John Quelch’s article for Harvard Business Review highlights new research that says CMOs are holding onto their jobs longer, suggesting that closer alignment with the CEO is the main reason. In a broadly B2C focused article Quelch says, “The best CMOs stay low-key and aim to make the CEO, who is often from a non-marketing background, comfortable becoming the chief cheerleader for the brand.”

He goes on to argue that, if the CMO is hanging around longer, then the recession has actually elevated his or her standing. He thinks there are 4 things that the CEO is looking to marketing/the CMO for in the recession. We’ve taken these thoughts and reinterpreted them for B2B marketers.

Revised approaches to segmentation.

For B2B, marketers need to focus more around client and target data, and allow that to inform and ultimately drive the communications strategy. By targeting at a micro-vertical or even account-based level, comes become more relevant and more compelling for the recipient.

Core benefits re-emphasised in the face of recession-driven price sensitivity.

For IT marketers especially, it’s important in a fast-paced world to remember your company’s heritage. Look for strong messages, opinion-leading thoughts that reinforce the good things about what you’re already known for, and apply them to the world’s new challenges. In doing so you engender a sense of trust and reliability.

 More from the marketing budget.

Focus on what matters, consolidate core programmes and make sure they are operating at an optimum level. Invite your team, the salespeople and your suppliers to think with you on this issue.  Adopt a strategy of long term, continuous campaigning where there’s a blend of added value communications with stronger “call to action” pieces to build up a value exchange and increase credibility. This has the added advantage of providing you with multiple opportunities to contact, increasing the likelihood that your timing will be just right.

Digital consideration

We’re completely channel agnostic at The Marketing Practice but it can’t be denied that the recession is accelerating the move online. It’s cheaper, faster and increasingly well-used by even senior decision makers. However, don’t fall into the trap of the move online only being about email marketing and monitoring click throughs, or on the other hand a broad “skittles-esque“ web 2.0 programme. The online move needs to be planned and executed like a traditional programme. Who are we targeting, what are they interested in? Where will they go online to find it and how do we meet them there without looking like an ‘advertiser’. More on how to do this here.

It’s worth noting that at the end of his article Quelch points out that there will be “two major, and lasting, ramifications” of the recession for marketers - “increased financial accountability, and the financial literacy that comes with it.” Now’s the time to start tackling the thorny issues of how programmes can make a difference to profitability and profitable growth.

This just-released interview in Sales & Marketing magazine between the EVP of Miller Heiman and Brian Carroll (author of the book “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale” ) makes for good reading for marketers facing the “not enough leads” scenario.

When asked what the common pitfalls are in getting sales and marketing working effectively together, Brian points out that high level consulting and reoganisation is no substitute for a joint go-to-market strategy and getting on with it. “Companies sensing the need for cooperation and teamwork sometimes believe they can perform miracles by reorganizing the sales and marketing departments. But, really what matters most is having everyone on the same page, integrated and viewing each other as pro forma customers.”

He goes on to suggest that it’s often not lead generation that’s the issue, it’s the handover of too many “non-ready” leads which stop salespeople from focusing on the really good ones.

“Ask most executives what salespeople need to help them sell and they will say, “More leads.” I’d say your salespeople don’t want more leads. They want more effective selling time. In my experience, the average sales force spends around 20% of their time actually doing productive selling (up to 40% if you’re great). Don’t get me wrong, lead generation is still extremely important to salespeople. But we need to realize that the extreme time pressure salespeople face—especially those with a complex sale—requires them to ignore “early,” “is not immediately relevant,” and [focus on] ”highly likely” to produce revenue.”

We call this the “knee jerk” effect – short termist campaigning built without a long term, continous approach and no central (and jointly agreed with sales) data or content assets. it produces a quick flow of poor-quality or unready leads. By investing in lead generation for the long term you get a more controllable flow of sales-ready leads, and sales people with more time to spend on selling.

It’s not a quick fix… but the investment in the data, content and joint working approach will bear fruit in the long term whilst driving down marketing costs and increasing reputation and awareness.

