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.

These questions were at the heart of our recent Sales & Marketing Forum, where we heard from IT buyers about their attitudes and experiences of marketing. We’re now running debriefing sessions for people who weren’t able to make the evening (request a session), but we’ve also collated online the presentations from three speakers:

• Keith Mitchell, former Global Head of Shared Infrastructure, Reuters
• Claire Myerson, Information Technology Solutions Director, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals
• Chris Cottam, former European Marketing Manager, HP

The presentation can be downloaded at http://www.themarketingpractice.com/documents/S&M_PeepShow.ppt – but it might be best read alongside some of the following thoughts (a short summary of my impressions, I hasten to add, not necessarily those of the speakers)…

Breaking in as a new supplier

The speakers had mixed views on specific channels to use to approach a buyer. Unanimously, social media and online channels (like webinars – as long as they last less than an hour and start at a time that is clear to a UK audience) are growing in importance. Keith’s point around web 2.0 was important to bear in mind when planning new social media initiatives: while he uses it for research and to bring insights/experiences into his team, you shouldn’t expect him to reciprocate or actively contribute.

The general message with other channels (direct mail, email, events…) was that the content needs to be either incredibly targeted or impactful (whether in a creative or business sense) for there to be any results. Claire emphasised that business buyers are also consumers and that inventive approaches or creative impact can have their place. But she was clear that nothing resonates more from a new supplier than stories of having done similar work for someone else in her industry.

Part of the issues suppliers face is to make sure that they are working where the money is. The example Chris used was the desire of almost all IT suppliers to become a ‘trusted advisor’ and the danger that such a strategy can significantly damage transactional revenue streams (which can be up to 75% of IT budgets) and leave the door open for the competition at a more practical level.

In the battle to reach the CIO or IT Director, don’t underestimate the role of the PA. Keith made the point that his PA would know what was on his agenda, would often be as interested in the content as he was, and would be able to open doors to other key people in the department. The overall message is that you should treat the PA as if they were themselves the CIO.

What do buyers want from existing suppliers?

We found in our own research that existing suppliers were seen as the most important source of information for buyers. This was confirmed by the forum speakers – particularly against sources like analysts, who received mixed reviews (some useful industry-specific analysts exists, but the big names seem increasingly irrelevant, especially compared with user-generated content online).

The speakers described how, in their best relationships, suppliers work alongside customers to plan out priorities for the year. It means that suppliers can share ideas, understand what they can expect, and avoid trying to sell anything inappropriate. It’s good to have shared formal account plans written down – although Chris did make the point that suppliers need to evaluate exactly how much effort to put into individual accounts depending on the business value they are likely to deliver. He used the example of people following the account-based marketing bandwagon without properly understanding the consequences both for the focus accounts and for the others that are left behind.

Keith wanted suppliers to be constantly sharing information – not only about industry or product trends, but also about them and their own activities. His worry was that suppliers would only communicate when they had something to sell, but at a time like this that can mean not being well positioned when spending does come back online. Having said that, his advice was also that, when you are in productive conversations, not to be too cautious about pushing the deal to a close. If there is a clear interest on his part it is frustrating if there is too much procrastination.

What can marketing do to help?

All the speakers had examples of marketing working well with sales and the customer – as well as examples of where things did not seem joined up. Claire’s advice was for marketers to work hard to ensure their offers reflect what sales already know about a businesses’ priorities.

At the same time, marketing has a lot to offer that sales cannot. For example, marketing can be a great vehicle for bringing in inspiration (sharing examples of other clients in the same industry) or strengthening ties with a supplier (through activities like industry forums or conferences).

Some specific ideas from the panel included:

• Working to celebrate success – for example, creating a video to celebrate a project going live (can strengthen the relationship with the customer and lead to future opportunities).
• Focusing on activities that give real value to individual customer contacts. One example given was a programme of MBA modules run by one supplier, where marketing had identified some key learning requirements and were supporting those.
• Using the opportunity of the recession to double-down on client references – increasingly important to be able to prove that you offer the low-risk alternative.
• Getting more personal in communications – not only in understanding customer issues, but also simply in the style of communication. For instance, Keith pointed out that graphics and formatting in emails are lost by the time they reach his Blackberry – and they also instantly make the message less personal.
• Staying honest and pragmatic – whereas hospitality is becoming increasingly difficult for customers to accept, the offer of a charitable donation (especially to a corporate charity) can persuade a customer to give up their time.

