James Gardner, CTO at DWP, is writing an e-book about what the enterprise sales process looks like from the buyer’s point of view. (The chapter on Tricks Vendors Play to get a first foot in the door promises to be particularly interesting…)

A recent extract posted on his blog talks about the tell-tale signs of a ‘gone native Account Director‘ (an Account Director who feels they work for the client organisation rather than their own, is building a true partnership with their customer, and is embarrassed by any overt attempts to sell to the client because they believe the client will bring opportunities to them rather than the other way round).

Now I’m putting words into James’ mouth here, but he seems to be saying that going native is a good thing for an Account Director – and ultimately for the sales operation they work in – because a true partner will end up with more (or better quality) business than they would have done through hard selling.

I would suggest that Marketing needs to think about the same principles too. We know for a fact that the campaigns we run work best when they “don’t feel like marketing” to the end audience – that’s a key principle of course for social media and it’s always been valid in real life too. But it’s very difficult to achieve, and only possible I would argue if you start from

• a real interest in the issues of the marketplace;
• combined with a deep belief that things could be better for that marketplace if they thought more about what you have to offer;
• and an interest/affinity for the people you believe you can help.

Those are the defining beliefs of pretty much all the best marketers I know. Start from anywhere else, and the sales objectives you’re trying to support will be blatantly obvious – to such an extent that they will switch off the audience. So much so that I find myself getting embarrassed when I see examples of marketing that add nothing to a bare sales message, or are obviously trying to promote a course of action that will result in a sale. (I’ll pick out some examples of this from advertising in this month’s Harvard Business Review in an upcoming post.)

Now this isn’t to say that Marketing shouldn’t be about supporting sales objectives – if it isn’t helping to sell today or creating a better sales environment for tomorrow, then it doesn’t have any reason to exist. But the point is that – for the ‘gone-native Marketer’ – successfully driving sales is inextricably tied to the belief that their product/service can make the world a better place, a desire to find opportunities to make this happen, and a deep interest in the people whose world they can improve.

Our recent Sales & Marketing Forum examined the position that suppliers to the public sector find themselves in now. Our speakers on the night were James Gardner, CTO, Department for Work and Pensions, Colin Cram, Former Director, North West Centre of Excellence, and Simon Carter, Marketing Director, UK Government Division, Fujitsu.

A write-up of the session is available to read here, covering four key sections:

1. Why is the public sector so important?

“Put simply, annual government procurement is huge — at £220 billion it represents 0.75% of the total global GDP”

2. Why is selling to the public sector so challenging?

“The implications of a new government determined to significantly reduce government spending are massive, but this drive to cut costs also represents an outstanding opportunity for technology vendors to demonstrate options for driving operational efficiency and effectiveness. The baseline objective of any supplier should be to demonstrate an ability to deliver savings in the order of 25-30%, either on previous contracts or as process savings. Do this, and they will be ideally positioning IT as a force of innovation as well as equipping public sector workforces for future challenges.”

3. What is the experience of procurement client side?

“Most business cases brought before the public sector collapse because they do not help address the ‘big game’ — the immediate and urgent need to find ways of taking massive amounts of spend out of government operations.”

4. How can vendors best approach the public sector?

“In reality there is very little that can’t be outsourced by government — even Whitehall policy work can be outsourced! — and if public sector management have the ambition and vision to follow a more ambitious outsourcing policy there is estimated a further £100-150 billion of services that could be run by the private sector.”

[Or, a hymn in praise of integration...]

Have you got an iPad yet? Did you buy a 3D TV just in time for the World Cup? How about a walkman? (…OK, one of those isn’t actually a must-have gadget this year)

And what about the marketing must-haves for 2010? Have you appointed a Head of Social Media? Implemented a marketing automation system? Designed a content marketing strategy?

The next big thing makes our capitalist world go round – from the consumer who believes their life will be complete with 3D TV, to the marketer who turns to the latest technique as the answer to their prayers.

Suffering from boom and bust marketing?

The danger comes when you step off the merry-go-round. You realise that football is still football whether you’re watching in black and white or 3D – and social media won’t automatically solve fundamental challenges like uniting Sales and Marketing or differentiating you from the competition.

What’s the problem with jumping to adopt new marketing techniques?

