I’d recommend a look at the deck Pete Jakob (IBM’s Marketing Transformation Leader) has recently put onto SlideShare entitled “The Organic Gardener’s Guide to Lead Nurturing“. 

Major highlights from his slides include advice from his experiences of running successful lead nurturing programmes at IBM. His main points resonate closely with those at The Marketing Practice’s heart:

-run fewer, longer-running programmes (see this post on the case for multi-touch campaigning)

-be accountable (see this post on working with sales by joint working on the business development process)

-think about the next step, not “are you ready to buy now?” (see this post on how to develop “next step” propositions)

-plan for frequent change (and expect it) in your programme, add innovation as you go (by effectively “scheduling in” change, you could have moved quickly to integrate messages like these into your programmes)

As an aside, it’s an interesting job title Pete’s got. As the post-watershed world rolls on, I wouldn’t mind betting we’ll see quite a few more of these.

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. In a paper only just published, McKinsey has called it “The New Normal” – a fundamentally different business environment.

This watershed moment has left many B2B marketers high and dry, so we’ve decided to take an in-depth look at what has really happened, what the new world order means for marketers, and what you should be doing about it. Over the coming months, this blog will feature 5 major articles, with accompanying downloads, to help you to adapt to this brave new world:

1. What happened? What’s wrong with what we used to do? Why isn’t it working any more? There’s a growing call for a new style of marketing, and the impetus to make a change for good, but where’s this coming from?
2. What’s still working in this post-watershed marketing environment? Which marketing models and techniques are bearing fruit? From provocation propositions to adaptive campaigning models, we separate the babies from the bathwater.
3. What’s new? A look at the trends that will shape our industry over the coming year. We’ll be looking at the best B2B examples out there and taking inspiration from some unexpected places.
4. Working with sales. In the post-watershed world, a closer relationship with sales is imperative. How can you integrate with them, solve the data challenges and work out lead targets? We investigate the rise and rise of account-based marketing and bid marketing techniques.
5. Structuring to deliver it. Finally we take a look at how B2B marketing departments can gear up to deliver in a post-watershed world. What will the B2B marketing department of the future look like and what can you do now to get a head start?

Sign up now via RSS or email (top right hand side of this blog) to receive these articles as soon as they are published. If there’s anything you’d like to see covered in this Watershed Series then let me know by adding a comment underneath this post.

Research from Computer Economics in North America has shown that mid- and smaller sized companies are embracing IT outsourcing. Report Author Frank Scavo says “These findings suggest the outsourcers are doing a much better job of communicating their value proposition into the small and mid-market. That’s interesting because while traditionally we tend to think smaller companies are willing to try new things, in this market at least, they are surprisingly conservative.”

Irregular Enterprise has produced a useful summary of the key findings of the report:

• Outsourcing services gaining the most strength among customers include help desk, desktop support, data center operations, and website/e-commerce systems outsourcing. Large organizations, in particular, are making greater use of help desk outsourcing.

• Outsourcing services making the smallest gains are application maintenance, application development, and data network operations service providers. Application development, while still the single most frequently outsourced function, is losing ground in the current economic environment as organizations cut back on project-based work.

• The three most popular IT functions to outsource include data center operations, disaster recovery, and website/e-commerce systems. These IT functions are both frequently outsourced and outsourced at relatively high levels compared to other functions in this study.

• The typical IT organization spends about 5% to 6% of its total IT budget on outsourcing services. This is true regardless of the organization’s size.

• IT organizations are experiencing the most cost overruns with application development, website/e-commerce systems, and data network operations outsourcing contracts. They have the easiest time predicting costs for IT security, voice network operations, and data center operations outsourcing contracts.

• Application development and application maintenance are most-frequently offshore outsourced IT functions, while disaster recovery services and IT security are the two functions least likely to be sent to offshore service providers.

If the angles on using new media blended alongside traditional channels in yesterday’s post interested you, this article from eMarketer is worth a scan. It’s an interview with Melissa Katrincic, the head of interactive digital marketing and ecommerce at cult skincare provider Burt’s Bees.

