Here we’ve provided a simple question set which will help guide your proposition development when creating campaigns for complex B2B offerings. This is the first in a three-part post.

What is a proposition? In basic terms, it’s how we communicate what benefits your customer gets for the money they pay you. It normally involves a USP (unique selling point) which is the strongest and most differentiating factor in your favour.  But in campaign design we need to take that one step further. i.e. You might be selling consulting services, but how do we package up and take to market exactly what your end purchaser gets? Not just benefits but what the realisation of those benefits means to the person you’re selling to?

The point about a campaign proposition is that, however great your product/service proposition is, it has no intrinsic right to be read. People are bombarded with promises of ROI – it’s not a simple question of beating every other percentage quoted that week.

The campaign proposition is what earns the right for the real proposition to get a hearing.

In attempting this, what’s important is how these resonate with the end purchaser. Finding the likely emotional resonance for the customer’s purchasing decisions is really important. Even when buying decisions are made for “practical” reasons, it will be the way that the buyer felt (or will feel) about that practicality that was important in the decision-making process. It’s about knowing what’s top of the target’s mind – both in terms of challenges and emotions (Challenge: I need a collections solution that costs less to maintain and has the functionality to help us collect more debts. Emotion: I’m worried about all the risk involved in replacing our legacy system).

And we use this to realise that however much more money we’re promising that our collections solution can help them collect (which will be the proposition they use to make the business case), what we need to get across first is that we can take away to risk of migration.

We use some of the following questions to get to the campaign proposition:
• What does the audience need to think about us before they will listen to our proposition?
• What’s the emotional connection between where they are now and the promise of where the proposition will take them? What persuades people to buy in the real world? (If it doesn’t ring true to you, or interest you, it probably won’t to anyone else either.)
• What’s the single part of what we have to offer that is most instantly relevant to them?
• Or is it about offering a safe pair of hands? Telling the sometimes uncomfortable truth? Delivering consistent innovation?
• The proposition should have defined their needs, but what emotion sits behind these? How are we going to get them emotionally bought into it?
• Are there any fundamental misconceptions about the company, product, service, industry or area that we need to address?
• What do we need them to think about the client before they will consider the proposition?
• Why is it that the client gets repeat business? What does the customer need to see above and beyond a physical solution?
• What do we offer above and beyond a specific solution and the associated benefits? Could be guidance, thought leadership, practicality, understanding of their business…
• What are competitors doing that gives them an edge in the relationship with prospects?
• What are the most challenging bottlenecks between awareness and sale?
• What are the most interesting anecdotes, “factoids” or war stories that have come out during the research and workshops?
• What’s the problem the target audience is grappling with on its way into work each day?

Remember, you are trying to build a position here for the company’s product or service around positive and engaging content. Simpler (although not necessarily shorter) is often better in this environment. Keep boiling down the proposition until you are left with something compelling, interesting and emotive.

Just because we’ve got their attention doesn’t mean they will rush to make contact and become a sales-ready lead. That’s where the next level of proposition comes in – the proposition that persuades them to take the next realistic action on the path to buying. Look out for the next post on ‘Selling the next step’.

The Economist’s Intelligence Unit has released this report Future Tense: The Global CMO

This is interesting from two perspectives. A glimpse of the global CMO trend will help us understand where all our jobs are going. At the same time, many of us are marketing to these CMOs.

One of the major themes for me was the view that the CMO is increasingly becoming a gatekeeper of critical customer intelligence information. The report suggests that marketing departments will increasingly become integrated marketing & communications organisations: there to gather, develop and use customer information.

The role of how the two-way customer communications now happening as a result of the web is covered, as are the opportunities presented by it.

McKinsey has just published its “Industry trends in the downturn” snapshot, covering predictions for consumer goods, chemicals, technology and steel industries.

The outlook for consumer goods is mixed, based on the fact that consumers change their habits and priorities in a recession, rather than making general cuts, McKinsey argues. The key is therefore understanding any category’s likely performance.

The report believes that technology will fare broadly better than in 2001 because IT is already managed more effectively and spending is, if anything, behind the 10 year average.

The chemicals prediction is focused on geographic moves; the report highlighting that lower cost Chinese and Middle Eastern players could supplant higher cost, established businesses.

McKinsey predicts that the steel industry is likely to recover, evidencing the infrastructure growth in India, China and the Middle East.

McKinsey requires registration (free) for this article.

I’d highly recommend reading this superb FT article which analyses the year to come from a CIO perspective. In particular, this quote from Ian Campbell, of British Energy and chairman of the UK-based Corporate IT Forum, is really enlightening.