A point to note: Miller Heiman’s industry reports, based on their 2008 Sales Best Practices Study, are worth the (free) registration to download. Opportunities to Achieve Revenue Growth in the Technology Industry and Business Services Sales Organisations: Catalpulting off Previous Successes are especially relevant for readers of this blog and feature some interesting sales best practices that marketers can align with.

We were delighted to get a glowing mention by the UK’s leading IT analyst Richard Holway on his Techmarketview site yesterday. He posted a link to The Marketing Practice’s write up of a debate on the future of global IT services between him and Richard Christou, of Fujitsu. You can read Richard’s comments here, and our own write up of the debate and tips for marketers here.

If you don’t already subscribe to Techmarketview’s daily email service, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Daily news and great insight into the tech market with brilliant commentary. All that, and it’s free! You can sign up here, using the blue box on the homepage.

Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame has just contributed to this superb article for the Harvard Business Review, called “In a Downturn, Provoke your Customers”(free but registration required). 

Its premise is that, in today’s challenging sales environment, where discretionary spend is being cut, you need to provoke the customer into buying. And that to do this requires you to go beyond solution selling. (and thus, we would argue, beyond what has traditionally been seen as ’lead generation’.)

Citing an example from Sybase, the article says, “The vendor identified a process that was critical for customers in the current business environment, developed a compelling point of view on how it was broken and what that meant in terms of cost, and then connected the problem to a solution that the vendor was offering… Instead of aligning with a company’s prevailing outlook, it provides a new angle on the situation… Whereas solution-selling salespeople listen for “pain points” that the customer can clearly articulate, provocation works best when it outlines a problem that the customer is experiencing but has not yet put a name to.”

The article suggests the following process:

-Identify a high-impact issue, develop original point of view, lodge your provocation, prove your point.

Whilst you could argue that this is simply solution selling with knobs on, when looking at the process in detail is requires a phenomenal level of research and a highly co-ordinated business development team to generate such an opportunity.

Not least, the level of intelligence on each customer that’s required to support these sales tactics has big ramifications for marketers. The article suggests that you need to put your best people on such a “provocation” and that you need to pick your fights carefully based on the biggest opportunities.

Doing this require a more account- and intelligence-driven approach to lead generation. And if you are going to set up meetings to “provoke” the customer about an issue, you’d better make sure you’re right!

So where can you get the level of information needed to be near-psychic? Sources of such information cited by Moore et al are securities analysts, assuming that the issues they highlight will be high on the CEO’s agenda because of shareholder pressure. Intelligence gathered from the sales/account team and good profiling will really help too. Marketing is good at getting the best from large volumes of data, and can coral the output into useable intel.

Above all, I’d say that the message surrounding the provocation is a big area where marketing can support. This kind of attack needs to be very finely balanced to provoke but not insult.

Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing for BearingPoint was recently interviewed by Britton Manasco. He gives some very useful tips for marketers wanting to further the reach of their thought leadership content and use it more effectively to drive people  into your lead nurturing process. He recommends the creation (or outsourcing) of a “content factory” to kick start this.

Paul says, “don’t hand me just the white paper.  Hand me the white paper, hand me the landing page, hand me the blog content, hand me the key words, hand me the email post and then I can get that to the interactive team.  The interactive team can just begin to formulate it and distribute it in places it needs to be distributed. I can post it to our RSS feed, post it to the blog, maybe do a podcast around it. The team can make that very systematic. I think this is going to be key for us because the day of thought leadership being just the white paper is over.”

I’ve attached a slide highlighting our own approach to the ”next generation” content factory. It is designed to maximise impact and reach of thought-leadership content by helping B2B marketers blend traditional and new publishing techniques. Download it here.

(Note additionally the potential for making the very creation of the content a more collaborative process – for example, ask your readers for hot topics to cover or questions they want the answer to, through the social media tools at your disposal.)

Ever wondered what sales would do in your shoes with your budget? Want to know what sales people think are the most effective types of marketing programme? Ron Rose of HP Exstream, career IT salesman tells all…

How did you get started in IT, and what path has your career taken?