“CIOs reported that renegotiating vendor contracts and head count reductions were the primary focus areas for accommodating budget reductions,” said Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP. “CIOs report shifting more work to in-house resources and delaying capital expenditures more than reducing IT project investments.”

The survey found that CIOs expect the economy to recover between the first and third quarter of 2010. CIOs plan to increase IT investment projects and workforce levels as their first investments in such a recovery. Software, hardware and infrastructure investments are also high on the CIO’s agenda on the path to economic recovery.

The BMI’s 20 questions amalgamated a number of checks against which to review your content for focus and appropriateness. It recommends the creation of “persona” of the recipient before approaching them – to ensure message and fit are absolutely right.

This makes a lot of sense – we’ve had many CIOs say to us “don’t assume I want technical content”, many seemingly time-poor executives happily read detailed 3 page letters that have broken all the “traditional” rules of direct marketing – all because the understanding of the target market and the journey they needed to be taken on was exactly right.

The very good Buyer Persona Blog recommends building formal buyer personas for each of your target demographics, and lists ways to go about achieving this.

This chimed with a recent Harvard Business Review article entitled “Getting Brand Communities Right” which discusses the huge success of Harley-Davidson in this arena. So if Wyeth, Reuters and Harley are doing it so well, why can’t IT companies? The answer, or one of them, seems to reside in the HBR article – where the author says, “Too often, companies isolate their community-building efforts within the marketing function.” As a result, it’s not inclusive or authentic and the IT companies’ business audiences are turned off. As Wyeth’s CIO said at the event last night, ” if the blog or content sounds like a corporate push then it turns me off immediately.”

The same goes for any really successful marketing initiative – the thing that’s remarkable is that it’s so rarely anything to do with pure marketing, it’s something that comes out of the business that marketing can build on. If marketing isn’t playing a role to spot (or create) these opportunities and react to them, then it’s always likely to be hamstrung. However many communities it tries to build, it’ll never be the B2B Harley-Davidson.

This ties in with HBR’s interview with Fiat’s CEO, who says: “There was also a lot of young talent locked up in marketing and other functions that historically were not considered high-potential career paths. The guy who runs the Alfa division now is 40 years old. The guy running the Fiat division is 42. Neither has an engineering background, but both were first-rate consumer-products marketers, and the company sorely needed their talents.” Based on what our CIOs were saying last night – that their successors are the 20-somethings with the mix of marketing savvy and technical wizardry – it won’t be at all long before an interview with an IT CEO says the same thing.

“He is the first person in his position at Tube Lines to sit on the executive committee and with a head of information management, Liz Scott-Wilson, having recently been appointed, and a head of IT, Adrian Davey, already in situ, he feels he has the team to address both opportunities and problems.

“Before, you either worked for the FD or the chief executive and IT reported to the FD,” Connolly says. “That’s OK if you’re trying to run IT as a back-office transactional service but if the dilemma is how you manage information, it’s not such a good place.”

That level of executive intimacy and freedom to focus gives Connolly the opportunity to drive the information agenda at Tube Lines, a key aspect of which is organising the reams of content implicit in upgrading track, stations, signals, and trains and maintaining infrastructure.”

What do you think of the general level of understanding IT marketers have of buyers, both in terms of their general priorities and their buying habits?

There’s a general separation, I think, between the marketing activities that go into IT product organisations and IT service organisations.

On the product side, marketing has a good understanding of the buying criteria, buying processes and buying needs.  We’ve been at this game in IT for close to 50 years now, and in the transactional space I think people understand how that works.  It’s easier than in the  relationship or value part of the market, just because everything you use to differentiate tends be hard, verifiable facts and figures. The points of differentiation tend to be much softer and therefore harder to substantiate in the value-based side.

Also on the product side, there is an absolute mass of market- and client-related data available.  People understand how you get that information and what you do with it. They’re very comfortable with doing user trials – certainly at my old organisation, HP, in the printer space for example. There was extensive blind consumer trialling and testing before they ever brought a product to market, so when they did bring it to market they already knew that it was something that absolutely hit a sweet spot with customers.

