What a week it was last week. The world is changing before our eyes.

What interested financial services companies a week ago may well now hit a brick wall. Our business intelligence team, calling into banks this week on behalf of various clients, have been met with everything from “I’ve just been made redundant” to “I don’t know what’s going on, I simply can’t talk to you – it’s all up in the air.”

So what action can you take, right now, to keep on generating leads? To make sure your marketing messages will continue to strike home?

1. Talk to your customers, more on this below

2. Find out where there is still opportunity to sell. (we’re tracking several of these areas – get in touch if you want to sign up for our email newsletters on this)

3. Find cost-effective ways of getting your message in front of people – and prove why you are worth their time

Our own experience, only last week, was showing that what mattered a month ago is seen as frivolous now. The unusual market conditions are definitely creating opportunities but they are not always immediately obvious.

To use a B2C example, The Sunday Times reported yesterday that John Lewis has seen a 247% increase in sales of hot water bottles versus this time last year. Presumably this is people trying to conserve their cash by keeping the central heating switched off. Makes thrifty sense, but not an immediately obvious market opportunity.

It goes to show that, in a time of unprecedented goings-on, no-one can know for sure what will work. For B2B, it’s back to basics marketing – the most important action you can take is to get out there and ask some questions of your clients.

Ask them how, in this new environment, they will be making decisions, ask what are the pressures they’re facing, and what is valuable to them now. Understand how their own customers are behaving. You need to really understand both of these aspects to be able to put together proposition and messages that will engage them in uncharted territory.

We’ve made available our own client insight questionnaire to speed things up for you. Download it here: customer-insight-questionnaire.Your buyers’ worries (and their urgent need for future performance) are a real opportunity – if you understand them properly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this recent post on mycustomer.com, Yuchun Lee argues that there are three interrelated trends that are rendering some B2C marketing techiques obsolete: The rise of consumer power, a budget shift to interactive marketing and an upsurge in marketing complexity.

To counter this, Yuchun suggests B2C marketers should be considering an alternative “4Ps” of marketing: personalisation, presence, persuasion and permission. I think that B2B marketers are seeing similar trends, and they can take a lot from what Yuchun writes. Here’s how the new 4Ps could be put to use for B2B marketers. 

Personalisation In B2C, this means systematically tailoring offerings and relationships to the needs of individual customers, often in real-time. For B2B marketers, we should be leveraging the opportunity to create communications that are always relevant and helpful, and ensuring that the recipients’ channel and content preferences are understood and used.

Presence. Yuchun states, “As the buying process increasingly incorporates online channels, physical distribution and placement become less important. Today, marketers need something broader: presence. Presence manifests itself in keyword searches, in online product reviews, blog endorsements and recommendations made on social networks.” Even in a mid-sized B2B firm, especially one in IT, you will find your company and your product debated online whether you like it or not. You might as well use what other people are saying about your company and product to get a head-start in your market research. As marketers in B2B IT, we often never get to use the products we are marketing. The people commenting online do. They are a convenient and cheap market research tool.

Yuchun adds that a presence-based strategy requires deeper knowledge about customers, and more reliable signaling as to when they are preparing to act. Adding intelligence to B2B marketing systems ought to reduce wasteful over-promotion at the same time it increases response.

Persuasion. Yuchun says that “Marketers have traditionally sought to ’shout’ at their customers to break through the clutter” whereas “persuasion begins with the desire to be helpful to a potential buyer.” This means crafting messages that are more relevant and useful to each customer. This is just as true in the B2B world. The best campaigns listen to what the customer has to say – they then use that to generate interesting content that adds to the knowledge available in the market place. B2B marketers should aim to make their company a useful resource for the buyer.

Permission. Yuchun says, “Permission underpins the entire customer relationship…Marketers who accept this stop thinking about bombarding customers, and start thinking about how to make the most of each contact a customer is willing to offer.” Absoutely! We often take this one step further in our B2B campaign design, and refer to this as ”value exchange”.  Marketing campaigns are inflinitely more successful when they appreciate that the campaign target is in control, and that communicating with them is a privilege that needs to be earned.

A fascinating glimpse into the true value of IT has been revealed by the Lehman Brothers’ collapse.

This article from Data Centre Knowledge and this one from Vunet highlight the actual amounts paid for Lehman’s businesses ($250m) versus its property and data centres ($1.45bn) – a similar story when JPMorgan bought Bear Sterns’ assets earlier this year.

Interesting that when cool assessments of the true value of a company are being made, IT’s importance, and the value of data, are at the top of the list. 

I have been reminded once again this week of the need for B2B marketing and sales departments to be more closely aligned.

The “Best of” Harvard Business Review article “Major Sales: Who Really Does the Buying?” is the best $6.50 I’ve spent in a while.

It argues that it’s much harder to identify the real decision-maker in a major B2B sale than you might imagine – and recommends the account team works with marketing to understand buying motives. He adds that this requires a psychologists’s eye – something marketing teams are well placed to offer.

The first page of this article is free to read on HBR’s site from the link above. In reading it, I felt a strong case for further marketing and sales alignment.

Account-based programmes designed to increase revenue from existing customers are already paying dividends. We’ve already seen that IT companies who align their sales and marketing teams benefit from increased revenue per customer and better relationships. It looks like the benefits of taking an account-focused approach to new business development can result in higher bid win rates too.