Insight from IDC's Annual Sales & Mktg. Effectiveness Summit

We recently finished our 6th annual IDC Sales & Marketing Effectiveness Summit. You would think after years of us working towards greater alignment between marketing & sales that we would have figured it out by now! However, as recent IDC research indicates, both marketers and sales still remain unsatisfied to say the least with their current working relationship. (Marketing and sales give marketing a score of 64 and 45 respectively for marketing's effectiveness at supporting sales) That said, we spent 8 hours with over 80 of the industry's top marketing and sales folks during this summit discussing marketing and sales alignment; moving beyond the traditional platitudes that you'd expect at your typical conference to actually discuss solutions to our challenges. Here are just a couple of the key insights that I took away from the event:

• One of the root causes of marketing and sales misalignment?. . we need to better collaborate on shared metrics, including agreeing on which metrics to track and what objectives to set. A few metrics examples?. . . . . Lead aging (e.g., average time that it takes marketing to qualify [or reject] a lead; average time for sales to follow up a marketing-qualified lead in aggregate or by each salesperson); % of marketing qualified leads accepted by sales; % of sales' pipeline that should be marketing-generated vs. marketing-enhanced; new customer revenue; sales enablement metrics such as time to onboard a new salesperson or an indicator of value of marketing assets to sales.
• "10% to 20% of sales teams are the 'A' players that can close deals no matter how bad the economic environment is. The real challenge is to get the other 80% to 90% of the sales teams to the same level as these 'A' players; or at least close to that level. Sales enablement provides the opportunity to leverage this knowledge across the company. Yes we need to improve the formal content, however, the more difficult resources to tap into include the subject matter experts and the best practices of the 'A' players."[Jeff Summers, COO, SAVO]
• "We found key sound bites, elevator pitches, value propositions and customers' stories to be extremely valuable to help enable sales; not just lengthy marketing assets and PowerPoint presentations. We established managed business objectives for our marketers that require them to get X number of customer stories and/or key success factors from our 'A' player sales folks to share with the rest of the sales team. (e.g., in the form of a 1/2 page write-up or a video tape of a top performer giving their pitch)" [Tom Miller, VP Marketing, ADP]
• "90% of the time the conversation about your company, its products or solutions or services, is happening without you being present. Marketing and sales need to collaborate on how to best influence this conversation; and that includes increasing the relevancy and overall value of your interactions with the market. To do this we need to permanently change how we view our jobs, having more of a two-way, information sharing exchange with the market versus a one-way spouting of our product features." [Jocelyne Attal, President JAgency (former CMO, Avaya)]
• "At a cost of $800 to $1,500 per marketing-qualified lead, we need to apply more rigor to our lead management process, from marketing through to sales; and we won't be able to accomplish this goal at a systematic level until we better align our marketing AND sales lead management processes and systems." [Jocelyne Attal, President JAgency (former CMO, Avaya)]
• Sun has developed an in-house application that provides the applications and an online, interactive repository to personally create sales enablement videos (e.g., product launch training, market intelligence, solution information). Examples of unique features: anyone in Sun can create this content, either for internal and/or public use; all content can be scored and receive public comments, thereby encouraging marketers to improve value of their content; and videos and other media can be downloaded to iTunes. (http://slx.sun.com/)
• Carol Carpenter, VP Trend Micro, did a nice job reminding us that we need to improve our alignment between corporate, business unit and field marketing versus simply focusing on aligning marketing and sales. You could say that we need to "get our own house in order" as a first step in improving sales and marketing alignment; including strategic planning, budget management and campaign execution. (further strategic insight on field marketing is available for CMO Advisory Service clients)

Based upon the highly interactive, problem-solving nature of the discussion throughout the day, it is evident that we are progressing as an industry in solving the marketing and sales alignment dilemma; but is improvement rapid enough? Please do feel free to comment below or send an email directly to me at mgerard@idc.com.

