In the September 2008 issue:

• First: End the Opportunism
• What's Hot: ABM Is Not as Expensive as You Think
• The Interview: Content that Salespeople Will Actually Use
• Research Desk:
  • Ask ITSMA: How Can I Use Web 2.0 to Communicate with Sales?
  • Recent ITSMA Thought Leadership
  • Most Popular Listens
• News & Notes
  • Upcoming ITSMA Events

First

End the Opportunism

By Chris Koch, ckoch@itsma.com

Marketing is like most areas of the business when it comes to technology: opportunistic. A specific need arises and you find technology to fill it. That may lead to choosing the best software for the particular job, but not necessarily for the strategic goals of marketing and IT.

For example, maybe the software isn’t scalable to other marketing groups, or maybe it is incompatible with existing software. Of course, such issues are what often leads marketing to go around IT in the first place; IT rejects the best software for the job because of all these concerns. In the end, marketing and IT must have consistent communication about marketing’s goals with technology. That usually means assigning a liaison on both sides.

Why create linkages to IT? Because the pressure for marketing to become more efficient isn’t going to go away anytime soon. Automation is one of the ways to do more with less.

So how do you start down the marketing automation path? It’s sounds like a cliché, but you need to take a process view. Chances are you don’t have a map of all of marketing’s processes, much less the ones that could benefit from some kind of automation. I’ve tried to create a broad list of processes that could benefit from automation. No provider covers this entire list, but that’s not the issue. The issue is, which of these processes are you doing manually today, and which ones, if automated, would provide the most value—not just to marketing operations, but to the overall strategic goals of your organization?

Here’s my list of the major processes:

• Get a single view of the customer. Collect data from multiple places to improve analysis of individual customers.
• Model the behavior of the customer so you can predict which ones are the best to do business with.
• Collect and manage conversations about you online and offline.
• Contact customers when and how they want to be contacted.
• Organize marketing content so that it can be targeted at a specific customer, delivered at the right time and in the right context. Automate the delivery of content that supports different customer interactions—call center, sales call, for example—and different events that occur, such as high number of transactions.
• Improve interactions with customers on your Website. Can you make your site respond to the customer’s actions and history on the site?
• Better measure and manage marketing activities.

Does this cover all your major processes? What have I left out?

What's Hot

Account-Based Marketing Is Not as Expensive as You Think

By Julie Schwartz, jschwartz@itsma.com

Treating every customer and prospect like a market of one—what we at ITSMA call Account-Based Marketing, or ABM—would seem to be a time- and resource-intensive proposition—the mother of one-off, nonscalable marketing programs.

Not necessarily, according to a recent ITSMA multiclient study. Interviews with leading practitioners found that ABM is indeed scalable.

But there are conditions. One is that you have some sort of central governance for the program, whether it be a program management office, a governing council, or both.

Why? Because the central authority can facilitate regular meetings and conference calls to share best practices and lessons learned, including tools and templates for process standardization, internal communications programs, and formal training programs. It can also act as the arbiter of metrics to determine what’s working across the various programs and what isn’t.

The central group can also help local field marketing organizations get the help and support they need to execute ABM. Local field marketers are the “last mile” of ABM. They are responsible for most of the direct customer interaction. Therefore, they can’t be reinventing the wheel for each account, because ABM is rarely their only responsibility—with other demands on their time, they need help.

Another condition for scaling ABM is reusing resources—in essence, a one-to-few approach rather than one-to-one. In one sense this is easy: ABM is an extension of the things you already do, with a special emphasis on market research and thought leadership. So some of the costs for ABM are already covered by existing programs.

But there’s more to it than this. Not all research and thought leadership will be applicable to every account, even if it is customized. There needs to be a strategy behind using resources across multiple accounts (here, too, it helps to have a central coordinating authority of some sort). You need to make smart choices about which customers and prospects will benefit from a one-to-few approach and which require a strict one-to-one relationship. And you also need to create tools and templates to minimize the effort involved in creating the materials for these programs—with the level of customization increasing with the degree of one-to-one treatment.

