In April, we researched 100 UK decision makers’ social media attitudes and behaviours. The findings have made for interesting reading, confirming some suspicions but surprising us in other areas. Above all, they’re intended as prompts in terms of important considerations when planning social media engagement.

You can read the results as both supporting the importance of social media and illustrating why it can’t succeed on its own:

For: We’ve seen that half of decision makers feel that suppliers should be active within social media, and that a surprising number have met and given business to suppliers following a first interaction via social media.

Against: But the influence of social media dips at some key stages of the buying cycle, and more traditional channels are becoming seen as more valuable than ever before in the face of ‘overwhelming’ digital interactions.

To summarise our conculsions:

Social media has reached a point where it is almost universally used, but is at its most effective alongside other channels – hopefully we have reached the stage where it can be sensibly considered as an element of any wider marketing strategy rather than hyped as a standalone silo…

If you are interested in any further information from the full findings (over 20 different question areas and variations by size of organisation/age/job function), please contact peverett@themarketingpractice.com.

Corning Glass’ “A day made of glass” video has reached over 11 million views on YouTube after just 2 months. Glass may not be the easiest product to create reputation-driving content around (of course, nor were blenders before “will it blend?” came along), but they’ve done a brilliant job to paint a compelling vision of the future that just demands to be shared.

So what are they getting out of it? The 11m viewers can’t all be potential buyers for Corning Glass (although they are all potential buyers of phones/TVs etc that use Corning’s Gorilla Glass). And the products featured in the film obviously aren’t available to buy yet. A few thoughts on the benefits they may see (not an exhaustive list and not done with any knowledge of Corning’s business model!):

• More strategic profile with their major customers (like Apple): the buzz and coverage around the video provides a level of credibility that Corning can’t only talk about good engineering but they also have a vision of how this engineering relates to consumer behaviour/expectations. So it opens up a more strategic position with major customers. Hopefully they have plans to turn that into longer term exec-level relationships.
• I also assume that it would be more difficult for Sony (for example) to decide to switch manufacturers of the glass components in its TVs if Corning have a greater level of consumer awareness. In fact, using Corning Glass may actually be able to be used as more of a selling point (or at least a relatively high profile feature) for consumer devices – which would also be good for Corning’s business if more manufacturers turn to them on the back of greater consumer awareness. Hopefully they have a plan to nurture/capitalise on new demand that comes their way from brands that want to tick this box for consumers.
• From the Corning website, it looks like they are heavily focused on R&D for competitive advantage. This in turn means recruiting and retaining the best talent in the industry – and showing the kind of future-thinking that’s in this video can only help with that.

My big worry is whether they are doing enough to capitalise on the video’s popularity. They’ve got an advert running alongside the video on YouTube (good) but it just goes through to the standard company homepage (bad) – what about a specific page aimed at converting visitors around the kind of benefits I listed above (or whatever the goals they’re really looking for as a business!). If you look around the Corning website, you are able to find a page that promotes following them on Facebook/Twitter/YouTube (it doesn’t really explain what benefits you will get from doing that), but the rest of the site doesn’t really seem designed to encourage inbound contact/face to face meetings at the exhibitions listed etc, or to offer/encourage any lighter-touch ways that they might be able to keep in touch with interested prospects through the buying cycle (lead nurturing/marketing automation).

But I don’t want to take away from a brilliant job conceiving and executing the video, or to suggest that it won’t have a significant impact on Corning’s reputation – just that as with any social media activity there are next steps/opportunities to integrate with wider marketing strategies that need to be maximised. Among the 11m viewers will be potential customers for Corning (or people who work with/advise/know potential customers) – and will they still be in touch with them in 6,12,24 months time?

Have you noticed how devalued the word ‘campaign’ has become? When you hear it used in marketing now, it’s typically just another way to describe a single wave of activity. For example, ‘email campaign’ has become synonymous with sending a singe email.

The trouble with this is that it’s a route to running one-off activities that build no momentum around a specific proposition, no lasting reputation with the audience, and ultimately miss out on most of the latent opportunity in a market. The word ‘campaign’ gives too much legitimacy to these one-off actions, so it’s time to reclaim it for serious marketing!