I got into IT by accident rather than design – a variety of early roles led to working for a company producing software and hardware to process cheque remittances. I had a mentor there who spotted the sales potential I had and I then took a sales role within a legal software company. At the time, software was urgently needed by legal firms, conveyancing levels were high, as was debt collection volume. Solicitors needed to computerise their time recording, start to use email, log and track documents – it was the ideal industry for technology. The company I worked for was acquired by Sanderson, one of its major products, Minder, monitored debt recovery for customers like Barclaycard. Tallyman, also a debt management product, was then developed by Sanderson. I was involved in the launch of the product and went on to sell it to customers like Lombard and British Gas and Barclays. I went on to join the London Bridge Software sales operation (later acquired by Fair Isaac) selling their Debt Manager product. After launching and running my own software reseller business for 3 years, I joined HP’s Exstream division about a year ago.

What has shaped the way you work with marketing?

During my time at Sanderson, I was actively involved in the development for a debt management software product called Tallyman. This was my first experience of developing a joint go-to-market strategy with the marketing team, and was instrumental in shaping the way I work with marketing departments now. I saw the power of merging the two disciplines during the Tallyman launch. Sales and marketing were heavily involved in all aspects, from the creation of the position and message through to the creative aspects, direct marketing and follow up. I had to work through the whole process: how do we express what this software does? How do we make the differences it has versus the competition clear? How can we get the message out? I developed an appreciation that getting all of that right is not easy. Throughout the process, sales and marketing were not two separate entities, and were never seen as such – perhaps it is the nature of a new product launch that it clarifies and makes urgent what needs to be done. As a result, we had such a dependency on each other to make Tallyman a success that I developed a deep understanding of and commitment to the marketing process.

The second major factor was an experience at London Bridge. In conjunction with the marketers, we created a joint go-to-market plan for Debt Manager. The plan was designed to support the sales process along the length of the sales funnel and sales and marketing worked together on this. Sales drove the intel from the perspective of what clients were feeling and needing, and marketing drove the positioning and messaging to attract the right type of people. They also provided the engine room to execute the programme. It was an integrated campaign that took place over the course of a year or so, and included multiple elements from seminars and thought-leadership to lead nurturing and more gentle contact activity. There was no formal “handover” point; more colleagues working together to develop a market and generate quality interest. It re-energised a whole market for London Bridge, made the product relevant to people’s challenges brought in great opportunities and have us a number of excuses to go back to people.

What changes have you seen in the way that sales and marketing work together since your experiences at Sanderson?

I’ve seen quite big changes. Marketing is less a department and more a process – more a science. In my experience, marketing teams have always been concerned with lead generation, but it used to be in the direct response arena. The marketing teams would send follow up letters and collateral after the salesman’s cold call. It’s more proactive now, plus lead generation is not the be-all-and-end-all, it’s a component of a much wider discipline.

Where can gaps between sales and marketing arise?

I’ve seen this in every IT organisation. There seems to be a cynicism, a kind of barrier, between sales and marketing people. I’m not sure why this arises, but in my view most marketing people seem very willing to engage in the lead generation process. Perhaps it happens because sales people just aren’t incentivised to engage with marketing. Sales training is also quite narrow – it doesn’t teach marketing engagement, which could be really helpful.

Poor mapping back to corporate objectives can often be to blame. The sales plan, the marketing plan and joint GTM plans have to back directly into the business’ strategy. Sales must sell what they have now, they can’t sell the future. Marketing have a more difficult balancing act; supporting now’s sales with tomorrow’s market and business development.

What’s the best example of marketing working well with you/the sales team?

It has to be the experience of the seminar campaign programme at London Bridge for Debt Manager. Why? Because in creating the GTM strategy we really questioned what we were doing. We reinvigorated a great product by building on its heritage and developed content that people wanted access to. We generated leads, all the time positioning us far enough from competitors that we were able to engage on our own terms. The programme enhanced our credibility as a company and the content we generated fed into the entire sales approach: sales pitches and bid support reinforced the messages and helped us close the deals.

What are the biggest opportunities sales and marketing have to work more closely together?

