CIO Magazine’s CIO 100 for 2009 has just been released and makes interesting reading. The CIO 100 lists the one hundred companies that are creating business value by innovating with technology. Featuring high profile firms such as BP and Wyeth, through to smaller innovators such as Vail resorts and Midland Memorial Hospital, the survey goes into good detail about the BPM, SOA, CRM, Marketing, BI and ERP (and other) IT projects perceived to be truly innovative.

Useful detail is available on each project – for example Pfizer’s recent implementation: “Pfizer launched a voice-directed order picking solution within a regulated and validated pharmaceutical environment. Warehouse workers wear a lightweight, battery-powered device that connects to a Wi-Fi network, through which they can hear verbal commands that direct them to the location of a product. Pfizer says the system has reduced pick errors by 57 percent, which reduces the quantity of orders being returned. It has also saved 10 percent of costs due to overtime and reduced training time by 50 percent. Workers achieve maximum speed and productivity in four weeks rather than two months.”

The McKinsey Quarterly has recently released an article called Memo to the CEO: Why we need an annual report for technology. It is premium content, but its broad premis is that to get the IT organisation and the business units more in tune, CIOs could suggest to the CEO that they jointly issue a technology annual report to the business.

McKinsey writes the memo from the CIO to the CIO, suggesting ”The idea is quite simple: you and I would jointly issue an annual report for technology—something analogous to the annual report for investors and the broader market. This document would not only provide a candid overview of our ability to extract business value from technology but also substantiate that analysis with hard metrics. We would share perspectives on the challenges of technology, convey our ideas about its role in our company, celebrate achievements, and articulate our plans and visions for the future.”

Whether this takes off within organisations remains to be seen – but I would suggest that IT companies could use this approach themselves – creating an “annual report” for the client based on the account plan they have, and the way they see their technology and services being taken forward within the account. They could map the annual report against the key goals laid out by the Chief Exec and Chairman in the organisation’s real annual report. It’s a great way to show early commitment and understanding.

In part two of our interview with Chris Cottam, the former European Marketing Manager of HP, he speaks about how buyers select suppliers for the consideration list, and offers a rare insight into what marketers should be doing to make sure they build a lasting relationship. Chris is speaking on this topic at tomorrow evening’s S&M Forum event.

A lot of our clients are talking to us now about how they are under pressure and feel the need to get much closer to customers. What should marketers be doing now to get closer to the customer?

If you look at it across the whole spectrum of marketing activity there is undoubtedly value that marketing can bring to relationship selling, starting with the ‘go-to-market’ strategy. It’s all so easy to say ‘we’re going to sell to the FTSE 100′ because they’re all big, blue-chip household names.  I’ve seen organisations try and do that without really thinking about why those accounts would be interested in what we’ve got.  There, discipline around ‘which customers’ and ‘what portfolio’ has to be undertaken exactly as you would in a more product or transactional-based sales environment.  It’s just the criteria are different.

Thereafter, I think where we are all collectively weak these days is in delivering some of the marketing basics in a relationship environment.  For years and years, people have banged on about how the sales force needs to be armed with a really good elevator pitch, and yet I’m staggered that if you stop many sales people and ask them about an elevator pitch they understand the principal, but can they actually deliver it?.  No.

Why is that?  I think it’s because in a product environment, the product pitch to the senior buyer or board member you happen to meet, is seen as a ‘nice to have’ – a ‘what would you do if?’.  In a relationship-based situation, though, it’s much more important than that.  You may struggle to get hard appointments with people, so metaphorically hanging around in elevators may not be a bad thing to do to get yourself known.  And then it’s crucial that you know exactly what you’re going to say to them in that 30 seconds or one minute.

Ditto if do get the opportunity to meet them in a more formal environment – that first minute or two of the conversation is the most important one or two minutes that you’re going to have, because that’s going to decide, in the buyer’s mind, whether it’s worth having the relationship with you or not.

