CIO UK has released an updated list of the 100 top spenders on IT in the UK – available here. The DWP, MOD, Shell, Tesco and the Department of Health top the list, while RBS has slipped out of the top 5 and Lloyds out of the top 10.

It’s hard to draw significant suprising trends from the list – public sector largely moving up the list, banks still near the top but slightly down, sectors like construction and retail taking a hit…

Where the list is particularly interesting is in the detailed profiles of each organisation’s IT strategy/performance/existing infrastructure. There are also some specific examples of popular projects for the year:

“Many were considering overhauling their communications networks to support either voice over IP or unified communications. Upgrading Microsoft Office and operating systems was also high on the list of tasks, as were improvements to e-commerce and customer management systems.”

It’s valuable information; now the question becomes how you best use this insight to support decisions/activities focused on these organisations. (You might also ask, assuming all the compeition will be targeting the top 100, how you get hold of the names of the organisations that came 100-150 on the table…)

So having made the case in the previous post for clarity in content and simplicity in presentation, it’s time to show that complex means of presentation can also be impactful and – yes – even fun…

Augmented reality (AR) is probably as complex as presentation can get – in case you haven’t come across it, AR involves laying ‘artificial’ information/graphics over images of the ‘real’ world. The first businesses using this technology to communicate a proposition are benefiting from buzz and excitement – and are finding some interesting ways to apply it.

Take GE, who are using AR to raise awareness of their Smart Grid proposition. They’ve created an application that builds a smart grid in your hands when you hold a printed symbol up to a webcam. There’s a video of someone playing with GE’s smart grid below, but their site gives the best illustration: http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality.

Right now, there are more examples of AR in B2C marketing – like BMW’s site for the Z4, which tied in to a recent series of TV ads and lets you drive a Z4 around your desk. But people are steadily finding business applications for the technology, as well as ways of making it work in the real world (as with the iPhone app below).

There’s nothing like keeping it simple when it comes to raising awareness at the early stages of the sales cycle. Every time we talk to buyers, we hear their need for the information that will clarify a proposition’s relevance to them (they have personal positions as experts to defend in their organisations, after all).

So there’s a real opportunity to be the supplier who clarifies things for a market and stakes a claim to be first port of call in any potential deal.

I’ve picked out a couple examples of extreme clarity to illustrate how even complex propositions can be made simple. Both examples make a virtue of simplicity – emphasising it not just in the content, but also in the presentation.

First, we have an explanation of cloud computing – a ‘hand-made’ presentation that belies the painstaking planning that must have gone into its creation:

And second, an overview of on-demand CRM – there’s something I find very compelling in this ‘no-gimmicks’ style of delivery:

Of course there’s a time and a place for complexity – talking to a well-educated buyer in the later stages of a bid, for example. But even this example isn’t black and white (the immediate audience for your proposal may be well educated, but what about the other influencers in the deal?).

Perhaps this is just making simplicity too complicated – there’s a quote from Jason Fried that our creative director is very fond of and which could probably stand instead of all the above:

“You don’t need to outdo the competition. It’s expensive and defensive. Underdo your competition. We need more simplicity and clarity.”

Forrester’s recent research (’How Managing Leads Pays Off In A Stronger, More Qualified Pipeline‘ – registration required) makes for interesting reading. Sponsored by marketing technology vendor Silverpop, the research is based on interviews with 15 senior B2B marketers in the US.

The interviewees paint a consistent and compelling picture of what lead management can deliver:

• Healthier pipelines (both better qualified and higher in volume as more leads are nurtured through to opportunities)
• More accountable marketing (consistently planned, measuring the right things and drawing out valuable intelligence)
• Greater efficiencies (more re-use of content, smarter contact strategies, less blanket comms)
• More appropriate communications (a better experience for customers and prospects)

What’s particularly refreshing (for a paper sponsored by a technology provider) is how much emphasis is given to getting the lead management and content creation process right before selecting the technology platform to use.

It’s exactly as we’ve seen across long term lead nurturing and relationship programmes – the technology is essential (whether that’s Salesforce or Siebel, Eloqua or Silverpop or even just Excel) but there are so many other factors that need to be considered first:

• Building the necessary alignment with sales
• Setting valid goals and designing the overall process
• Understanding the audience (to reach them, meet their needs, and score them)
• Creating the content that will make a difference to the audience
• Designing the campaign components to distribute the content (and mapping these into communication flows that take contacts on the right journey)
• Defining how issues like data quality and sales handover (in both directions) will be managed in the ongoing programme

After all of these (and there are several useful models to consider in the report), comes the right technology solution. There’s rarely just a single answer – far more often it comes down to the ability to integrate different platforms to make the desired process possible.

