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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Update on Social Business Transformation

Social Media in the B2B world has got a bit of a bad rap right now. Let’s frame the problem. The obstacles might be spoken (or whispered) as:

• "These new communication platforms, and this social media movement within our company…is …who knows? Well, let’s just keep an eye on it. Let’s see what develops. But for the time being these are…
• NOT the valid business-communications media we should be using to communicate with the serious audience we wish to reach. "

These obstacles may be over-observed.

Let’s broaden the definition and talk not about Social Media, but about "Social Business Transformation". The real Transformation lies not in what you see: with Twitter or LinkedIn or FaceBook. For personal networking, these tools may be the whole game: you are involved in connections that are one or two links deep. But at the enterprise level these tools are merely the surface layer. Social Business Transformation is about deep communications adaptation; changes in culture; new rules of engagement; shifts in organizational centers-of-influence; and then (lastly) the associated tools and technologies that enable communications on the surface.

IDC is digging deeper to uncover this major trend and transformation in business communications. "Social" will continue to press its way into the enterprise - into our lives as business professionals.

With my research partner and IDC’s Social Business expert Erin Traudt, IDC has just completed a series of interviews with IBM about their own Social Business Transformation We are impressed with IBM’s accomplishments.

To boil it down, here are three observations for Social Business Transformation success:

1. Tap in to the Professional Ego.

You say that you enter into a web community because you want to "connect". But I would suggest that most of the energy behind any personal or business Social Media activity has a strong element of: "Here I am!" None of us would enter a single Social keystroke unless we wanted to satisfy an ego need. The need to feel important. And, (fingers-crossed), the desire to be recognized! By extension, would not the math argue that if we spend nine or ten hours each day at the workplace, that this dynamic should be a more powerful force in the business world ("Look at my great new technical workaround!") than in the personal world ("Look at my cool new postcard collection!")

The IBM developerWorks website is a technical resource for the IBM developer community. Established in 2000, it is now one of the largest IBM sites, with over 4 million unique visitors per month. It is a resource where developers in the IBM ecosystem offer their knowledge and skills. About one-half of the content on this vast site is posted from outside of IBM: developers, partners, and customers. Why does it work? Professional ego! But it takes time and investment. developerWorks has been an eleven-year work-in-progress for IBM.


2. You can’t force interaction.

The viable and vibrant IBM communities we have studied are years in the making. It takes significant time and investment to devlop a community to the point where it is somewhat self-sustaining. One IBM executive noted that Community development is like planting a tree where the first year of nurturing, watering and pruning requires almost constant attention. And more than one IBM community that we examined was several years underway and still under active investment mode. It is also notable that each Community only becomes self-sustaining because of the external contributions (see above). Our estimate would be that for every one community that is self sustaining, that there are hundreds in "push" mode (hoping that our voices will be heard and enjoined).

"If the people don’t want to come, all the marketing in the world won’t stop them".


3. Construct and Adhere to Policy.

This is interesting. I think we all are a bit attracted to the Social Media because we can express ourselves in a way that allows us to put our corporate toes across the corporate line, if even for an instant! However, the successful sites that are viable today are here in part to some basic and sensible policing. We have to. We all need to protect our customers, to do the best by them.

Our sense is that sustained and successful Social Business Transformation efforts are going to be more powerful than we have ever imagined. Good examples (such as with IBM) are already in place. Of course there are challenges; but these obstacles will over time be trumped by the benefits (see Figures).

How is your company coming along on its own Social Business Transformation?

- Rich Vancil

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Marketing Automation: Keys to Success

Of the 235 respondents in a November IDC survey, nearly 40% had not implemented a marketing automation solution (yet). Not implementing a marketing automation solution may be the ultimate career limiting move for today's marketers. Digital marketing has exploded in scope and complexity making it practically impossible to efficiently and effectively reach your target audience without a fully realized marketing automation infrastructure. If you haven't gotten started you are already way behind the ball.

40% have not yet implemented marketing automation

Source: Marketing Automation: the Rise of Revenue, IDC #255860, Dec 2010. n = 234

Marketing automation is a must have for today's marketing and sales organizations. There is a wide array of online sources readily available to buyers that can significantly influence purchasing behavior. As a result, marketers must maintain a pervasive and continuously refreshing digital presence. Frequency is emerging as the most critical capability for sales and marketing organizations – frequency of outreach, analysis, and reporting. The cycle time for everything in marketing is under enormous pressure and companies that deliver more often, respond faster, and sustain their digital presence more successfully will be the winners.

