[Or, a hymn in praise of integration...]

Have you got an iPad yet? Did you buy a 3D TV just in time for the World Cup? How about a walkman? (…OK, one of those isn’t actually a must-have gadget this year)

And what about the marketing must-haves for 2010? Have you appointed a Head of Social Media? Implemented a marketing automation system? Designed a content marketing strategy?

The next big thing makes our capitalist world go round – from the consumer who believes their life will be complete with 3D TV, to the marketer who turns to the latest technique as the answer to their prayers.

Suffering from boom and bust marketing?

The danger comes when you step off the merry-go-round. You realise that football is still football whether you’re watching in black and white or 3D – and social media won’t automatically solve fundamental challenges like uniting Sales and Marketing or differentiating you from the competition.

What’s the problem with jumping to adopt new marketing techniques?

• It can excuse (or distract) from failure in older channels – hopefully the next new thing will come along before it’s time to analyse the success of the last one…
• It can make marketers chase the wrong goals – metrics become about the success of the online community rather than contribution to the sales pipeline…
• It can make us less strategic – distracting from the chance to become the voice of the customer, driving the creation and application of new propositions.

This isn’t an argument to ignore the latest marketing trends – especially not ones like social media that have such potential to reach key audiences. It’s just a plea to consider them in a more integrated way.

Paul Dunay from Avaya was talking to Brian Wallace, VP of Digital Marketing and Media for RIM, and recalls him saying that “2 years from now – if I still have a Director of Social Media – I should be fired!” Once it gets off the ground, social media isn’t a programme in itself – it needs to support the bigger goals like prospect acquisition, customer growth or co-creation of products/services. Putting it in a silo won’t help anybody achieve these core objectives.

Demand generation – integration in practice

Take a big marketing challenge like delivering sales leads. (To start with, let’s not forget that the ‘old’ channels (events, direct mail, telemarketing…) are still delivering opportunities every day.)

But suppose you believe you could be driving more demand ‘inbound’ rather than relying solely on the traditional ‘outbound’ channels? You’re faced with the temptation to kick off any number of isolated projects to attract these sales opportunities.

Take the big three – social media, marketing automation, content marketing. It would be simple to create a programme for each:

• One set of people looking to improve your reputation/presence online
• Another building nurturing/communication processes for visitors to your website
• A third group dedicated to creating content that customers and prospects will find valuable

But shouldn’t these really all be part of a single programme? Creating content that the audience wants, delivering it in a format that can be distributed across the web/used to start conversations, and then being ready to track inbound interest and provide more good content at relevant points on the prospect journey.

And integration would go further than that – it would look at the ‘old’ channels and see how they could also use the same content, qualify people into the lead nurturing funnel, and provide essential opportunities to convert initial interest into sales leads.

Seven success factors for the new integrated model

To start with, there are four pre-requisites – all about knowing what you’re going to do. But let’s assume you’ve done all of those – understood your audience, thought about the great content you can provide, identified the channels to use, and set your objectives.

The final three success factors are a bit less obvious, and more about how you do it:

1. Sell the next step
   It’s true that the best programmes create content and calls to action to suit the needs of the audience – but it’s also possible to subtly direct those needs and the journey the audience will take. This means stepping back from the core proposition you’re selling, and think more about selling why the prospect should stay with you for the next step of their journey.
2. Don’t be afraid to involve sales: you can’t automate everything
   In the rush to become more self-sufficient, Marketing is increasingly frightened of handing an ‘unready’ lead to Sales. But sometimes (especially for high value deals in the relatively small UK market) a sales conversation or meeting can be the best next step for the prospect even if they aren’t going to buy for another 9 months.
3. And keep going… across all the channels that work
   In one recent programme, 57% of leads handed to sales came after three or more waves of campaigning. The point is clear – seamlessly integrating multiple touchpoints (social, email, website, events, calling…) over time is the only way to uncover the true potential of a market.

So like any team of superheroes (The Avengers, the Power Rangers – select according to your generation) using tools and channels on their own will only defeat some challenges: it’s the ability to combine them seamlessly that will destroy the evil genius who is taking over the world.

IDC ’s 2009 tech sales barometer has just been released. Entitled Selling in 2009: 10 ways to find, win and keep the money it features the findings of its barometer study alongside its recommendations for tech sales people. Its key findings are summarised below, but the long and short of it is that sales teams are investing more in inside sales and demand generation techniques, whilst realising that they need to be more aligned with marketing on lead gen programmes. If there was ever an opportunity for marketing to work with sales more closely, as highlighted in my interview with Ron Rose of HP last week, or in the post on getting sales and marketing to collaborate on business development, it’s now.