One major element that the report begins to highlight is the importance of the human factor. In our experience, there are very few processes that can be fully automated – this is where the ideal lead management process needs to account for things like efficiently handling inbound responses and making the most of opportunities for personal interaction like initial sales workshops. Above all,  it demands a new skill-set from B2B marketers to conceive, deliver and operate a lead management process.

A January article in McKinsey Quarterly raised the old question of how much emotion really comes into major purchase decisions – particularly after hearing recently from one decision-maker who said that the first projects to get budget approval are when the mandate comes straight from the Board for an urgent action or to get something new in place (JFDI was the acronym he used).

McKinsey’s article (Data to dollars: Supporting top management with next-generation executive information systems – free registration required) highlights an opportunity for CIOs to ‘make their roles more critical than ever’ by making the benefits of Business Intelligence directly visible to the Board. [Off the topic of this post, the article contains some great examples of models to visualise complex BI in action]

The article uses an example to show precisely how poor information can become a personal and emotional issue for the CIO:

“Executives intent on reviewing key performance indicators (KPIs) had to sort through a jumble of onscreen data, so the CIO needed to take several IT analysts offline every month to comb through the figures and create the desired analyses. Frustrated, the company’s board pressed the CIO to explain why group reporting costs were climbing upward and so much IT support was necessary. As the chief information officer, the CIO should play a more central role in designing next-generation executive information systems that can help a company’s top managers extract value from the data that surrounds them.”

Considering this kind of personal argument can often lead to the best response when we’re taking a proposition to senior buyers. It’s where the heart (in this example, ‘I need to be seen to do something’) can multiply the effect of the head (’there’s a better way for us to work as a company’).

Other more ‘emotional’ sales angles could include  playing on how you can make their department into a hero, or help it to prove its worth. Staying with the example of Business Intelligence, it struck me at our recent S&M Forum that the Finance decision-makers would be keen to invest in BI simply around the promise that it could help them track the performance of all the other investments they are making (ability to measure results being one of the main things they are looking to improve). This kind of thinking doesn’t normally come into a BI proposition, but it may be closest to the buyer’s heart.

This more ‘emotional’ angle  to selling can be matched by a more ‘psychological’ approach to marketing. When we look at the programmes that are delivering the best results, we can see that they are tied to some level of psychological or behavioural insight.

For example, people are more likely to respond to a lead generation activity if you make the next step ‘visible’ (giving a phone number to call if people want more information is one thing – but explaining the first stages of your sales process could actually be more powerful in helping them to see how they can take their interest forward). We also know that response or interaction can be prompted by factors like a fear of falling behind (ultimately tied to job security), a desire to be seen as posessing (and sharing) greater knowledge than peers, feeling indebted for a valuable experience…

It’s certainly too simplistic to apply B2C models of emotional buying behaviour to B2B purchases, but we do need to remember that decision-makers aren’t simply automated decision-taking machines. Our work will always be more powerful if we consider the people as well as the business that we’re marketing to.

Few people would argue about the power of ‘content marketing’ (or whatever you choose to call it): the importance of sharing the right insight, with the right people, in the right way, at the right time, for the right purpose.

A couple of recent blog posts shed some interesting light on why content marketing can be such a challenge – and, living up to the theory behind the approach, some of the conversations going on in blog comments are as interesting as the posts themselves.

Chris Koch has a great call to arms around the need for a marketing transformation – part of which is about building the ability to plan, create, disseminate and leverage truly insightful content.

Chris believes that there’s an element of fear that is preventing marketers from putting all their energy into making this the success it should be: “I think it’s fear that the hardest aspect of marketing, content development, is ascending to become marketing’s most important role, as advertising, traditional PR, and events shrink and fall away.”

I think there’s an argument that actually all successful marketing should now be thought of as ‘content marketing’. Yes, content can be some great research, or a video, or a podcast, or an interview with a customer, or a new model for understanding a complex problem… But I believe that exactly the same thinking is also at the heart of great events, for example. Like any other content, they need a story, detailed thought on what value they add to which audience, and how that audience best wants to receive that value.

When I made this point in a comment to Chris, he came back with the view that “Buyers aren’t interested in information anymore–they can get that anywhere. They are interested in insights.” I think this is the test we should be applying to all marketing activity – and whether we offer this insight at a face to face event, or online via twitter, it can all be part of a valid plan – but the core challenge of creating great content is still there. As Chris puts it, “Marketing departments are going to have to transform themselves into content development engines.”

So how do you go about building a content engine?

