CIO Magazine’s top 3 initiatives for CIOs make interesting reading. It suggests that 2009 is a great year to look to outsourcing for economic, efficiency and innovation advantages. Its top 3 suggestions for CIOs looking at their outsourcing arrangements are focused on structure of deal, cost of deal and rationalisation. Which on the face of it makes pretty gloomy reading for outsourcing providers.  Look deeper however, and there are rays of light in the article, and possible angles for lead gen campaigns.

1. The article suggests reviewing the structure of agreements to make them based on demand/consumption rather than people/T&M. Such agreements require better alignment between supplier and customer - surely a major factor in generating useful leads, proposing a solution and winning the bid
2. Portfolio rationalisation for application outsourcing – the article also suggests an optimum mix of outsourcing suppliers depending on the size of the CIO’s organisation. A bigger share of the pie will be up for grabs for suppliers willing to invest in getting it.
3. Cost-cutting: keeping costs down was always going to be one of the three. However, the article says that CIOs can also save money by spending it - if you can get to market faster, make quality improvements or improve productivity versus what’s already being delivered then you’re in a good position.

If CIOs are looking at these three priorities now, it’s a great opportunity for marketers to work with sales and take propositions to companies based around one, two or all three of these priorities.

It’s worth noting the many comments that that have been posted in response to this article. The backlash against offshoring is clearly gathering momentum, especially in the wake of the money earmarked for IT projects in the economic stimulus package.

Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame has just contributed to this superb article for the Harvard Business Review, called “In a Downturn, Provoke your Customers”(free but registration required). 

Its premise is that, in today’s challenging sales environment, where discretionary spend is being cut, you need to provoke the customer into buying. And that to do this requires you to go beyond solution selling. (and thus, we would argue, beyond what has traditionally been seen as ’lead generation’.)

Citing an example from Sybase, the article says, “The vendor identified a process that was critical for customers in the current business environment, developed a compelling point of view on how it was broken and what that meant in terms of cost, and then connected the problem to a solution that the vendor was offering… Instead of aligning with a company’s prevailing outlook, it provides a new angle on the situation… Whereas solution-selling salespeople listen for “pain points” that the customer can clearly articulate, provocation works best when it outlines a problem that the customer is experiencing but has not yet put a name to.”

The article suggests the following process:

-Identify a high-impact issue, develop original point of view, lodge your provocation, prove your point.

Whilst you could argue that this is simply solution selling with knobs on, when looking at the process in detail is requires a phenomenal level of research and a highly co-ordinated business development team to generate such an opportunity.

Not least, the level of intelligence on each customer that’s required to support these sales tactics has big ramifications for marketers. The article suggests that you need to put your best people on such a “provocation” and that you need to pick your fights carefully based on the biggest opportunities.

Doing this require a more account- and intelligence-driven approach to lead generation. And if you are going to set up meetings to “provoke” the customer about an issue, you’d better make sure you’re right!

So where can you get the level of information needed to be near-psychic? Sources of such information cited by Moore et al are securities analysts, assuming that the issues they highlight will be high on the CEO’s agenda because of shareholder pressure. Intelligence gathered from the sales/account team and good profiling will really help too. Marketing is good at getting the best from large volumes of data, and can coral the output into useable intel.

Above all, I’d say that the message surrounding the provocation is a big area where marketing can support. This kind of attack needs to be very finely balanced to provoke but not insult.

I recently read this interview with a PA on what it’s like to be on the receiving end of marketing efforts. Whilst the interview is somewhat forthright in its tone, it reminded me of the importance of having a strategy and a comms plan for the gatekeeper, especially the more senior you go.

When looking at chopping up campaign data into chunks you can target, spare a thought for the PAs, assistants and secretaries. At best they are entirely overlooked, and worst, campaigns (both content and tactic) are deliberately designed to “get past the gatekeeper”. This has always seemed an odd approach to me.

PAs are paid to do a job, they know their bosses better than you ever will and they have access to a host of privileged information. They have unparalleled access to diaries and meeting agendas. Often they are specifically briefed on what their boss or the team wants to receive or know more about. Why not use them? If what you have to say is relevant and compelling they won’t just let it through, they’ll ensure it gets there.

Some pointers…do your research and customise any communications heavily before sending them. Think about their specific circumstances, the hassle factor of their roles and how what you’re offering could help. A traditional and formal approach can work wonders. Remember, this is the pinnacle of selling the next step - you’re using your communication to them lay out your stall for the ultimate recipient.

Just published by the McKinsey Quarterly, its views on the 5 trends that will shape technology for business in 2009.