They are absolutely everywhere. It’s a question that’s very different because of the different cultures organisation to organisation. However, as a general point I would say that marketing people will get great knowledge and a lot of respect from getting more involved in the sales process itself. If they get out and meet customers, understand the products backwards, they can then get more involved in supporting the sales funnel right to the end. For example, a lot of bid documentation and presentations should have a marketing eye cast over them. Positioning, messaging, consistency – they’re critical in bids and marketing has a lot to add in this environment. I don’t believe in a designated handover point between sales and marketing, they should work together through the length of the funnel.

What would you spend marketing’s budget on if you had it?

If you asked 100 sales people, I suspect that 90 of them would say “corporate hospitality”. Partly because it’s a day out for them, and partly because they are incentivised around closing deals and the opportunity to build relationships is really valuable for them. Personally, I’d spend it on solid product awareness – being known by the right people for the right stuff. I’d want to make sure that I was automatically on the list to receive relevant RFIs; a seat at the table for big bids.

What are the most valuable things sales people get from marketing?

Lead generation without a doubt. It’s worth saying that lead numbers from marketing don’t impact my views of marketing effectiveness. My expectation as a salesperson is that I need and expect to be out there generating leads. If marketing’s doing its job well, that should be straightforward for me. Any leads I receive from marketing are a welcome bonus.

Market research is right up there too. There’s some great information and intelligence about competitors and key accounts around but I don’t always have time to track it all down. Marketing’s digest of this and view on what it means are really valuable.

The positioning, messaging and referenceability material is vital too.

What can sales teams do to work better with marketing?

The biggest battle is that sales need to believe in marketing. But sales teams are under pressure too, and the onus has to be on marketing to sell what it does and demonstrate the value. Best way to do that? It has to be to generate leads and work back from there. Marketers should work hard to develop joint GTM plans with sales and allocate a shared responsibility for its outcomes.

Pick a cosy chair, open a bottle of wine and take a look at the B2B and ICT marketing articles and white papers we will mostly be reading in January.

-Richard Holway’s “State of the ICT Nation” PDF download from the excellent TechMarketView, covering where ICT has been and what will happen next. (free and no registration required)

 -The New Power Couple by Peppers & Rogers.  Getting better synergy between sales and marketing – a framework for good strategy and process. Good thinking in here, even though it does lean somewhat to the technology side in places. (registration required, but free)

-McKinsey’s most popular interviews of 2008 - especially the interview with the head of Global Business Services at P&G about how to make the back office a strategic partner and the “Crafting a message that sticks” interview with Chip Heath on the keys to effective communication.

-Marketing Prof’s piece B2B Lead Generation: Marketing ROI & Performance Evaluation Study - why lead quality is critical to improved ROI. Makes a strong case for lead nurturing activity and a closer link between sales and marketing, as argued here. Registration is required but the link above takes you straight to a free, non-registration article that covers the salient points in good detail.

At our recent S&M Forum event it became clear to me that the reports of the death of the sales and marketing disconnect have been greatly exaggerated.  

Some of the sales people in attendance said that marketing departments can be ‘intellectually smug’. “They don’t ask what we need” claimed one salesman, “and they make it all far too hard to understand.” One of the main reasons marketing suffers from such a poor reputation in B2B was highlighted by a few more salespeople, who claimed “no-one knows what marketing does.”

Whilst the views from around the table highlighted that marketing now clearly understands it has to support and enable the sales team, in responding, some marketers said they feared they wouldn’t be able to “do their jobs” due to being mired in sales support - something highlighted by Kotler, Rackham & Krishnaswamy in their HBR report on getting sales and marketing working better together. There was also a feeling that sales was selling “the wrong thing.”

During this particular strong exchange of views, it struck me that the benefits of seeing business development as a single, end-to-end process worked on by both the sales and marketing teams will be invaluable this year.

In a December blog post, Paul Dunay says that “marketing is the department a company builds to interact with the market place and the customer base.” But in B2B, how often is this really the case? I can’t think of many companies where the marketing department is closer to the market than the sales team. And therein lies the rub I suspect.

It’s even more important in this environment to get both teams working together to identify profitable segments and clients, as McKinsey’s report, the downturn’s new rules for marketers identifies, as well as a new report by Peppers & Rogers. But too often marketing is generating leads that sales don’t want, can’t close, or both – because it’s simply too far from the coal face.