That’s one of the questions we wanted to answer (for the digital world, anyway) in our overview for planning great online content programmes. Paul Dunay also had some strong advice in a post I came across recently. Paul was talking about how important sharing great content is to building brands and relationships – and he raised the point that it’s essential to keep up the momentum once you start. In response to a comment asking how to create a plan for sustained content creation around a blog, he had 6 specific steps to offer:

“1) you need to start thinking like a publisher – what are you going to produce each month
2) once you have that in your mind – now make a publishing calendar out of it – so you have a plan
3) stop asking thought leaders to write stuff for you – get a writer and have the writer interview them and “suck it out of their head”
4) then send them the resulting paper for comments and approval
5) you write up the blog post and get the web page done
6) then launch blog post and send out the email to a data dip of those that have downloaded similar types of content

and bingo you have the makings of a content factory”

The point is that having big content ideas is all well and good – but these need to be supported by doing the basics well. We’ll have more on the different elements you can build into a ‘content factory’ – and how to sustain insightful conversations with customers – in some upcoming posts in the Marketing after the Watershed series…

There seems to be a growing feeling that the priorities behind IT investments are changing once again. Rounding up views from McKinsey and Gartner research, as well as recent stories from major corporations, shines some light on how we may be able to use this to our advantage…

IT budget projections from McKinsey

According to McKinsey’s survey (results available here), while operating budgets are largely expected to continue at the reduced levels of 2009, the story for new investments tells a more cautiously optimistic story. More than 45 percent of respondents expect to increase investments, while about 20 percent see them holding steady. Of course, we shouldn’t get carried away (back in 2007, 69 percent were predicting increased investments for 2008), but it does point to a return to more strategic considerations for IT.

There are some interesting industry variations – with Financial Services leading the pack in making investments (61 percent expecting to increase new investments, up from 40 percent last year).

Reasons why from Gartner

Gartner’s recent CIO research paints a similar picture (”2010 IT budgets are projected to be flat increasing by a weighted global average of 1.3 percent in nominal terms, compared with 2009 levels where IT budgets declined 8.1 percent”). The main thrust of Gartner’s opinion seems to be that we’re moving from cost-cutting priorities to a drive for productivity gains. These gains are about opening up to fresh thinking, smart innovations – but not massive costs…

“These productivity gains will come from collaborative and innovative solutions that take advantage of the new “lighter-weight” services-based and social media technologies, including virtualization, cloud computing and Web 2.0 social computing.”

If we thought that IT decision-makers were open to outside ideas when it came to making massive cost reductions in the IT budget, that may pale to insignificance compared to their thirst for insight around these ‘lighter-weight’ smarter-thinking options.

Change in action at the BBC, Deutsche Bank and Barclays

Three big changes in technology strategy in January seem to support the argument that 2009 was a year of significant strategic thinking going on in the background, and that this year we will see investments begin to catch-up.

First, Computing reports on the BBC’s strategy roadmap for technology over the next two to five years. The BBC’s CTO John Linwood supports Gartner’s recommendation of lighter-weight technology: “broadcast systems need to be increasingly agile, flexible and able to adapt quickly to new demands.” As we’ve seen several times already, standardisation will be one of the buzzwords of 2010, and the BBC report continues this theme: “The BBC must strive for further standardisation in the technology solutions it employs to minimise the overall costs and maximise re-use. The use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) technologies and solutions should be the preferred option. Whilst specific customisation is necessary it must be done consciously and when commercial off the shelf offerings have been evaluated.” 

Next, we have the New Statesman’s coverage of Deutsche Bank’s plans to replace various solutions with a single new core banking system from SAP: “The SAP implementation shall underpin the bank’s strategy to push for a high degree of industrialization and standardization of processes. The bank is also looking to achieve flexibility in its IT infrastructure, building on standardized, modular SAP software functions within a SOA.”

Finally, an interesting report on Barclays from Computer Weekly describes how the bank is taking a number of outsourced contracts back in house. Following the decision in December to bring the management of desktop systems back in house, last week saw the decision not to renew the application development contract with Accenture. It’s open to speculation on which factors were most important of cost, flexibility, business alignment, control…

So three very different stories to start the year – all the combination of a long time thinking and justifying investments that are now coming on-line. We can expect to see more changes in direction as other businesses follow suit and place their bets for the recovery – and by 2011 we may well be sick of the words standardisation, flexibility and productivity…

Smurfs may be great gardeners, but would they make it in B2B marketing? With this whole ’spot the difference’ idea, they’ve clearly bought into the common marketing principle of ‘differentiate or die’. But is that just qualifying them out of potential deals?

[/end tenuous Smurf analogy/]

I’m worried that many people (me included, too often) put too much faith in the ‘differentiate or die’ message. It can lead us to try and create USPs at a point in the sales cycle when we should be concentrating on answering customer needs. Just because competitors also answer these needs, doesn’t necessarily mean we can’t talk about it too.