He says his priorities are: “first, year-on-year savings on business-as-usual expenditure – “The more companies just ask for a ‘flat’ 10 per cent across all areas, you know there is a general squeeze,” he says.

“Second, he says, are service efficiencies which demonstrate IT is providing exceptional value for money, and third, continued outsourcing and “managed service” activity.

“He argues for the need to ensure there is no wasted investment or poor cost control: these will be far more noticeable in a downturn and quickly show up poor management.

“He says there is already a greater focus on return on investment, with payback expected even more quickly. Interest in “technology” projects such as Vista or Services Oriented Architecture has also dwindled. Software as a Service (SaaS) has its supporters but he adds: “There is little in the way of proper commercial offerings, so we have not seen many massive deals or a shift in the market.”

An enlightening podcast discussion on what effect the regulation of the financial services industry will have was released yesterday by Finextra, featuring a discussion between Michael Dawson of Promontory, (an ex-regulator himself) and Keith Saxton, Global Director of Financial Markets of IBM.

Here are some of the highlights and our conclusions on them:

• Management information systems available to regulators and firms are not robust enough to cope with increased demands. It’s still too hard to measure risk horizontally and technology is being looked at now to help cope with this
• There was a clear identification of regulators as opportunities – especially a potential “uber-regulator” – maybe the IMF, to look at systematic risk across financial markets
• The commentators said that there was a significant data issue – that FS companies needed to build effective models of liquidity risk, and technology was urgently needed to help solve this issue
• The desire for greater transparency is becoming more real, there’s more commitment to it. First stop will be governments opening up their “national darlings” to regulators. There was a view that only technology could help FS companies manage the huge number of compliance obligations in the future.
• Regulators are keeping a sharp eye out for banks “going too fast, taking on too much risk, banks who might need to slow down” – the banks that do well out of the turmoil will need the systems and processes in place to prove that they can chew what they bite off.

You’re an IT Director in financial services. Or the Head of e-Delivery in the public sector. From our decision-maker research, we know that you receive around 30 supplier marketing emails every day (without even considering more regular spam emails) – and probably find barely a quarter of these to be relevant.

It’s a sign of email’s growing popularity or even over-use in isolation from other activities (as a more ‘measureable’ and ‘cost-effective’ digital channel) and of some common mistakes being made in how it is used.

We recently reviewed a year’s worth of emails sent out as part of wider relationship, lead generation or thought leadership programmes. The key conclusions are presented – and illustrated with examples – in a paper available to download here.

What’s in the document?
- 10 tips to consider at the tactical level. If you believe that you are communicating with the right people about something that should be important to them, but are failing to see the results you need, then the chances are that these tips will help. Issues in email execution – like when to go for beautifully designed html versus personal-looking text – are absolutely critical.
- And stepping away from the tactical, the document also puts a narrative around the whole email story – its place in wider programmes, what the audience likes and dislikes, considerations around testing, and the need for exceptional content.

For me, the single most important advice the document has is about creating simple steps for the audience.

No-one ever signed an outsourcing contract after reading an email – so rather than trying to lay out the complete case for the deal, the email has to have a clear and realistic action it asks the reader to take. This could be nothing more complex than a compelling case for why they should click through to read a document that positions you as a thought leader on the subject. Or it could make a proposition for them to arrange a first workshop with you (something more personal than a ‘healthcheck’ offer – do you have a recent business case from a deal with a similar client? Have you got research that you could share with them?).

This idea of creating emails with a realistic call to action (one you would feel comfortable writing in a personal email to someone you wanted to meet) applies to both planning and execution of email programmes. At the planning stage, it means mapping out the call to action, audience journey and key messages. And when it comes to execution, it is why emails are potentially the very hardest job facing any copywriter today. Hopefully this document goes some way to solving the challenge.

Computing.co.uk reported this week about the rise of the interim CIO. In a very useful article, they looked at the reasons behind the increasing number of interim appointments, and made a good start at getting under the skin of this new breed.

 John Hall, who works as an interim CIO, describes how the role has come to be popular for driving through change:  “more recently it has become about change implementation. We are used to coming in and ramping up quickly, taking control and driving something forward. Also, because we are interim we are unencumbered by thoughts of our careers, any hidden agendas, or indeed office politics.”

What does this mean for IT marketers? Among the range of consequences, here are three trends we have picked up.

