Another post in our “IT Boomhunter” series – helping you find growth IT markets in fast-changing times.

This McKinsey report that shows how remote infrastructure management is predicted to be a boom area. “While other offshoring services have grown rapidly, the management and maintenance of core infrastructure from afar has been slow to gain popularity. Only a sliver—about 7 percent—of the addressable market is being captured. But our research suggests that this is about to change. Shifts in customer attitudes and economics could trigger rapid growth for these services, known in the industry as remote infrastructure management.”

“34 percent of CIOs say they expect to offshore some infrastructure services over the next three years—a sharp increase from 19 percent in a similar survey a year earlier.” McKinsey.

The PDF of the report is here.

Next week I’ll be interviewing the Tom Ilube, ex-CIO of Egg, for this blog about what it was like to be marketed to by IT companies.

If you’ve always wanted to ask a tame CIO something, here’s your chance. Post any questions you have in the comments field.

Useful 2009 IT marketing spend statistics released this week by IDC research – there’s a free webinar here covering the research. Some of the main benchmarking highlights, as described by Jon Miller:

-Marketing Budget Ratio (marketing spend/revenue): 2.8% average (2.6% for hardware, 5.1% for software, 0.8% for services)

- Program-to-People Ratio (program spend as a % of total mktg. spend): 61%

- Marketing Staff Throughput Ratio (program spend per staff): $293,000

- Slide 23 describes how companies allocate their program budgets across events, advertising, direct marketing, marketing support and sales tools, digital marketing

- Slide 24 shows how staff is allocated across functions

- Slide 25 shows how companies are allocating their digital marketing budgets across advertising, search, email, etc.

Note that these benchmarks are for large IT companies with average revenue of $6 billion a year.

Many B2B marketing campaigns are not fundamentally flawed. They are good ideas that suffer from lacklustre execution. Or a great idea, and great plan – targeted at entirely the wrong people.

We see a number of these issues happening again and again in the B2B marketing industry. Sometimes the devil really is in the detail. Here are 10 common mistakes and how to avoid them. 

1. Not engaging the sales force at the outset – ultimately, the sales force will define whether all your work has been a success. Did your campaigns increase sales opportunities or not? Were they the right kind of opportunity? Talk to them in person before you start to ensure you know what’s expected of you. A lot can get lost in translation.

2. Not listening hard enough – in creating a campaign, as the marketer, you’ll have a lot to add, and you can bring great experience to bear. Don’t forget that the sales and product experts have as much to add too. Ask a lot of questions before you make any broad statements, and don’t assume anything until you’ve checked it. A small misunderstanding can result in a campaign going very wonky later on.

3. Not finding out what current customers think – despite point 2, the best point of reference for any campaign is the people who will eventually be receiving it. Beg, borrow and steal to get the chance to speak to a few tame customers or prospects! For some help in framing up your client interview, see my post on B2B marketing client interviews.

4. Assuming leads can be “generated” for all propositions – it’s a huge and expensive challenge to “make” market opportunity. There is an ongoing debate in the industry about whether “making” demand is possible. Our view is that it can be uncovered, found, prompted, but probably not “made” – certainly not without mammoth budgets. The best way to proceed is to map the market size and build relationships in the long term – so that as opportunity arises you can get to it quickly.

5. Never reaching the real decision maker – many marketing campaigns are simply targeted at the wrong people. Completely understandable, given that the companies we are marketing into may have a hundred thousand employees or more. Being a “data junkie” is the key here – make sure you’re obsessed by the data the campaign will be sent out to. Its relevancy and its quality. Also, it stands to reason that your DM or email will hardly ever hit exactly the right person first time – it’s a process of repetition and refinement.

6. Misqualifying or overblowing new prospects – all campaigns are under pressure to generate leads. As a result, marketing departments can pass “leads” back to a client that don’t live up to expectations. Understand in detail what the sales team’s definition of a lead is – and don’t take it at face value – question them hard on it. Passing back non-leads will only lead to dissatisfaction, but opening the door to a key account (even if it doesn’t strictly meet BANT qualification) can be just what is needed. Sometimes sales don’t always mean exactly what they say.

7. Not following up on leads or nurturing slow burners – sometimes the sales team will commit to follow up on your campaigns themselves. As they get busy, or as other leads turn into bids, the salespeople can become distracted and drop the lead follow up. Make sure you have a plan if this starts happening. Also, have a strategy for “slow burners” – these are people who have expressed an interest but are not ready to move forward yet. How will the campaign keep them warm until they are ready to buy?

8. Not understanding the product or service – the IT world and the marketing world both become more complex by the minute. For us marketers, it’s a big job just to keep up to speed with the day job, never mind what the latest solutions do and how they work. The best campaigns are a perfect unity of customer need and product understanding. To develop the perfect campaign proposition, see a demo for every release, visit a site where it’s in use every day, speak to customers regularly and directly.

9. Assuming the buyer understands the market – it would be very easy to imagine a campaign being designed that proved in concrete terms why your software was palpably, demonstrably better than your competitor’s… and then finding out that the targets of the campaign didn’t understand the nature of the market at all and didn’t respond to the campaign as a result. At the same time, an experienced and savvy IT Director might well know the market backwards and dismiss a campaign as underestimating his/her knowledge. Understanding what the typical buyer does know about the market before getting started on your campaign is key.

10. Measuring activity rather than outcomes - marketers strive to measure the impact of their activity and rightly so. Marketing needs to demonstrate its value to the business. But a lot of metrics measured by marketing are fairly meaningless without knowing how much revenue they’ve generated. Whilst it’s easy to measure hits on a website, clicks from an email, number of mailers sent, number of event delegates (and these should still be measured) unless we know the ultimate impact that these activities had on business through the door, we can’t know how much of a return on its investment we are getting for our marketing spend.

