In scanning the list of the Harvard Business Review’s “HBR Voices” bloggers recently, I discovered that Gary Hamel was on the list. His most recent, 25 Stretch Goals for Management is worth a read as I think it offers up an interesting model for a relationship campaign that could generate great thought leadership.

Under the banner of a “Management Innovation Lab” Hamel brought together management experts, social commentators and “progressive” CEOs with the goal of laying out the agenda for management in the 21st century. Hamel writes “What drew the participants together was a set of broadly shared beliefs about the importance of management, and a sense of urgency about reinventing management for a new age.” The output of the 2 day session, called “Moon Shots for Management” was a series of interviews and content, as well as a 25 point action plan for innovation around the future of management.

It strikes me that this approach would work well to support a relationship marketing initiative and/or thought leadership campaigns. By identifying the most progressive CIOs, CTOs, CFOs or other relevant group in your client and prospect base, and bringing them together with matching futurologists and management gurus, it would be possible to design and direct a campaign that developed a closer relationship with these people, helped them deliver strategic value within their own businesses, offered real account and market intelligence and output fantastic content with which to further engage your audience.

Whilst the content, approach and tone of any campaign would need to be focused on the market and audience, the model itself is a really interesting one – playing as it does on current appetite for community and the “age of reference“.

IBM has claimed that analytics will be bigger than CRM and ERP combined, heralding a new era of “information led transformation”.

Interviewed by MyCustomer.com, Ovum analyst  Madan Sheina said “The company is now poised to funnel even more of its profits into BI and analytics over the coming years, anticipating that they will be bigger than the ERP market two decades prior – the tipping point being a shift from business automation to business optimisation.” The company’s main “information on demand” products centre around sales analytics, workforce performance and supply chain management.

IBM has released a research piece “The Evolving Role of the CIO” alongside its transcripts of interviews with leading UK CIOs, which I mentioned in yesterday’s post. Some useful trends are highlighted by the white paper. Two of the major areas of interest are the changing nature of the role’s reporting line: the majority of CIOs – 42% of them - report to the CEO, with only 14% now reporting to the CFO. And the longevity of the average CIO is pointing up their increasing role in long-term planning: it is normal for CIOs to remain in their post for 6 years (research by Allan Alter, April 06), which is twice as long as the average CEO.

However, when looking to communicate with, and ultimately build relationships with, this particular beast a few points made in the white paper really resonated:

“The CIO is an idea position to take increasing business responsibility and control.”

“It’s one of the most dynamic and creative roles in a modern company.”

“CIOs are on the way to becoming tomorrow’s CEO”

“Key skills of today’s CIO include the ability to translate Board requirements into solutions. He needs to talk the language of the Board and the investors.”

“All innovation in our industry will be technology-led or technology facilitated.”

All of the above suggest that while the CIO no longer has to “sell the IT philosophy”, he or she is expected to be able to lead people, lead technologically and have acute business acumen. As Acergy’s CIO says in the report “tomorrow’s CIO must have the proficiency to be heir apparent to any senior executive position.” It stands to reason therefore, that the CIO of now and the future will want access to people and content that will satisfy their needs to contribute at the boardroom table.

The white paper suggests that the CIO will need to “understand the possibilities of the future” – any communications programme aiming to paint that picture more clearly for the CIO is at a distinct advantage.

To supplement its recent white paper on the evolving role of the CIO, IBM has just launched a series of downloadable CIO interviews as PDFs. As it’s a feature of  their UK site all these interviews are with UK based CIOs; certainly in my experience, it’s fairly rare to get UK information this freely available, as many previous CIO series are largely US-based.

Interviews are, among others, with the CIOs/CTOs of Waitrose, Wincanton, Network Rail, Dundee City Council, O2 and HSBC. They are downloadable as separate PDFs and provide good insight into the challenges in each of these accounts. We’ll be commenting on the umbrella “Evolving Role of the CIO” report in our next post.

Richard Holway, IT market analyst and guru, has said he’s seeing a narrowing gap between offshore and onshore due to the recession. He made the comments whilst commenting on Logica’s Q3 results, in which he noted that outsourcing was performing well for the company. “Outsourcing was the star driver. Up 11% in both Q3 and YTD. Looks like order intake is strong too as Book to Bill is 103% YTD.” You can see the full detail on his news service site TechMarketView.

Cisco and EMC launched a joint venture called “Acadia” last week, which will “bundle EMC storage gear, VMware management tools and Cisco networking and computing products with dedicated services” according to the Financial Times. In an interview, Cisco’s chief executive, John Chambers, told the FT that the deal could be the most significant technology alliance in a decade.

Acadia’s offer is aimed at competitors Hewlett-Packard and IBM , said the paper, and the new venture is chasing a slice of the $350bn annual market for core computing products, consulting and maintenance.

FT’s Techwatch blog has, this week, been suggesting there’s another tech bubble at play, focusing on the successes of Intel and Apple. Commenting on the results, the blog suggested tech was leading the charge for the recovery… ”most of the big tech companies have turned in pretty solid earnings in the past few weeks. Investors have been most interested, though, in their outlook for the coming year. By and large, they have been getting what they need, if little more–signs that tech customers are buying, and that they the recovery is gaining traction, with tech once again leading the way.”