If you look up a dictionary definition of ‘campaign’, you’ll find something like:

1. Military.
a. military operations for a specific objective.
b. Obsolete . the military operations of an army in the field for one season.
2. a systematic course of aggressive activities for some specific purpose: a sales campaign.

Personally, I like the idea of the ‘operations of an army in the field for one season’ (in our world of course this would be a Sales & Marketing ‘army’). But it’s the second definition (’systematic course…aggressive activities…specific purpose‘) that best describes what a marketing campaign should be.

• Systematic course: Do we really know the audience we are talking to? Are there a number of stages of a journey that we will take them on (through to sales handover and beyond)? Do these stages span the different channels by which we can reach the audience? Can we track the journey through the data and respond to their actions?
• Aggressive activities: Do we know what the intended action is for the audience at each stage? Are we selling the value of them taking that action? Have we done enough to merit their attention?
• Specific purpose: Have we defined the objectives of the campaign (in terms of reach, efficiency and pipeline effectiveness)? Is everyone (in both Marketing and Sales) aware of the objectives and ready to play their part?

If we integrate our plans around these real campaigning principles then we can finally eliminate the danger of siloed thinking and one-off activities. It also gives us the opportunity to look at integrating two areas where campaigns need to move with the times (again, rather than tackling these in isolation):

1. Inbound marketing. Rather than simply using outbound channels to shout about the message, campaigns today need to take into account the inbound opportunities provided by social media. But this doesn’t mean they need to be passive and wait for the audience to act first – there’s still a strong case for orchestrating messages across channels, combining outbound and inbound activities, and staging a series of waves of activity.
2. Automation. Campaigns no longer need to be time-bound (or have the specific dates of their execution dictated in advance). With marketing automation tools, you can have various campaigns ready to roll to contacts when the time is right for them (rather than just for you).

So we have three principles to judge the vision of our ‘campaigns’ and two new tools in the kit to add to them. But the battle isn’t over yet, let alone the war…

In the previous article on “Challenges with lead scoring and qualification in the high value B2B sale“, I used the example of a company where Marketing wanted to get 150 BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timescale) qualified leads to pass to Sales, when Sales actually wanted something completely different (a smaller number of earlier stage opportunities with named accounts, coupled with better market intelligence and relationships for the future).

The story of how they arrived at the target of 150 leads is an interesting illustration of the vicious cycle that can start when the targets for marketing and sales aren’t aligned.

The previous year, Marketing had a goal to deliver 10 new signed deals. They predicted a 1 in 5 conversion rate and so set a target of 50 leads. But only 4 of the leads converted to a sale in the year. So taking that conversion rate of 1 in 12.5, and a marginally higher business goal of 12 new deals, they arrived at a target of 150 leads for the following year.

It could very easily have turned into a vicious cycle where targeting an even wider market to generate three times as many leads led to an even lower conversion rate and an even higher target the next year (with less respect for Marketing in the business), and so on…

But the point about properly understanding Sales’ needs holds true. It became clear that one of the main reasons for the low 1 in 12.5 conversion rate was that Sales weren’t interested in most of the companies that Marketing had been supplying as ‘leads’ (even though they met the criteria of organisations of the right size, in the right industries, with the right level of contacts at the ‘right’ stage of the buying cycle). In a perfect world, Sales would have been crying out for the leads – but in reality, each sales person had a named set of target accounts – any leads that fell outside this list would only receive cursory attention, and only if they weren’t busy with a named account.

So rather than delivering the 150 BANT qualified leads, the marketing ojectives for the year changed:

• to uncover any potential opportunities within named accounts that Sales weren’t actively working (still targeting the 12 new deals, but with conversion ratios for these opportunities being far higher than in the previous year)
• to build intelligence across all named accounts and strengthen relationships with decision-makers
• to nurture the wider addressable market with the goals of building a long term reputation and mapping the potential for future years to support a re-alignment of the sales team

And they all lived (reasonably) happily ever after…

I’ll start with an example. A couple of years ago, a company approached us with a single, clear requirement – the marketing team wanted 150 BANT qualified leads within 6 months. (BANT is shorthand for a decision-maker who has a defined Budget, the right level of Authority, a clear Need for the solution, and a Timescale for the project.)

