Sometimes stark examples make the case for account based marketing (ABM) better than any ROI calculator can.

For the un-initiated, ABM is the approach to creating individual marketing plans aligned to specific accounts. We’ve got an overview blotter on the subject here.

So back to the stark example – see if it rings true with anything happening in your business right now. One of our clients has a customer worth over £200m per year globally – it’s one of their largest accounts. We’ve just started work at the last minute on a bid where they’re pitching to retain and grow the contract.

At the minute, they’re in 3rd place on the bid (behind one incumbent and one potential new supplier). The team at the customer has recently changed, and they’re saying that they’re not aware of any benefits from the last couple of years of the contract, and they don’t feel like they’re seeing any innovation or desire to keep the business.

Both of these objections are key areas where account based marketing could have helped. Highlighting the benefits and talking about the good work being delivered is a relatively simple job. Sharing innovation and ’showing the love’ are slightly more difficult, but there are some good places to start. Having seen the account plan, there are some obvious things that could have been done simply to build awareness across key contacts around the world – something that an account team of 12 people would struggle to do.

So even if it had only started 6-12 months ago, an ABM programme could have created a significantly different position going into this bid.

And this is really still only talking about retaining existing business in the account – there’s some obvious ROI to be shown in uncovering new opportunities or expanding into new areas/geographies. ABM seems to be gaining momentum as a practical strategy in complex B2B markets, and examples like this show how relevant it can be.

But anyway, there’s no point crying over spilt milk (unless it’s stained your favourite loafers) – there’s a bid to be won…

John Crane, former CIO of National Australia Bank, and John Suffolk, former UK government CIO, spoke at our recent Sales & Marketing Forum on the opportunities available to suppliers when an organisation goes through transformational change.

Discussion points included:

• The challenges of transformation – what’s the real role of the CIO and their team?
• A glimpse behind the scenes – how are major decisions made?
• Knowing IT’s place – should you be approaching IT or the wider business?
• Inside the IT function — it’s not just about the CIO
• Why do they turn to certain suppliers?

Finally, we asked our guest speakers to put their marketing hats on and come up with some ideas and suggestions on how suppliers should engage with CIOs.

The full forum write-up can be read here or viewed below.

To some marketing is a science, to others a craft. To a select few however, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. History is littered with examples of well-thought-out marketing plans crashing and burning against hubris, bad translation and rank stupidity.

In the days before the internet such mistakes could – if the company was lucky – remain confined to localised markets or the pages of industry publications. However, luckily for us, the web and social media not only means that mistakes can garner an audience in the millions before you can say: ‘fancy a flight to the US for buying this £100 vacuum cleaner?’, but technology also gives companies even more opportunity to show how not to do it.

Here’s some of our favourites:

Qantas – on the face of it launching a twitter competition to describe a  ‘luxury in-flight experience’ seemed quite a straightforward way of engaging with customers. But as Tommy Cooper knew, timing is everything. Which is why launching said campaign soon after you’ve grounded all your flights during a dispute with your workforce, is only ever going to encourage your customers to share experiences you’d rather the world didn’t hear.

Kenneth Cole – American shoemaker Kenneth Cole is an enthusiastic user of social media and even makes a habit of signing his tweets with his initials. Apparently he also makes some great footwear – although I wouldn’t know anything about that, being a bit of a philistine as far as those things are concerned. What he isn’t is a comedian, which is why the tweet below at the height of Egypt’s recent revolution was followed almost instantly by a grovelling apology.

Netflix – is an incredibly successful company, which rents DVDs via the post – just like Love Film. Since its formation, it has diversified into providing films, TV shows and other media through internet streaming – and been equally as successful. Last year it announced that it was splitting the company in two, with its DVD business to go under the name of Qwikster. Press releases were sent and executive statements aired, which again was successful until someone pointed out that the company had failed in the rudimentary responsibility of buying up the Twitter hashtag of the same name. Worse still, the Qwikster tag is actually registered to one Jason Castillo – whose expletive-filled tweets on the wonders of dope, women, sports and avoiding all kinds of schooling make great reading.

Walkers Crisps – apparently we only ever need to look back at history to learn our future, which makes you wonder what Walkers Crisps were up to when it came up with its ‘Guess where it will rain and win £10’ wheeze. A handy code on every crisp packet led to a website where punters found a map of the UK. All they then needed to do was choose a point where they thought it might rain and sit back – having first of course checked the Met Office site for a bit of ‘background’. The company was allegedly looking at a £1m bill before the site ‘went down’; those responsible seem to have completely missed the Hoover Marketing Masterclass from the early 90s.

Pepsi – there’s a great many challenges to doing business in China and among the cultural, regulatory and geographical difficulties any enterprise needs to navigate, surely the most difficult is shooting yourself in the foot. In the West, the slogan Pepsi gives you zest for life, is a fairly straightforward encouragement to partake in its sugary wares; in China it comes out as Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.