1. In my recent interview with the former CIO of Egg, Tom explained the importance of the ‘trusted advisors’ around him (subordinates, peers in other departments, key suppliers) – with CIO change becoming more common, it’s essential to have programmes that reach out to these other audiences.

2. Other marketing programmes may need to move from a company focus to an individual focus. We have seen great examples of event series that someone attends as CIO of one organisation, moves companies and then gets back in touch to request an invitation. Web 2.0 strategies can also be very powerful for keeping track and maintaining relationships (in a very simple example, we’ve seen more and more people subscribing to email newsletters with personal rather than business addresses).

3. Timing becomes even more important – seeing when a new CIO is brought in, understanding the change that this is intended to drive, and building your messages around this (whether advising as an incumbent supplier or making a speculative move to break into the business). Equally, it means that now more than ever it is important to be very strict before qualifying an organisation out or stopping a programme around a specific proposition – things can change overnight.

We don’t have to look far for examples of the power that these individuals hold – see the recent post on the most popular man in IT.

…This time from the SME market, where ChannelWeb.co.uk reports on CompTIA’s research.  56% of UK SMEs plan to increase their IT budgets in the next 12 months, with a focus on IT security, and the number of UK firms planning to increase spend has grown to 56% from 54% last year (while the percentage of US firms planning to invest more has dropped from 64% to 52%).

Other interesting stats out recently highlight that there is slowing growth in the services market (IDC), whilst Silicon says that Datamonitor is showing spending growth in healthcare:

Viviane Reding, Member of the European Commission responsible for Information Society and Media made a speech yesterday on the theme “Why ICT research is even more important in the aftermath of the financial crisis.”

She made some interesting points about the amount of investment the EU is making (more than 2bn euro in 18 months), the areas where they want to encourage European growth (software and services, especially in the cloud). Some of the interesting parts of the article and what she had to say are below: 

“The ICT sector provides the heartbeat of the real economy, of our productivity growth, of our capacity to innovate and create jobs and of our ability to address key societal challenges.

What is on the agenda at ICT 2008? We will unveil details of the EU-funding for the next wave of ICT projects – more than € 2 billion of EU funding over the next 18 months.

If Europe wants for example, to lead the transition to a low-carbon, knowledge economy we can only do this with a massive and targeted development and take-up of innovative ICT solutions.

• In telecoms, European equipment manufacturers are leaders in broadband data networks and mobile devices.
• Europe is also a leading worldwide player in the design, integration and supply of embedded systems.
• Europe has secured 30-35% of the market for ICT systems embedded in products in domains like automotive, industrial automation and avionics.
• Europe is also a leading player in the semiconductor industry. Here European programmes have helped us build and keep these positions as the recent funding decisions by the embedded systems and nano-electronic Joint Technology Initiatives demonstrate.
• Europe also has leaders in enterprise software, equipping many of the world’s major companies and SMEs. World leading research on software technologies is also taking place in our public labs. We need to build on this and expand further our presence in software and services including in important areas such as web-based services 

The second principle is that we should be well placed to seize the opportunities of future markets. Let me highlight two such markets: The Future Internet and ICT for Energy Efficiency

Our investments in research and the opening up of the new markets will not be fully exploited unless we can make Europe a much better place to establish high-tech start-ups. Today, few European SMEs break through the ceiling of € 20 million turnover. Why is it that so few European ICT start-ups have come through to become global players?”

The whole article is available from Public Technology

Tomorrow night sees the November gathering of the ever-slinky S&M Forum.

Our topic couldn’t be more timely – the need to justify the business value of marketing is perhaps more pressing than ever. Why, so the boardroom argument may go, should we invest in marketing when propping up our sales team would surely get more money in? When such a claim is levelled, marketing needs the numbers at its fingertips to respond. Why then, are they often so far from reach?

How can the marketer quantify what he or she does in terms of boardroom-friendly raw numbers? How can ‘marketing success’ be measured? What activities are generating a good return on marketing investment? Is answering any of these questions actually possible? In researching tomorrow’s event, we dug up a number of useful articles and interesting commentators on the B2B marketing measurement debate…

Starting with the basics, Jim Lenskold’s recent study (2008 Marketing ROI and Measurements Study) showed that many marketers are struggling with the fundamental measurements required to manage and improve marketing’s contribution to an organisation’s business plan.

Thus those who do measure are already ahead – the study showed that simply the act of measuring marketing in the first place has a direct effect on performance.

Respondents who described their marketing as highly effective all showed better measurement and ROI practices than those lower down the table, and they are using business information that ranges from sales reports, financial data, lead gen data, marketing spend and sales pipeline details to furnish their measurements. Perhaps most revealingly, these ‘highly effective’ companies comprised only 9% of study respondents.

