Citi has just released a survey it carried out in Nov/Dec 08 on 2009 CIO budgets. The 200 CIOs (split between the U.S. and Europe) said that they expect budgets to fall for the first time in five years -  US CIOs are expecting IT budgets to fall 2.7 % in 2009, European CIOs are seeing decline of a more modest 1.9 %. Useful information on spending priorities (server consolidation, security) and possible areas of cutback are also covered.

What do this month’s revelations about outsourcer Satyam mean for the marketing and selling of outsourced services? (Chairman Ramalinga Raju resigned on 7 January, admitting the firm had falsified accounts and assets and inflated its profits over several years).

First, a quick round-up of the headlines,

• which range from the near-hysterical (India’s Madoff? Satyam Scandal Rocks Outsourcing Industry in BusinessWeek),
• through an analytical look at the family ownership of other Indian SIs by Anthony Miller,
• to ComputerWeekly’s report on likely effects on Satyam customers (including Unilever, Sony, Tesco, Boots, Nestle and Fifa) and analyst predictions (”‘The Indian technology market had already been weakened by a tough 2008, and the badly dented broader market sentiment is sure to impact on other Indian IT services providers,’ said analyst firm Ovum”).

But other than the potential for Satyam’s customers to look elsewhere (which raises the question – would it be vulgar for marketing to target them?), does this change anything else?

It will certainly add power to a significant trend of the last 2 years – the rising influence of the Procurement department (and not only for outsourcing deals; this will be used as a wake up call for any major supplier decision-making).

So when we look back on this, it will be interesting to see if Satyam contributes to the effect started by the credit crunch to market increasingly on trust. In consumer marketing, you only have to look at the joy with which Lloyds TSB trumpets its record as Britain’s most trusted bank 8 years running.

And because we’re all human (whether deciding where to invest our life savings, or who to shortlist for a BPO deal), it seems likely that there will be knock-ons for who and what to focus on in marketing complex services. A few ideas to start us off:

• It would seem to be a good idea to start emphasising in-country and near-shore capabilities alongside the scale of offshore operations.
• Procurement can be a friend to prospective suppliers looking for a level playing field or hoping to sell on value/trust/reliability rather than just price. Time to start building relationships if you’re not already.
• There may be a backlash against the movement towards selling ‘business value’ as the way to get a prospect’s attention. We may find prospects a lot more engaged by hearing about guarantees of reliability & repeatability than about the benefits they already know they need.
• We mustn’t forget the power of the great examples that all outsourcers have of pulling off successful projects against the odds, or delivering advantage in a uniquely innovative way – mismanagement at the top of Satyam shouldn’t detract from the skills shown in building client relationships and delivering complex programmes.
• Finally, it is probably time to take a hard look at the strength of relationships between outsourcer and customer (and between customers themselves) – it’s going to be more important than ever that people are emotionally convinced that they are making the right decision (which means that they need to feel part of the pack, not out on a limb).

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.

Building lead generation programmes for 2009? We’ve put together our 7 critical success factors – the things we’ve seen the best lead generation programmes have in common.

The 7 factors below are in order chronologically. Approaching them in this order (starting with the data, moving through the development of a reputation, building access at the right level and then a concentration on timing) has the greatest cumulative effect.

Factor 1: The best campaigns have a deep understanding of the data set to be campaigned on. Typically, the data set and a joint go-to-market strategy around it have been developed with the sales team at the outset. Marketers who use the sales teams’ knowledge to help segment and tier target organisations and develop specific programmes for each will have best success.

Factor 2: The internet is rapidly becoming a fantastic source of information. Both to get your data (sources such as LinkedIn and ZoomInfo) and to work out who should be in it (searching Monster for job descriptions similar to those of the people you are targeting, reading end-user blogs (ie Waitrose’s MD kept a blog for the whole of last year). Real-time information helps targeted campaigns strike at the most opportune moment.