Whilst Burt’s Bees is a B2C brand, Katrincic still struggles with the same challenges as B2B marketers: creating a consistent online/offline experience whilst maintaining control of offer and image:

“If we’re doing something online, how can we deliver an experience that is similar to retail, where you still feel an identification with the brand?”

“Facebook is a great new foray for us. The fact that it’s global has, at times, proved challenging because we run online promotions in the US that sometimes are unavailable to our Canadian or UK consumers. They let us know that they’re not very happy about that, but we’re working on it.”

The article’s available in full on eMarketer here.

The 2009 B2B Barometer report, from the IDM, ABBA and Circle Research has just been released. It’s been designed to give an insight into the goals, trends, channel preferences, areas of budget allocation and investment priorities of B2B marketers.

A specific section of the report focuses on what the 100 B2B marketers interviewed for the study are working on right now, and has uncovered 5 major areas, based on an entirely open questions. I’ll go on to cover these 5 in detail at the end of the post – but first some thoughts on the study’s broad findings. 

My major conclusion is that marketers appear to be attempting to demonstrate ever-more rapid and cheaper results (especially around lead generation) without claiming the time and investment they need up front to support the delivery of those results in the first place. For example, the study shows that long term programmes such as research, marketing strategy and brand identity are losing favour in the face of competition for budget from social media, email campaigns and website development.

Whilst it’s true that online is cheaper, faster and one of the first places that prospects will go to look for something, B2B marketers must be cautious to keep the baby in its bathwater. In this digital rush, we mustn’t forget that we still need to say something compelling over these channels (that’s where market research comes in, even if we need to use new channels to conduct that research)… and that we need to be saying it to the right people (clean and accurate database with agreed sales interaction processes). Without the right platforms in place – data, propositions, mechanisms – marketing programmes are doomed to failure, be they online, offline or a blend.

As I said in the intro to this post, the ”Key marketing priorities” section of the report is one of the most interesting – focusing as it does on the 5 big things your B2B peers are struggling with right now.

These 5 biggest priorities cited by the study are reproduced in bold below, grouped into 3 major areas (data, online and ROI). I’ve interwoven these with suggestions on how to get tackle each priority:

 -Strengthening online presence through improved website content, visibility and interaction and enhancing the effectiveness of email marketing

-Obtaining a better understanding of new media and how best to integrate this with more traditional forms of communication

Enough of the new/social media black magic! Surely the most useful understanding of new media any of us can possibly gain comes from truly getting under the skin of how our clients and potential clients are using it now and will use it in the future. Your time to engage new prospects is short enough without demanding that they use an unfamiliar site or technology to boot. We need to think through the lifecycle of interaction during the go-to-market process and build online and offline tools to support that.

Speak to customers and prospects face to face about the way they’re really using the web. Whilst they are unlikely to blog or contribute to websites, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t reading them. They are still highly likely to be searching for articles and downloads to help them create a presentation or research a new tool or service. Ask what is meaningful and useful to the prospect, what will support the campaign’s goals and what makes the prospect’s life easier.

Don’t get hung up on generating an online debate or getting oodles of feedback – Jakob Nielsen highlights that only 1% of any online community actively contribute and the rest effectively “lurk”. The goal with online is ultimately the same as online - position the offer and attract people to it in the first instance, then support the building of a relationship, the sale, and the growth of that relationship going forward. Do this through the provision of great content and fantastic service.  Also, what about the prospects and customers of the future? Having grown up in the web generation, you need to keep an eye on what they’ll want in the future too.

-Cleansing and maintaining accurate and up-to-date customer and prospect details

Data is the foundation of any great marketing programme, and an essential nut to crack for both customer and prospect programmes. Most programmes fall down when they say “we must sort the data issue” and then acse investment immediately once it’s been cleansed. It’s something you should budget to make a never-ending investment in. Brian Carroll makes the point that “the quality the marketing database can influence your lead generation or nurturing program’s success by a factor of 50 percent.” Keep it current through continuous campaigning and a good information sharing process. Data is also one of the ultimate crossover points between Sales and Marketing, so it’s critical to put good people on data projects and commit to them in the longest term.