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Marketing Shared Services - An Alternative to Centralization

While the notion of shared services is prevalent across many management functions including IT, HR, and finance, it is for many marketing organizations a business technique that is in its infancy. A marketing shared services (MSS) model offers the opportunity for improved service delivery, greater economies of scale, greater concentration and leverage of expertise, and more rapid and effective program/campaign execution. IDC defines marketing shared services as:

• Organizing two or more areas of repetitive and redundant marketing activities into a fewer number of activity areas that are offered to internal customers at a cost, quality and/or timeliness that is competitive with internal or external alternatives. Marketing shared services result in cost reductions and an overall increase in efficiency and effectiveness of operations.

Given the difficult economic environment that we are all navigating through in 2009, tech marketers' who are developing shared services strategy should be prepared to respond to the following challenges:

• Company-wide mandates to reduce marketing costs: IDC is forecasting a 10% decrease in marketing investment for FY09 (with a 15% decrease for the first half of the calendar year). Tech marketers are and will be forced to permanently eliminate entrenches silos of program costs as well as target duplicative marketing costs.
• Rigid marketing budgets in the product/lines and field: Given the current nature of marketing investment, comprised of tight marketing budgets and slimmed-down marketing staff levels, the overall flexibility of spend across corporate, BU (business unit), and field marketing is quite limited. With stringent cuts in BUs and field likely, it will be challenging to solicit these groups' buy-in for a MSS strategy. Moreover, asking the regions and product lines to "give up" some control of their marketing spend will be challenging, and a very thorough business case will need to be developed to even begin the process of obtaining buy-in.
• Developing an effective worldwide structure for the MSS organization: "Where to start ?" becomes quite relevant here as marketers will be challenged to not only identify the prime functions for MSS but also how to structure their MSS strategy. Which countries and regions will most benefit from a MSS strategy? Where can you best leverage low cost countries? What functions can these countries provide? How can you best leverage your current marketing staff? What will be the impact of language/cultural barriers?

Based on a recent study conducted by IDC's CMO Advisory Practice as well as findings from IDC's recent Marketing Operations Board meeting, I'd like to provide some brief guidance and insight around shared services:

1. Successful MSS strategies start with a “pilot test". Marketing shared services still remains an emerging area across tech marketing, particularly for vendors <$10B in revenue, so the importance of "testing the waters" before moving forward is a critical successful factor. Marketers must first gain executive buy-in, lock down the process, demonstrate overall success and usability, and then roll-out to other areas.
2. MSS organizations should target marketing's most repetitive operations and also better leverage marketing automation and related infrastructure.
3. MSS organizations must be run like a business (not an overhead corporate function) to be successful. A company's MSS center should outperform the competition (internal and external vendors in areas such as pricing and customer service), build internal success stories, so that the "brand equity" of MSS starts to carry weight and impact within the organization.

The IDC CMO Advisory team is currently in the process of publishing a detailed study that analyzes best practices in marketing shared services with case studies from Microsoft, SAS, and IDG. Look for it in the coming weeks. However, please do feel free to comment below or email us directly.

Seth Fishbein, Senior Analyst, CMO Advisory Practice, sfishbein@idc.com

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Digital Marketing and Marketing Automation Hit Critical Mass in 2009

Well, our 2009 IDC Tech Marketing Barometer results are in; and if you missed the Telebriefing two weeks ago, here are some of the highlights:

Marketing Investment:

• 0.5% Growth for Global IT Spending in 2009, while Average Tech Marketing Investment Drops 10%.
• Larger companies (>$1B in revenue) will take the greatest hit in marketing budget as they wrestle with significant revenue drops in key parts of their portfolios and continue to improve efficiency.
• Growth areas still exist within: enterprise social media, security management, mobile data, SaaS, Internet advertising, business analytics and IT outsourcing & BPO to name a few. (source: John Gantz's presentation at IDC's recent Directions event)

Marketing Mix:

• The pendulum of investment swings to demand generation, with sales enablement closely coupled to this priority. (awareness building takes a "back seat", yet remains a key part of healthier companies' portfolios)
• We've been all talk as an industry with regards to full-scale shifts of our investment to digital marketing over the past couple of years. The economic downturn will catalyze this shift in 2009 with almost 70% of marketers indicating an increase in investment in digital marketing while 60% and 72% of marketers will decrease advertising and events spend respectively. (refer to the past couple of posts in this blog for additional details about digital marketing shifts)
• Sales enablement will become a high priority for getting internal and external sales teams (and partners) the most relevant content at the right time and in the right place to assist in moving specific opportunities forward. Endless pages of collateral and white papers will be replaced by more relevant content that is better leveraged across the organization. (check out the previous blog post, "Content Squared")

Organizational Structures:

• Here we go again as marketers shift their organizational structures. Some organizations will entirely abandon their relatively cohesive marketing structure to shift to an entirely decentralized organization in an effort to simply survive; while the better positioned organizations will "weather the storm" with a more centralized marketing function and/or leveraging marketing shared services to improve efficiency and effectiveness in execution.
• Marketing operations and sales operations teams will continue to work together, increasing focus on the lead management process and associated nurturing and lead qualification strategies.

Marketing Automation:

• Marketing automation will experience a turning-point in 2009 as adoption significantly increases in the technology sector. Drivers include the significant improvements in the transactional CRM system vendors as well as the increased availability and cost effectiveness of SaaS offerings from planning to event-triggered marketing to performance measurement.
• A few questions to ask yourself: Do I have a marketing operations team in place to deploy and govern marketing automation?; Are we ensuring that process drives the technology versus the other way around? How do we ensure consistent adoption and use of these applications across functions, business units and regions on a regular basis?; Have we partnered with finance, sales and other teams as part of this strategy?; and Do we have a marketing automation road map?

These are just a few highlights of the recent study as well as food for thought as you progress through your 2009 plan. As technology marketers, I continue to believe that we are better prepared than ever to respond to the challenges posed in this difficult environment. This will not only facilitate our survival in 2009, but will enable us to rebound quicker than from prior downturns.

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Does Your Go-To-Market Strategy Align with Your Customer Needs? – Insight from IDG's Recent Marketing Summit and CIO Panel

IDG and IDC recently held its 4th annual Marketing Summit in San Francisco, with over 50 marketing executives in attendance. This annual, senior level event offers the opportunity to not only network with some of the technology industry's best and brightest marketing executives, but also offers the chance to hear from a panel of CIOs about "the good, the bad and the ugly" of our marketing and sales effectiveness. This year proved to be as valuable as prior years in helping to confirm some of our existing knowledge as well as offering contradictions to our preconceived notions of what works and what doesn't work.

The CIO panel, moderated by Rich Vancil of IDC's Executive Advisory Group, included executives from Chevron, Levi Strauss and Byer California (a mid-market company that manufacturers womens' clothing). Here are a couple of "gold nuggets" that I took away from this event including the actual quotes from the panelists: [my comments in brackets]

• "In a recent RFP process, I had discussions with five companies' sales teams. Only one out of the five companies was able to understand our needs and reiterate our challenges and communicate a solution without making it a one-way sales pitch." [How can we as marketers improve our sales enablement strategy to better equip our sales teams for these engagements?]
• "I prefer to print out white papers and read them at home, while my staff prefer web casts and other online material." [That's right, the CIO uses printed material to absorb information while more junior staff have adopted newer consumption methods. Always segment your customers. A role-based marketing strategy may highlight significant differences in how individuals consume information; including the continued need for an integrated, multi-media go-to-market approach.]
• "As a mid-market company, spend more time telling me about how you've deployed your solutions at companies similar to mine. Yes, you may have a Fortune 50 company as a client, but those companies will buy one of everything and put them on a shelf! I'll be investing my entire budget into one solution." [Segmentation and understanding of your customer, an often neglected area, continues to be a key success factor for marketing and sales engagements with customers.]
• "As a CIO, I may not use webcasts since every minute that I'm in the office someone is coming into my office; however, I may pass on the opportunity to my staff who I greatly depend upon to influence my decisions." [Once again speaking to the importance of a role-based marketing strategy. As B-to-B marketers, we need to not only understand the importance of selling to different members of an extended buying team, but embed this knowledge into our go-to-market and sales enablement strategies.]