This kind of detailed qualification is often important when dealing with ‘commodity’ purchases and is increasingly used when trying to industrialise the handover between Marketing and Sales (often the case with marketing automation systems). But in this example, the BANT qualification was being applied to multi-million pound IT programmes, and it’s a great illustration of the kind of issues facing lead scoring and qualification for complex B2B sales.

Where’s the downside of handing over a lead when it gets to the ‘BANT’ stage?

Well, if you have a high-value proposition – or if you have a commodity proposition but want to shift to a value-sell – then by the time they reach this stage, the prospect will probably already have been working with one of your competitors to define their needs and a potential solution. There’s every chance you’ll be making up the numbers at RFP stage and Sales or Business Development will have an uphill battle to prove your competitive value.

If you really talk to Sales leaders in these businesses, they usually want a broader mix of opportunities for their teams. It’s good to have some highly qualified leads (less time to the potential close, less effort required, very useful to give to new people in the sales team), but it’s also important to have the earlier stage pipeline too (often these become the biggest value deals as they have the chance to work with the prospect to define the solution, and for a similar reason they can have a higher conversion rate once they become competitive).

If you’re handing leads over manually to Sales, this isn’t too complex. Have an honest conversation about what kind of organisations they’re most interested in (or analyse existing customer information if you have the opportunity to get more scientific!), what kind of people they talk to early in deals, and what the signs are that they are interesting to take further. Then talk through leads as they are handed over to refine the picture of what makes a good or bad early-stage opportunity.

There are two main challenges that we see when using automation to hand over early-stage opportunities:

1. Setting up marketing automation scoring or lead ranking with a model to flag likely prospects at an earlier stage where you’re able to shape the deal. The scoring models will probably need frequent adjustment based on feedback from Sales, but the general idea is to score based on activity (how frequently a person has responded or accessed what kinds of information in how short a timeframe) as much as specific information (e.g. job roles or budgets). Looking for related information, I found this great story on Eloqua’s blog (”But What if I Want to Follow Up on ‘D’ Leads?“) with another angle on why sales people want access to early stage leads and how difficult it is to get lead scoring right. It’s exactly these kind of human factors that muddy the waters of automation.
2. Supporting joint working between Sales and Marketing. It’s inevitable that if you are trying to uncover earlier stage opportunities, then some (however good your lead scoring) won’t be right for Sales to keep hold of. Which makes it very important that they can hand prospects back into the Marketing process (avoiding the infamous leaky funnel). It’s another argument for tighter integration of Sales and Marketing people and systems.

It’s still all about the marketing, not just about the systems…

But actually, the bigger marketing challenge is a counter-intuitive one and doesn’t relate to systems or automation at all. Earlier stage leads are often simply harder to engage with than BANT qualified ones. Once they have a budget and project timescales, people tend to be more willing to give up their time to talk to relevant suppliers and are busy searching online for information. But if you’re looking for the opportunity to raise a potential issue with a prospect before they’ve properly defined a solution, then you really need good ammunition delivered in the right way to make a successful claim on their time.

The best marketing automation system, with the most appropriate nurture tracks and lead scoring, is nothing without the content, targeting and proposed next step that can bring the next opportunity to life.

There’s an interesting new post on Harvard Business Review by Rafi Mohammed, “Companies Must Learn to Brag“.

“Does your company help its customers understand the unique value of its products? If not, it’s time to start bragging, which is the only real path to higher growth and margins.”

Of course, the idea of anything approaching ‘bragging’ would be anathema to most of our clients. It seems completely counter to their typical brand positions and also unlikely to be the most productive start to deals with customers who are looking for more relationship-based approaches. I think that the HBR article has more of a commodity-sell focus, where emphasising a differentiator in something that people have to buy anyway can make the difference.