Keys to success:

• Standardize your customer data
• Deploy marketing automation
• Review KPIs for marketing and sales to ensure alignment, visibility, and data integrity
• Integrate data, workflows, and governance across the whole "response to revenue" cycle

Top 3 places small companies (less than $1B) start:

• Lead management
• Campaign management
• Content management

Top 3 places large enterprise ($1B or more) start:

• Campaign management
• Lead management
• Financial reporting

Marketers must solve a stack of process, operational, and technical issues. It is a very complex and large scale problem spanning not only marketing and sales, but every other piece of the "response to revenue cycle, including: configuration, pricing, order processing, accounting, as well as service and support functions as well. The full scope of the customer relationship must be visible and measurable. Point solutions focused on particular marketing processes are great catalysts, but, IDC recommends companies take a holistic approach that ensures consistent data, workflows, and governance throughout the customer lifecycle.

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The Complexity of Multi-Path Marketing

In our most recent survey of CMO's, we asked: "What is your primary Voice by which you go to market? Is your Voice that of: product line; industry; solution; campaign (or theme); customer segment; or job role?" The responses were evenly spread across these six voices. Which basically translates to: "As an industry, we go to market with all those voices at once".

I see so many executives struggling with this complex messaging ambition. Mar-Comm executives like to refer to this ambition as their "messaging architecture" but frankly I don't see many of these architectures that would pass the building inspection: it's just too complex.

Now, add to this a second dimension: the media in which your voice is carried into the market. Today's marketer has dozens of choices of media to choose from: from traditional advertising to social media tools. Obviously.

Finally, add a third dimension of time. New IDC research shows that the average cycle time of creating a new tech B2B customer -- from initial marketing all the way through to a closed deal -- is over 17 months.

And so now you have six voices, perhaps 35 different mediums of choice; and 17 months of engagement time. What do you get? In the first place - you get overwhelmed with choice! In the second place, what you do get is about one closed deal for every 2000 contacts that you started with at the very beginning of your campaign.

I once had a job as an assistant product marketer and my boss gave me a direct task: "Fax those new product fact sheets to our top 100 clients, today". One medium, one voice, and one dimension of time. No decisions on my part. I was a skilled faxer, and quite poorly paid.

But now you are the boss and "they're paying you the big bucks"… So, how are you going to figure this out?

This is the challenge of multi-path marketing and I believe that it is a bellwether issue for senior marketers. Over the past several weeks I have been interviewing some of our industry's top marketers about this issue, seeking their approaches. Here is what I am hearing, and some guidance on process approach:



1) The objective of all of this is greater "Personalization". Get the right message and content to the right person in the right time, place, sequence, format and voice. Now, to accomplish this, you might think to install the marketing content and execution tools in the part of your marketing apparatus that is closest to the customer: the channel partner or field seller. Counter intuitively, the opposite is happening.

2) Personalization begins with centralization. To make personalization happen, the best marketers are moving content production, tools, and process "Upstream" -- that is, away from the field and deeper inside the central machinery of the marketing operations areas. Content and asset management tools and sales enablement portals are helping this process.

3) Yes, there still needs to be local execution decisions: translation and choice of media are the two primary areas. But the field marketers who are most successful in these decisions are supported by those robust content management tools way up-stream at headquarters.

4) An additional element that adds to the complexity of multi-path (and multi-geography) marketing execution is the contribution of agency partners. Agencies will add their own flavor of voice and media choices - which may cause a global campaign to become very "un-unified" quite quickly. Several large tech vendors are moving towards agency consolidation to help alleviate this.


In a recent head-to-head with a CMO I asked: "From a marketing perspective, what is your single biggest challenge for your $20b company?" His reply: "We need to ensure that the marketing messaging that we create here at the top is effectively threaded into our execution all across and down through the organization".

In a nutshell, that is the challenge of multi-path marketing.

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An Ice Cold Bucket of Reality - The Challenge of Selling to Today's Harried Buyer

Savo held their annual user group meeting in Chicago on October 26th and 27th. Two hundred people working on Sales Enablement (SE) attended and a number of very interesting keynotes and customer presentations were given.

Jill Konrath provided a very entertaining and sobering take on the challenge of marketing and selling to today's harried (understatement of the year) buyers. The centerpiece of her talk was an improvised role playing exercise in which Jill played a sales executive that was a key target for a fictitious company. The point was to show what everyday life is like for our prospects before we ever try to contact them. It was the start of her day and she had to get a presentation ready for the quarterly board meeting that afternoon.

The CMO is the first to walk into her office to complain about sales not following up on marketing leads and they have the "marketing leads are crap" argument. "You were in our lead scoring meeting you have no excuse." "You didn't listen or take any of my ideas so the leads are still crap." "Sounds like we need to go over the lead scoring again, do you have time today or tomorrow?" "No, I'm totally booked - wait a minute. OK, let's do something late tomorrow." "Fine, I'll send an invite."

