solve the data challenges and work out lead targets? We investigate the rise and rise of account-based marketing and bid marketing techniques.
5. Structuring to deliver it. Finally we take a look at how B2B marketing departments can gear up to deliver in a post-watershed world. What will the B2B marketing department of the future look like and what can you do now to get a head start?

Sign up now via RSS or email (top right hand side of this blog) to receive these articles as soon as they are published. If there’s anything you’d like to see covered in this Watershed Series then let me know by adding a comment underneath this post.

The 2009 B2B Barometer report, from the IDM, ABBA and Circle Research has just been released. It’s been designed to give an insight into the goals, trends, channel preferences, areas of budget allocation and investment priorities of B2B marketers.

A specific section of the report focuses on what the 100 B2B marketers interviewed for the study are working on right now, and has uncovered 5 major areas, based on an entirely open questions. I’ll go on to cover these 5 in detail at the end of the post – but first some thoughts on the study’s broad findings. 

My major conclusion is that marketers appear to be attempting to demonstrate ever-more rapid and cheaper results (especially around lead generation) without claiming the time and investment they need up front to support the delivery of those results in the first place. For example, the study shows that long term programmes such as research, marketing strategy and brand identity are losing favour in the face of competition for budget from social media, email campaigns and website development.

Whilst it’s true that online is cheaper, faster and one of the first places that prospects will go to look for something, B2B marketers must be cautious to keep the baby in its bathwater. In this digital rush, we mustn’t forget that we still need to say something compelling over these channels (that’s where market research comes in, even if we need to use new channels to conduct that research)… and that we need to be saying it to the right people (clean and accurate database with agreed sales interaction processes). Without the right platforms in place – data, propositions, mechanisms – marketing programmes are doomed to failure, be they online, offline or a blend.

As I said in the intro to this post, the ”Key marketing priorities” section of the report is one of the most interesting – focusing as it does on the 5 big things your B2B peers are struggling with right now.

These 5 biggest priorities cited by the study are reproduced in bold below, grouped into 3 major areas (data, online and ROI). I’ve interwoven these with suggestions on how to get tackle each priority:

 -Strengthening online presence through improved website content, visibility and interaction and enhancing the effectiveness of email marketing

-Obtaining a better understanding of new media and how best to integrate this with more traditional forms of communication

Enough of the new/social media black magic! Surely the most useful understanding of new media any of us can possibly gain comes from truly getting under the skin of how our clients and potential clients are using it now and will use it in the future. Your time to engage new prospects is short enough without demanding that they use an unfamiliar site or technology to boot. We need to think through the lifecycle of interaction during the go-to-market process and build online and offline tools to support that.

Speak to customers and prospects face to face about the way they’re really using the web. Whilst they are unlikely to blog or contribute to websites, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t reading them. They are still highly likely to be searching for articles and downloads to help them create a presentation or research a new tool or service. Ask what is meaningful and useful to the prospect, what will support the campaign’s goals and what makes the prospect’s life easier.

Don’t get hung up on generating an online debate or getting oodles of feedback – Jakob Nielsen highlights that only 1% of any online community actively contribute and the rest effectively “lurk”. The goal with online is ultimately the same as online - position the offer and attract people to it in the first instance, then support the building of a relationship, the sale, and the growth of that relationship going forward. Do this through the provision of great content and fantastic service.  Also, what about the prospects and customers of the future? Having grown up in the web generation, you need to keep an eye on what they’ll want in the future too.

-Cleansing and maintaining accurate and up-to-date customer and prospect details

Data is the foundation of any great marketing programme, and an essential nut to crack for both customer and prospect programmes. Most programmes fall down when they say “we must sort the data issue” and then acse investment immediately once it’s been cleansed. It’s something you should budget to make a never-ending investment in. Brian Carroll makes the point that “the quality the marketing database can influence your lead generation or nurturing program’s success by a factor of 50 percent.” Keep it current through continuous campaigning and a good information sharing process. Data is also one of the ultimate crossover points between Sales and Marketing, so it’s critical to put good people on data projects and commit to them in the longest term.

 -Deriving the maximum value from marketing budgets – making them work to the fullest extent- at a time of budget cuts. 