Across all companies participating in the study, we found that the foundation of ABM is demand generation rather than lead generation. In other words, this isn’t going at them and trying to find someone who has budget and already has an idea of what they want to buy. You 're working with the customers to help them uncover their problems and business issues and collaborate with them to create the solutions.

Of course, while our research found that there are ways to be more efficient with ABM, it is still an investment. But we don’t recommend that companies try to sell it internally as yet another marketing program that needs to be justified in tough budget times. ABM is a business strategy, not a marketing program. If you 're talking about a strategy that 's going to increase profits or increase revenue, it 's hard to say, “Well, how do we justify that?”

But if you do need to justify it, here’s some evidence: Of all the companies we interviewed, none are cutting back on ABM. Some have had failed campaigns, but all believe that ABM has been an overall success, and have the case studies to prove it.

Clearly, there is no turning back on ABM now.

The Interview

Five Types of Content that Salespeople Will Actually Use

Most marketing materials are too broadly focused and too complex to help salespeople in the heat of the sales cycle, says John Aiello, CEO of software provider SAVO. His point is well taken—and backed up by independent research. Here, Aiello offers tips for creating types of content that will work better for salespeople and for tapping into the “black market” of content and competitive intelligence that salespeople develop on their own.

ITSMA: John, what kinds of materials do salespeople want their marketing departments to give them to work with customers?

Aiello: One type of content that we see working well across industries is a dynamic PDF that can be customized easily by the salespeople.

It took us a little while to understand why the PDFs needed to be dynamic, however.

At one of our auto industry clients, marketing created these nice one-page PDFs describing how great doing business with them can be. The salespeople had said it was just the sort of thing they needed.

But when marketing sent out the PDFs, no one in sales used them. Through a little bit of analysis, we discovered that it was because the one-pager directed the prospects to call the company’s 1-800 number. That meant that the seller who dropped off the one-pager with the prospect didn’t get quota credit. So there you go—the things were never used.

By quickly understanding that simple dynamic, we created a customizable version of the exact same PDF that allowed the seller to drop his or her contact info in there. The salesperson got the call (and the quota), and adoption went through the roof. Also, about 10% of the space on the PDF was targeted to the local region. So by pulling in our customer’s own data, Boston got a slightly different version than San Francisco. It was really easy to automate that small amount of customization with some basic demographic information from each city.

ITSMA: What are some other types of content that salespeople like?

I see four other broad categories:

1. Industry updates. Salespeople don’t want a deck with 100 slides, they want one page with everything they need to know. One of our customers sells business process outsourcing, but their processes cut across 18 different industry verticals. Plus, they have 20% turnover per year in the sales force. They needed a way to ramp up new salespeople quickly so that they could have intelligent conversations with high-level people in those different industries.

So they went out and aggregated data from sites like Hoover's First Research to determine the three most important things on the minds of the top decision makers in, for example, the banking industry. Those turned out to be three things: control costs, maintain profitability, and reduce risk for the customer and the institution.

Then our client created a slide containing ways to talk about its value proposition in the context of those three top issues. And it included three open-ended questions to ask, along with things to listen for in the response. This is what salespeople want.

2. Competitive intelligence documents. Most companies’ competitive intelligence lies in the brains of the product experts. We need to be able to get that to salespeople when they need it. Here it is definitely not about quantity but about quality, and it doesn’t have to be beautiful, either. Salespeople need to quickly know, “What do we know about these guys, why do we beat them, and why do we lose to them?” All marketers and salespeople need to be able to deliver the elevator pitch about all their competitors.

3. Solution brief. If you want a solution sell, you need materials to support the solution sell. One pharmaceutical company we work with whittled down the list of things their drugstore customers care about to five. One of them is growing market share in their pharmacies. So the pharmaceutical company developed a one-page solutions brief that talks about everything the company does to help pharmacies grow market share. On the brief is a coaching tool link that includes a conversation prompter, a diagnostic questionnaire, and links to correspondence templates such as an intro email follow-up letter and status email to support further conversation.

4. Objection-handling sheets. Buyers always have objections to your products and services, such as the price being too high or the installation being too difficult. You should have a sheet that talks about each objection and offers tips on how to resolve them along with content necessary to answer the questions or problems.

ITSMA members will receive the full interview with Aiello later this month.