As if we ever need reminding, the importance of maintaining our connection to our customers should never be underestimated. In fact, I find that the best marketers serve as a "beacon of light" for customer and market information for the entire organization. Don't let your marketing cuts inhibit your drive to serve this role in your company. Now more than ever your customers' needs are changing, if not due to rapid adoption of the Internet then most certainly due to the economic downturn.

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The Changing Marketing Mix

The press is filled with stories about the demise of traditional advertising and the in-person, public trade show. Sounds quite similar in fact to the predicted disappearance of the "brick-and-mortar" storefront, and the emergence of a new on-line world where we can do all of our shopping in our slippers from the comfort of our home. Well, IDC CMO Advisory's recent 2009 Barometer study does continue to indicate that our traditional marketing mix is in the process of permanently changing. In fact, almost 70% of technology marketers indicate that they'll be increasing their program investment in digital marketing in 2009, while 72% of companies will be decreasing their in-person events spend and 60% decreasing their advertising spend (print, broadcast and corporate sponsorships). What are the top digital marketing initiatives for technology companies in 2009?

• Corporate web site: No longer simply a marketing billboard, the corporate web site has become the window to the customer. The most effective corporate sites offer visitors the opportunity to not only learn about your products and solutions, but to also learn about the latest technologies and business challenges as well as offering the opportunity to interact with their peers and your technology experts. (e.g., through a community portal) The best sites also track the details of visitors to enable more of a 1-to-1 experience as well as tracking detailed customer data to improve marketing's lead management and nurturing process.
• Email: An often over-used vehicle for sending marketing collateral to the masses in a one size fits all mentality, this channel is being used more effectively for engaging with customers through an event-triggered marketing process. For example, providing respondents with additional, customized, relevant information based upon their responses to earlier communications.
• Search engine marketing: Although display ads will continue to be part of a strong portfolio, search ads and search engine optimization(SEO) will increase in importance. Search ads offer the opportunity to more surgically target your prospects as they reach out for information, while SEO continues to yield a strong return in increasing your companies' prominence in organic search.

However, before you hand the "key to the city" over to your digital marketing team, there are some important things to consider:

1. First and foremost, the rest of the marketing mix will continue to be an important part of a strong portfolio of marketing's strategy; and the balance of this mix will only get harder. For example, the CIO may prefer to continue reading their magazines and printing out pdf whitepapers; their direct report(s) will attend webcasts and read interactive white papers; and third level staffers will attend virtual events and online communities as part of their everyday job. Your mix will need to address the information consumption patterns of each of these roles – hence the need for role-based marketing.
2. As you continue to rush into digital marketing, ensure that your team does not leave their Marketing 101 learnings behind. For example, continue to leverage market intelligence as part of a market segmentation strategy; to identify your target customers, to understand what information is most relevant to your customers along different stages of the buying cycle, and to understand how and where your customers' consume their information.
3. Look for opportunities to differentiate yourself in the marketplace. While everyone is shifting to email and webcasts, a portion of your investment may be best spent on direct mail or in-person proprietary events.
4. Yes, continue experimenting with digital marketing, however, now is the time to begin including digital marketing as part of the fabric of your go-to-market strategy. Best practitioners are establishing campaign management teams to maintain an integrated marketing strategy focused on the customer, as well as developing centers of excellence in the digital marketing space as part of a shared services strategy.

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Is Database Marketing on Your Marketing Operations Radar?

How many times have we heard in the B-to-B marketing press the past several months about the importance of increasing content relevance to our prospects and customers, better engaging them through digital marketing vehicles and improving our ability to generate and qualify marketing leads? Yes, all extremely important priorities for us as marketers, however, if you're a $100M+ company none of this can be accomplished in an efficient and effective manner without the back-office infrastructure to support it. And we all know how difficult an infrastructure conversation is in this economic downturn. For the purposes of this conversation, let's focus on the area of database marketing.