-Measuring the return on marketing investment – but in reality often the return on sales investment – at a time when budgets are tight and marketers are being asked to justify and substantiate marketing spend.

Consider allocating budget by priority rather than channel or activity (I saw data from AMR Research recently that showed “lead generation” as the primary marketing objective of 70% of B2B marketers, but it was rated third in the list of activities by spend allocation). Also, ensure that you’re budgeting from scratch for this quarter’s or year’s programmes and ask hard questions about everything on there (the old adage, do what you’ve always done, get the same results).

Don’t fight against programmes measured by sales-driven metrics, in a recession they’re here to stay. Instead be sure that you don’t sign up to a lead target in the absence of solid knowledge. Look at the sales cycle, the buying patterns, the previous history of the prospect or customer group the programme is targeted at before committing.

We are pleased to be able to offer clients of The Marketing Practice a free copy of the B2B Barometer report, normally £100. Please speak to Paul Everett on +44 (0) 1235 833233 to obtain your copy.

Microsoft’s Chief Executive Steve Ballmer gave the CBI’s annual lecture this week.

Describing the recent recession as a complete economic “reset” Ballmer covered two areas in his lecture that are of interest to IT marketers.

The drive for a “new efficiency”: automation and information are critical

Ballmer commented that the number one objection he gets from CEOs about the IT industry is ‘I spend a lot on IT but I still can’t seem to lay my hands on the information I want, when I want it.”

Making a strong plea for further information and automation to drive out of recession, Ballmer said that the trick now is to identify things that will generate real productivity and innovation growth. H said that companies would need now, more than ever, to do more with less.

Arguing that whilst many businesses claim to be automated, incredibly few actually achieve it in any way that sets them apart meaningfully, Ballmer stressed IT’s role in turning paper processes into digital ones.

He commented that there was an accepted wisdom that new technologies had 40 year “innovation run” before they became mainstream. He used the example of the steam era. He said that he felt the computer world had seen a 60 year run to date, but that he could see more opportunity for innovation in the next 5-10 years than ever before. Ballmer put this down to IT’s ultimate flexibility – from PCs that will physically become ‘digital paper’ in the next few years through to PC applications that revolutionise paper-based processes and will allow pertinent information to flow to us when we need it.

Microsoft’s main measurables during the downturn

Most interestingly for us marketers, Ballmer told the CBI that Microsoft is focusing on market share and customer satisfaction as the two major measures of its success for the foreseeable future. Ballmer made the point that in a volatile market, revenues are no longer a “controllable” factor whereas market share and customer happiness are.

Along with the recession has come much advice for businesses to focus on keeping their existing customers. Perhaps this is a golden opportunity for marketers to demonstrate to the board exactly how much marketing programmes can protect and extend those key customer relationships.

You will often hear an IT company saying, ‘buyers don’t understand the cloud’, and using that as a justification for either (a) not saying anything about it, or (b) launching into a grand programme to define the cloud for CIOs.

But in the background, buyers are creating specific plans for the elements of the cloud they want to use now. What vendors really need are some focused examples of problems their solutions can solve, not high level positioning of where they fit amongst SaaS, IaaS, PaaS…

Perhaps more significantly, all this talk of ‘as a service’ is starting to extend to non-cloud conversations and contracts. The FT’s recent article, Outsourcing begins to blur into services, shares a range of views on providing more flexible pricing and resourcing models on wider IT Services contracts. In an interesting section 3/4 of the way through the article, there are some good CIO viewpoints:

Simon Post, CTO at Carphone Warehouse: “Flexibility is vital to us, not just in the infrastructure space, with IBM, but also for applications. Retailers have shorter buying cycles than other businesses, so we do need to gear up and gear down quickly.” According to the article, “Buying IT services on a pay-per-use basis is certainly on the agenda at Carphone Warehouse”.

Richard Boynet, CIO at Electrocomponents: “when our current data centre contract runs out, we are looking at multiple options from virtualisation, to taking some of that [capacity] as a service. We might, for example, use a vendor such as Amazon to stress-test the next release of our main IT systems.”

