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.

You’re an IT Director in financial services. Or the Head of e-Delivery in the public sector. From our decision-maker research, we know that you receive around 30 supplier marketing emails every day (without even considering more regular spam emails) – and probably find barely a quarter of these to be relevant.

It’s a sign of email’s growing popularity or even over-use in isolation from other activities (as a more ‘measureable’ and ‘cost-effective’ digital channel) and of some common mistakes being made in how it is used.

We recently reviewed a year’s worth of emails sent out as part of wider relationship, lead generation or thought leadership programmes. The key conclusions are presented – and illustrated with examples – in a paper available to download here.

What’s in the document?
- 10 tips to consider at the tactical level. If you believe that you are communicating with the right people about something that should be important to them, but are failing to see the results you need, then the chances are that these tips will help. Issues in email execution – like when to go for beautifully designed html versus personal-looking text – are absolutely critical.
- And stepping away from the tactical, the document also puts a narrative around the whole email story – its place in wider programmes, what the audience likes and dislikes, considerations around testing, and the need for exceptional content.

For me, the single most important advice the document has is about creating simple steps for the audience.

No-one ever signed an outsourcing contract after reading an email – so rather than trying to lay out the complete case for the deal, the email has to have a clear and realistic action it asks the reader to take. This could be nothing more complex than a compelling case for why they should click through to read a document that positions you as a thought leader on the subject. Or it could make a proposition for them to arrange a first workshop with you (something more personal than a ‘healthcheck’ offer – do you have a recent business case from a deal with a similar client? Have you got research that you could share with them?).

This idea of creating emails with a realistic call to action (one you would feel comfortable writing in a personal email to someone you wanted to meet) applies to both planning and execution of email programmes. At the planning stage, it means mapping out the call to action, audience journey and key messages. And when it comes to execution, it is why emails are potentially the very hardest job facing any copywriter today. Hopefully this document goes some way to solving the challenge.

Tomorrow night sees the November gathering of the ever-slinky S&M Forum.

Our topic couldn’t be more timely – the need to justify the business value of marketing is perhaps more pressing than ever. Why, so the boardroom argument may go, should we invest in marketing when propping up our sales team would surely get more money in? When such a claim is levelled, marketing needs the numbers at its fingertips to respond. Why then, are they often so far from reach?

How can the marketer quantify what he or she does in terms of boardroom-friendly raw numbers? How can ‘marketing success’ be measured? What activities are generating a good return on marketing investment? Is answering any of these questions actually possible? In researching tomorrow’s event, we dug up a number of useful articles and interesting commentators on the B2B marketing measurement debate…

Starting with the basics, Jim Lenskold’s recent study (2008 Marketing ROI and Measurements Study) showed that many marketers are struggling with the fundamental measurements required to manage and improve marketing’s contribution to an organisation’s business plan.

Thus those who do measure are already ahead – the study showed that simply the act of measuring marketing in the first place has a direct effect on performance.

Respondents who described their marketing as highly effective all showed better measurement and ROI practices than those lower down the table, and they are using business information that ranges from sales reports, financial data, lead gen data, marketing spend and sales pipeline details to furnish their measurements. Perhaps most revealingly, these ‘highly effective’ companies comprised only 9% of study respondents.

Arguably, the main reason for this paucity of highly effective marketing measurement lies in collecting this data and presenting it in an actionable way to those in the marketing department, and an understandable way to those outside it. There are certainly tools that can be deployed to assist in this process, for example marketing dashboards, but the key is to have not just the short-term, but also the long-term view driving all analysis.

This long-term view was touched upon in a recent series on B2B marketing measurement in which Forrester’s Laura Ramos urged for customer-centric metrics to be employed to measure the impact of marketing over the entirety of the customer life-cycle. Ramos recommended that marketing measurement should move away from focusing on the basic lead-gen approach and towards building and maintaining brand loyalty by measuring how prospects buy, using demand management to build further customer dialogue and align marketing and sales around common objectives.

This latter point, the disconnect between marketing and sales, is often the shadowy figure lurking at the back of this measurement debate.  So much so, in fact, that one article in the Harvard Business Review from a couple of years ago, set about ending the war between sales and marketing once and for all by tackling the economic and cultural differences that usually cause the tension. But what relevance would such a sales and marketing peace treaty have to effective marketing measurement?