Research Desk

Ask ITSMA: How Can I Use Web 2.0 to Communicate with Sales?

By Julie Schwartz, Senior Vice President and Chief Research Officer, ITSMA

Each month, ITSMA receives a number of queries through Ask ITSMA, a resource designed to give members a quick and easy way to get insight on important services and solutions marketing questions they face. In this column, we will publish some of our favorite questions along with excerpts from our replies.

Can you offer any tips on how to use Web 2.0 to communicate with the sales staff?

Sales enablement is more important than ever. Consider these results from ITSMA’s annual Budget and Trends Survey:

• Enabling sales is the #2 marketing priority, second only to differentiation.
• Sales enablement will see the largest budget increase in 2008 compared to 2007.
• Nineteen percent of the marketing budget is earmarked for sales enablement.

Web 2.0 and social media provide some important new ways to communicate with sales. A recent ITSMA-facilitated videoconference with leading companies on Web 2.0 marketing revealed these nuggets:

One company is using Wikis to get input from delivery and sales on new service offerings.

Another company is creating daily video and audio files for the sales team on key information, announcements, and the like for the sales force. The video clip "newscasts" are pushed to sales reps’ BlackBerrys.

One-liner daily emails pushed to sales reps by topic are proving effective for some marketers. Sales reps can pick the topical emails they will accept, by product or service. But beware: Some choose not to receive the service emails, and the marketing group is powerless to control that—ouch!

	Do you have a services marketing question? Visit Ask ITSMA to access our experience, insight, and research results.

Recent ITSMA Thought Leadership

17 Ways to Create More Valuable Leads
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/V0042.htm

Brian Carroll wants us to get passionate about one of marketing’s most important tasks: finding and nurturing leads—80% of which wind up being ignored or discarded. In this Viewpoint, Carroll, who is CEO of InTouch, a lead generation optimization services firm, explains 17 ways to make B2B lead management more effective.

The First Task of a New Marketing Leader: Assess the Business and the Market
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/TB039.htm

Marketers need to know the business as well as or better than anyone else in the organization—and be ready to discuss its possibilities from multiple perspectives. This knowledge will not only enable more effective marketing strategy and planning; it will also help position marketers as peers at the management table. In this ITSMA Tool, Bob Baginski, ITSMA’s senior vice president, lays out a five-step framework to help marketers acquire broad and deep knowledge of the state of the business and market.

Close the Loop: How to Build an Effective Lead-Nurturing Process
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/V0041.htm

For years, the process of lead generation in B2B has been like making cream: Skim the best from the top and forget about the rest. In this ITSMA Viewpoint, Paul Dunay, global director of integrated marketing for consulting company BearingPoint, outlines a process for retaining the people who aren’t hot sales leads and nurturing them until they heat up.

The Steps to Vertical Market Leadership: ITSMA's Vertical Maturity Model
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/U0061.htm

ITSMA has created a Vertical Market Maturity Model to help gauge progress toward vertical market mastery. In this Update we examine the model and outline the steps necessary to transform a company and its marketing group into vertical market experts.

The View from the Other Side: B2B Marketing Practices from Other Industries
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/OLB080612.htm

If you want to break through and be unique, you need to look at how other industries market. It’s not that they are more creative, it’s simply that they might face different competitive pressures, industry norms, and corporate cultures. In this Online Briefing, we examine consumer packaged goods and professional services and look at ways to organize marketing more effectively to deliver breakthrough demand-generation programs.

Elevating the Focus on Customers: ABM at Unisys Europe
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/CS0017.htm

ABM is an ambitious strategy that views each of a company’s most important customers as a market of one. Though the concept is simple, the follow-through is not. As Unisys Europe discovered, ABM implementation brings significant challenges, including organizational change, shifting marketing competencies, close coordination with sales, and a need to raise marketing to new heights, both inside the organization and with customers. Unisys has already learned some valuable lessons that we discuss in this ITSMA Case Study.

