What a week it was last week. The world is changing before our eyes.

What interested financial services companies a week ago may well now hit a brick wall. Our business intelligence team, calling into banks this week on behalf of various clients, have been met with everything from “I’ve just been made redundant” to “I don’t know what’s going on, I simply can’t talk to you – it’s all up in the air.”

So what action can you take, right now, to keep on generating leads? To make sure your marketing messages will continue to strike home?

1. Talk to your customers, more on this below

2. Find out where there is still opportunity to sell. (we’re tracking several of these areas – get in touch if you want to sign up for our email newsletters on this)

3. Find cost-effective ways of getting your message in front of people – and prove why you are worth their time

Our own experience, only last week, was showing that what mattered a month ago is seen as frivolous now. The unusual market conditions are definitely creating opportunities but they are not always immediately obvious.

To use a B2C example, The Sunday Times reported yesterday that John Lewis has seen a 247% increase in sales of hot water bottles versus this time last year. Presumably this is people trying to conserve their cash by keeping the central heating switched off. Makes thrifty sense, but not an immediately obvious market opportunity.

It goes to show that, in a time of unprecedented goings-on, no-one can know for sure what will work. For B2B, it’s back to basics marketing – the most important action you can take is to get out there and ask some questions of your clients.

Ask them how, in this new environment, they will be making decisions, ask what are the pressures they’re facing, and what is valuable to them now. Understand how their own customers are behaving. You need to really understand both of these aspects to be able to put together proposition and messages that will engage them in uncharted territory.

We’ve made available our own client insight questionnaire to speed things up for you. Download it here: customer-insight-questionnaire.Your buyers’ worries (and their urgent need for future performance) are a real opportunity – if you understand them properly.

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In this recent post on mycustomer.com, Yuchun Lee argues that there are three interrelated trends that are rendering some B2C marketing techiques obsolete: The rise of consumer power, a budget shift to interactive marketing and an upsurge in marketing complexity.

To counter this, Yuchun suggests B2C marketers should be considering an alternative “4Ps” of marketing: personalisation, presence, persuasion and permission. I think that B2B marketers are seeing similar trends, and they can take a lot from what Yuchun writes. Here’s how the new 4Ps could be put to use for B2B marketers. 

Personalisation In B2C, this means systematically tailoring offerings and relationships to the needs of individual customers, often in real-time. For B2B marketers, we should be leveraging the opportunity to create communications that are always relevant and helpful, and ensuring that the recipients’ channel and content preferences are understood and used.

Presence. Yuchun states, “As the buying process increasingly incorporates online channels, physical distribution and placement become less important. Today, marketers need something broader: presence. Presence manifests itself in keyword searches, in online product reviews, blog endorsements and recommendations made on social networks.” Even in a mid-sized B2B firm, especially one in IT, you will find your company and your product debated online whether you like it or not. You might as well use what other people are saying about your company and product to get a head-start in your market research. As marketers in B2B IT, we often never get to use the products we are marketing. The people commenting online do. They are a convenient and cheap market research tool.

Yuchun adds that a presence-based strategy requires deeper knowledge about customers, and more reliable signaling as to when they are preparing to act. Adding intelligence to B2B marketing systems ought to reduce wasteful over-promotion at the same time it increases response.

Persuasion. Yuchun says that “Marketers have traditionally sought to ’shout’ at their customers to break through the clutter” whereas “persuasion begins with the desire to be helpful to a potential buyer.” This means crafting messages that are more relevant and useful to each customer. This is just as true in the B2B world. The best campaigns listen to what the customer has to say – they then use that to generate interesting content that adds to the knowledge available in the market place. B2B marketers should aim to make their company a useful resource for the buyer.

Permission. Yuchun says, “Permission underpins the entire customer relationship…Marketers who accept this stop thinking about bombarding customers, and start thinking about how to make the most of each contact a customer is willing to offer.” Absoutely! We often take this one step further in our B2B campaign design, and refer to this as ”value exchange”.  Marketing campaigns are inflinitely more successful when they appreciate that the campaign target is in control, and that communicating with them is a privilege that needs to be earned.

