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).

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.

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.

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.

So what are they getting out of it? The 11m viewers can’t all be potential buyers for Corning Glass (although they are all potential buyers of phones/TVs etc that use Corning’s Gorilla Glass). And the products featured in the film obviously aren’t available to buy yet. A few thoughts on the benefits they may see (not an exhaustive list and not done with any knowledge of Corning’s business model!):

• More strategic profile with their major customers (like Apple): the buzz and coverage around the video provides a level of credibility that Corning can’t only talk about good engineering but they also have a vision of how this engineering relates to consumer behaviour/expectations. So it opens up a more strategic position with major customers. Hopefully they have plans to turn that into longer term exec-level relationships.
• I also assume that it would be more difficult for Sony (for example) to decide to switch manufacturers of the glass components in its TVs if Corning have a greater level of consumer awareness. In fact, using Corning Glass may actually be able to be used as more of a selling point (or at least a relatively high profile feature) for consumer devices – which would also be good for Corning’s business if more manufacturers turn to them on the back of greater consumer awareness. Hopefully they have a plan to nurture/capitalise on new demand that comes their way from brands that want to tick this box for consumers.
• From the Corning website, it looks like they are heavily focused on R&D for competitive advantage. This in turn means recruiting and retaining the best talent in the industry – and showing the kind of future-thinking that’s in this video can only help with that.

My big worry is whether they are doing enough to capitalise on the video’s popularity. They’ve got an advert running alongside the video on YouTube (good) but it just goes through to the standard company homepage (bad) – what about a specific page aimed at converting visitors around the kind of benefits I listed above (or whatever the goals they’re really looking for as a business!). If you look around the Corning website, you are able to find a page that promotes following them on Facebook/Twitter/YouTube (it doesn’t really explain what benefits you will get from doing that), but the rest of the site doesn’t really seem designed to encourage inbound contact/face to face meetings at the exhibitions listed etc, or to offer/encourage any lighter-touch ways that they might be able to keep in touch with interested prospects through the buying cycle (lead nurturing/marketing automation).

But I don’t want to take away from a brilliant job conceiving and executing the video, or to suggest that it won’t have a significant impact on Corning’s reputation – just that as with any social media activity there are next steps/opportunities to integrate with wider marketing strategies that need to be maximised. Among the 11m viewers will be potential customers for Corning (or people who work with/advise/know potential customers) – and will they still be in touch with them in 6,12,24 months time?

The story of how they arrived at the target of 150 leads is an interesting illustration of the vicious cycle that can start when the targets for marketing and sales aren’t aligned.

The previous year, Marketing had a goal to deliver 10 new signed deals. They predicted a 1 in 5 conversion rate and so set a target of 50 leads. But only 4 of the leads converted to a sale in the year. So taking that conversion rate of 1 in 12.5, and a marginally higher business goal of 12 new deals, they arrived at a target of 150 leads for the following year.

It could very easily have turned into a vicious cycle where targeting an even wider market to generate three times as many leads led to an even lower conversion rate and an even higher target the next year (with less respect for Marketing in the business), and so on…

But the point about properly understanding Sales’ needs holds true. It became clear that one of the main reasons for the low 1 in 12.5 conversion rate was that Sales weren’t interested in most of the companies that Marketing had been supplying as ‘leads’ (even though they met the criteria of organisations of the right size, in the right industries, with the right level of contacts at the ‘right’ stage of the buying cycle). In a perfect world, Sales would have been crying out for the leads – but in reality, each sales person had a named set of target accounts – any leads that fell outside this list would only receive cursory attention, and only if they weren’t busy with a named account.

So rather than delivering the 150 BANT qualified leads, the marketing ojectives for the year changed:

• to uncover any potential opportunities within named accounts that Sales weren’t actively working (still targeting the 12 new deals, but with conversion ratios for these opportunities being far higher than in the previous year)
• to build intelligence across all named accounts and strengthen relationships with decision-makers
• to nurture the wider addressable market with the goals of building a long term reputation and mapping the potential for future years to support a re-alignment of the sales team

And they all lived (reasonably) happily ever after…

“Does your company help its customers understand the unique value of its products? If not, it’s time to start bragging, which is the only real path to higher growth and margins.”

Of course, the idea of anything approaching ‘bragging’ would be anathema to most of our clients. It seems completely counter to their typical brand positions and also unlikely to be the most productive start to deals with customers who are looking for more relationship-based approaches. I think that the HBR article has more of a commodity-sell focus, where emphasising a differentiator in something that people have to buy anyway can make the difference.