Unsurprisingly, it is value. With an aligned sales and marketing team communicating with the market in a consistent and timely fashion, the ROMI is not muddied by conflicting sales activity – the marketing effort put in at the beginning of the sales cycle will have a direct effect right through to the end.

Indeed, Laura Patterson develops this point when she states that marketing isn’t an island. Pulling the lens out so the focus is on sales, product, customer service and finance as well as marketing can really add value to the measurement process by placing all campaign activity into its real-world business context.

Brian Carroll’s call for a marketing funnel is another case in point. Carroll takes the view that most companies use only sales funnels to collect all their leads, qualified or not. The result is less a funnel and more a bucket riddled with holes out of which the less-qualified leads leak. By creating a marketing funnel, leads can accurately be filtered through to sales only when they are sales-ready. And Carroll agrees with Patterson when he says that measuring the effectiveness of this sales-marketing interaction is central to its success.

Generating actionable leads rather than just leads is important here too, and certainly something that should be the focus of any measurement. Lead quality is vital in the context of marketing value. For example, if a lead is measured purely as a cost-per-click (CPC), does this mean that each resulting sales opportunity is treated as equally valuable? CPC certainly has its place – if the average sales opportunity return isn’t expected to be high compared to the number of click-throughs, a decision would be made about using such a model. But if a relatively few click-throughs (with a higher-than-normal CPC) results in one or two significant sales opportunities, the value of this kind of marketing must be properly measured.

The damn lies inherent in such measurement statistics are ably demonstrated by email marketing. As Stephanie Miller points out, a study conducted by the DMA for marketing activity throughout 2007 showed that email marketing had 150% more ROI than non-email online marketing. Great, but behind these bare figures lurks the spectre of spam and the Gatling gun approach to some email marketing. Because there is simply so much of it out there, hitting thousands of potential targets with a broad email sweep usually has a negative effect of alienating potential sales leads. With a smaller but more targeted email campaign approach, the opposite can be true. Miller urges us not to be blinded by the glittering promise of gold with email marketing but to measure emails in exactly the same way, using customer take-up across different styles and sizes of email campaign to guide future success.

So, is there a danger of measuring too much? Perhaps not, if the right activities are measured in the right context. And, no matter how difficult the economic climate is, marketing value will always come down to money: the sales that are generated directly from a campaign.

As Paul Dunay suggests, in the grand scheme of things, sales is the only metric that really counts. This is, he argues is the ‘right context’ for measuring marketing value, based on three tiers of marketing metrics, with the first two tiers feeding into the most important third tier:

1. Reach metrics: the straightforward campaign hits – e.g. webpage click-throughs

2. Efficiency metrics: how cost-effective each form of reach activity was and whether it achieved the desired result – e.g. cost-per-clicks and the number of downloads of a whitepaper

3. Value: the contribution to the sales pipeline – e.g. the ROI for the number of attendees at an event

Of course, saying that marketing reach and campaign efficiency impact on and drive the overall value of the campaign is nothing new, nor is it astounding. But this is a very tidy way if thinking about it.

Measure what you’re doing to make sure you’re doing enough of it. Measure how you’re doing it, to make sure you are learning and getting better. Finally, measure if it’s working for the business. So, in the end, it’s all very simple.

(Although setting up the lean, mean marketing operation that can get hold of those figures and track them is a whole new blog post!)

We’ve been doing an increasing amount of bid support and win-based marketing work for clients in recent months.

With their strong understanding of positioning and presentation, B2B marketing departments complement the sales team’s skills are well placed to make a real impact on the outcome of a bid.

There’s a range of win-based activity you can undertake to support sales. We’ve a free powerpoint outlining the best of these - available from The Marketing Practice’s main site here.

What makes a successful account-based marketing (ABM) programme? Great execution is essential (as is a planning framework like this one), but here we wanted to highlight three elements of programme management that we think mark out ABM that really delivers results.

Having run account-based marketing (ABM) programmes for our clients over the last 2 years (treating their key individual customers as markets of one or, at least, a few), we’ve identified these areas as essential to keep in mind.

They’re important to ensure an ABM programme stays within its original budget and doesn’t demand more management than originally expected; keeps the faith and interest of the sales or account team; and delivers the promised results.