Coke – whatever Pepsi can do, Coke can do better. Apparently. When it launched itself on unsuspecting Chinese soft drink aficionados it called itself Ke-Kou-Ke-La. In a full on marketing blitz it made sure that the many thousands of signs and other red-based collateral proudly displayed the name, before discovering that the phrase means ‘bite the wax tadpole’ or ‘female horse stuffed with wax’ – depending on the dialect. As Napoleon Dynamite might say: sweet.

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…

Plenty of suppliers are focusing on ‘consumerisation’ as a topic of major interest to their customers and prospects. (’Consumerisation’ is all about what it means to a business when employees would rather use their own personal devices for work, would rather select their own apps, and want to interact with each other in ways that have more in common with Facebook than traditional ‘big’ corporate IT.) As a major change facing businesses, it’s creating threats and opportunities for IT, comms, services and other suppliers.

It’d be an easy prediction to say that suppliers will spend more time in 2012 to get their consumerisation stories straight – although it’s certainly not simple to stand out in an increasingly crowded market.

But the thing with consumerisation is that it’s not just another trend that marketers can use to resonate with the key decision-makers that they’re targeting. For many suppliers, it’s going to fundamentally change who these decision-makers are.

It won’t happen instantly, but over time some suppliers are going to see their heartlands (e.g. doing a single major deal with procurement) replaced with the new reality that thousands of individual employees (or at the very least hundreds of department heads) are free to make their own choices. Of course, some suppliers with security/consulting/hosting propositions may see little change (or even potential growth) while others (’consumer’ brands like Google and Apple) will find new opportunities to break into corporate markets that were previously sewn up (by major procurement relationships or ‘gatekeeper’ system integrators). But between these two extremes, there’s a mass of suppliers who face some tough choices in the mid-long term.

Assuming that they have (or can find) a business model that sustains a much larger volume of smaller (or even individual) deals, these suppliers will also need new marketing approaches to influence all of the people who could be buying, trialling, evaluating or recommending their services. You might describe it as a shift from B2B to B2C2B (I’d love to lay claim to that one but Google tells me it’s been used 25,000 times before…). As I say, none of this will happen overnight – but we can expect to see more and more examples of organisations reaching out beyond traditional decision-making units, and an increasing interest from others to see how they get on.

It’ll affect the buying journey, the sales process (e.g. more trials, less face-to-face), the approach to promotion and incentives, the real potential direct ROI from social media, the challenges of data (if you struggled managing 20,000 contacts, try coping with 20,000,000!) and the need for new types of content/user interactions. But it’s also an exciting time to stake a claim in a new area (where it feels like the Salesforce.com model has only scratched the surface and Apple is seeing success mainly by default).

How many of us have been guilty in our careers of spending all our efforts creating fantastic content and then adding ‘for more information please call…’ at the end? Such a vague request makes the likelihood of a response extremely low. It’s wrong to assume that a prospect is going to commit to a sales meeting after reading one email or piece of direct mail. Yes, the content may beautifully describe the benefits of a product or service. But the time-poor reader won’t pick up the phone unless they can see what’s in it for them.

If a prospect is to respond, they need to be clear on two things: what it is we want them to do next and why it is valuable to them. It’s a simple principle, but if we apply it with an understanding of the market and the buying process, it can dramatically improve results.

Here are three key steps to creating calls-to-action that actually work.

1. Consider the buying cycle

There are probably as many versions of the buying cycle as there are books on sales and marketing. But when it comes to developing the right call-to-action, they are useful tools since they help us understand that when we ask the reader to do something, it has to be appropriate to their current situation.

A typical buying funnel contains four stages: recognising the problem; working out what caused the problem and how big it is; evaluating possible solutions; and deciding on the best course of action.

Somebody who has only just recognised they have a problem is unlikely to pick up the phone and jump straight in to a sales meeting. At this stage, what will be most valuable to them is help in understanding the nature of their challenge. For these prospects, we might consider a link to download a whitepaper, or even inviting them to a workshop that helps them think through the cause and scope of their challenge.

Even at the later stages of the buying cycle, our time-poor prospects will be wary of picking up the phone unless they can see the value they will get in return for their time. Instead of ‘arrange a meeting with one of our experts’, then, how about a ‘case study road-show’ that shows how others have dealt with similar challenges?

2. Plan a series of CTAs

So, we understand the importance of a call-to-action that is relevant to the prospect’s current situation. And we can also assume that, in any given market, organisations will each be at a different stage in the buying cycle.

What we can do now is plan campaigns that have a series of calls-to-action, each one helping to ‘nudge’ the prospect along the buying cycle. Ask yourself, at every ‘touch point’, what is the right action to motivate people along the buying cycle?

Think about the ideal next step for your prospect, based on where they are in the buying process and taking into account any other considerations relevant to the market you are in. Also, plan out the subsequent touch points you will need to maintain customers’ forward momentum. Success comes when all of these touch points tie together seamlessly.

So, our appetite-whetting email might link to a website. The website persuades our prospect of the value of attending an event. The event finishes with an offer of a one-to-one workshop that helps the prospect understand their challenge and gives them materials to promote their case internally. And then, when they’ve had that crucial meeting with finance, we get in touch and book a sales meeting to discuss the next steps.

3. Put CTAs at the forefront

OK, we are now ready to create our content. All we need to do is remember the golden rule: we are selling the next step just as much as the solution.

