#CMOFact: IDC 2013 Marketing Investment Planner

With 2012 coming to an end, for many businesses planning for 2013 will bleed into the New Year. Marketers are no exception; in anticipation of the planning cycle each year, the CMO Advisory Service publishes our annual Marketing Planner in August/September, developing the B2B tech industry's leading marketing (and sales) benchmarking study. To anyone familiar with the industry, you are probably used to hearing that Marketing is transforming. What is so exciting about our Marketing Planner is we are able to provide specific guidance on changes, challenges, and successes within the industry through incredibly accurate industry data and qualitative information provided by you, the senior marketers. Marketers in turn are able to use this information to successfully plan for the upcoming year.

I’ve taken the liberty of pulling out some key facts below from our report that are particularly interesting or useful. Feel free to share them and remember to follow me on twitteror check out the CMOFact hashtag - we will continue to share some marketing goodness there.

#CMOFact Number 1:  In 2012 the average large B2B Marketing organization is in receipt of a 1.7% budget increase. This is 50% LESS than the 2011 rate.

#CMOFact Number 2:  The Marketing Budget Ratio for B2B tech companies has declined each year from 2009 through 2012. Marketing Investment is not keeping up with revenue growth.

#CMOFact Number 3: B2B Tech CMOs are spending approximately 30% of their budget on digital marketing programs. This is up from 12% in 2009. 

#CMOFact Number 4: For Large Tech Companies, only those in Software (vs Services & Hardware) are receiving increased budgets!

#CMOFact Number 5: The marketing automation train is picking up speed, and fast. Jump on now or prepare to be left behind. This is a new category in our survey and is already at 3.1% of programs budget and 1.6% of staff allocations.

These are just 5 nuggets from the 2013 Marketing Planner. The full version includes a complete overview of the current state of the B2B Tech Marketing it includes; program spend, staffing breakdowns, up and coming technology, and forward looking advice. For your own copy, reach out to Wendy Pemberton at wpemberton@idc.comor find it here. 

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Essential Guidance for 2011

Building the Intelligent Sales & Marketing Organization.

IDC's best and brightest analyst teams were assembled in Boston and San Jose during the past two weeks to present their latest insight and guidance for creating the global intelligent economy; focusing specifically on the impact of social, mobile and virtual technologies on this vision. Morning speakers discussed how to position for the third wave of IT industry growth driven by mobility, clouds, big data and intelligent industries. In the afternoon, one of the many tracks included presentations by IDC's Sales and Marketing Advisory team about the vision of the intelligent sales and marketing organization and they key success factors required to achieve this vision. A few key take-aways from each of the presentations in this track are provided below.

Executing for Marketing Excellence in 2011 by Rich Vancil:

Start – or accelerate – your social business transformation
 With communication cycle-times dropping and the purchase decision influence continue to shift to buyers, a shift to "social business" is imperative for your success;
 41% of businesses have already implemented an enterprise social software solution
 Focus on building "peer-to-peer" connections, not "vendor-to-customer"
Make a deeper investment in intelligence and operations
 Drive marketing operations and market intelligence initiatives and investment down through the organization, across the business units and into the regions
 Better establish and govern the processes for sales enablement and data quality to improve sales intelligence and their ability to leverage insight and resources.
Build a better budget (IDC CMO and Sales Advisory clients should refer to IDC's combined marketing and sales investment benchmarks data)
 As marketing budgets recover, allocate new investments with the needs of a new reality – digital marketing is here to stay, and is only increasing in its ability to drive awareness building and demand generation; and greater alignment with sales will require continued investment in campaign management, sales enablement and lead management extending into what has traditionally been considered sales' domain.


Building the Intelligence Sales Organization by Michael Gerard:

Listen to your buyers:
 Technology buyers indicated a desire to reduce their buying cycle time by 40%.
 Two-thirds of the delay between desire vs. actual buying cycle time is the result of buyers' internal funding and decision-making processes; however, vendors' sales teams can impact this part of the delay!

Drive sales to be more strategic by investing in a next generation sales operations team which focuses on – sales strategy, productivity and automation. Team with marketing, your learning and development organization and IT to gaps in sales intelligence – customer intelligence for sales and sales enablement.