1. Turn theory into practice: we’ve seen a few situations where ABM becomes all about the planning, and ignores the detail in execution that can make or break the programme. For example, marketing might take on the role of profiling a target account, understanding its current priorities, and handing this analysis back to the sales team with a list of propositions to target the account with. For an effective programme, this should only be the first phase (and should be done with sales, not in isolation). For marketing’s involvement to stop there means that the most effective potential actions are never taken (whether it’s creating sessions to run for new contacts in the target account, or putting more effort into engaging them with corporate materials and events, or even targeted lead generation to help the stretched account team break into a new area of the business). Equally, there will always be some personalisation – or even unique material – needed at the account level. If it was as simple as just targeting the right existing activities at an account, then everyone would be doing it.

2. Keep focus: there are instances where we’re asked to support 9 or 10 different propositions being taken into 5 or 6 areas of a customer account. While this is achievable over a year, it can’t all be done at once. The key is to pick the most important 3 propositions and find where in the account they are most suited, craft the specific story and work with the sales team to take them in (supporting by building data, or creating campaigns, doing research or preparing sales materials). This way, the sales or account team will really feel the benefit and stay engaged, without the danger that your work will either be watered down or you will be asking for more time than the sales team has to give.

3. Avoid overcomplicating: in some cases, an ABM programme is really no different from any other marketing programme, just targeted at existing customers. Yes, it needs more intelligence upfront to avoid stepping on toes or saying the wrong thing – as well as more consistent interaction with sales or account teams. But that shouldn’t stop us being able to quickly and effectively get returns from existing customers: now more than ever, they are the best sources of potential new business.

Bearing all this in mind, we can deliver the three or four key activities that will make a real difference in a single quarter.

Just in the last month, we’ve seen examples of the results: two instances where our clients have uncovered workshops in their customers that they wouldn’t have known were happening – and which they can now use to start scoping a new project. All this aside from many other meetings with fresh contacts to discuss new propositions, opportunities entered into the pipeline, bid support on major deals, and the intelligence on customer plans that we have built.

All of which ties in to our ABM planning diagram (available to view here) – a useful tool for outlining the stages and scope of any ABM programme.

In the last week I’ve met two marketing directors at global B2B companies. Both with similar challenges: in 2009 they need to do more.

Both are looking to us to make the most of their money. So what did I do? I stepped through our lead generation engine approach – how more concentrated investments in sales-aligned marketing can deliver greater results at lower costs.

Why are B2B marketing departments increasingly seeking a longer term lead generation strategy?

First, because we have to work harder now than ever to identify the parts of the market where there is opportunity. It’s still there, arguably more of it than before, but in very different places than a few months ago. Longer term campaigning actually shows you where do market next (Sign up to our IT Boomhunter series via RSS or email to keep abreast of IT market developments as they happen.)

Second, because increased cost-control is changing clients’ and prospects’ behaviour – and sales and marketing approaches need to adapt in line with this. Again, only from longer term campaigning can you see these changes before your competitors do.

Third, because marketing departments themselves are under pressure to find efficiency, increase productivity and deliver bottom line results. This can result in ‘quick and dirty’ campaigns that frustrate the sales team (see this post on selling in harder times) and actually damage your chances of selling (see this interview with Egg’s ex-CIO, explaining why one-off campaigns won’t get a hearing.)

What’s needed is a cool appraisal of the real market conditions, and a programme worked out over the long term to reduce the cost of business acquisition whilst increasing marketing efficacy.

The Marketing Practice’s approach shows that this can be done. How?

It’s not just a theory. We’ve proved it. For example, we’ve been running an executive events series for more than 2 years. Working the same set of data (because we started with a clear idea of everyone in the target audience), we’ve more than doubled the number of attendees at the events every other month, cut by 35% the cost per delegate, and delivered countless opportunities for sales engagement (exciting, because we know that the events are just a means to an end, not an end in themselves).

Or take another example – a lead generation programme running over the last 3 and a half years for a software company. Over this time, we’ve worked online, offline, through events, dinners and conferences and with ongoing teleservice. Always to the same audience, building and refining data across their target markets. These kind of programmes work right from day one and build phenomenal market intelligence.

If you want to know how, we’re running a roadshow featuring case studies of how our “lead generation engine” approach works. Drop us a line now to find out when and where.

If it feels like you’re doing more marketing activity, and getting fewer results at the moment, then you need to have a glance through this document. It was given out by Neil Rackham the author of SPIN selling at Verne Harnish’s Sales Conference – www.gazelles.com/sales_summit/Rackham_Selling_Harder_Times.doc

It only takes a couple of minutes to read and debunks a few myths on the way. ie. you don’t have to compete on price, and you shouldn’t be chasing every opportunity.