-in 2009 tech sales teams will be expected to do more with less; as a result demand generation will be a major focus – most teams are shifting more budget to inside sales

-sales organisations that bolster dedicated investments in lead quality and demand generation will be rewarded with significantly higher sales productivity

- the research highlighted that sales teams were increasing investment in sales enablement, lead qualification and demand generation across the board, with budgets for sales’ travel and training being slashed

-shared metrics was highlighted as the area that sales and marketing are still least aligned, with sales people giving an alignment mark of  only 25 out of a possible 100.

I’m pleased to be able to make available our web 2.0 planning guide. We’ve had a lot of interest in this document, as marketers look to introduce more “pull” techniques into their programmes. You can download it here for free: B2B web2 blotter

It provides a process for thinking through your approach, suggests how different tecnhiques can be used to relieve pressure at points in the sales funnel and provides management considerations for marketers using web 2.0 for lead generation for the first time.

Easy to use, fill in, make notes on, and share in a brainstorming meeting. Do drop me a line or reply in the comments field with any questions.

10-1 doesn’t always equal 9. When it comes to running lead generation campaigns, you need to get 10 things right – leave any one of these out and 10 minus 1 will give you a 0 return. Below are the 10 areas that you need to get right.

1. Does your campaign align completely with the business’ strategy?

2. Is it thoroughly researched, does it use market and audience understanding as its starting point?

3. Does it have contact strategies for both the buyers and the influencers? Do you understand the specific types of people you are hitting and have you built communications to influence them as people?

4. Does your campaign take a holistic approach to demand generation, considering the end to end sales process?

5. Is it targeted and pragmatically creative, and does it focus on demand generation as the goal. Not every contact should be designed to generate leads, but whole programmes should be focused around moving prospects through the sales funnel.

6. Does your campaign have an integrated contact strategy? Does it maximize the recipient’s familiarity with your organization, whilst building consistency and credibility through multiple channels?

7. Does it have a ccontinuous campaigning strategy at its heart; are communications focused on building a long term relationship (lots of bites of the cherry), not sending out a one hit wonder?

8. Is it closed loop? Does it focus on lead nurturing and sales support along the length of the pipeline? Does it have a sensible and effective marketing data management process?

9. Have you set goals at the beginning of the programme that you will critically measure against at the end?

10. Will the campaign move your organisation’s understanding of its market forward at every stage?

…but I feel fine. Yes, tomorrow morning at 9:30am local time the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will turn on. Shortly after 10:00, the first micro black hole with have appeared. Within two minutes, it will be visible to the human eye and by 10:15 the Earth will be no more.

Or not, as the case may be.

For too many very complex reasons, Chris (who works with me and has a physics degree) can confidently predict we’ll still be here at 10:30 (and if we’re not, shoot me. Or better still, shoot Chris).

What I’ve been thinking about this week, though, is how such a complex and potentially esoteric science experiment, three decades in the making, has captured the public’s imagination. The entire world has a film crew in there and Google returns more than 12m pages on LHC alone.

The answer lies in the first couple of lines of this post – it’s all about the story. The idea that the LHC might evaporate the planet in a single star-trek-esque moment has, understandably, got legs.

But it’s the facts and figures about the LHC that also grab attention. It’s so big it spans two European countries, just 1/8th of it qualifies as the world’s largest fridge, it will generate temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the centre of the sun and it houses the world’s most powerful supercomputer.

The really important stuff – like the fact that it will recreate the moments after the Big Bang, and that it may reveal where the universe is headed, that science and advancement as vital for us as people – are filtering through on the back of the statistics and “will it, won’t it” drama. The ultimate message is getting across, but the vehicle for the ultimate message is a handful of stories with the common touch.

We are compelled to find out more, and in doing so we learn a bit about what LHC is actually for.

I am in wholehearted agreement with FutureLab’s recent blog post on the power of the story in marketing. Stories and anecdotes stand out in our minds: we remember presentations that are heavily anecdote-based, we gravitate towards people who can spin a good yarn. Companies who have a good story to tell engage us – those who involve us in their stories keep us loyal.

The problem comes for B2B marketers when we try to create viral campaigns or marketing creative to take our message out in the marketplace, rather than trying harder to understand what the story is – what’s genuinely interesting about us and what will actually travel.

And you don’t have to threaten to blow up the world to do it. Take Rackspace – a B2B company. It’s spun great stories around the way it delivers something that other companies take for granted – customer service. It’s given it a name “Fanatical Support”, it’s involved customers (and very importantly staff) in delivering its pledge. Customers feel a vested interest – they are part of the story as they are experiencing and can talk about the great support they get. Rackspace has realised that the message (our servers are up all the time) isn’t what buyers really want, (and isn’t even something they believe to be true.) Buyers want Rackspace to jump to it when something does go wrong, because they know something eventually will. And that simple message, backed up by a super service organisation, has really travelled.

What travels helps people tell stories, helps them do their jobs better, helps make them interesting to have a beer with. The key is finding something that travels for all the right reasons.

So we can learn all something from LHC. And, of course, if I’m proved wrong about tomorrow, at least I won’t know about it…