 -Deriving the maximum value from marketing budgets – making them work to the fullest extent- at a time of budget cuts. 

-Measuring the return on marketing investment – but in reality often the return on sales investment – at a time when budgets are tight and marketers are being asked to justify and substantiate marketing spend.

Consider allocating budget by priority rather than channel or activity (I saw data from AMR Research recently that showed “lead generation” as the primary marketing objective of 70% of B2B marketers, but it was rated third in the list of activities by spend allocation). Also, ensure that you’re budgeting from scratch for this quarter’s or year’s programmes and ask hard questions about everything on there (the old adage, do what you’ve always done, get the same results).

Don’t fight against programmes measured by sales-driven metrics, in a recession they’re here to stay. Instead be sure that you don’t sign up to a lead target in the absence of solid knowledge. Look at the sales cycle, the buying patterns, the previous history of the prospect or customer group the programme is targeted at before committing.

We are pleased to be able to offer clients of The Marketing Practice a free copy of the B2B Barometer report, normally £100. Please speak to Paul Everett on +44 (0) 1235 833233 to obtain your copy.

Microsoft’s Chief Executive Steve Ballmer gave the CBI’s annual lecture this week.

Describing the recent recession as a complete economic “reset” Ballmer covered two areas in his lecture that are of interest to IT marketers.

The drive for a “new efficiency”: automation and information are critical

Ballmer commented that the number one objection he gets from CEOs about the IT industry is ‘I spend a lot on IT but I still can’t seem to lay my hands on the information I want, when I want it.”

Making a strong plea for further information and automation to drive out of recession, Ballmer said that the trick now is to identify things that will generate real productivity and innovation growth. H said that companies would need now, more than ever, to do more with less.

Arguing that whilst many businesses claim to be automated, incredibly few actually achieve it in any way that sets them apart meaningfully, Ballmer stressed IT’s role in turning paper processes into digital ones.

He commented that there was an accepted wisdom that new technologies had 40 year “innovation run” before they became mainstream. He used the example of the steam era. He said that he felt the computer world had seen a 60 year run to date, but that he could see more opportunity for innovation in the next 5-10 years than ever before. Ballmer put this down to IT’s ultimate flexibility – from PCs that will physically become ‘digital paper’ in the next few years through to PC applications that revolutionise paper-based processes and will allow pertinent information to flow to us when we need it.

Microsoft’s main measurables during the downturn

Most interestingly for us marketers, Ballmer told the CBI that Microsoft is focusing on market share and customer satisfaction as the two major measures of its success for the foreseeable future. Ballmer made the point that in a volatile market, revenues are no longer a “controllable” factor whereas market share and customer happiness are.

Along with the recession has come much advice for businesses to focus on keeping their existing customers. Perhaps this is a golden opportunity for marketers to demonstrate to the board exactly how much marketing programmes can protect and extend those key customer relationships.

Retailing giant Tesco has, according to the Harvard Business Review’s John Quelch, ”taken the lead in promoting its  [corporate responsibility] Sustainable Consumption Initiative, now being copied by Wal-Mart.”

In an article highlighting that CR programmes are not just surviving, but thriving, in a recession Quelch says that  Tesco “plans to require carbon footprint information to be placed on the label of every product sold in its stores.” He ties this back to the trend that shoes a growng segment of consumers worldwide considers CR evaluations important in selecting among brands across a wide range of categories.

Terry Leahy, Tesco’s CEO, wants to make it easy for consumers to incorporate environmental impact criteria in their purchasing. As he says: “To achieve a mass movement in green consumption is to empower everyone, not just the enlightened or the affluent.” Corporations cannot change the world on their own. They need to empower their customers to help change the world for themselves.”

For all of Tesco’s major suppliers, this must be a hell of an ask.  They are effectively demanding CR measurements and focus back up their supply chain. For those suppliers, these demands can surely only only be met by using actionable using data driven from IT systems. Certainly to accurately measure carbon footprint across product lines going foward will require IT support. This resonates with my earlier post this month that revealed CIO’s challenges for 2010 and beyond, that many CIOs are heavily focused on interrogating data to support decision-making. If you can help Tesco’s suppliers out with this challenge right now, you’re well placed.