So often, we devote 90 per cent of the content to the end product or solution and leave ourselves just a tenth to get across the bit that really matters: what we want them to do.

But now we have planned our ‘next steps’ to work together, our content can reflect that. We can devote more space to explaining the value of taking each step, giving us a much better chance of getting a response.

Consider it as your chance to make a pitch to the reader as to why they should act. Think about the level of investment you are asking them to make. The bigger the investment we ask, the stronger the case needs to be. If we ask them to take half a day out to attend an event, the value of that half-day will have to compare favourably – not only to other events but also any way they might usefully spend their time. With an audience that is frequently very time poor, ‘do nothing’ can be the strongest competition we face.

So, rather than making your call-to-action an afterthought, it should be at the forefront of your communication. If planned in the right way, it completely changes the structure and emphasis of your content. Let’s put calls-to-action at the heart of our creative.

It’s possible to generate leads for pretty much any proposition. Not that you should, of course – if it’s going to be impossible to sell, then it would be a good idea to reconsider the proposition.

But let’s assume that the proposition is a sound one, and that any right-thinking buyer would bite your arm off to sign on the dotted line – if only you could spend an hour with them to explain it (followed by 6-12 months going through the sales process…).

All you need is to sell them on the idea of spending an hour with you. Easy if you’re Megan Fox. Less so if you’re a ‘leading supplier of business services’.

Let’s also assume (it’s a dream scenario) that your data is entirely accurate and you have a contact strategy which is a thing of beauty (say, an integrated campaign plan with multiple touch-points over several months).

So you push ‘go’ on your lead generation campaign, but you only get a trickle of opportunities back. Why? 9 times out of 10, it’ll be because the strong proposition wasn’t converted into a strong set of campaign messaging.

What’s the difference between proposition and message?

The short answer: it’s the difference between a campaign that sounds good to an internal audience (strong proposition) and one that actually works when it reaches customers and prospects (strong message).

The longer answer:

The proposition is the articulation of the superior value (compared with the competition) that you can bring to bear on solving an issue that a prospect faces.

The campaign messaging is what happens when you take the proposition and think about what the audience needs to know there and then, what/who they are most likely to listen to, what will capture their imagination, and what will convince them to take the next step with you.

Let’s take the 4 elements of successful messaging in turn

1. What the audience needs to know – depending on what stage the market is at for your proposition and what stage of the buying cycle your ideal prospect is at, they will respond to very different messages. The simple example would be to compare a prospect who doesn’t even know they have an issue with one who is already evaluating different solutions. Clearly you need to share very different information with people in these two scenarios – the same applies to the difference between a proposition that is brand new to the market with one in a category that’s well established.
2. What/who they are most likely to listen to – really an extension from the previous point, the idea here is to think about the kind of information people will respond to and what sources will hold most authority (analysts, existing customers, their peers, your delivery experts….).
3. What will capture their imagination – this is an invitation to get more ‘creative’ than any standard value proposition would allow. That could mean ‘creative’ in the design/copy sense – for example, we took a client proposition about joining up strategy with execution and turned it into a campaign about great weddings (complete with pieces of wedding cake sent to their key customers). Or it could mean ‘creative’ in a more business sense – for example identifying that building a ‘maturity model’ around your proposition will help you to open doors and sell more consultatively.
4. Convincing them to take the next step with you – the best campaign messaging is entirely context-aware, and is rooted in the knowledge that buyers will be going through several stages and can be speeded up by focusing on selling the value of taking the next step (e.g. an hour’s meeting) rather than always focusing on the end solution. What’s the value of the hour’s meeting? What will they get that they couldn’t get from someone else? How will it help them to do their job? (In a way, this part of the campaign message is like building a little proposition all of its own for the next step in the sales process)

Get all of these 4 elements right, and prospects should be beating a path to your door – and having spent so much time on crafting vaue propositions it would be a shame for some of the mega deals to get away for lack of campaign messages.

Why have 1 in 5 buyers been put off a supplier by information found through social media? This presentation gives a special focus on the critical issue of trust that came up in our decision-maker research on social media (see here for the full research overview).

In April, we researched 100 UK decision makers’ social media attitudes and behaviours. The findings have made for interesting reading, confirming some suspicions but surprising us in other areas. Above all, they’re intended as prompts in terms of important considerations when planning social media engagement.

You can read the results as both supporting the importance of social media and illustrating why it can’t succeed on its own:

For: We’ve seen that half of decision makers feel that suppliers should be active within social media, and that a surprising number have met and given business to suppliers following a first interaction via social media.

Against: But the influence of social media dips at some key stages of the buying cycle, and more traditional channels are becoming seen as more valuable than ever before in the face of ‘overwhelming’ digital interactions.

To summarise our conculsions:

Social media has reached a point where it is almost universally used, but is at its most effective alongside other channels – hopefully we have reached the stage where it can be sensibly considered as an element of any wider marketing strategy rather than hyped as a standalone silo…

If you are interested in any further information from the full findings (over 20 different question areas and variations by size of organisation/age/job function), please contact peverett@themarketingpractice.com.