BtoB Magazine has named its top 25 marketers of 2009 in a supplement you can download here.

It’s fascinating to note just how many of the top 25 to have made the grade are technology brands, or brands from closely-related industries. More than half (15 of the 25) fit into this category. CMOs from Oracle, Avaya, Cisco, AMD, Siemens, SAP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, HP, Accenture, AT&T, Verizon, Motorola and Sybase are all named in the list.

I’d highly recommend downloading the supplement and looking at how these different CMOs are tackling their marketing challenges. It reveals why AMD have reduced 900 global campaigns down to 4 core ones, why FedEx chose to drop its spots at the Superbowl in the face of the economic downturn, through to how an ex-Disney marketer is using the web at HP and will soon be leading a repositioning of the brand. From IBM’s focus on smarter planet technology, the Sybase CMO’s provocation-based marketing strategy and Oracle’s organisational focus on delivering opportunities to the sales force, there’s a lot to ponder. There’s also interesting insight from companies such as UPS, General Electric and Aon for a bit of non-IT inspiration.

A couple of choice quotes from the piece:

• Judith Sim, Oracle’s CMO saying, “There is no doubt, at the end of the day, that with Oracle marketing – and this is direct from Charles Phillips – we win when the cash register rings. We know what our end goal is, and that’s to support the sales organization. It’s not as much about winning those brand awards.”
• Mich Mathews, Microsoft’s VP Central Marketing “In the case of our business campaign, it was working; but we thought it could work harder,” she said. So Mathews and her team talked to customers and got feedback from Microsoft’s global subsidiaries and, ultimately, decided to retool the campaign, which targets business and IT decision-makers. In just 21 days, the company update various campaign assets—focusing messaging on how Microsoft technology can help people run their businesses successfully, particularly in a down economy.”
• Jeff Hayzlett, CMO, Eastman Kodak “In tough times you have to focus on the value proposition. The fluff, the funny campaigns, go out the window.”
• Mark Wilson, VP Sybase “We had a very compelling value proposition around risk management and risk analytics. If you looked at capital markets at the time, they were going through huge turmoil. Instead of asking companies what keeps them up at night, we would tell them what should keep them up at night. It was a very different way of selling.”

Marketing after the watershed: part 1

The world has changed in the last two years, and the one thing everyone agrees on is that it’s not going back to how it was anytime soon. McKinsey has called it “The New Normal” – a fundamentally different business environment.

A combination of economic factors and social phenomena have collided rapidly to reshape the marketing landscape. Where strategies were previously predicated on historical norms and certainty, marketers now need to make change the constant in their planning.

 As Lowell Bryan, a Director of McKinsey has said “…the flaw is trying to think that you can predict the weather—as opposed to designing a boat that is capable of withstanding all sorts of different weather. The objective is not to control things you can’t control but to enable you to be relatively better at delivering results and performance over time, no matter what the weather is. I think that what has been the big wake-up call for people…is because they can’t see the future. And they haven’t got a business model and a strategy designed for an uncertain, unpredictable environment. They’ve got a strategy and business model for smooth sailing.”

The marketing department’s being buffeted by the weather on two fronts – zero budgeting and headcount freezes prompted by the recession are making it harder to put in place teams who can spend time designing the boat (orchestrating major new programmes internally), whilst the sea keeps on getting rougher ( the growing role of participatory media and a decline in trust of traditional media means that when those programmes are executed, they struggle to make an impact in a fast-changing environment.)

Commentators are calling it the “age of reference” as opposed to the previous era of deference. “[We] are now entering the “age of emotional proximity”, says Marketing Week, where peer recommendations surpass all other marketing.” Bell Pottinger echoes this, saying “people prefer to trust people like themselves rather than traditional authority sources.”

Add to that the fact that corporate reputations are in tatters after the events of the last few years, (according to the 2009 Edelman Trust Barometer 62 percent of respondents, across 20 countries, say that they trust corporations less now than they did a year ago) and it adds up to a maelstrom for marketers, who are struggling to respond.

And what impact has this watershed had on B2B marketing? For many, it feels like crisis point. Response rates are stagnant at best, plummeting at worst. Budgets are under threat, and the demand for measurable results is here to stay. You only have to look at marketing’s place in the corporation to see the impact all of this is having. CMOs typically last fewer than two years in their role. Senior marketers hardly ever make it to the board, much less Chief Executive and marketing departments frequently struggle to gain a good reputation for their product understanding and customer intimacy.

Calls for a newly customer-centred CMO are coming thick and fast. In a prescient McKinsey Quarterly 2007 article entitled  “The Evolving Role of the CMO” David Court argues that “Few senior-executive positions will be subject to as much change over the next few years as that of the chief marketing officer…” and suggests that the CMO must assume a larger role as the “voice of the customer” across the company as it responds to significant changes in the marketplace.” This is backed up by Forrester’s research, showing that half of business executives believe customer experience will play a very important role over the next three years. According to the same study, 73 percent of respondents cite a lack of clear experience strategy as a key challenge. In B2B organisations, where the customer relationship traditionally resides with the sales force, this challenge becomes magnified.