On the services side it is much more difficult.  Many organisations on the services side have grown out of a products business.  They grew from, ‘let’s add some services to help to sell our products’, and as this new business accelerates it becomes almost an independent business.  But there’s still an element of trying to think about how to engage the buyer with a product mentality, and I think that’s still an issue that many service marketing organisations face. They still try to apply the good old four Ps or seven Ps or however many Ps we’ve got these days to bring the ‘product’ to market.  There’s nothing wrong with this and it needs to be done for relationship selling, but success requires more.

This service element, or the value part of the business, is about risk and the mitigation of risk is trust.  Everything, in my view, that marketing in a service organisation needs to be doing, should be focused on how to establish trust.  What can you do as a marketing organisation to help the sales people demonstrate a trustful relationship with the client?  That’s really hard.  There are no, as far as I know, textbooks written on how you do this stuff from a marketing perspective (there are many for sales), unlike the consumer or product end of the business where you can pull textbook after textbook off the shelf. In the value end of the business there’s really not a lot out there to help people, so organisations are doing this by trial and error.  I think we’re beginning to get a framework together about what are the elements that go into successful relationship marketing, but the buyer-specific part, I think, is a weakness right now.

In your delineation between product companies and service companies, are the natures of the marketing departments different, or is it that the way marketing has more involvement in the requirements-gathering for the products side means that they inevitably have a better understanding of the buyer than their counterparts in service organisations?

I think that the market and client research side of the business actually is something that could be a common platform to support both business activities, because the way in which you go about getting the data is pretty similar.  You might go to different organisations for different views, but the actual ‘what are we doing and how do we analyse it to guide our business decisions?’ is pretty much the same.  But there’s no substitute for personal contact in the relationship space.  You may be able to use market intelligence to segment potential clients; you may be able to use client-based research to help identify particular opportunities in particular clients or even which individuals are key.  But at the end of the day, the success of value-based selling or relationship selling is in the relationship.  And that’s where I think that the real issue lies, which is why I am happy to be involved in your next event.  How do you set up and manage that relationship with people who are senior in the organisation, given that they are so extremely busy? And yet, if you don’t have a relationship there, you won’t be successful.

Are you noticing any trends around different methods of marketing communications that are more successful than others?  For example, we’re noticing a lot of continued and sustained interest in account-based marketing, not just from a strategic level but from an operations and delivery level. We’re also seeing a lot of people talking to us about how to create marketing that doesn’t ‘feel’ like marketing, which I think goes to the heart of your point about how you gain influence without it looking like you’re trying to gain influence.  Is there anything that you’re seeing that is similar or different to the things we’re seeing?

No, I don’t think so. I think people are really wrestling with the concept of account-based marketing.  I think it has been a little theoretical.  People put down all the elements of an account-based marketing programme without really understanding why they’re doing it. So you’ve got a lot of execution because there is a list of things you can do, without that depth of understanding or experience because this is relatively new as a way of engaging clients.  I think what people are finding now is that, just like every other element of marketing, if you don’t fully understand why you’re doing it the results you get are likely to be disappointing.

The phrase you used about trying to do ‘marketing that doesn’t feel like marketing’ might be a reaction to that a little bit.  In really building relationships, the terms ‘marketing’ and ’sales’ are so blurred that yes, you need some element of demarcation to say who’s job is what, but from the client’s perspective, they don’t want to perceive a difference.

I couldn’t agree more, and I think that’s where this push towards the less theoretical ABM and this ‘marketing that doesn’t feel like marketing’ is coming from, because finally people are looking at the buyer and saying, ‘what we should be doing is mimicking the actions of the very best salesperson as a marketing team’.

Exactly, and how do you do that? For me, sales engagement is not only equipping the sales guys with some collateral.  We under-invest in one of the key obstacles to building a trust relationship which is, ‘have you done this before?’. We talk fairly easily about references – but what people mean by that tends to be something very short.  It almost feels like the more client names that you can put on the table, the better.  The more names I add, the better the impression, but in my experience that’s not the case.  What people want is relevance; and that means detailed business case studies that talk about both what was done and the overall experience.

This is especially true with senior people, who are essentially doing a risk assessment of you as a person and your organisation.  ‘If I go with you down this inevitably grey path, do I believe you’re doing to deliver for me?’ is the question they are asking.  And that’s about track record and having done it before, but ultimately it’s about the buyer being able to look  the supplier in the eye and feel confident when they hear ‘we won’t let you down’.  And they’ll believe some people more than others.  That’s the magic that marketing has to try and bottle and inject into everybody in your sales organisation.