But while ‘bragging’ may not be right for the complex sale, there’s still a kernel of truth in the article for B2B marketers: suppliers should have the strength of their convictions about the value that they have to offer to their customers and prospects. And there’s scope for us to be a lot more passionate about sharing this value and making prospects aware of it.

This leads me onto something we’ve been talking more and more about lately – ‘inside-out’ marketing. It’s counter to the ‘outside-in’ approach that involves asking prospects ‘what keeps you up at night?’ and building a proposition to match. Instead, ‘inside-out’ marketing starts with the fact that a supplier should already have a good idea of what they are best at and the critical issues they help customers with.

It’s our belief that other prospects are going to be more interested in hearing about these answers (and how they relate to their business) than they are in being asked questions where they have to do all the work of defining their issues and potential solutions. So this is where we can show unique value – not necessarily in having unique product differentiators, but in being best at communicating the potential benefits to buyers.

It’s often a different story when it comes to bid support, but again ‘bragging’ isn’t really the right description. Having identified the ‘win themes’ that will differentiate you in the bid, the idea is not to ‘brag’ about them, but to come up with ways of proving the points to the buyer and leaving them with the right impression (rarely by simply ’saying’ the messages of the win themes, and far more often by ’showing’ them in action).

Of course, all these approaches rely on the initial ability to identify the value that will really make a difference to your potential buyers. Whether you’re bragging, running inside-out marketing or developing bid win themes, they all come to life when they’re matched to the right value at the relevant stage of the buying cycle for the maturity of the market for your product or service (more on identifying this value in a future post…).

It’s also fair to say that the debate was pretty unstructured (increasingly so as the dinner progressed…) which makes the task of writing a summary quite challenging. But I’ve tried to start the ball rolling by grouping some of the highlights from the evening into four main themes. If you were with us at the dinner, feel free to add a comment with your key points below…

But first, a two-sentence summary…

The world (especially technology) is changing faster than our ability to understand it; countries as well as companies need to get better at spotting and seizing the opportunities that are out there. For suppliers to the public sector, this will require radical change towards taking ‘speculative’ business-led propositions to autonomous areas (like health or police) where solutions will be replicable (and the days of massive central government contracts are numbered).

Challenges and opportunities for suppliers to the public sector

The challenges are more numerous than the opportunities, or certainly in central government. The headline shift is that suppliers have the opportunity to be bolder in creating propositions to solve specific challenges. Consultants need to stop asking “what keeps you up at night?” and software vendors need to stop saying “we have the best tool on the market – how many licenses do you want to buy?” Instead, suppliers should come with specific propositions that solve well-documented business challenges – the kind of thing that we’ve described before as a ‘provocation proposition’.

But that’s not the whole story. Broadly speaking, there are 3 audiences that suppliers will need very different messages for (and should probably be communicating with pretty constantly to build up momentum for an opportunity). There are the strategic thinkers and CIOs who are looking for bold, business-led commercial propositions, but purchasing and procurement teams are often still thinking in 10 year cycles, and then there are the ministers (of varying quality) who need the vote-winning angle alongside seeing the relevance to stated policies.

So who do you take these business-led propositions to? Generally, the opportunities are outside central government – in health, police, education, local government. Forward looking leaders in organisations in these sectors are going to be most receptive to the more speculative supplier approaches.

There’s also a view that now’s the time to be preparing your approaches to these organisations. Why? Because they’ll need to be making radical changes in 2012 and will be planning these towards the end of 2011. This year, they’ve managed to make small changes and sacrifices to achieve 10% budget reductions. But when they start planning after the summer, they’ll realise that making an additional 10% cut on top of this will mean doing some things in a radically different way (the BBC has just covered views of the implications for the police – the first shots in an ongoing battle). It’s essential for suppliers to tie into budget planning after the summer with ideas in support of the structural re-thinks that will be happening.

John’s view is that the greatest opportunity (as yet not properly understood by suppliers) lies with the mutualisation agenda, which may begin with the formation of locally-based services and organisations, but which could grow with consolidation into big business.

Procurement and commercial models

There’s no point pretending though that all buyers and suppliers will be able to take up some of the opportunities available (or that there are enough opportunities for all).

In terms of procurement, there was a nod to the fact that some of the biggest suppliers find it to their advantage when procurement drags on (the major bid budgets involved keep a lot of competition out of the process). The discussion also covered some of the challenges with the EU procurement process – and the fact that there are ways of speeding up the process if buyers and suppliers find the right ways of framing the purchase.