• It can excuse (or distract) from failure in older channels – hopefully the next new thing will come along before it’s time to analyse the success of the last one…
• It can make marketers chase the wrong goals – metrics become about the success of the online community rather than contribution to the sales pipeline…
• It can make us less strategic – distracting from the chance to become the voice of the customer, driving the creation and application of new propositions.

This isn’t an argument to ignore the latest marketing trends – especially not ones like social media that have such potential to reach key audiences. It’s just a plea to consider them in a more integrated way.

Paul Dunay from Avaya was talking to Brian Wallace, VP of Digital Marketing and Media for RIM, and recalls him saying that “2 years from now – if I still have a Director of Social Media – I should be fired!” Once it gets off the ground, social media isn’t a programme in itself – it needs to support the bigger goals like prospect acquisition, customer growth or co-creation of products/services. Putting it in a silo won’t help anybody achieve these core objectives.

Demand generation – integration in practice

Take a big marketing challenge like delivering sales leads. (To start with, let’s not forget that the ‘old’ channels (events, direct mail, telemarketing…) are still delivering opportunities every day.)

But suppose you believe you could be driving more demand ‘inbound’ rather than relying solely on the traditional ‘outbound’ channels? You’re faced with the temptation to kick off any number of isolated projects to attract these sales opportunities.

Take the big three – social media, marketing automation, content marketing. It would be simple to create a programme for each:

• One set of people looking to improve your reputation/presence online
• Another building nurturing/communication processes for visitors to your website
• A third group dedicated to creating content that customers and prospects will find valuable

But shouldn’t these really all be part of a single programme? Creating content that the audience wants, delivering it in a format that can be distributed across the web/used to start conversations, and then being ready to track inbound interest and provide more good content at relevant points on the prospect journey.

And integration would go further than that – it would look at the ‘old’ channels and see how they could also use the same content, qualify people into the lead nurturing funnel, and provide essential opportunities to convert initial interest into sales leads.

Seven success factors for the new integrated model

To start with, there are four pre-requisites – all about knowing what you’re going to do. But let’s assume you’ve done all of those – understood your audience, thought about the great content you can provide, identified the channels to use, and set your objectives.

The final three success factors are a bit less obvious, and more about how you do it:

1. Sell the next step
   It’s true that the best programmes create content and calls to action to suit the needs of the audience – but it’s also possible to subtly direct those needs and the journey the audience will take. This means stepping back from the core proposition you’re selling, and think more about selling why the prospect should stay with you for the next step of their journey.
2. Don’t be afraid to involve sales: you can’t automate everything
   In the rush to become more self-sufficient, Marketing is increasingly frightened of handing an ‘unready’ lead to Sales. But sometimes (especially for high value deals in the relatively small UK market) a sales conversation or meeting can be the best next step for the prospect even if they aren’t going to buy for another 9 months.
3. And keep going… across all the channels that work
   In one recent programme, 57% of leads handed to sales came after three or more waves of campaigning. The point is clear – seamlessly integrating multiple touchpoints (social, email, website, events, calling…) over time is the only way to uncover the true potential of a market.

So like any team of superheroes (The Avengers, the Power Rangers – select according to your generation) using tools and channels on their own will only defeat some challenges: it’s the ability to combine them seamlessly that will destroy the evil genius who is taking over the world.

Here’s the last great campaign in this run and it only seems fair that I choose something technology-focused for all you purists out there.

Today’s example is from HP and its recent ‘Let’s do Amazing’ campaign. Starring Rhys Darby (funny man) as well as Dr. Dre and a few other HP users, the ads are designed to look at one man’s incompetence with technology and how HP can really transform the everyday tasks of consumers and businesses. I’ve linked to a few videos below to give you a bit of choice, but they’re all pretty short and worth a look.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhqi5QgEr9c (Here’s the internal launch video to get the HP team inspired… hmm)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7rv1CsXkHI (Dr. Dre)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu8Re1mpB8M (HP Labs)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fb-6k5sn8Q (UPS Delivery)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jymYv2EvsQ (DreamWorks)

I think the ads definitely grab your attention because of the way they are made, but do they make you think ‘I should buy HP’?

As a tagline ‘Let’s Do Amazing’ sounds inspiring, but the examples provided don’t necessarily showcase the groundbreaking innovation that makes HP different from other suppliers out there.