We as a marketing crew tend to send the sales people out with words of encouragement…… ‘ooh, guys, this is really important’. What we don’t do is actively give them something very concrete that we can train them on.  We train the hell out of them about the product – how fast is it, what colour is it, how fast does it go – but the basics covering the equivalent things in a relationship environment, I don’t think we do.

I don’t think we invest anything like enough time in supporting the salespeople.  I’m being very black and white here, just for brevity – not everybody is quite this bad, but when we talk to people in a relationship environment about sales enablement, the first thing people will typically respond with is ‘oh yeah, we give them lots of collateral’.

Well, great, and you need to have it, but actually in terms of the level of importance of a relationship-building exercise, collateral is fairly low down the list.  It’s on the must-have list, because eventually somebody might say, ‘have you got a brochure?’ or whatever, but fundamentally that’s not going to get you through the first five minutes.

Understanding the individuals in a client organisations – what do they like, what do they not like – is key.  A real key question in terms of what I’ll talk about at the S&M Forum tomorrow is, ‘how do you get onto a senior buyer’s consideration list?’.  This is not the decision list, this is just the ‘I’ve got a problem, who might I talk to about that?’ list.

The first person is the people they always talk to.  If you’ve got an existing relationship, it’s absolutely fantastic and it’s so hard for anybody to take that away from you.  From my experience with HP several years ago, we all charged off on the ‘we need to be more relationship-based’ angle and we didn’t have any understanding about how difficult it is to break into a senior-level relationship where they have established suppliers who they trust. It’s very, very hard to get into that space. 

Nevertheless, that’s the top level thing. And it makes sense – if you’re a top level executive, having a regular chat with someone from a consulting or a solution-provider organisation, and you say to them, ‘I’ve got this issue, could you help?’ and the answer’s ‘yes’, you probably go ahead on that basis.  You don’t want to be expanding it out to any kind of formal procurement exercise – you just want to get the job done.

Second level, if you don’t have a regular supplier, you start asking colleagues.  ‘I’ve got this issue, does anybody else have this issue? Do you know anybody who could help?’.

Third level is actually going to professional associations. Relevant to us as marketers, people are coming to The Marketing Practice event with their own issues, and over a drink they’ll say, ‘I’m having an issue with this or a challenge with that, is this something you’ve seen, is there anybody who can help me?’.  These professional bodies have or should have a far more important role to marketing in building relationship-type sales because this is where people ask the question, ‘who could sell to me? Who could help me with this problem?’.

And then fourth on the list is the independent analysts.  I know in the IT arena people are very quick to jump on the phone to IDC and Gartner and others, or at least that’s what we think they do, but in fact if somebody’s done that they’ve already exhausted all the other options, so you’re putting yourself into a very competitive space.

The point of all that is that people invest time and effort into things that are as concrete as possible.  Briefing analysts about how good you are and all the wonderful things you’ve done is a very tangible thing to do, and something you can, as a marketing organisation, reflect back into the business to say ‘look what a good job we’ve done of this and all the analysts think we’re great and they’re writing nice things about us’. 

It is important to do that, but it isn’t as important as some of the harder things about getting knowledge about individuals in the business.

Ultimately the concern should be about effectiveness, which by its very nature is hard to put metrics against. But there is also, especially in today’s climate where budgets are being squeezed, this need to justify activity to the rest of the organisation.  And I think that tends to push marketing organisations down the ‘I need to do something very tangible so that I can demonstrate how busy we’ve been’ route. 

So they tend to select those as higher priorities items than they should be if you were looking purely at how to effectively develop business.

How do you think the downturn is affecting all of this, both from the buyer’s psychology point of view and from a buying habits point of view?