I have been reminded once again this week of the need for B2B marketing and sales departments to be more closely aligned.

The “Best of” Harvard Business Review article “Major Sales: Who Really Does the Buying?” is the best $6.50 I’ve spent in a while.

It argues that it’s much harder to identify the real decision-maker in a major B2B sale than you might imagine – and recommends the account team works with marketing to understand buying motives. He adds that this requires a psychologists’s eye – something marketing teams are well placed to offer.

The first page of this article is free to read on HBR’s site from the link above. In reading it, I felt a strong case for further marketing and sales alignment.

Account-based programmes designed to increase revenue from existing customers are already paying dividends. We’ve already seen that IT companies who align their sales and marketing teams benefit from increased revenue per customer and better relationships. It looks like the benefits of taking an account-focused approach to new business development can result in higher bid win rates too.

10-1 doesn’t always equal 9. When it comes to running lead generation campaigns, you need to get 10 things right – leave any one of these out and 10 minus 1 will give you a 0 return. Below are the 10 areas that you need to get right.

1. Does your campaign align completely with the business’ strategy?

2. Is it thoroughly researched, does it use market and audience understanding as its starting point?

3. Does it have contact strategies for both the buyers and the influencers? Do you understand the specific types of people you are hitting and have you built communications to influence them as people?

4. Does your campaign take a holistic approach to demand generation, considering the end to end sales process?

5. Is it targeted and pragmatically creative, and does it focus on demand generation as the goal. Not every contact should be designed to generate leads, but whole programmes should be focused around moving prospects through the sales funnel.

6. Does your campaign have an integrated contact strategy? Does it maximize the recipient’s familiarity with your organization, whilst building consistency and credibility through multiple channels?

7. Does it have a ccontinuous campaigning strategy at its heart; are communications focused on building a long term relationship (lots of bites of the cherry), not sending out a one hit wonder?

8. Is it closed loop? Does it focus on lead nurturing and sales support along the length of the pipeline? Does it have a sensible and effective marketing data management process?

9. Have you set goals at the beginning of the programme that you will critically measure against at the end?

10. Will the campaign move your organisation’s understanding of its market forward at every stage?

Today Google launched Chrome, its new beta browser. Chrome is designed specifically to run applications rather than just display pages. As such, it’s ideal for running SaaS applications such as salesforce.com, sugar crm, SAP BusinessByDesign, Oracle CRM OnDemand etc.

Nicholas G Carr on his blog today argues that “the real goal of Chrome, embedded in [its] open-source code, is to upgrade the capabilities of all browsers so that they can better support (and eventually disappear behind) the applications.” The web as a computing platform continues its relentless march.

As SaaS gains increasing popularity, the way businesses are buying applications is changing. SaaS apps are proving easier and quicker to buy. The average business unit head is very comfortable with the web – it doesn’t hold the fear and pain of “going through IT” to get something done. If you can sign up for FT.com to get your news with the company credit card – why not a CRM tool too?

But the fact/illusion that you can simply “sign up over the internet” is having real impact on the decision-making cycles B2B marketers are used to. Sales cycles are shorter, traditional due diligence is being shortcut. Many more decisions are being made on the basis of politics, ambition, emotion and frustration. Often IT is being left out of SaaS purchase processes entirely.

Nick Booth’s article last week for Computer Weekly highlights a study by Gartner research which showed that 75% of all SaaS is bought by business unit managers, rather than IT managers. Gartner warns CIOs to get involved in the decision-making, saying: “It’s happening in your organisation anyway, whether you like it or not.”

All this adds up to interesting times ahead for B2B marketers. If browser technology is evolving to make applications easier to run and access to the latest software is a click away, what does that mean for our marketing efforts? Should we look to the publishing world or the gaming world for models? Is the SaaS subscriber model bringing a “throwaway” culture to organisational IT buying?