The article suggests that this year will see IT and corporate finance converge (CFOs using IT assets to leverage cash); tension around IT budgets increases (CIOs with newly limited budgets will need to be honest brokers between different departments demanding IT resource and spend); the “last” IT project (companies are shutting down discretionary spend); regulators demand more from IT (IT systems will need to gather more and better data to manage risks); offshoring and outsourcing landscape shift (vendors are in for big change, there’s a need for CIOs to manage their vendors carefully).

Last night saw the Prince’s Trust Technology Leadership group’s Big Debate on Supplying Global IT Services & Technology in the Next Decade, between the President of Fujitsu’s Global Business Group, Richard Christou and IT analyst and guru Richard Holway. First, a summary of the debaters’ respective positions:

Richard Holway

• The IT industry will never again see such staggering growth as it did during the 90s. We will roughly track GDP from now on (as a broad IT industry trend)
• Within this broad trend there will be significant winners and losers; the hardware industry is already being dented by the downturn whereas applications services and outsourcing will remain stronger
• At present, BRICs countries do not have strong enough economies within themselves to support strong IT growth, they are still heavily reliant on servicing the western world, either directly, or servicing local companies who themselves service the west
• Cloud will be THE driving force in IT for the next decade. Thomas Watson’s famous quote that there will only be a market for 5 computers worldwide may still come true in a sense – as people and companies increasing don’t want to own and service IT, they just want to use it. Perhaps the big 5 ‘computers’ will be cloud owners like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, the US government etc 
• Challenges for the next decade: changing to a service/SaaS approach may ruin many companies’ revenue model, it will be an expensive and disruptive time (cashflow and revenue models), the downturn has accelerated change in our industry and the leader is now the most threatened.

Richard Christou

• Not sure it’s quite so bad as RH makes out. Agree that BRICs countries won’t replace revenues for now. Downturns throw up discontinuities – you can plot new entrants against downturns in the market. Plus downturns provide the opportunity to look at what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. A period to invest.
• The new technology always takes longer to come through than expected. Supplier models such as SaaS can be seen as us coming full circle (ie. back to bureau model of old). Netbook/cloud can be seen as mainframe/dumb terminal. Revenue models for SaaS are highly relevant – who’s going to pay for the next generation of IT development if such businesses are so hard to run profitably?
• Cloud’s impact on business as opposed to consumers isn’t entirely as clear. There will be clouds, many owned by large real estate companies. Google/Amazon etc exploit the IT infrastructure that makes up the cloud but that leaves an opportunity for outsourcers to manage the them.
• Christou draws a distinction between Google/Amazon and enterprise needs. There are data ownership, confidentiality and cross-border information flow issues. There will be a cloud within the enterprise and IT companies will get a  lot of business here, as you will interface through many devices to your corporate cloud
• Managing a company supplying global IT services and technology will need close attention to local cultural alignment from a sales perspective. For example, outsourcing not really undertaken beyond US and fringes of Europe. Vision for the global IT company has to be locally strong operations which operate to standards/best practice but have ability to operate in local cultures highly effectively
• Managed services and outsourcing is not a bad place to be right now

Useful points made from the floor, and in response by the debaters:

• If IT becomes more of a utility, then in the future there will only be room for a few very large players. Similarly to Apple iPhone and its downloadable apps, will this happen in enterprise IT? Huge vendors becoming the channel for mini “widget” vendors?
• IT as a term is becoming a hindrance – we are an industry supplying business support and organisational outsourcing that is technology enabled
• Focus on investing in applications and outsourcing. No-one can do without IT these days – companies cannot manage without it, even in the downturn banks, travel companies, airlines, are all still spending
• Our mindset in IT should be about change, not recovery – it will never be the way it was. We will not go back to the industry we left, but the future is exciting and full of opportunity.

My top 3 summary for IT marketers is:

1) it’s going to be easy to jump on cloud/SaaS/virtualised bandwagons but much harder to carve out a decent and defendable position.

2) as IT expands from “IT” to “business support” you’ll need to understand your key accounts and segments better than ever to keep relevant. If you’re not looking to rearrange your marketing along these lines, then get started.

3) If you’re not one of the IT giants then keep an eye on them and get aligned. There was a strong feeling that the really big companies will become even more critical as a channel to market for everyone else.

The entire management team of The Marketing Practice attended the event. To see all of their conclusions on it, take a look at the comments fields of this post.

Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing for BearingPoint was recently interviewed by Britton Manasco. He gives some very useful tips for marketers wanting to further the reach of their thought leadership content and use it more effectively to drive people  into your lead nurturing process. He recommends the creation (or outsourcing) of a “content factory” to kick start this.