So to summarise, by the start of 2010, if you have a cloud offering you will need the specific examples of where people can use it (which may sound obvious, but is currently surprisingly thin on the ground). And even if you are keeping your head above the cloud (sorry), you will still be coming up against competitors for traditional services who have developed some model for ‘pay as you go’ pricing that could be opening doors for them in your client base.

Until now, there has tended to be agreement that pricing is more of a hygiene factor than a compelling component of a proposition (with clients more interested in any existing relationship, proof of past delivery, or promises of helping them to achieve large savings). But is the rise of cloud propositions making the pricing strategy of traditional services a more decisive issue? How can suppliers build more flexibility (not just performance-related elements) into their offerings?

What do senior decision-makers think of your marketing and sales efforts? What are they responding to? What do they want more or less of from you?

These questions were at the heart of our recent Sales & Marketing Forum, where we heard from IT buyers about their attitudes and experiences of marketing. We’re now running debriefing sessions for people who weren’t able to make the evening (request a session), but we’ve also collated online the presentations from three speakers:

• Keith Mitchell, former Global Head of Shared Infrastructure, Reuters
• Claire Myerson, Information Technology Solutions Director, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals
• Chris Cottam, former European Marketing Manager, HP

The presentation can be downloaded at http://www.themarketingpractice.com/documents/S&M_PeepShow.ppt – but it might be best read alongside some of the following thoughts (a short summary of my impressions, I hasten to add, not necessarily those of the speakers)…

Breaking in as a new supplier

The speakers had mixed views on specific channels to use to approach a buyer. Unanimously, social media and online channels (like webinars – as long as they last less than an hour and start at a time that is clear to a UK audience) are growing in importance. Keith’s point around web 2.0 was important to bear in mind when planning new social media initiatives: while he uses it for research and to bring insights/experiences into his team, you shouldn’t expect him to reciprocate or actively contribute.

The general message with other channels (direct mail, email, events…) was that the content needs to be either incredibly targeted or impactful (whether in a creative or business sense) for there to be any results. Claire emphasised that business buyers are also consumers and that inventive approaches or creative impact can have their place. But she was clear that nothing resonates more from a new supplier than stories of having done similar work for someone else in her industry.

Part of the issues suppliers face is to make sure that they are working where the money is. The example Chris used was the desire of almost all IT suppliers to become a ‘trusted advisor’ and the danger that such a strategy can significantly damage transactional revenue streams (which can be up to 75% of IT budgets) and leave the door open for the competition at a more practical level.

In the battle to reach the CIO or IT Director, don’t underestimate the role of the PA. Keith made the point that his PA would know what was on his agenda, would often be as interested in the content as he was, and would be able to open doors to other key people in the department. The overall message is that you should treat the PA as if they were themselves the CIO.

What do buyers want from existing suppliers?

We found in our own research that existing suppliers were seen as the most important source of information for buyers. This was confirmed by the forum speakers – particularly against sources like analysts, who received mixed reviews (some useful industry-specific analysts exists, but the big names seem increasingly irrelevant, especially compared with user-generated content online).

The speakers described how, in their best relationships, suppliers work alongside customers to plan out priorities for the year. It means that suppliers can share ideas, understand what they can expect, and avoid trying to sell anything inappropriate. It’s good to have shared formal account plans written down – although Chris did make the point that suppliers need to evaluate exactly how much effort to put into individual accounts depending on the business value they are likely to deliver. He used the example of people following the account-based marketing bandwagon without properly understanding the consequences both for the focus accounts and for the others that are left behind.

Keith wanted suppliers to be constantly sharing information – not only about industry or product trends, but also about them and their own activities. His worry was that suppliers would only communicate when they had something to sell, but at a time like this that can mean not being well positioned when spending does come back online. Having said that, his advice was also that, when you are in productive conversations, not to be too cautious about pushing the deal to a close. If there is a clear interest on his part it is frustrating if there is too much procrastination.

What can marketing do to help?

All the speakers had examples of marketing working well with sales and the customer – as well as examples of where things did not seem joined up. Claire’s advice was for marketers to work hard to ensure their offers reflect what sales already know about a businesses’ priorities.