But while ‘bragging’ may not be right for the complex sale, there’s still a kernel of truth in the article for B2B marketers: suppliers should have the strength of their convictions about the value that they have to offer to their customers and prospects. And there’s scope for us to be a lot more passionate about sharing this value and making prospects aware of it.

This leads me onto something we’ve been talking more and more about lately – ‘inside-out’ marketing. It’s counter to the ‘outside-in’ approach that involves asking prospects ‘what keeps you up at night?’ and building a proposition to match. Instead, ‘inside-out’ marketing starts with the fact that a supplier should already have a good idea of what they are best at and the critical issues they help customers with.

It’s our belief that other prospects are going to be more interested in hearing about these answers (and how they relate to their business) than they are in being asked questions where they have to do all the work of defining their issues and potential solutions. So this is where we can show unique value – not necessarily in having unique product differentiators, but in being best at communicating the potential benefits to buyers.

It’s often a different story when it comes to bid support, but again ‘bragging’ isn’t really the right description. Having identified the ‘win themes’ that will differentiate you in the bid, the idea is not to ‘brag’ about them, but to come up with ways of proving the points to the buyer and leaving them with the right impression (rarely by simply ’saying’ the messages of the win themes, and far more often by ’showing’ them in action).

Of course, all these approaches rely on the initial ability to identify the value that will really make a difference to your potential buyers. Whether you’re bragging, running inside-out marketing or developing bid win themes, they all come to life when they’re matched to the right value at the relevant stage of the buying cycle for the maturity of the market for your product or service (more on identifying this value in a future post…).

We hosted a small dinner last month, with guest speaker John Suffolk (the former Government CIO – http://johnsuffolk.typepad.com) and a group of leaders from the UK ICT sector. It’s fair to say that the discussion was wide-ranging: What’s next for IT suppliers in the public sector? What’s next for Britain? What’s next for the human race? Is Moldovan sparkling wine better than Champagne?

It’s also fair to say that the debate was pretty unstructured (increasingly so as the dinner progressed…) which makes the task of writing a summary quite challenging. But I’ve tried to start the ball rolling by grouping some of the highlights from the evening into four main themes. If you were with us at the dinner, feel free to add a comment with your key points below…

But first, a two-sentence summary…

The world (especially technology) is changing faster than our ability to understand it; countries as well as companies need to get better at spotting and seizing the opportunities that are out there. For suppliers to the public sector, this will require radical change towards taking ‘speculative’ business-led propositions to autonomous areas (like health or police) where solutions will be replicable (and the days of massive central government contracts are numbered).

Challenges and opportunities for suppliers to the public sector

The challenges are more numerous than the opportunities, or certainly in central government. The headline shift is that suppliers have the opportunity to be bolder in creating propositions to solve specific challenges. Consultants need to stop asking “what keeps you up at night?” and software vendors need to stop saying “we have the best tool on the market – how many licenses do you want to buy?” Instead, suppliers should come with specific propositions that solve well-documented business challenges – the kind of thing that we’ve described before as a ‘provocation proposition’.

But that’s not the whole story. Broadly speaking, there are 3 audiences that suppliers will need very different messages for (and should probably be communicating with pretty constantly to build up momentum for an opportunity). There are the strategic thinkers and CIOs who are looking for bold, business-led commercial propositions, but purchasing and procurement teams are often still thinking in 10 year cycles, and then there are the ministers (of varying quality) who need the vote-winning angle alongside seeing the relevance to stated policies.

So who do you take these business-led propositions to? Generally, the opportunities are outside central government – in health, police, education, local government. Forward looking leaders in organisations in these sectors are going to be most receptive to the more speculative supplier approaches.

There’s also a view that now’s the time to be preparing your approaches to these organisations. Why? Because they’ll need to be making radical changes in 2012 and will be planning these towards the end of 2011. This year, they’ve managed to make small changes and sacrifices to achieve 10% budget reductions. But when they start planning after the summer, they’ll realise that making an additional 10% cut on top of this will mean doing some things in a radically different way (the BBC has just covered views of the implications for the police – the first shots in an ongoing battle). It’s essential for suppliers to tie into budget planning after the summer with ideas in support of the structural re-thinks that will be happening.