Thirty seconds to restart on the board presentation.

In comes the CEO. "Hi Jill, do you have a few minutes?" "What? Sure." "Congratulations it looks like the eastern region is doing well and the west is coming back nicely, great job." "Thanks." "But what's going on in the Midwest, we're really underperforming there." "Yes, I know, we have some weak reps out there and I have a plan for addressing that." "Oh great, let's discuss it after the board meeting." "Umm…" "Once you get the board presentation done, just write up your plan for the Midwest and we'll get that situation fixed." "OK, when is this?" "Right after the board meeting, in my office."

Twenty seconds to restart on the board presentation.

The HR person comes in. "We have to get the first round interviews done this week if we want your new reps in the field for next quarter." "I don't have any time on my calendar for this." "Well, you won't be fully staffed next quarter if we don't get these positions filled." "OK, OK, I'll see if I can juggle some stuff around." "Great! Oh, did you see what the new girl in accounting was wearing today?" "Come on, I don't have time for that." "It's a funny story…" "Honestly, here let me walk you out."

Ten seconds to restart on the board presentation.

A phone call from her sister. "Hi Jill, I'm at the supermarket and I'm looking at turkeys for Thanksgiving. Do you remember if Mom likes the free range ones or was it something else last year?"

Harried. Distracted. Under-resourced. Over-pressured. Completely frazzled. And she hasn't even checked email or voice mail. Work and life are constantly bombarding our key prospects, and we're part of that bombardment. The chilling fact of the matter is that we have absolutely no chance of getting this person's attention unless we have intimate and immediate insight into what's going on around her. Is she going to respond to a generic email or phone pitch? No, never.

This is a crucial point for today's marketing and sales professionals. IDC has seen this message come through in our surveys of CIOs. And we heard a less dramatic but equally poignant version from the CIO panel at our CMO and Sales Advisory board meetings a few weeks ago. The gist of which is summarized in the following figure.

Marketing and Sales Models Not Aligned
with Buyer's Purchasing Models

Source: IDC, 2010

The message IDC is hearing from customers is loud and clear: Solve the business problem that's killing me right now even if it doesn't involve your solution and you'll transform the nature of my relationship with you from sales rep to trusted adviser and your company from a seller to a strategic partner. If I have that relationship with you, I just might call you for help with my problem in the Midwest. But if your competitor is in that position, you are a snowball in a very hot place.

The Buyer's world has changed dramatically with the economy. Approaches that proved themselves when times were good cannot be relied upon when such a radical shift has taken place. It takes managerial courage and organizational fortitude not only to admit we have a problem but to do something radically different to address the new set of challenges. As a result, IDC strongly recommends you consider the following fundamental questions as you embark on enabling your sales force.

• How are you going to get your Sales People to become "Trusted Advisors" when they are being trained and compensated to sell?
• Is that the difference between your top performers and rest that struggle to make quota?
• Have you properly defined the act of "selling"?
• Do you understand the full scope of the "buying" process?

How you answer these questions will profoundly affect your customer relationships and your approach to sales enablement. Customers are calling for radical change and your Sales Enablement implementation may be just the catalyst you need to get started down a new path.

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Planning Season for 2011: Trickier than Usual

This is my 8th year of analyzing and guiding on tech marketing budgets and allocations and it will be the most dynamic that I have witnessed.

Here are the facts and factors, and some guidance thoughts.

First, the Macro-Economics of revenues and marketing budgets:

Based on IDC's annual Tech Marketing Benchmarks Survey (completed 9/10), marketing budgets for the very largest tech vendors will increase by 3.7% in 2010. (I estimated that it would be 3.5% back in 3/10; and so our forecast was very good.)

For the first half of 2010, revenues for tech vendors grew faster than IDC had expected when we began the year. Today, our current forecast is for 5.8% WW IT revenue growth. My sense is that this better-than-expected sales volume in the first half of 2010 took the marketing-planners and budgeters a bit by surprise; and so the marketing investment level for the year will be somewhat behind the revenue growth. Unless of course revenue growth slows in the last quarter. These types of changes are what keeps us analysts in business :--)


Bear in mind that this "snap-back" in budgets for 2010 follows on the 8.3% decline in budgets during 2009. This means that the average large tech vendor is operating with a budget that is still below the 2008 level.

Guidance thoughts on these macro numbers: I don't see that marketers are investing fast enough into this recovery. Marketing leaders tend to keep investment at or higher than revenue growth and so many are behind the curve. Yes, I am seeing some big new campaigns and launches but where is the pent-up spend from 2008 and 2009?