Paul says, “don’t hand me just the white paper.  Hand me the white paper, hand me the landing page, hand me the blog content, hand me the key words, hand me the email post and then I can get that to the interactive team.  The interactive team can just begin to formulate it and distribute it in places it needs to be distributed. I can post it to our RSS feed, post it to the blog, maybe do a podcast around it. The team can make that very systematic. I think this is going to be key for us because the day of thought leadership being just the white paper is over.”

I’ve attached a slide highlighting our own approach to the ”next generation” content factory. It is designed to maximise impact and reach of thought-leadership content by helping B2B marketers blend traditional and new publishing techniques. Download it here.

(Note additionally the potential for making the very creation of the content a more collaborative process – for example, ask your readers for hot topics to cover or questions they want the answer to, through the social media tools at your disposal.)

Will the next generation of CIOs be more focused on the customer experience than ever before? Starbucks’ new CIO thinks so in this interview with CIO Magazine.  The interview highlights how Stephen Gillett is facing the challenge to take technology and use it to connect with Starbucks’ customers in whole new ways.

Why was the 32 year old hired? “What fascinated the leadership team was Stephen’s knowledge of where and how these consumers lived, and how he was technologically engaged with them. While he did not have the traditional retail IT experience, we wanted someone who was leading edge, who knew where the technology was evolving.” said Starbucks’ management team recruiter.

As retailers becoming increasingly focused on netting customers and keeping them faithful, can we expect to see the retail CIO out there supporting the marketers?

If recent experience is anything to go by, maybe we can – real-life examples of this are popping up all over the place. At a large department store in Manchester this week I was asked for detailed information for the first time, which was entered into a brand new terminal branded “CRM” at the top (subtle, but points for trying). Similarly the hotel I stayed at seemed extremely interested in understanding useful preferences and keeping in touch. If you are targeting retailers, take a look at this recent post highlighting their top 5 priorities.

A final point to note – the CIO magazine interview links to Gillett’s LinkedIn profile, where he has more than 500+ contacts listed, as well as groups he’s a member of, places he used to work and a link to his blog. If you’re building an account-based marketing campaign to reach him, you can start with a multitude of information that will give you a much greater chance of success. Not only does he list out his technological musings and leanings, but he’s a serious player of World of WarCraft, likes Seth Godin and his birthday is Jan 20th. How’s that for a starter for 10?

Mycustomer.com quoted Gartner today, saying that “customer relationship management is too strategically important for enterprises to abandon projects in the recession. As the recession deepens, however, enterprises are looking to drive greater efficiency and lower the costs of their CRM projects.

“Gartner estimates that CRM spending in 2009 will not decline as dramatically as it did after 2000, but growth will be more moderate than in previous years. It forecasts that the European CRM software market will reach $3.5 billion (€2.4billion) in 2009, an increase of 4% from 2008.

“When placed in the context of ongoing negative growth in the UK economy, which many predict will last until Q3 2009 or beyond, those are impressive figures.” See the whole mycustomer article here.

CIO Magazine’s article yesterday on whether IT can help retailers survive 2009 and thrive in 2010 pulls together its own research with that of Forrester, AMR, Northeastern University and Retail Systems.

It concludes that retailers should be using the current climate to challenge the status quo and make changes that can impact the bottom line within 12 months. CIO Magazine says that chief execs are asking IT to contribute to customer acquisition, customer retention and to drive innovative offerings. The article suggests that retailers are, or should be, focusing spend on 5 areas that can meet this brief:

• merchandise assortment and space planning, allocation and optimisation;
• regular price, promotion and markdown optimisation;
• instore systems such as point of sale, kiosks and mobile technologies aimed at improving the customer experience;
• cross-channel merchandising that improves channel visibility and connectivity and;
•  business intelligence that facilitates action.

IDC ’s 2009 tech sales barometer has just been released. Entitled Selling in 2009: 10 ways to find, win and keep the money it features the findings of its barometer study alongside its recommendations for tech sales people. Its key findings are summarised below, but the long and short of it is that sales teams are investing more in inside sales and demand generation techniques, whilst realising that they need to be more aligned with marketing on lead gen programmes. If there was ever an opportunity for marketing to work with sales more closely, as highlighted in my interview with Ron Rose of HP last week, or in the post on getting sales and marketing to collaborate on business development, it’s now.

-in 2009 tech sales teams will be expected to do more with less; as a result demand generation will be a major focus – most teams are shifting more budget to inside sales

-sales organisations that bolster dedicated investments in lead quality and demand generation will be rewarded with significantly higher sales productivity

- the research highlighted that sales teams were increasing investment in sales enablement, lead qualification and demand generation across the board, with budgets for sales’ travel and training being slashed

-shared metrics was highlighted as the area that sales and marketing are still least aligned, with sales people giving an alignment mark of  only 25 out of a possible 100.