It has been said, (if it hasn’t, then we’ll say it) that the best marketing is about taking the cream of your sales team’s capabilities in one-to-one sales and turning this into a mass-market lead generation machine. This tends to be why the best campaigns involve a close marketing-sales partnership to understand how to position offerings, view the competition, differentiate themselves and drive prospects through the sales funnel.

It’s also been oft repeated that the best marketing is about communicating the right messages at the right time.  So maybe we can bring these together into one grand unified theory of marketing-sales success? Wishful thinking maybe, but McKinsey this month published the results of their research into the buying habits of 1,200 decision makers in long- and short-sale cycles across the US and Europe. This insight into b2b sales draws a powerful conclusion: the top two turn-offs (comprising over half of those surveyed) that sales people could do were to have inadequate knowledge of their product/service and to try to communicate with them too often.

Timing + message. QED.

Fortunately, these two faux-pas are perfectly possible to remedy. But in the theme of this post, it’s not just sales that should learn this lesson but marketing too. And we bear this evidence out frequently – the most successful communications are the ones that tie a significant aspect of the product/service to a timely need of the audience. When this happens, the audience doesn’t see it as ‘marketing’ – it’s just a valuable part of their business day.

I’ll delve into another area where marketing can learn from sales in a future post, but maybe you have some experiences on this area already that you’d like to share?

I attended a fascinating presentation last night given by Tom Ilube, the CEO of online identity theft prevention company Garlik. Tom is also the ex-CIO of Egg.

Online identity fraudsters can apparently gather the information they need to steal your identity in 2-3 hours – something that used to take them days. By visiting your Facebook or LinkedIn page, company site, Flickr account and searching the online government archives, fraudsters can now get everything they need to mock up convincing passports, bank statements, utility bills – basically any document that they need to get credit.

When you stop to think about what’s online about you when the information is culled from all sources – your photos, CV, personal information, mother’s maiden name – you start to think differently about how you use the web.

If you, or any of your team, are thinking about starting blogs or exploiting social networking sites either for marketing purposes or personal use, Tom made some great points about protecting yourself online. 

Start by using Google, or better still ZoomInfo or Wink, to search for yourself and see what’s already out there. His major two hints for keeping safe? Never put your personal mobile number or home address on anything. 

There’s a lot more useful info on Tom’s blog and Garlik’s site. I’m off to Google myself…

Yesterday I wrote a post on how to argue a case for your marketing budget.

But what if you’re not sure you’ve got a strong case to start with? Here’s a checklist to make sure you’ve thought through all the angles before you go in for the meeting with the CFO. (If you didn’t get it yesterday, here’s a download summarising other useful stats and links to online B2B marketing budget resources. Marketing Investment – Resources Sheet)

1. Have you started with a clean sheet of paper? Have you questioned old or inherited assumptions? Don’t use last year’s budget as a starting point, it will often lead you to make the same mistakes.
2. Have you budgeted on the basis of what you are paying now? Can you get things cheaper through better buying practices? Manage costs through prudent buying, investigate alternatives for spend rather than assuming it will cost the same this year as it did last year.
3. Have you looked hard enough at the people and skills side? Do you have what you need, or are you living with what you have? Have you considered outsourcing rather than increasing headcount or replacing leavers?
4. Have you budgeted programmes rather than lines? Line-based thinking can lead you from where the real issues are with marketing programmes. Sometimes changing creative or changing tactic masks a fundamental problem with the marketing strategy itself. You can also make a much more effective business case for a programme than a single line.
5. Have you cut out costs by standardising production? Adopt marketing agency type-approaches to numbers of authors’ amends you will allow internally. Impose SLAs on yourself and your team to uphold and improve the services you provide to the business.
6. Have you looked at where you can adopt new purchasing and manufacturing techniques within your job or team? Consider a “just in time” approach to content generation for example. Review your processes and look to minimise waste wherever possible?
7. Ask yourself a lot of tough questions – do you absolutely have to do things? Have you challenged received wisdom that certain activities work – are you sure they don’t just make people feel good? Do you have measures from previous years that can back you up?
8. Have you focused your spend on improving what really matters to the business? (Leads generated, a better conversion rate, customer loyalty increase?, larger average £ sale per customer, increased profitability per customer?)
9. Have you projected the revenue stream from your activity forward rather than looking back? Different activity, in a different market or at a different time will give different results. Look forward over the coming year with your assumptions, don’t base this year’s marketing on last year’s revenues.
10. If you have multiple products or services, have you budgeted differently for them depending upon the corporate objectives, aspirations and markets for each?
11. Are you being asked to do too much with too little? Avoid the “marketing always wants more budget” accusation. Be clear and realistic – don’t be pressured into agreeing to achieve myriad objectives with insufficient resources. You will fail to achieve your objectives and undermine the reputation of marketing.
12. Are there other areas of the business that will impact your success? Should you make a case for the marketing spend in these areas too? (Customer care, sales and bid support, internal communications.)
13. Have you pre-identified points throughout the year when you are willing to sit back down the CFO and review your progress and the returns you are generating?