Take an example: let’s say there are lots of companies acknowledging a need for your kind of solution (some in the sweet spot where you really do have better features than the competition) – but there are two or three big names always getting on the shortlist for the RFP.

Now, do you really need marketing to differentiate yourself from the big three? Or is the issue actually that people see them as exactly placed to answer their needs and perceive you as too different already (or don’t see you at all)?

Perhaps there’s an argument that marketing up to the point of the RFP should be all about ‘me too’ – we have a great client list (like them), we have delivered great results (like them), we have features x,y,z (like them)…

The chances are that knowledge of what one of the big competitors can do is already helping the prospect to shape their RFP  – so the only thing you’re going to achieve with differentiation is to discount yourself from the deal. This obviously isn’t a hard and fast rule (and would I imagine vary according to market and product maturity), but should be food for thought before we jump to look for a USP to market around rather than a clear customer need.

Of course, if the competition is bigger than you, then you will need one kind of differentiation – not necessarily to do with what you say, but all to do with how/where you say it. They’ll own various saturated marketing channels (think Google AdWords, tradeshows/exhibitions, industry publications, analyst activity…) – but it’s your opportunity to get smart and targeted with your direct communications to really deliver that ‘me too’ message in a way that gets ‘me too’ onto the shortlist…

And once you’re on that shortlist and having your sales meetings – that’s the time to really stick it to the competition (and your sales team need all the support they can get to highlight the places where your product/service differentiators meet the pain points of the prospect).

But start the differentiation too soon and you’ll end up needing to create a whole new market before anyone will buy from you (which is a great challenge to have, if you’re up for the fight!).

So, anyway, have you spotted the 5 differences in the smurf picture? Go here to see if you got it right!

December saw the latest session of our Sales & Marketing Forum, inspired by what seems to have been the rallying cry of 2009: “Let’s sell to the CFO as well…”

Speakers included Mark Evans, CFO, Vodafone Group Technology, and Gareth Bailey, Head of Central Services, Logistics & IT Group, Marks & Spencer, and our guests were on good questioning form (possibly inspired by the finest mulled wine the Soho Hotel could provide…).

Our write-up of the event (available to download here) covers four main areas of discussion from the night:

• Understanding Finance’s role in the organisation/process

• What are the key factors influencing Finance decisions?

• How can we reach the Finance decision-maker?

• What content works best? What do suppliers need to prove?

Everyone has an inkling that, for all the obvious reasons, the role of the Finance decision-maker is becoming steadily more important in major enterprise deals. But before adding them as simply another role on a long list to target, we need to immerse ourselves in their world and their language. Doing this can reveal where so many people are going wrong in their attempts to reach such a complex and elusive group of people.

If you have any other questions about the speaker’s views, or if you were at the event and think I’ve missed a vitally important issue, please add your thoughts in a comment…

Are there any suppliers who don’t aspire to a ‘thought leadership’ position? It’s an admirable objective, but fails to deliver on the promise all too often. Meanwhile, a more practical approach seems to be delivering ever-stronger results…

So last week, a colleague proposed the possibility that – with every man and his dog creating a ‘thought leadership’ position – the real thought leaders might be doing just the opposite.

The impulse behind a thought leadership programme is to have something interesting to say to clients and prospects, ideally something that stands a business apart from the competition as more forward-thinking and creating new solutions to existing challenges.

Which is great as a principle, and when it works it can pay massive dividends. But too often, after this great start, people put the ’stand apart from the competition’ before the ‘interesting to clients and prospects’ – which typically means taking an ever more tangential/futuristic view on a subject. And so the thought leading position gets farther and farther away from where the majority of clients/prospects are fighting their day to day battles (and spending the majority of their budgets).

When we researched the people making buying decisions worth millions of pounds, we found that the ones taking the decisions weren’t necessarily in the c-suite, but departmental heads/programme directors – people with day jobs too big to worry about what might be possible in the future and all too concerned with what’s happening today.

There’s also a tightrope to walk between innovation and delivery – at our recent S&M Forum we heard from Finance decision-makers who explained how they prioritise budget for suppliers who can clearly show what they will deliver and how they are capable of delivering (having done the same thing 100 times before being more important than some potential but unproven competitive advantage).

This won’t be true for every proposition or every audience (some companies are less risk-averse than the norm and are typically good target early adopters for new solutions), but the current environment does seem to call for a more practical, pragmatic kind of leadership.

Maybe the really innovative thinking would be to stick to what worries today’s decision-makers – details of where your proposition fits their budgets and priorities, stories about what’s going right and wrong, implementation pot-holes, war stories…

So what would we call the opposite of thought leadership? Well, if the balance is between thinking and doing, perhaps it should be ‘deed leadership’.