Are there other scenarios where HP products can / could make a difference and therefore set the character-led ads and the HP products apart from the field?

It might not be the most immediate field to bring to mind, but HP do some good work in the healthcare sector with Electronic Medical Records and Picture Archiving and Communications Systems and so my suggestion would be using an example from here…

Let’s take Rhys through the hospital, where his entry card ensures his details are recognised on arrival and his appointment and department shown on the board in reception. Let’s show doctors doing their rounds with the latest touch-screen tablet computers where they can bring up individual patient records in an instant.

Potentially it’s an example a bit more worthy of the line ‘Let’s Do Amazing’ and is a clear showcase of pushing the boundaries to improve patient response times and medical treatment.

Just a thought…

Today I’d like to talk to you about crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing is basically a problem-solving and production model. Problems are put-out to an unknown group in an open call for solutions.

More and more businesses and brands are looking to consumers to generate content either in the form of adverts or virals — which are then shared among a community of friends and brand advocates. And it’s a really good way of developing long-term engagement with a brand and product, as the audience actually has some form of emotion / time invested in the output.

One really good example of this is the current Doritos King of Ads campaign — inviting the audience to make the next TV ad for the brand. Having started in March, the competition has run across TV and online (including Facebook and YouTube), and is now in the final stages with the last 3 ads being put up for public voting. The winner will get the glory of their ad on TV and £200,000 in the bank — Doritos get an original idea, limited production costs and will probably have made their money back with interest from all the people buying the corn-based snack for ad-making purposes.

You can see the judges’ final 15 videos here – http://kingofads.doritos.co.uk/#/gallery/selection/type=userSubmission

And you can see the ad Dan and myself entered here – http://www.youtube.com/doritoskingofads#p/u/29/X1COmp74jqE

Sadly we didn’t make the cut, but it’s Doritos’ loss if you ask me.

Benefits of crowdsourcing include the following:

• Problems can be explored at comparatively little cost, and often very quickly
• Payment is by results or even omitted
• The organisation can tap a wider range of talent than might be present in its own organisation
• By listening to the crowd, organisations gain first-hand insight on their customers’ needs and requirements

Possible pitfalls of crowdsourcing:

• Added costs to bring a project to an acceptable conclusion
• Increased likelihood that a crowdsourced project will fail due to lack of monetary motivation, too few participants, lower quality of work, lack of personal interest in the project, global language barriers, or difficulty managing a large-scale, crowdsourced project
• Projects can fail to attract participants and sometimes require the agency involved to create and seed their own films
• No written contracts, non-disclosure agreements, or employee agreements
• Difficulties maintaining a working relationship with crowdsourced workers

Here’s the great campaign for today (the link is at the end of the post). It’s by DDB and Philips, for the latter’s cinema screen TV. It’s also the follow-up to the Cannes Gold Lion winner and much loved one shot sequence – Carousel (below).

The basic premise is this — if you have one story and one simple piece of dialogue, how many ways can you tell the story? For this exercise, the creative team took five leading directors and created five very different films. All of them were underlined by the message – ‘There are millions of ways to tell a story. There’s only one way to watch one.’

And I’d say the same thing to you, the nature of our business means that we, more often than not, push very similar products and messages to our clients. Yet there are always news ways to say things or new ways of making the familiar different. We just have to think of them

I won’t say much more about these, just have a look, turn the sound up and the ambilight on and pick your favourite (mine’s the one with the robot).

http://www.cinema.philips.com/gb_en/

The following ad is for Old Spice (it’s what real men used to splash on their face before the likes of Calvin Klein and Paul Smith made us all smell like summer meadows). Made by Wieden & Kennedy Portland, the ad was shot in one take and uses humour to great effect to get the audience’s attention.

The takeaway point:

This ad isn’t aimed directly at who you’d assume to be the typical target audience for male grooming products – men. Instead it focuses attention on addressing a female audience. There’s a level of aspiration in the tone (the man your man could be), but more importantly the ad is speaking directly to the people who spend the most money on male grooming – women!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1266206/How-women-massive-surge-sales-male-grooming-products.html

The humour in the ad and the fact that it was launched during the SuperBowl ensured that the ad also appealed to men — taking a familiar product and giving it a modern twist.