The watershed events of the last two years are shining a bigger and bigger spotlight. Companies learned in the last downturn that cutting marketing spend entirely leaves them uncompetitive as the upturn happens. And as boards look to their marketing teams for recessionary marketing strategies, strong leadership, innovative routes to the customer and particularly lead generation… many are left wanting.

Ultimately, in a challenging environment, the corporation focuses on shorter-term returns. Thus lead generation and nurturing requirements are boosted up the ‘ to do’ list. Lead generation programmes  are currently the top priority of 70% of B2B marketers according to recent research by AMR.

Historically, it was seen as the sole preserve of the sales team to bring in the “now” revenue – whilst marketing focused on the future through its research and brand programmes. Over time, this has lead to a belief from many sales teams that marketing are too intellectually focused, and are not interested in revenue generation, and marketers’ belief that sales are selling the wrong thing.

This legacy, however, has meant that up until extremely recently, lead generation was only seen as a tactical and ad hoc activity. As a result, demand generation often follows the cycle of feast or famine, with no continuous marketing campaign process supporting the revenue forecast. ‘Lead generation’ programs are frequently short term initiatives, driven by the need to fill quickly a dwindling sales pipeline. They often have no long-term strategy and no follow-up plan. This results in knee-jerk campaigns, which deliver an oversupply of low quality leads.

The poor quality of the intelligence provided to the sales force leads to low sales productivity and often frustration. What the sales team want and need is a steady stream of high-quality account intelligence; which enables them to focus their prospecting activity on the accounts where potential projects have been identified or they have the greatest chance of success. The delivery of high quality leads is dependent on gathering detailed and sometimes sensitive information from prospective clients (who are bombarded with requests for such information, often from competing marketing departments within the same company). It is increasingly recognised that such information can only be systematically and reliably gathered from an ongoing value exchange, via thoughtful and focused marketing communications.

So we can sum up the four main areas of B2B marketing challenge that present themselves as a result of the watershed: building and maintaining a great reputation, driving a fantastic customer experience, building solid relationships across multiple channels and generating leads that satisfy the business plan. 

Not much new in the challenges themselves then – but the way in which you tackle them has changed for good. Our strong belief is that marketers should start with the end in mind. Lead generation programmes can drive all four of these if designed and executed effectively and with a long-term commitment at heart.) Can deliver leads in the short term, but ultimately work to enhance reputation and relationship as well.

And yet, even when faced with today’s brave new world, B2B marketers seem unable to break out of the rather nostalgic view that lead generation is a “one-off” activity in response to short term need. This is why the watershed moment has been so important – from this point on, lead generation cannot be seen as an emergency programme or non-core activity any more; it’s a central plank to any B2B marketing strategy, and it’s core to the entire business development process. 

Lead generation is no longer the knee-jerk campaign that you give to a telemarketing agency – it’s the ultimate goal of everything you are doing. It’s time for marketing to realise that if you can’t plot the journey of how something contributes to sales then it isn’t worth doing. And if you do plot the journey, then everything becomes more effective.

So how to get started building post-watershed marketing programmes? Our next articles in this Watershed series will cover what’s working now and how to build a framework at the heart of your marketing department that delivers these four watershed priorities, what will work in the future and how to start looking at it now, how to develop the best relationship with sales (you’re going to need it), and how to structure your team to achieve all this.

Recent research by ITSMA (the IT Services Marketing Assoc.) has looked into the C-suite’s use of social media and been surprised by the findings.

Writing on his blog, ITSMA spokesman Chris Koch said that ITSMA’s annual survey of buyers of complex IT solutions (entitled How Customers Choose Solution Providers, 2009: The Importance of Personalization, Epiphanies, and Social Media), “shows that the door to the C-suite is opening up”. You can download a free summary of the research here but the full piece costs.

The research Chris quotes found that usage of social media among IT and business buyers of technology rose 50% over last year. Now 55% of respondents said they use social media as part of the technology buying process in 2009 versus just 37% in 2008.

The research also found that C-suite executives used social media more than their lower-level buying peers. Just 15% of CEOs and directors said they did not use any form of social media at all, while 34% of manager/directors and 26% of VPs/Assistant vice presidents said they do not use it.

Commenting on these findings, Chris says “This has big implications for marketers. It means that social media is taking hold within your biggest, most valuable accounts at the highest levels. Sounds like a business case for investment to me.”

My stance on this would be that any social media strategy has to be woven into a wider business case for C-level contact.

Are C-suite execs using LinkedIn or Facebook to keep in touch with peers and ask for advice – yes, they are. Are they making decisions solely on the basis of this information? Our experience suggests that’s simply not the case. Designing a business case for social media investment on a standalone basis is pretty risky – you are in danger of embarking on a non-integrated programme that very likely cannot survive without supporting communications. Think instead, what do you want to say to these execs, and how can social media be used to best effect in the series of communications you’re going create over the long-term.