John’s view is that the greatest opportunity (as yet not properly understood by suppliers) lies with the mutualisation agenda, which may begin with the formation of locally-based services and organisations, but which could grow with consolidation into big business.

Procurement and commercial models

There’s no point pretending though that all buyers and suppliers will be able to take up some of the opportunities available (or that there are enough opportunities for all).

In terms of procurement, there was a nod to the fact that some of the biggest suppliers find it to their advantage when procurement drags on (the major bid budgets involved keep a lot of competition out of the process). The discussion also covered some of the challenges with the EU procurement process – and the fact that there are ways of speeding up the process if buyers and suppliers find the right ways of framing the purchase.

On the commercial side, supplier margins will continue to be squeezed – with offshoring services and the SaaS model cutting prices and entry/exit costs, even the bespoke software and services that are needed at the top of the stack will feel the pinch. It’s not that there won’t continue to be a need for high end services and bespoke software at the top end – it’s just that there will be a knock-on effect from lowering costs at the bottom end.

For software, the old license model is dead and it will all move to pay as you go (some procurement may still be a bit behind the curve in looking cost of ownership over 5 or 10 years, but not for long). The more commoditised side of the services market is already following suit, and the large Indian outsourcers (who have already been proven by government) will be adopting them as part of their armoury of tactics. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can disguise an old model and still compete against these new entrants!

One thought this raises is how much both traditional software and particularly services providers realise that changing buying behaviour and commercial models will demand a re-think of their marketing models. Looking for smaller, potentially shorter term contracts, would suggest a marketing model more like Salesforce.com than SAP (or even Accenture – as they move to a pay by performance or by demand model, services businesses could learn from the SaaS model). As margins go down, maintaining the personal touch and 121 relationships with potential buyers will become even harder commercially.

But when John rattled off a list of countries around the world that are watching the UK to see how our initiatives perform, it was clear that there are potentially global prizes to be won by suppliers who can get over these hurdles and make a success of the opportunities in the UK.

Wider government challenges/strategies

There was some interesting discussion about how technology is changing the way that government interacts with the people. One example was in terms of how pressure groups can emerge that force government to respond.

Social media is obviously a significant factor here – creating forums for groups that might not otherwise have reached critical mass and allowing them to influence policy-making. One consequence could be that more single-issue politicians may be elected, or at least that each politician may have to justify their position on certain issues.

And views on trends in the world in general…

John started the evening with a call to arms – the old models of everything (from government, to technology, to business, education, travel…) are disappearing, and leading IT suppliers are among those best placed to embrace the change – if they want to. Try to resist it, and you likely won’t be around in 10 years time.

Asked where the next revolution in technology will come from, John’s views highlighted both the small (nanotechnology) and the massively large (million connection distributed computing networks).

And where the evening started with discussion around the pace of change, it ended on a similar note. Will technology come to the rescue of the planet? John’s answer was partly positive – that technology opens a lot of new possibilities for us (for example, leading edge use on show in South Korean health service), and in fact that the greatest challenges provoke the combination of new and existing technology into solutions to major problems. But he also had a word of warning that the speed of innovation is way outstripping our ability to comprehend the possibilities on offer – something we will have to overcome or find ways to manage if we want to make the best use possible of the innovations that are coming down the pipeline.

Following on from my previous post on Gartner’s predictions for 2011, I was struck by the fact that these surveys can never tell the full story of life as a CIO.

Far from things like ‘implementing and updating business applications’ (Business Priority #6 for 2011), when we talk to CIOs their real priorities tend to be things like ‘keeping my job after that security fiasco’, ‘finding a new job where budget isn’t shrinking each year’, or perhaps more business-centric things like ‘building a leadership team that can support me properly’ or ‘convincing my suppliers to cut their costs again’.