IT decision-making power is shifting rapidly, and the perception of organisational IT is changing with it. Take a good look at what it means for your programmes.

I recently interviewed the marketing director at one of the UK’s largest systems integrators about her views on the marketing she receives. Her “most memorable” was a mailing containing a box of tissues and the headline “crying into your sales forecast?”.

She couldn’t remember who sent it, why, or what they were selling. She recalled it – for all the wrong reasons – and no-one got an appointment or a sale out of it.

These attention-grabbing techniques are often agency-inspired. They happen when agencies can’t or don’t understand the proposition. ”But it got a 57% recall rate” shrieks the agency. “Yes, but did it generate any leads?” we should ask! The recipient is a real person with real challenges. They want information to help them do their jobs better, not balloons, trowels or tissues.

The same is even truer online. People vote with their feet. If the content is interesting and useful, it grows legs. If it doesn’t, it dies.

A derth of good, relevant, valuable and honest content has been the B2B marketing world’s challenge for decades. For years buyers have been asking for “warts and all” stories but few companies have the stomach to provide them. (It’s why shows like Top Gear are so successful in B2C – they tell it like it is with a strong opinion and bags of personality.) But is a change on the horizon for B2B? Is the web 2.0 phenomenon finally forcing B2B marketers to change their ways?

Consider whether you would rather read a private diary from someone actually using the multi-million pound software product you are considering purchasing, or a corporate brochure describing its features? The brochure will probably be skimmed through but you can imagine the diary getting read thoroughly. As increased truth and interaction is being demanded by web 2.0, a new era is dawning for B2B marcomms functions.

Going from decades of broadcasting brochureware to something more akin to crafting diaries and narratives (and being prepared for a good amount of criticism along the way) is going to require quite a shift for the traditional B2B marketing department.

The upside is war stories, honesty, interest, more pull-able and usable content. It’s what buyers have been screaming for. The trade-off is less editorial control and a necessity that the content-generators themeselves are better informed and involved in their products’ or services’ world.

You’ve won the deal, delivered the project, delighted the customer. But don’t let it stop there (or with a simple testimonial) Here are a few things that have worked time and again to build on that first success.

1. Make them even happier – maybe handing out a medal (I successfully implemented company X’s CRM solution and no-one was mortally wounded) is going too far, but celebrating a good project is rarer than you think and the right touch can turn everyone on the customer’s team into advocates for life
2. Get them into the public eye - speaking at a conference or interviewed by a journalist alongside one of your consultants (don’t forget to send the resulting article direct to your prospects)
3. Create a reference pack - not just the standard press release or case study, but the podcast, video, ppt slide
4. Build a “drag and drop” proposition – Use this ideal customer as a model to find other organisations and people that match their profile (size, industry, situation): chances are this will uncover a raft of great prospects, then build a creative door-opener to start the conversation about your proposition
5. Run a proper reference site event - rather than ask them every month to run a reference visit for a single prospect, hold an event on their site for 15 prospects (they will like it if it raises their profile and also cuts down on the ad-hoc reference requests)
6. Make them the foundation of your web 2.0 activity – turn the case study into a proper narrative, war stories and all, that people will really want to read/hear/watch/discuss
7. Sell more to them - keep them up to date with great, pertinent content (our research shows that decision-makers look to existing suppliers as their top channel for information), and build a strategy around them to expand out within the account (for a how-to guide, see this post on account-based marketing)

The big thing I’ve learnt is not to be nervous about asking the occasional favour from a satisfied client: it only ever seems to strengthen the relationship, flatter the customer, uncover a new opportunity or help them raise their profile within their profession.

The key to keeping the happy customer happy is to continue that thoughtfulness you apply to bid situations beyond the bid. And don’t forget, a happy customer is a retented customer…