On the commercial side, supplier margins will continue to be squeezed – with offshoring services and the SaaS model cutting prices and entry/exit costs, even the bespoke software and services that are needed at the top of the stack will feel the pinch. It’s not that there won’t continue to be a need for high end services and bespoke software at the top end – it’s just that there will be a knock-on effect from lowering costs at the bottom end.

For software, the old license model is dead and it will all move to pay as you go (some procurement may still be a bit behind the curve in looking cost of ownership over 5 or 10 years, but not for long). The more commoditised side of the services market is already following suit, and the large Indian outsourcers (who have already been proven by government) will be adopting them as part of their armoury of tactics. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can disguise an old model and still compete against these new entrants!

One thought this raises is how much both traditional software and particularly services providers realise that changing buying behaviour and commercial models will demand a re-think of their marketing models. Looking for smaller, potentially shorter term contracts, would suggest a marketing model more like Salesforce.com than SAP (or even Accenture – as they move to a pay by performance or by demand model, services businesses could learn from the SaaS model). As margins go down, maintaining the personal touch and 121 relationships with potential buyers will become even harder commercially.

But when John rattled off a list of countries around the world that are watching the UK to see how our initiatives perform, it was clear that there are potentially global prizes to be won by suppliers who can get over these hurdles and make a success of the opportunities in the UK.

Wider government challenges/strategies

There was some interesting discussion about how technology is changing the way that government interacts with the people. One example was in terms of how pressure groups can emerge that force government to respond.

Social media is obviously a significant factor here – creating forums for groups that might not otherwise have reached critical mass and allowing them to influence policy-making. One consequence could be that more single-issue politicians may be elected, or at least that each politician may have to justify their position on certain issues.

And views on trends in the world in general…

John started the evening with a call to arms – the old models of everything (from government, to technology, to business, education, travel…) are disappearing, and leading IT suppliers are among those best placed to embrace the change – if they want to. Try to resist it, and you likely won’t be around in 10 years time.

Asked where the next revolution in technology will come from, John’s views highlighted both the small (nanotechnology) and the massively large (million connection distributed computing networks).

And where the evening started with discussion around the pace of change, it ended on a similar note. Will technology come to the rescue of the planet? John’s answer was partly positive – that technology opens a lot of new possibilities for us (for example, leading edge use on show in South Korean health service), and in fact that the greatest challenges provoke the combination of new and existing technology into solutions to major problems. But he also had a word of warning that the speed of innovation is way outstripping our ability to comprehend the possibilities on offer – something we will have to overcome or find ways to manage if we want to make the best use possible of the innovations that are coming down the pipeline.

Far from things like ‘implementing and updating business applications’ (Business Priority #6 for 2011), when we talk to CIOs their real priorities tend to be things like ‘keeping my job after that security fiasco’, ‘finding a new job where budget isn’t shrinking each year’, or perhaps more business-centric things like ‘building a leadership team that can support me properly’ or ‘convincing my suppliers to cut their costs again’.

Perhaps someone should pick up David Cameron’s ‘Gross National Happiness’ theme and try to research what really makes CIOs tick and how to make them happy?

But the big trends that this research picks up do offer a couple of interesting angles to marketers:

1. All the business priorities are very optimistic-sounding. But the ‘fear’ equivalents could actually be more useful to us in capturing a decision-maker’s attention. So rather than the carrot of ‘Attracting and retaining new customers’ we would raise the danger of ‘Losing wallet share to new market entrants’. Sounds simple, but putting a bit more ‘provocation’ into the propositions can be more effective than always selling on ‘hope’. It’s definitely an opportunity to stand out from all the vendors who pick up on the priorities and parrot them back to the decision-makers.

2. There will be useful observations to draw by comparing different answers in the full research. Just one example that suggests itself from the summary findings would be that Gartner claim Cloud Computing is advancing faster that previously thought. Cloud Computing and Virtualisation are the top two technology priorities for 2011. The combination of these results (moving faster than expected but still at the top of the priorities) suggests that decision-makers will be on the hunt for detailed information and support to turn the priority into a reality. There will be a lack of success stories readily available to companies looking to go into the Cloud – so client references, site visits, and even case studies/customer interviews will be massively useful. And – picking up on the point above – any fear messages about areas that CIOs might have overlooked or potential causes of project failures will probably be enough to merit their attention (just make sure you have a good antidote to the fear!).