Locking horns with the CFO or CEO over B2B marketing budgets? Here are 9 ways to argue a strong case.

Plus – struggling with where to start or how to put the budget together in the first place? We’ve collated the most useful starting points from our own desk research. Download it here – Marketing Investment – Resources Sheet.

1. Start by completely aligning your proposed marketing plan with the business plan – draw a straight line between what the company wants to achieve and what you are planning to do. Explain in detail exactly how it will contribute. Have the company’s stated strategic plan with you on the day.
2. Measure what matters, not what’s easy – use metrics that the CEO and CFO will genuinely care about. Pipeline, lead generation, increased revenue from existing accounts and new business. You will be measuring a lot of other things too, but these are the numbers they want to understand your contribution to.
3. Use the right language – talk about investment rather than spend. Argue a solid business case. Focus on short term ROMI (sales leads for today) and longer term ROMI (an easier selling environment for tomorrow). Explain for each budget line what you are targeting the return on investment to be and why.
4. Help the CFO achieve his/her ends – suggest that the marketing spend be amortised as the benefit is realised. We’ve also seen a number of companies who account for their marketing spend only when they see the actual benefit from the campaign (typically when the deliverables hit).
5. Use standard sales terminology – map your programmes against the sales funnel, visually if possible, showing how your plans will contribute to driving prospects through that funnel.
6. Get the sales director behind you – if you’re already delivering leads, use this to support your case. If not, make a start on sales-approved programmes and use the sales director to support your case before the meeting.
7. Don’t forget to map against profitability targets as well as revenue targets. Demonstrate how your programmes will increase average sale per customer, keep customers loyal for longer or retain more of them.
8. The CFO can’t argue with what the customer is saying. Poll your customer and prospect base about what they want and expect from you marketing-wise. Take visuals in with you to demonstrate what is needed. See my recent post on how CIOs like to be marketed to as an example of the kind of first-hand information you can use to back up your case.
9. Remember to sell the plan just as hard as you explain it. Enthusiasm is infectious.

Ed (name changed to protect the innocent) is responsible for all infrastructure globally for the entire organisation. He has more than 20 years’ experience in the IT sector, having worked in retail banking and for major retail organisations. He shared his thoughts with us recently on the best way for IT companies to market to him:

• I’m interested primarily in content and information that will help me do my job. If you can help solve the problem I’ve been grappling with in the car on the way in to work then I’ll listen to you.
• The strength of the proposition is not always the key determinant here; more important is the timing of the proposition and how relevant it is to me and my priorities.
• Be prompt and to the point. I want information, but I don’t want to spend too long getting it.
• Demonstrate a personal understanding of my business. Show you appreciate my company’s stated corporate direction and its market challenges.
• Make me feel obliged to respond, make the effort by investing time in helping me.
• If you can’t get me directly, the best way in is through a member of my team or my PA.
• I listen a lot to my ‘customers’ in the business, so you can always reach me through them – maybe they will be first people in the company to recognise the issue we have.
• Engage with me on a business level, don’t talk technical.
• Respect my team. If I ask you to deal with someone else there’s a good reason for it.
• Give me great content – sexy channels like podcasts are good, but I’ll only want the content if it’s useful to me
• I want to network with my peers, and hear their stories. Help facilitate that for me.
• My next step needs to be clear – if you’re asking me to do something (from taking a meeting to requesting a document), it needs to be easy for me to do and pitched to sound as valuable as possible.