At tomorrow’s event I’m going to touch on this split between the transactional- or product-business and the more value-based end or relationship or solution end.  I think it’s generally accepted, from an economic perspective, that when things are tough, the focus moves more to only delivering essential transactional procurements, and that major board-driven programmes tend to go on the back burner.  The world becomes much more short term-focused, much more operationally-focused and much more margin-focused. Anything which is not going to have a short term positive impact on improving margin, tends to go on the back burner.  Not shelved, because it’s probably still a good idea but it’s of lower importance.

The one exception in my experience is significant merger and acquisition activity.  And the reason given by some of the senior folks I’ve worked with is that you know if you’re about to make a serious acquisition – and serious probably means it’s going to add 20% either to your workforce or to your revenue line – it’s going to be a big change and it’s going to have a significant impact.  And that impact will likely be negative for a period of time.  So if you know you’re going to be putting out results which are probably not as positive as people have become used to, there is no better time to do that than in the middle of an economic downturn where everybody is expecting reduced or unpredictable results anyway.  The general rule about things becoming more transactional-focused, more short term-focused is true, with the exception of any significant M&A activity.

In terms of how does that work with the buyers, clearly the buyers in the transactional space are going to be under even more pressure than normal to justify things.  It’s foolish, I think, for a marketing organisation to try and pretend that that’s not the world the buyer is in.  We need to, just like you shadow people and mirror them in the sales process, from the buying side you need to be doing exactly the same things, and put more emphasis on the cost validation of whatever it is you’re proposing, because that is going to help the buyer side justify this back inside their own organisation.  That, I think, should be a bigger percentage of the proposal or proposition, than it would be in the normal times or the good times.

I think on the relationship side, and this is really difficult, if the capital budget gets put on hold and the big projects and the big programmes that you were hoping to do with the clients are no longer available, then the selling part of the business has an issue.  How can you invest time in a client who isn’t going to buy anything?

When times are hard I would argue strongly that this is the time that you need to really double down on building those relationships and the marketing organisation should be looking at things that can be done almost in the absence of regular and intense sales contact, that’s going to help build that relationship and elements of trust for two reasons really: one is that the competition might have stopped calling on the basis that there’s no business in the short term, and the second thing is that all of these capital-based programmes will go forward as soon as things turn around.

If you invest in relationships when things are not good, I think that sends a very strong message to the client that actually this is someone who cares about me, they want a real relationship, they’re not only going to be here when things are good, they’re going to be here when things are not so good and they understand my current position.  It is hard to think of a better example of building trust than that.

There’s great insight by HBR’s John Quelch once again this month, in an article entitled “How Financial Brands Should Market in a Recession.” Featuring his thoughts on just how damaged financial services brands like Citi, RBS, AIG and Merrill Lynch have been by this recession, Quelch argues that certain financial brands have completely lost the trust of the public (Merill Lynch and RBS specifically) should be phased out (and replaced by the less tarnished Bank of America and NetWest brands).

If you’re marketing into FS, there’s a lot of useful psychological and market insight in Quelch’s article about how this sector might go forward, and what it needs to offer product-and-service wise to get there.

He ends by speculating that the FS brands of the future may lie outside FS. He thinks brands like Tesco, WalMart and Google, those in whom the public have much trust for “doing no evil”, are well placed to clean up in the FS space now. Why not start talking to them now about this, especially if they’re already your customers?

I wanted to share some interesting stats from a set of campaigns we are running for an IT company. This is a very focused industry campaign, and as such was targeted at the same data set over a period of months. The campaign had a very clear journey along which it drove the recipient, (a mixture of offering value and sales messages) and whilst each had different creative treatments, the messages built into a cohesive picture and were followed up by our in-house inside sales team.

Of 100% of leads we handed over to our client:

• 40% required two campaigns to develop into a lead
• 35% required three campaigns to develop into a lead
• 22% required four campaigns to develop into a lead

This just goes to show that a longer-term, nurturing approach bears a good deal of lead generation fruit. This is especially true when you are taking complex propositions into complex organisations. It can take time to introduce yourself, educate people, and get them to take the next step.