Most Popular Listens

Check out these ITSMA Online Briefings that drew the largest audiences and were rated highest by ITSMA members:

Account-Based Marketing: Best Practices and Critical Success Factors
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/OLB070213.htm

ITSMA's Jeff Sands, IBM's Naomi Wilsey, and Xerox's Liz Vega co-present this Briefing on best practices and critical success factors for Account-Based Marketing (ABM), a hot new approach that helps companies deepen relationships and increase revenue with key accounts.

Thought Leadership Marketing for Professional Services: Getting Attention in aCompetitive Marketplace
http://www.itsma.com/research/abstracts/OLB070612.htm

Today's crowded market for professional services puts a tremendous premium on thought leadership. Even though professional services firms tend to have a stronger track record with thought leadership than product firms, in many companies, marketing isn't seen as a player in content development. This needs to change. During this Briefing, ITSMA's Steve Hurley, The Bloom Group's Bob Buday, and Accenture’s Terry Corby tell you how.

News & Notes

Upcoming ITSMA Events

To view all events, please go to http://www.itsma.com/aspfiles/events/calendar.asp

Sharpening Marketing's Edge: New Tools and Approaches
Breakfast and Lunch Briefings
Free for ITSMA members

September 24, 2008 (12:00–2:00 p.m. PT)
Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, Santa Clara, CA
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08LB09N28.htm

October 1, 2008 (7:30–9:30 a.m. ET)
Newton Marriott, Newton, MA
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08BB10N27.htm

The incentives for marketing to automate its operations for more efficiency and effectiveness have never been greater. Yet the technology options are complex and confusing. In this briefing, we will untangle the complexity of marketing automation and offer valuable advice—including results from ITSMA’s exclusive survey of best practices, challenges, and ROI from top marketing decision makers’ use of marketing automation technologies.

Making Marketing "Atomically Global": How the "Flat World" Is Changing the Way Marketing Is Organized and Managed
Executive Roundtable
Invitation-only for ITSMA members
September 25, 2008 (12:00–4:30 p.m. ET)
Santa Clara, CA
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08RT09N29.htm

During a recession, marketing budgets are among the first to be slashed. Marketing’s resilience can be traced directly to a history of outsourcing to outside agencies. Today, offshore outsourcing provides access to marketing staff in other countries where salaries and other expenses are comparatively lower and perhaps the talent is comparatively higher. At this Executive Roundtable, ITSMA’s Dave Munn and Ajit Maira will share the results of ITSMA’s latest research on marketing operations and management and facilitate discussion with a group of your peers.

Marketing 3.0: Challenging the Paradigm and Embracing Change
Annual European Marketing Forum, October 8 and 9
Beaumont House, Old Windsor, Berkshire, England
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08AF10E31.htm

ITSMA’s European Forum brings together the region’s top marketing practitioners and thought leaders every year to discuss where the profession is and where it is going. This year’s event is focused on change and the way leading organizations are shifting their behavior and adopting new approaches. You’ll hear from marketing leaders from BT, Google, HP, and IBM, along with Professor Malcolm McDonald from the Cranfield School of Management, Richard Lewis from Richard Lewis Communications, Des Lee from Executive Change, and ITSMA’s own Richard Seymour and David Munn, among others.

Maximizing Marketing’s Influence: The New Marketing Rules
15th Annual Marketing Conference, November 4 and 5
Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel
http://www.itsma.com/Events/event_desc/08AC11N32.htm

No more excuses: It’s time for marketing to step up to the plate and lead. Now more than ever we need to maximize our influence and create bold new marketing rules. Join our usas we hear insights and success stories from marketing leaders on a wide variety of vital topics—each with a window into what they did, how they led, and the results they achieved. Our keynote speaker will be Jonathan Zittrain, one of the world's leading Internet scholars and author of The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. Other speakers include:

• Krishnan Chatterjee, Associate Vice President, Business Marketing, HCL Technologies
• Ed Daly, Senior Director, US & Canada Theater Operations & Marketing, Cisco Systems
• Malcolm Frank, Senior Vice President, Marketing & Strategy, Cognizant
• Reed Holden, CEO, Holden Advisors
• Nancy Lyskawa, Vice President, Support Services Marketing, Oracle
• Kelly Nelson, Leader, Strategic Initiatives, Deloitte
• Katharyn White, Vice President, Marketing, IBM Global Business Services

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