Perhaps someone should pick up David Cameron’s ‘Gross National Happiness’ theme and try to research what really makes CIOs tick and how to make them happy?

But the big trends that this research picks up do offer a couple of interesting angles to marketers:

1. All the business priorities are very optimistic-sounding. But the ‘fear’ equivalents could actually be more useful to us in capturing a decision-maker’s attention. So rather than the carrot of ‘Attracting and retaining new customers’ we would raise the danger of ‘Losing wallet share to new market entrants’. Sounds simple, but putting a bit more ‘provocation’ into the propositions can be more effective than always selling on ‘hope’. It’s definitely an opportunity to stand out from all the vendors who pick up on the priorities and parrot them back to the decision-makers.

2. There will be useful observations to draw by comparing different answers in the full research. Just one example that suggests itself from the summary findings would be that Gartner claim Cloud Computing is advancing faster that previously thought. Cloud Computing and Virtualisation are the top two technology priorities for 2011. The combination of these results (moving faster than expected but still at the top of the priorities) suggests that decision-makers will be on the hunt for detailed information and support to turn the priority into a reality. There will be a lack of success stories readily available to companies looking to go into the Cloud – so client references, site visits, and even case studies/customer interviews will be massively useful. And – picking up on the point above – any fear messages about areas that CIOs might have overlooked or potential causes of project failures will probably be enough to merit their attention (just make sure you have a good antidote to the fear!).

Gartner has just released the findings of its 2011 CIO Agenda survey. Over 2,000 CIOs report on their budgets and business/IT priorities for the year and beyond. The good news: three times as many CIOs are reporting budget increases as a suffering from cuts. And while many budgets are flat, CIOs will be able to take savings from some areas and apply them to investments in others (rather than handing all saved budget back to the CFO).

So what are the investments they’ll be making? Broadly speaking, the summary confirms what you might already expect. Gartner have some hard facts about the move to cloud infrastructure, software and services. Almost half of all CIOs expect to have the majority of IT running in the cloud over the next four years (from just 3% now).

IT Management is an interesting one (the fourth technology management priority). Improving the professionalism of the IT Department and the ability to track performance and results from investments is going to be of increasing importance as IT lays claim to be more business-focused (not to mention as a diverse portfolio of projects and software in the cloud needs a closer management eye). In fact, whatever the proposition, messaging that emphasises how an investment can be managed and ROI tracked will be essential to getting to the top of the pile for Finance sign-off.

In terms of business priorities, operational efficiencies are still important but have been overtaken this year by growth considerations (broadly speaking, 2 of the top 5 business priorities are about improving efficiency, while the other 3 are about creating growth).

The top 10 Business and Technology priorities:

So now you know!

We’re certainly living through interesting times. One thing that brings home the pace of change is when last year’s future-gazing becomes this year’s prototype and looks like turning into next year’s game-changing product. The example of augmented reality glasses is particularly interesting as it only promises to increase the information overload that’s another symptom of these ‘interesting times’.

A bit over a year ago, Nokia Future Technologies released this trailer video for a pair of glasses that could take information from your mobile phone and place it right infront of your eyes:

Of course, the potential for reviewing and receiving information is clear. But there’s probably even greater promise in terms of finding new ways to overlay information onto the real world (anything from directions to orcs and dragons).

Where the Nokia glasses were speculation, the real world is catching up.

On the one hand, we have these augmented reality goggles from Vuzix. With video cameras on the front of the glasses linked to a mobile phone (for processing power), they take the reality infront of you, overlay digital information, and present it back on screens inside the glasses. The glasses are available now (although not yet at a price or with the associated applications that will make them appealing to the consumer market).

On the other hand, the Vuzix glasses are ‘missing’ the transparency of the Nokia vision. But this probably won’t be long in coming to the consumer market – Samsung were demonstrating transparent laptop screens last year:

This may be something of a ‘future gazing’ post to start the year, but it’s always interesting to think about the ways that technology is changing the way we perceive the world. It’s also an example of the growing range of hardware that’s emerging to provide new ways to interact with information in the cloud.