With any campaign we need to really look at the target audience we go after — is there someone other than the obvious choice we should be speaking to? Can we take a different approach by speaking to someone in another part of the business who can influence our desired end-audience? What are their pressures / problems? What do they find funny? What do they do outside of the office?

It’s a starter for 10, but have a think.

Each week in the barn, we run an internal best practice session on something topical, inspiring, or simply useful.

This week, we’re considering a range of consumer campaigns and seeing what inspiration they have to offer. So over the next 4 days, we’ll have a series of guest posts from Ben Peckett (long-standing member of our Creative Team), sharing his pick of the campaigns and some related food for thought…

In a recent post I wrote about some of the lessons marketing can learn from sales. Now, moving once more into the breach, the Sales Executive Council has posted a list of the seven principals to bear in mind when developing any sales tool.

Sales is often supported by tools that help them, but sometimes there are so many that these tools doesn’t always take off. Because the same practical challenges are faced in most marketing projects, maybe there’s something we can learn from these too:

1. Make sure you keep your focus on your end goal right the way through the development.
2. Prioritize and feature requests and focus on those you think will impact success most.
3. Early in the scoping, collect as much feedback as you can to base your decisions on.
4. Communicate during the build why the tool will make a difference to the user.
5. Ensure it’s easy to use. There’s nothing worse that thousands of features no-one can use.
6. Conduct pilots prior to launch so if there is any feedback to react to you can
7. Make sure everyone can get to the tool and use it when they need to.

See the link for more detail, but to say these rules are limited only to sales tools is pretty blinkered. Most of them are just common sense for just about everything we do. It never hurts to repeat good ideas, though.

We recently launched a set of four new propositions for one client, to be taken out by sales teams across EMEA. Eventually, as much effort and thought has gone into communicating how the sales teams could use the resources as in creating the resources themselves: bringing to life different sales scenarios; selling the value of the collateral; explaining how some of the newer presentation techniques can be used. And if all else fails, communicate directly with the market and create a demand for the sales team to meet…

McKinsey’s recent interview with Shell CIO Alan Matula gives some real food for thought in evaluating how you approach major enterprises (and hold on to them once you have them…)

When you consider that Matula is talking about IT transformation that has been going on for a decade (and is now looking for payback over at least 15 years from, for example, a new standardised HR system), it becomes clear why the long-term approach is the only one to take.

He talks through the different phases of the transformation, and what comes across most strongly is a ruthless focus on reaching a successful outcome. When it comes to selecting suppliers, it’s clear that only those most able to sign up to the corporate vision have been selected:

“We started with the idea that we wanted 70 percent of our spending to be external. Of that, we wanted 80 percent to be focused on the top 11 suppliers. We put those 11 into three groups: First, there are the foundation suppliers, those in which we make long-term bets—Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. Then there’s the infrastructure group, with three bundles—AT&T, HP, and T-Systems—for networks, end-user computing, and hosting of storage, respectively. And finally we have four application services suppliers—Accenture, IBM, Logica, and Wipro. What we’re doing differently is bringing all 11 of them together to work as a collective.”

It will be interesting to revisit the performance of this collaborative approach after a couple of years working. Shell is already noticing that traditional product/service divisions between suppliers are breaking down (movements like cloud computing and shifting to pay per performance models are exacerbating this at the higher level).

Matula’s closing comments illustrate 3 of his most significant priorities. Being able to measure the impact that IT has on the business. Having the skilled people available to manage relationships (internally and with key suppliers). And finally, avoiding failure at all costs – risk aversion is still top of the list.

“IT is more important and intense to the enterprise than ever before, and that essentially requires an ongoing effort to transform IT; there is always another phase. To support that mental model, the first thing is to never lose the perspective that you’re here to make the business more productive and more competitive. Our catchphrase, “business at the center,” keeps us grounded. Our position today is a reflection of the tight integration that we have with the business, combined with the efforts of key support functions like HR, finance, and procurement.

A second thing is that you’re only as good as the talent that you have. For instance, in the robust sourcing of infrastructure and applications we have put in place, the people at the interface are very important. They manage the critical supplier relationships with CEOs and top executives at these firms, and they have the technical know-how to help guide the suppliers.

Finally, if you don’t have the basics right, you won’t have any credibility. It only takes one bad “go live” on a project or a flaw in your basic delivery capabilities to set you back very quickly.”