So how to work more closely, spend more wisely and deliver results?

After much debate, it was agreed that one of the best ways to solve the mismatch was in sales and marketing collaborating over the creation of the go-to-market strategy (GTM). By starting with the business’ strategic plan, and working as a single team to plan the GTM, the S&M Forum delegates believed that marketing could deliver strategic ends whilst supporting the sales process. Thus there was peace on earth – or at least peace in the business development process.

Advice for speakers and delegates alike to those attempting this: 

-Start small, but do start

-Get everyone responsible for BD in a room, declare a truce and thrash out a GTM plan, by customer if necessary. Our account-based marketing tool might be useful here

-Communicate and collaborate along the length of the business development process. Marketers, get out on sales calls with sales colleagues. Sales, take the time to review campaign materials and target lists

-Put in place joint measures and commit to them

-Don’t be tempted to hand over leads too soon, keep leads in the marketing pipeline until properly sales-ready and keep campaigning continuously to pick up all the potential in the market.

-Work hard at the lead handover process – not a spreadsheet or an email, but a phone call between sales and marketing to cover the background and agree next best steps

- Build, share and buy into a data platform. Use it for all decision-making

- Execute small, quickly and use what the market is telling you to further develop and broaden when confident. Use this checklist to make sure it’s all on track.

Here’s a snapshot of the programmes we predict a major focus on for next year – an insight into what the best marketing departments will be doing in 2009.

4 key strands are emerging – a spotlight on data, gaining access at the right level, enhancing credibility and building programmes that appreciate timing and lead nurturing.

Spotlight on data

1.       Marketing teams will focus on building solid data platforms to increase effectiveness and control spend. The data sets they need to work on will take two forms – intelligence on customers (what they are interested in and how they are responding) and quality of contact data.

2.       Joint planning with sales (from account planning to CRM implementation) – marketing teams will be creating a single go-to-market strategy for key clients and segments with their sales counterparts.

3.       Key account monitoring – in an increasingly unpredictable environment those first to respond to opportunities will have the upper hand. Marketers are increasingly looking to us to monitor activity within key accounts and suggest appropriate actions to capitalise on any changes.

Building access at the right level

1.       Marketers are looking to improve the access they have at the right levels within the target organisations, as research shows that a focus on the C-level alone omits a broad sweep of other decision-makers. From partnering with influential network-owners through to building.

2.       Access is gained through a bargaining process – marketers need to work out how to give value through their communications and positioning, and work out how they want that to be reciprocated by the target. Good programmes will attract the right people and build strong relationships that can be further leveraged through networking.

Enhancing credibility

1.       Companies must position well next year to attract the right opportunities (without wasting money chasing the wrong ones. ) Authoritative comment will be critical to this – in 2009 marcomms ‘copy’ will move up several gears in terms of seniority and knowledge, becoming market comment. If something is perceived as “marketing” by the recipient then it’s probably failed – successful marcomms in this environment will feel like part of a good conversation.

2.       There will be an increasing use of the semantic web to understand and extend networks. People are publishing information about themselves, what they want and what they are interested in more than ever before. Programmes are being built that capitalise on that “interested market” information.

Understanding timing

1.       The emergence of continuous customer contact programmes that tie the three elements of the above together with characterise 2009. These lead generation “engines” will focus spend on enhancing reputation and favourability with only those customers most likely to buy, whilst appreciating that not all will be immediately ready to do so.

2.       Communications will focus on selling the next step, not just the end product. Ongoing comms programmes will drip feed useful information at the right time whilst supporting the joint lead nurturing efforts of sales and marketing.

The Economist’s Intelligence Unit has released this report Future Tense: The Global CMO

This is interesting from two perspectives. A glimpse of the global CMO trend will help us understand where all our jobs are going. At the same time, many of us are marketing to these CMOs.

One of the major themes for me was the view that the CMO is increasingly becoming a gatekeeper of critical customer intelligence information. The report suggests that marketing departments will increasingly become integrated marketing & communications organisations: there to gather, develop and use customer information.

The role of how the two-way customer communications now happening as a result of the web is covered, as are the opportunities presented by it.