Second, the Micro-Economics of marketing budgets and mix allocations:

What's happening within the whole cost envelope of Marketing in 2010? This envelope that has increased in size by a whopping 3.7%?? Here, we are looking at all discretionary spend (programs) and all fixed spend (marketing staff + overhead).

Advertising spending for traditional (print and broadcast) media has declined by 43% in 2010.
Digital program execution has grown by 53% in 2010.
Can we pause for just a moment and think about those numbers? These are very large changes. The 2008-2010 recession just threw huge quantities of fuel on the fire of the on-going marketing media shift.

On the "People" side of the ledger: not much change in 2010 with one exception. Marketing Operations staff grew by 35% from its 2009 basis. This is great news in our opinion: the "M.O." function that we have called for since 2004 continues to gather great momentum and it is now the fourth largest job-role category in tech marketing.

Guidance thoughts on these Micro-numbers. Are the "within-mix" shifts that we are observing finally impacting the macro view? Or in other words, is the "less expensive" digital and social media finally putting a dent in the top line marketing budget number? I think the answer is YES and this is a big shift in trend.

We have seen it coming... but the 2010 numbers have, in my opinion, made a permanent dent in the shape of the marketing mix.

What's the plan now for tech marketers? How do you execute within this accelerating transformation ? More on that in my next post.

Rich Vancil
IDC

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Channel Marketing Automation – When CRM is not Enough

Whether you pursue a lead through direct sales or a partner it doesn't really matter how you get the lead. But what happens next? With your direct sales, you track the nurturing process as the lead develops into an opportunity. You measure your sales reps by the number of meetings they get, the deals they close. You may even have a closed loop reporting process that shows the efficiency of your marketing and sales funnel.

With your partners, your lead gets passed off and … then what? Does the partner accept the lead? Do they follow up? Do their marketing outreach programs conform to your policies and expectations? How much time and how many touches does it take them to close? How do you decide which partner is qualified for which leads? How do you efficiently identify the productive partners, those that need encouragement and those that should be dropped?

Multi-Billion Dollar Channel Management Questions
These are critical questions that have a tremendous impact on businesses with significant indirect revenue. A recent IDC study of large IT companies found that on average channel revenue was $2.4B. It was generated by 34 channel marketing staff managing 8,500 active partners. That equates to $45 million of revenue per channel marketing staff member but only $1.2 million per partner. The dirty little secret – there are also on average approximately 19,000 inactive partners!


Source: IDC’s 2010 Best Practices Study in Channel Marketing (n=13)

A Better Way

Your CRM and SFA are not going to answer any of the critical channel management questions – although many companies think their CRM system is where they should be "managing partners". In fact, a partner management system fulfills a role more like an SFA – it tracks all the activity that occurs after the lead is generated. It should also facilitate the process of lead distribution – managing all the partner credentials and accreditations need to qualify for a particular lead. Then there's deal registration where the partners accept the lead so that it is not poached by another partner or … ahem … the direct sales force. And when you consider some of the other requirements of partner management, the CRM fallacy becomes clear:

• Recruitment and on-boarding
• Training and development
• Business Planning and Reporting
• Compensation and Incentive program management
• Marketing and Sales support

Are these capabilities that your CRM can provide? Your SFA? Would you even want them to? The answers should be no, no, and no. Don't be thrown off by that last bullet – the marketing and sales outreach your partners require is very different than the corporate outreach that marketing operations is doing. They rebrand, reschedule, embed, and otherwise repurpose marketing content, making a direct translation from corporate marketing to partner marketing wholly inappropriate.

If you have (or want to have) a significant amount of revenue going through the channel, you need a dedicated partner relationship management (PRM) system to automate more than just marketing and sales activities. Don't look to your CRM, SFA, or even the newer marketing automation vendors to provide you with the full set of capabilities necessary to effectively manage channels. Those solutions are focused on a very different set of requirements. They may have slideware and inch deep functionality, but that's typically it. Do ask about integrating a PRM with these systems as reporting should roll up easily across direct and indirect sales.

A number of key capabilities to consider when implementing a platform channel marketing automation:

• Manage partner profiles and contacts
• Deliver and track training, certifications, etc.
• Set business rules for lead distribution
• Handle deal registration
• Provide a single system of record for partner and channel management
• Provide detailed performance reporting (12-month rolling review)
• Track partner outreach campaigns
• Manage market development funds (MDF) and co-op spend

With these issues on the table, it should be clear that automating channel marketing requires a dedicated, purpose-built solution. It will be costly and painful and meet substantially lower expectations otherwise.

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