Push the limits on sales performance measurement
 Establish a sales analyst function to better measure sales productivity
 Improve data quality with the aid of other parts of the organization
 Analyze the sales pipeline, rep performance and the impact of sales productivity improvement initiatives to help impact strategic and tactical decision-making



The Sales & Marketing Automation Imperative by Gerry Murray:

o Investment in sales and marketing automation continues to increase as companies recognize the value of technology in adapting to new market realities
o However, sales and marketing need to better align across their own teams as well with other parts of the organization to create a more holistic experience for customers (e.g., marketing, sales, finance, services, support)
o Your company should establish a customer data czar, with team members in sales and marketing, to execute and govern data quality processes.
o Evolve to a more comprehensive sales enablement platform (i.e., beyond a content portal) centered on integrated customer experience management

Clients of IDC's Sales Advisory Service [http://www.idc.com/eagroup/sales.jsp] and CMO Advisory Service [http://www.idc.com/eagroup/cmo.jsp] should contact us for a full overview of any of these areas as well as access to our latest research schedule and listing of published research.

Please do provide any comments on this topic below or reach out to us to participate in upcoming sales and marketing research.

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The IDC Sales and Marketing Automation Framework

Sales and marketing organizations are seeing a rapid evolution of solutions for automating their core business processes. While we are years away from anything like an integrated ERP-class solution that can manage the full range of sales and marketing activities, the building blocks are available today. CRM vendors have established that a single system of record is within reach for the sales team, and an emerging group of companies are is starting to prove that this goal is attainable for the marketing side of the house as well.

However, automating these two organizations will be a major undertaking for large companies. There will be significant process, cultural, and technical challenges. But the benefits are self-evident: lower cost, higher efficiency and productivity, greater accountability, better performance, improved customer experience, and potentially shorter sales cycles.

The Need for Alignment
The 80/20 Rule and the 50/50 Rule: IDC research shows that up to 80% of the content marketing generates is not used by Sales, even though a lot of it is specifically created for Sales and Channel enablement. Additionally, customers say that Sales reps are insufficiently prepared for their initial meeting 50% of the time. Clearly a massive disconnect is at work.
IDC's Framework for Sales and Marketing automation is, therefore, focused on the tight alignment of key Sales and Marketing processes. This framework represents only those processes that must be coordinated (potentially integrated) between the two organizations. It is not meant to be a comprehensive map of all the processes in which each organization must engage to be successful – there are many activities on each side of the dynamic that do not have a corollary on the other.
Each high level process in Sales that has a counterpart in Marketing must share:

• A common set of definitions for inputs and outputs
• Proportional allocation of budget and resources based on overall business objectives
• Phase-appropriate performance metrics
• An integrated IT ecosystem

Source: IDC, 2010

Implementation
IDC recommends that sales and marketing automation efforts be tightly coordinated across both organizations so that the customer experience and lead management processes are handled seamlessly by all parts of the infrastructure. Even if a marketing implementation will have no sales users and vice versa, the data definitions and flow will be critical for both organizations. IDC recommends that:

• Senior marketing and sales leaders meet regularly to plan, review, and asses automation projects
• Marketing operations and sales enablement teams are especially critical, they should have representatives from both organizations with senior level sponsorship.
• Marketing needs to be very cognizant of how leads and lead details will flow into the SFA/CRM environment.
• Sales needs to be diligent in making sure marketing is capturing the high priority prospects and the high priority details so that lead acceptance criteria is routinely fulfilled.

Next Steps
One of the key issues for automating sales and marketing is establishing a shared automation road map. Upcoming research from IDC will help you: prioritize your plans based on business impact and implement best practices to be most successful.

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Watch that Org Chart in 2010

Twenty percent of tech vendors $1b or greater in revenue are now reporting that they have experienced some form of organizational "mash-up" between marketing and sales over the last 12 months. This is the C-level effort to adddress the long-standing mis-alignments and costly points-of-friction between sales and marketing.

Lots of thoughts on this...but the most important is a "heads-up" to expect more organizational pressure and change in 2010. IDC forecasts marketing expenses (investment) to rise by 3.5% this year. We expect sales expenses (investment) to rise by 4.7%. Finally, we expect average revenue to to rise by 3.2 %. So, the math is not hard: operating margins will be under continued pressure. My sense is that the C-Level will respond with more brute force re-drawing of organization charts.

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