By running one campaign and moving on you’re certainly missing out on further opportunities. Instead, focus on working the data, and building a longer-term set of campaigns that have the ability to learn from telemarketing input about what resonates and develop the recipients’ perception as they are delivered. This method of campaigning also has the added benefit of allowing you to add contacts you are passed onto during the first phase of calling into the wider campaign approach.

This just-released interview in Sales & Marketing magazine between the EVP of Miller Heiman and Brian Carroll (author of the book “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale” ) makes for good reading for marketers facing the “not enough leads” scenario.

When asked what the common pitfalls are in getting sales and marketing working effectively together, Brian points out that high level consulting and reoganisation is no substitute for a joint go-to-market strategy and getting on with it. “Companies sensing the need for cooperation and teamwork sometimes believe they can perform miracles by reorganizing the sales and marketing departments. But, really what matters most is having everyone on the same page, integrated and viewing each other as pro forma customers.”

He goes on to suggest that it’s often not lead generation that’s the issue, it’s the handover of too many “non-ready” leads which stop salespeople from focusing on the really good ones.

“Ask most executives what salespeople need to help them sell and they will say, “More leads.” I’d say your salespeople don’t want more leads. They want more effective selling time. In my experience, the average sales force spends around 20% of their time actually doing productive selling (up to 40% if you’re great). Don’t get me wrong, lead generation is still extremely important to salespeople. But we need to realize that the extreme time pressure salespeople face—especially those with a complex sale—requires them to ignore “early,” “is not immediately relevant,” and [focus on] ”highly likely” to produce revenue.”

We call this the “knee jerk” effect – short termist campaigning built without a long term, continous approach and no central (and jointly agreed with sales) data or content assets. it produces a quick flow of poor-quality or unready leads. By investing in lead generation for the long term you get a more controllable flow of sales-ready leads, and sales people with more time to spend on selling.

It’s not a quick fix… but the investment in the data, content and joint working approach will bear fruit in the long term whilst driving down marketing costs and increasing reputation and awareness.

A point to note: Miller Heiman’s industry reports, based on their 2008 Sales Best Practices Study, are worth the (free) registration to download. Opportunities to Achieve Revenue Growth in the Technology Industry and Business Services Sales Organisations: Catalpulting off Previous Successes are especially relevant for readers of this blog and feature some interesting sales best practices that marketers can align with.

Just spotted this in Holway’s TechMarketView bulletin, “In our just-released MarketViews report, we forecast that the UK BPO market will grow 8% this year, the fastest growing segment in the UK software and IT services marketplace.”

It makes sense, based on our own observations in the article “Outsourcing thriving in recession“ which highlights what’s happening with revenue announcements from the big outsourcing players. As the main UK vertical markets start to streamline, outsourcing is well placed to take up the slack.  Good news if you’re an outsourcer. And if you’re not, it’s worth reflecting on what this means for where your next big sales might come from…

IT companies “lack customer focus” says new research published by B2B Marketing and Tiger Lily Vanson Bourne. The survey found that “IT suppliers failed to meet 40 per cent of IT decision makers’ satisfaction levels whilst another 60 per cent commented that they had not been asked questions that mattered the most to them.”

The study claims that a focus on customer satisfaction research is the solution to these problems, but it looks to us as though what the decision makers were really frustrated about was the lack of understanding at a more fundamental level.

The lack of in-depth understanding of customers is something that has been endemic in IT B2B marketing for quite some time. It spans lead generation, key account/account-based marketing through to ongoing “regular” communication. This was echoed by Egg’s CIO Tom Ilube when we interviewed him late last year. Tom said, “I was most interested to receive updates from suppliers on things that were genuinely relevant. Almost all the material I got was too generic. I would think, “these guys could have done a bit more, they could have tried to understand Egg rather than banking in general.” It wouldn’t have been hard to do – just a bit of research for example – before targeting me.”