At the same time, marketing has a lot to offer that sales cannot. For example, marketing can be a great vehicle for bringing in inspiration (sharing examples of other clients in the same industry) or strengthening ties with a supplier (through activities like industry forums or conferences).

Some specific ideas from the panel included:

• Working to celebrate success – for example, creating a video to celebrate a project going live (can strengthen the relationship with the customer and lead to future opportunities).
• Focusing on activities that give real value to individual customer contacts. One example given was a programme of MBA modules run by one supplier, where marketing had identified some key learning requirements and were supporting those.
• Using the opportunity of the recession to double-down on client references – increasingly important to be able to prove that you offer the low-risk alternative.
• Getting more personal in communications – not only in understanding customer issues, but also simply in the style of communication. For instance, Keith pointed out that graphics and formatting in emails are lost by the time they reach his Blackberry – and they also instantly make the message less personal.
• Staying honest and pragmatic – whereas hospitality is becoming increasingly difficult for customers to accept, the offer of a charitable donation (especially to a corporate charity) can persuade a customer to give up their time.

If you’ve ever considered the impact social media might have on your marketing team’s organisation, or indeed the setup you will need to accommodate a successful social media strategy in the first place, then Forrester’s Marketing blog has suggested a few options.

Designed to cover questions such as “which roles do we need?” and “which department should be in charge of it?”, Forrester has developed a three-pronged model as follows (with Forrester favouring the hub and spoke method as the most sopisticated of the three):

1. The Tire (Distributed): Where each business unit or group may create its own social media programs without a centralized approach. We call this approach the “tire,” as it originates at the edges of the company.
2. The Tower (Centralized): We refer to this centralization as the “tower” – a standalone group within a company that’s responsible for social media programs, often within corporate marketing or corporate communicaitons.
3. The Hub and Spoke (Cross Functional): Like the hub on a bicycle wheel, a cross-functional group that represents multiple stakeholders across the company assembles in the middle of the organization. The hub facilitates resource sharing and cross-functional communications (via the “spokes” in the wheel) to those at the edge of the organization (or the “tire”)

As per my previous post on Barack Obama’s marketing campaign chief’s approach, message and strategy should always get the lion’s share of attention over channel and tehnology. Thus the people you hire for these positions and the structure of the team delivering social media marketing should be right at the top of the agenda of any social media programme. For insight into the planning of social media campaigns, download our popular B2B web 2.0 marketing campaign planner.

Insight into Asos’s approach (in this earlier blog post “A Tale of Two Retailers” also gives insight into how Asos is driving their strategy from the top.)

The man credited with masterminding Barack Obama’s marketing campaign has been airing rather surprising views at Cannes. David Plouffe’s comments were reported in the Financial Times’ Tech blog, where he talks about the value of “old school” marketing techniques that focus on the message being delivered by channels such as email and television, and supported by social media tools as “part of the arsenal” in Obama’s campaign. He stresses it was the unconventional way in which channels were used, rather than the use of the channels themselves, that delivered the results.

“The real drivers for us were old school – they were email and they were web,” he said. The legacy of that email campaign is that the Obama administration can still communicate with 10m Americans – “directly, not through a media filter”, said Plouffe, at a time when people trust media less and value personal recommendations more. “That may not be as sexy as a TV ad or a press conference, but I can’t think of anything more valuable than [staying in email contact with supporters],” he said. “There is nothing more valuable than a human being talking to a human being.”

This is eminently applicable to B2B comms, where the channel choice can often be overstressed in its importance versus the message. In the same way, Plouffe highlights the importance of the supporters being able to “move the message” through any channel of their choosing (Twitter, web, Facebook, email) but the overriding factor in the campaign design being the message itself.  Definitely a consideration for campaign design at the moment: consider how the message might be “moved” by its recipients, and how you can facilitate that process through the way the information is delivered in the first instance.

This recent Harvard Business Review article entitled “The Power of Old Ideas” sparked some thoughts about how you can build on your organisation’s heritage and your marketing team’s ideas to create more powerful communications and ultimately, therefore, enhance the performance of campaigns.