Even the best marketing organizations struggle with consistency in database marketing processes; consolidation of prospect and customer data across the multitude of databases in use across the world; cleansing of data to prevent a "bad data in = bad data out" scenario; and overcoming the complexity of data analysis and list pulls, especially with the increased data flow from digital marketing activities. In a recent best practices study, we spoke with (12) multi-billion $, complex organizations representing in total over $250B in revenue. When asked to indicate their marketing organization's satisfaction with the components of database marketing, some of the most fundamental elements of this area were identified as being the weakest. . . . including data cleansing, digital data integration and contact management.

So enough about the problems out there: that's the easy part to identify. What are a couple concrete things that you can do to help improve marketing's "back-office", especially in these difficult economic times when "throwing money" at the problem is not even a possibility?. . .

1. Establish a global database marketing council or team to set standards and govern processes and technology. (yes, virtual if need be and it will take more time out of your day . . . but this will pay off in the long-term)
2. Leverage third party partnerships for external expertise and best practices (e.g., data cleansing). Establish an approved vendor supply list to achieve economies of scale and better govern data standards.
3. Develop a process to enable the average marketer to obtain a highly targeted list for their activities or campaigns. A 100% self-service model will lead to supplier proliferation, poor leverage of scare marketing resources and an inability to leverage the power of your data. Ideas include: establish a relationship marketing team, deploy a shared services model to get dbse. marketing experts closer to the field (more on shared services to come in future blogs), create an expert analytics team that can do some of the "heavy lifting" for your team's larger projects (e.g., predictive modeling).
4. Reduce and consolidate disparate data sources. If you're lucky enough to have or pursue a universal data mart or EDW then great. For the rest of us, another option may be deploying an application that serves as the front-end for multiple databases. This option is available through several marketing automation vendors.
5. Ensure your database marketing and lead management teams are working together if not part of the same group. This is particularly important for establishing a closed-loop lead management process.
6. And last but certainly not least, establish metrics and targets to measure the performance of your database marketing capabilities. (e.g., data quality indicators, lead generation data to track the success of list pull activities, response times and internal customer satisfaction if you're leveraging a shared services model)

If you're fortunate enough to have a marketing operations individual or team, then turn to these folks for help in deploying the process rigor needed to initiate these actions.

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Marketing Budget Cuts of 15% for First Half 2009

Within the technology marketing sector, I predict budget cuts of 15% or so for the first half of 2009. And within the typical marketing mix, the events budget and traditional-media advertising will bear a dis-proportionate share of those cuts. Given the trend of accelerating spending on digital advertising, it is more likely then ever before that traditional media spend lost in the downturn of 2008-2009 will not - ever - be replaced.

In the tech industry we are now, over the past couple of months, just acknowledging the impact of the recessionary cycle; even while the macroeconomists are now saying we have been in an overall recession for a year. My sense of the marketing budget cuts in tech is that at the beginning of an acknowledged recessionary cycle (i.e. now), there is an over-reaction that brings budget cuts that go too deep on the first pass. It's the nature of management which is so often short-sighted. I have believed that good marketing investment policy has elements of a large inertial flywheel: let it stop spinning and the fuel to get it going again costs a lot more than if steady increments had been consistently applied. Vendors should have the wherewithal and courage to keep their investments basically steady.

Other guidance for senior marketers:

• Use the downturn to permanently eliminate or re-shape entrenched silos of program costs: 1) Example: Isolated events not part of a broader campaign or important new launch; 2) Let the downturn play the role of "bad cop"; 3) Be most rigorous/suspicious of heavily guarded budgets
• Given the forecasted short duration of the downturn: 1) limit staff reductions . . . Marketing headcount turnover has already exceeded 9% annually for the past two years; 2) Use the downturn to mandate/effect more aggressive Content Audits
• Identify and create shared services: 1) Target is duplicate discretionary costs (e.g. across your 3 product lines, PM’s have purchased 3 separate on-line community platforms); 2) Target is duplicate activities executed within fixed costs (e.g. you oversee 3 product lines and each group spends 4 days per month on separate dashboard performance reporting compliance, which you are unable to normalize)
  
  By Rich Vancil, VP, IDC's Executive Advisory Group (rvancil@idc.com)

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