IBM has just released its first global CIO study, free to download from their website. It covers the findings of over 2500 interviews with CIOs from across the world.

For those marketing to CIOs, the study points to contined unpredictable conditions  – 90% of the CIOs interviewed believe that there’s moderate or substantial change ahead for them. The top 3 factors driving this belief were agreed to be business model changes, budgets and macroeconomic factors.

Other major findings are that CIOs split their time between 3 main activities – making innovation real, raising the ROI of IT and expanding business impact. The levels to which they spend time on these depend very much on whether those CIOs work for high, medium or low growth organisations. 10 minutes spent reviewing the numbers in detail is worthwhile as there are some useful nuggets – the heavy usage of collaboration tools in the high growth environments is one. Another is the fact that all CIOs are seeing that IT is “key to making business models unique and difficult to imitate.” The relentless march of SaaS is obviously not causing a “utility” situation to arise just yet!

CIOs are spending their time now and in the medium term on plans that enhance competitiveness (83%) and virtualisation (76%). They are also highly focused on “making the data sing” – interrogating data to support decision making – especially around new ways to meet customer need. The unpredictability to the customer in the recession has clearly put a lot of pressure on IT to use data to reveal what they might do next.

For many marketers, one of the study’s most interesting findings is the conflict that’s increasingly inherent in the CIO’s role. Many of the verbatims and case studies draw this out… “I need to introduce new services without disrupting existing ones”… “I need to reduce costs and improve services”. It strikes me that acknowledging this in marketing material, and offering ways that these dichotomies could be resolved, might be one way to strike a chord with CIOs.

As the Edinburgh Festival Fringe gets underway, with comedy continuing to grow across popular culture, perhaps more B2B organisations will take the plunge and find new ways to use video to cut through to customers or even to engage their own employees?

Clearly considerations around audience, message, objectives and brand will always play a role in deciding whether comedy might be the right route to take. And while we have had great success introducing it into campaigns over the last few years, it is arguable that comedy could be used more often than it is. If you are thinking about whether video could form part of your web 2.0 marketing strategy, and what story you might have for your audience, our planner (available here) may help to put it in context.

I’ve listed here a few videos that spring to mind as examples of organisations that have taken the first step, but please do suggest your own…

Perhaps the classic high-production-value video is the EDS Superbowl advert from 2000:

Which does have a less well-known twin (with a slightly more involved business message):

Then there are vendors who have a more specific axe to grind, as in the case of Lawson, making a case for ‘Simpler is Better’ when it comes to software…

And while Lawson’s first video from 2007 (above) has 65,000 views on YouTube, the latest installment (below) from April 2009 now has over 300,000. Clearly, lessons to be learnt around the determination to see through a new media campaign.

Outside of IT, there are some very imaginative examples like this one from a supplier making the point that the time has come for their product (I won’t say any more to avoid giving away the secret to a very clever, very rewarding watch):

But what video round-up would be complete without Mr T? Especially Mr T promoting virtualisation: “I pity the fool who doesn’t use Hitachi Data Systems virtualisation”…

Computing’s announcement that “Royal Mail seeks suppliers for £750m IT transformation plan” hints at the underlying (and increasingly important)  link between investment in IT and cash availability.

At the start of July, with Mandelson’s plans for part-privatisation abandoned, Royal Mail described its big three issues as “The need for fairer regulation, the need for a resolution to the large and growing legacy pension deficit and flexible and timely access to capital remain as urgent as before.”

Come the end of July, with the funding apparently now available, Royal Mail is looking for suppliers under three separate agreements adding up to around £750m “which will include systems design, build and implementation, as well as the support and hosting of the postal service’s softwareapplications”.

Talking previously about the transformation required at Royal Mail, postal service minister Pat McFadden had said that “given Royal Mail’s falling revenues and limited profits over the next few years, and pensions fund deficit, clearly Royal Mail will not be able to fund this investment alone. Additional capital will be required and this could be hundreds of millions of pounds, in addition to the funding we have already provided.”

The availability of capital is yet another language that marketers need to learn and bear in mind when trying to find a place in buyers’ plans.