In the downturn, the pace of change is accelerated, and what once held true for entire industries (ie. retail, financial services) is now being splintered at a company by company level. Woolworths went under while Asda recruited thousands of people to cope with demand, Northern Rock is staging a strong comeback to the mortgage market whilst RBS will focus on retail and commercial banking. This makes industry-based and “pain point” marketing much more challenging – as marketers we need to be asking a  lot more questions before we take campaigns out that feature  explicit solutions to the specific challenges of companies we’re targeting.

It’s this very phenomenon that’s causing the drive towards more focused, narrow-cast campaigns and account-based marketing that we are increasingly seeing. For many ICT and professional services companies, treating existing accounts as markets in their own right is bearing a lot more fruit. If you’re looking to implement a narrow-cast or account-based programme then our continuous opportunity generation programmes start with the data and key account monitoring to get the comms and lead gen working in harmony. Get in touch with our Marketing Director to find out more.

Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm fame has just contributed to this superb article for the Harvard Business Review, called “In a Downturn, Provoke your Customers”(free but registration required). 

Its premise is that, in today’s challenging sales environment, where discretionary spend is being cut, you need to provoke the customer into buying. And that to do this requires you to go beyond solution selling. (and thus, we would argue, beyond what has traditionally been seen as ’lead generation’.)

Citing an example from Sybase, the article says, “The vendor identified a process that was critical for customers in the current business environment, developed a compelling point of view on how it was broken and what that meant in terms of cost, and then connected the problem to a solution that the vendor was offering… Instead of aligning with a company’s prevailing outlook, it provides a new angle on the situation… Whereas solution-selling salespeople listen for “pain points” that the customer can clearly articulate, provocation works best when it outlines a problem that the customer is experiencing but has not yet put a name to.”

The article suggests the following process:

-Identify a high-impact issue, develop original point of view, lodge your provocation, prove your point.

Whilst you could argue that this is simply solution selling with knobs on, when looking at the process in detail is requires a phenomenal level of research and a highly co-ordinated business development team to generate such an opportunity.

Not least, the level of intelligence on each customer that’s required to support these sales tactics has big ramifications for marketers. The article suggests that you need to put your best people on such a “provocation” and that you need to pick your fights carefully based on the biggest opportunities.

Doing this require a more account- and intelligence-driven approach to lead generation. And if you are going to set up meetings to “provoke” the customer about an issue, you’d better make sure you’re right!

So where can you get the level of information needed to be near-psychic? Sources of such information cited by Moore et al are securities analysts, assuming that the issues they highlight will be high on the CEO’s agenda because of shareholder pressure. Intelligence gathered from the sales/account team and good profiling will really help too. Marketing is good at getting the best from large volumes of data, and can coral the output into useable intel.

Above all, I’d say that the message surrounding the provocation is a big area where marketing can support. This kind of attack needs to be very finely balanced to provoke but not insult.

I recently read this interview with a PA on what it’s like to be on the receiving end of marketing efforts. Whilst the interview is somewhat forthright in its tone, it reminded me of the importance of having a strategy and a comms plan for the gatekeeper, especially the more senior you go.

When looking at chopping up campaign data into chunks you can target, spare a thought for the PAs, assistants and secretaries. At best they are entirely overlooked, and worst, campaigns (both content and tactic) are deliberately designed to “get past the gatekeeper”. This has always seemed an odd approach to me.

PAs are paid to do a job, they know their bosses better than you ever will and they have access to a host of privileged information. They have unparalleled access to diaries and meeting agendas. Often they are specifically briefed on what their boss or the team wants to receive or know more about. Why not use them? If what you have to say is relevant and compelling they won’t just let it through, they’ll ensure it gets there.

Some pointers…do your research and customise any communications heavily before sending them. Think about their specific circumstances, the hassle factor of their roles and how what you’re offering could help. A traditional and formal approach can work wonders. Remember, this is the pinnacle of selling the next step - you’re using your communication to them lay out your stall for the ultimate recipient.