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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So many of our team have found these links helpful, we wanted to make them more generally available. Both articles highlight the acute need to craft propositions very carefully around the ‘why invest in IT?’ message.

First, McKinsey’s views on how companies should be Managing IT in a downturn: Beyond cost cutting. It shows some key areas where IT suppliers can be focusing to create propositions and messages that have a sound business case in this economic climate. The report has some great ammunition for making targeted investments in IT (especially to streamline processes and make more of existing information) rather than cutting costs across the board:

“Investments in technology-enabled business processes can deliver up to ten times the impact of traditional IT cost reduction efforts.”

And here is Forrester’s view on which parts of the IT industry will be least affected according to current spending plans. It’s not that companies won’t be making IT investments in the downturn: the key point is that to access the budgets that are growing (especially services and outsourcing), marketing messages will need to major on instant ROI. There’s no doubt that marketing can really come into its own in taking this case to buyers – provided that we dig beneath the obvious headline ‘credit crunch’ messaging to the issues that really matter.

Campaigns that are grounded in an understanding of these spending trends and ROI cases are a critical component of ‘recession-toughened’ marketing – we’re already seeing the hunger that buyers have for information on how and where they could be making savings.

What are two of the top ways potential buyers find out about new software, hardware or services?

They Google for information, and they ask their colleagues and peers. Research in 2008 from ITSMA and The Marketing Practice back this up in concrete terms.

Relationship management and account-based marketing programmes are important as I’ve covered in previous posts, and are an important central platform in your lead generation. They are also extremely useful when looking to influence colleagues and peers both within and intra-organisation.

But what about Google? Technology firms, considering the market they are in, can be woeful at appearing in the search engine rankings. Research consistently shows that when people want to find out about something, they Google it.

Bear in mind this recent research from Think Eye Tracking. It would appear, if you’re not on the top page, you might as well have just fallen off the face of the earth.

Think Eye also says “when asked afterwards what they would normally do when they couldn’t find their desired search result on the first page of Google, 87% respondents replied that they would modify the search terms or refine the search by category. 97% of people tested answered that Google was the search engine they most commonly used and out of those people, 87% stated they wouldn’t bother using anything else.”

When considering go to market strategies and campaigning, B2B marketers simply must consider their organic Google page rankings. You don’t want to generate a lot of interest in what you do, only to find that your competitor comes up number one on the rankings whilst you languish on page 6. And sponsoring the keywords through Google’s advertising programme just isn’t enough.

There’s a lot of unncessary confusion around web 2.0. Online communities, wikis, blogs, podcasting…the list goes on. Most sensible marketers say to me, “but my target market doesn’t comment on blogs” and they are absolutely right. 

But there is a danger of missing the point here. Your target market may not be commenting on blogs, but your target market is very probably Googling you and search terms related to issues they are having that you can solve.

To get inbound leads from the web, you need to get as high as possible up the organic rankings for your chosen search terms. To do this, you need to contribute to the debate in your area, online. You need to get out and do this online as well as offline, to cater for different tastes. Think of it as journalism - where you control what the article says. Make your articles interesting and get out there and comment in influential places.

We interact with a lot of B2B IT marketing departments at The Marketing Practice. And we’ve noticed that the very best ones have a number of things in common. Here they are, and over the next few months, will be researching and testing this theory by interviewing the best in the business, to see if it holds water.

Please add your comments from your own experiences, if you’ve seen great marketing departments – what do they do that makes them great? Which areas are common amongst them? Do you agree with this list, or are there other areas that need to be included?

1. Sales alignment
a. Lead generation engine and lead generation optimisation focus
b. Strong joint data strategy between sales and marketing
c. Co-ordinated bid support & account-based activity
d. A genuine customer intimacy
e. Excellent product/service knowledge throughout both teams
f. Campaigns that push leads along at all funnel stages

2. Flagship programmes
a. Compelling programmes that people can march behind the banner of. Each builds and develops from the next
b. Programmes with strategic impact and tactical value – that get done on time, every time
c. Visionary, engaging, gives confidence to the business, customers and prospects
d. Paints a picture of the future

3. Insider status
a. Know the customer & their market(s) intimately and can wield the power that knowledge brings
b. Have detailed end-customer knowledge – can feed back and proliferate changing market needs
c. Thought-leadership around making it better for the customer (ie know what they want psychologically to do their job better)

4. CEO stance
a. Runs marketing department in same way best businesses are run
b. Marketing A players, a blend of staff, contractors, agencies that work in harmony rather than competition- a flexible resource model – plus all playing to their strengths
c. Has a network of peers within the industry
d. Strong ROMI focus – an uses ‘investment’ rather than a ‘spend’ model

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 attended a fascinating presentation last night given by Tom Ilube, the CEO of online identity theft prevention company Garlik. Tom is also the ex-CIO of Egg.

Online identity fraudsters can apparently gather the information they need to steal your identity in 2-3 hours – something that used to take them days. By visiting your Facebook or LinkedIn page, company site, Flickr account and searching the online government archives, fraudsters can now get everything they need to mock up convincing passports, bank statements, utility bills – basically any document that they need to get credit.

When you stop to think about what’s online about you when the information is culled from all sources – your photos, CV, personal information, mother’s maiden name – you start to think differently about how you use the web.

If you, or any of your team, are thinking about starting blogs or exploiting social networking sites either for marketing purposes or personal use, Tom made some great points about protecting yourself online. 

Start by using Google, or better still ZoomInfo or Wink, to search for yourself and see what’s already out there. His major two hints for keeping safe? Never put your personal mobile number or home address on anything. 

There’s a lot more useful info on Tom’s blog and Garlik’s site. I’m off to Google myself…