The Harvard article argues that great ideas and innovation do not involve reinventing the wheel. Instead, it suggests, your corporate history and its ideas/inventions are often the greatest sources of innovation. It even goes so far as to argue that most companies already know how to innovate and use their historical understanding to their advantage, but that few do because it would cause too much disruption to their profit models and established structures and processes.

As Mark Twain once said, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. How often, in the melee of day-to-day marketing activity, do we really have the time to stop and examine how far we really got with that brilliant idea from the last team day out? Or take an hour or two to delve through the corporate archives?  For example, I recently came across the very first presentation we ever gave to a client about The Marketing Practice. It’s 7 years old and absolutely focused on what the core of the business is all about today.

I think this is especially relevant at the moment, where innovation from old ideas and nostalgia are thriving. A determination to hang on to what’s “really important” have become psychological imperatives. Hot water bottles and lunchboxes are experiencing record sales, “make do and mend” is making its way into the technical lexicon and everyone’s growing their own. A great example of this, which The Guardian has christened “the pin up of our age” is the Keep Calm and Carry On poster which adorns everything in the UK from shop windows to deckchairs, T-shirts to mugs.

The “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster - never officially released, was designed to be put up if Britain was invaded during the second world war. As Alain Samson, a social psychologist at the London School of Economics, says ”in times of difficulty people are brought together by looking for common values or purposes, symbolised by the crown and the message of resilience. The words are also particularly positive, reassuring, in a period of uncertainty, anxiety, even perhaps of cynicism.” The poster chimes in with a general feeling, and whilst we are clearly not being invaded, it’s the echoes of the feelings brought on by the current crisis that make the slogan so popular now. It’s a beautiful example of history rhyming – during times of perceived national crisis we revert to what’s comforting.

So if you make time to do one extra thing this month, take a look a long way back in your corporate history and see what’s always been there but hasn’t been implemented? What stems from a similar era or has a fond place in people’s memories of your firm? Whether used for innovating in internal or external communications tactics, taking those great ideas forward right now makes a lot of sense.

The UK Government’s Digital Britain report came out yesterday. Hailed as the report that will guide the UK’s strategy to make it a leading player in the new media revolution, Digital Britain was written by Stephen Carter, the minister for communications, technology and broadcasting.

The report lays out 5 goals:

1. To upgrade and modernise the UK’s digital networks to enable the economy to remain globally competitive

2. To attract investment for UK digital content, applications and services

3. To create UK content for UK users, in particular impartial news, comment and analysis

4. To ensure fairness and access for all

5. To develop the infrastructure, skills and take-up that enable the widespread online delivery of public services and business interface with government.

Computing Magazine’s useful roundup of its key findings are as follows:

The mainstream media has reacted to it by saying variously “big on rhetoric, short on action” The Telegraph, for The Times, the government “shows an extraordinary willingness to extend government intervention into almost every nook of Britain’s broadcasting and communications industry” whilst the FT and the Guardian focused on the introduction of the “surprise” 50p per month broadband tax.

And finally, joining Sir Alan Sugar amongst the government’s ranks of celebrity businesspeople, the report unveiled Martha Lane Fox as the new “digital inclusion champion”.

And, just as importantly, can it communicate the fact that it’s satisfied the business when it’s got there?

The Forrester blog for CIOs is arguing that “old IT” (famous for one size fits all and blowing the budget according to Forrester) is dead. The new IT (from a silo mentality to a cross-functional business technology enabler) is apparently gaining ground rapidly.

But Forrester still perceives a gap between the business’ expectations of IT, and the perceptions of IT in the enterprise. It thinks this gap stems from a lack of decent IT governance (meaning CIOs are playing catch up on expectations) and that IT-to-business relationships are not as solid as they could be (highlighting that IT is not actively managing its clients). The author claims that “defining and marketing the portfolio of business technology services are critical competencies, as they set the objectives for the business-IT communications.”

This chimes with a point that Wyeth’s CIO made at our recent S&M Forum event - that she has funded post-project internal marketing activity to ensure a wider understanding of that project within the business and celebrate the success of the newly implemented technology. Certainly worth building in to every post-live ABM plan.