Factor 3: It’s not just the data you have – you need to ensure you are positioning to attract the right kind of customers. If you occupy the right position in people’s minds, they will come to you, or at least meet you halfway. In building a compelling set of content using to communicate intelligently with it, you’ll find you are attracting people, and your data set will grow organically as contacts and colleagues add themselves to your database.

Factor 4: In the lead generation space there’s a lot of debate about spend on brand awareness versus lead generation. The best campaigns acknowledge that it’s never about one or the other. Continuous campaigning builds brand through the very process of a longer term communication strategy that adds value, changes opinion, positions… and in doing so, generates leads.

Factor 5: In designing the content of a campaign, first consider the prospect’s next step. In enterprise B2B marketing, the next step is very rarely to click and buy. Think through the journey you want the prospect to go on, and sell the next step more than selling the product or service.

Factor 6: The quality of the content you’re providing is critical. In the spirit of reciprocity, people receiving your campaign will only give once they’ve taken – it’s all about a value exchange. It doesn’t have to be big on spend, but rather big on thought. What do they really need to help them do their jobs better? Become a resource for your target audience  – crack this and you’re streets ahead of a traditional campaign.

Factor 7: Work hard to know when it’s right. Industry statistics suggest that only ¼ of leads generated are ever sales ready at the point of generation. Monitor news and accounts and keep good records of purchasing cycles. Work a mixture of useful information and harder sales messages through your ongoing communications, pushing harder when your intel suggests you should, and taking a softly-softly approach at other times. Factor 2 can help you here as well, intelligence from the research (the web, your sales team etc) can tell you when you approach a company or industry.

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.

CIO’s list of the top 100 IT spenders in the UK is now available here http://www.cio.co.uk/cio100/companies/.

Some of the more detailed company profiles have useful intel on their operations and infrastructure (hardware, software, Database, BI etc), plus good soundbites from CIOs. Brilliant stuff for key account planning and account based marketing.

In enterprise B2B markets, selling the product or service out of the gate is pretty challenging. It might be too complex to get across in the time available. It might be that the prospect simply isn’t ready to buy. It could be that there are multiple logical marketing steps between first contact and first meeting. But many campaigns try to “close” the lead in just one step.

If the proposition itself is not compelling, or too complex to communicate, or if the prospect needs to be taken on a journey or to learn something before they will progress into a lead, you need to make the next step compelling instead.

Your job is to open the door and start a dialogue: entice the person to an event, get a prospect will take a call – not to sell the entire solution in one fell swoop.

Map the journey you need to take people on, and sell the next step. If you really want someone to take a meeting, consider what your proposition for the meeting needs to be. Have you information they would like? If you want them to attend an event, consider what they want to hear, look at what information you could provide that might make their job easier? (see what Egg’s CIO said about why this works.) Then consider what will happen after the event, what will they need to hear or see then to take them to the next step?

Nurture those who are a fit for your solution regardless of their timing to buy. As their knowledge of you and your propositions grows, you build credibility and access. Meaning that when the time is right for them, you are perfectly positioned.

The third and final post in this series will be available shortly, and features a number of ways you can tackle the creation of a compelling theme for your campaign. Get it as soon as it’s published by signing up to this blog’s RSS feed or subscribing to email alerts. Part one of this series on proposition development is here.

The Sunday Times featured this article on the formation of smart meter bidding consortiums.

The government wants every home to have a smart meter by 2010 (which wil monitor electricity use digitally, as well as allow two-way communication between supplier and home) and the Sunday Times claims that O2, Vodafone, BT, Logica, Accenture and Capgemini are all limbering up.

Ofgem is likely to run the tender, claims the paper, with the contract running from 2010 to 2020.

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 CIO Executive Council has released its CIO starter kit. In terms of getting inside a CIO’s head and understanding their  and how they work, it’s a fantastic resource.

The kit is made up of 20 documents created by leading CIOs, and features a research report on best practices, a guide on how to map IT to business drivers and what a CIO should do in their first 90 days.