Arguably, the main reason for this paucity of highly effective marketing measurement lies in collecting this data and presenting it in an actionable way to those in the marketing department, and an understandable way to those outside it. There are certainly tools that can be deployed to assist in this process, for example marketing dashboards, but the key is to have not just the short-term, but also the long-term view driving all analysis.

This long-term view was touched upon in a recent series on B2B marketing measurement in which Forrester’s Laura Ramos urged for customer-centric metrics to be employed to measure the impact of marketing over the entirety of the customer life-cycle. Ramos recommended that marketing measurement should move away from focusing on the basic lead-gen approach and towards building and maintaining brand loyalty by measuring how prospects buy, using demand management to build further customer dialogue and align marketing and sales around common objectives.

This latter point, the disconnect between marketing and sales, is often the shadowy figure lurking at the back of this measurement debate.  So much so, in fact, that one article in the Harvard Business Review from a couple of years ago, set about ending the war between sales and marketing once and for all by tackling the economic and cultural differences that usually cause the tension. But what relevance would such a sales and marketing peace treaty have to effective marketing measurement?

Unsurprisingly, it is value. With an aligned sales and marketing team communicating with the market in a consistent and timely fashion, the ROMI is not muddied by conflicting sales activity – the marketing effort put in at the beginning of the sales cycle will have a direct effect right through to the end.

Indeed, Laura Patterson develops this point when she states that marketing isn’t an island. Pulling the lens out so the focus is on sales, product, customer service and finance as well as marketing can really add value to the measurement process by placing all campaign activity into its real-world business context.

Brian Carroll’s call for a marketing funnel is another case in point. Carroll takes the view that most companies use only sales funnels to collect all their leads, qualified or not. The result is less a funnel and more a bucket riddled with holes out of which the less-qualified leads leak. By creating a marketing funnel, leads can accurately be filtered through to sales only when they are sales-ready. And Carroll agrees with Patterson when he says that measuring the effectiveness of this sales-marketing interaction is central to its success.

Generating actionable leads rather than just leads is important here too, and certainly something that should be the focus of any measurement. Lead quality is vital in the context of marketing value. For example, if a lead is measured purely as a cost-per-click (CPC), does this mean that each resulting sales opportunity is treated as equally valuable? CPC certainly has its place – if the average sales opportunity return isn’t expected to be high compared to the number of click-throughs, a decision would be made about using such a model. But if a relatively few click-throughs (with a higher-than-normal CPC) results in one or two significant sales opportunities, the value of this kind of marketing must be properly measured.

The damn lies inherent in such measurement statistics are ably demonstrated by email marketing. As Stephanie Miller points out, a study conducted by the DMA for marketing activity throughout 2007 showed that email marketing had 150% more ROI than non-email online marketing. Great, but behind these bare figures lurks the spectre of spam and the Gatling gun approach to some email marketing. Because there is simply so much of it out there, hitting thousands of potential targets with a broad email sweep usually has a negative effect of alienating potential sales leads. With a smaller but more targeted email campaign approach, the opposite can be true. Miller urges us not to be blinded by the glittering promise of gold with email marketing but to measure emails in exactly the same way, using customer take-up across different styles and sizes of email campaign to guide future success.

So, is there a danger of measuring too much? Perhaps not, if the right activities are measured in the right context. And, no matter how difficult the economic climate is, marketing value will always come down to money: the sales that are generated directly from a campaign.

As Paul Dunay suggests, in the grand scheme of things, sales is the only metric that really counts. This is, he argues is the ‘right context’ for measuring marketing value, based on three tiers of marketing metrics, with the first two tiers feeding into the most important third tier:

1. Reach metrics: the straightforward campaign hits – e.g. webpage click-throughs

2. Efficiency metrics: how cost-effective each form of reach activity was and whether it achieved the desired result – e.g. cost-per-clicks and the number of downloads of a whitepaper

3. Value: the contribution to the sales pipeline – e.g. the ROI for the number of attendees at an event

Of course, saying that marketing reach and campaign efficiency impact on and drive the overall value of the campaign is nothing new, nor is it astounding. But this is a very tidy way if thinking about it.

Measure what you’re doing to make sure you’re doing enough of it. Measure how you’re doing it, to make sure you are learning and getting better. Finally, measure if it’s working for the business. So, in the end, it’s all very simple.

(Although setting up the lean, mean marketing operation that can get hold of those figures and track them is a whole new blog post!)