Using Data as a Service for Scalable Channel Enablement

The magic ingredient for successful channel enablement at scale is data. Imagine having the financial, operational, and behavioral data you need on partners to optimize new product launches, coverage models, and channel programs. Imagine being able to show partners — no matter how new or small or niche their focus — how other partners like them have achieved high return on investment (ROI) on their business with you. IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model provides a stage-by-stage guide for advancing the organizational, process, technology, and data infrastructure necessary to transform your channel marketing and sales enablement operations. The journey along IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model is one of evolving from a publishing/transactional framework to a process-driven one.

IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model - Summary View

	Stage 1: Ad Hoc	Stage 2: Opportunistic	Stage 3: Repeatable	Stage 4: Managed	Stage 5: Optimized for Scale
Key characteristic	"Every product for itself"	"Portals grow like weeds"	"Consolidation but still stuck in publishing mode"	"Central control over process-driven approach"	"It's all about analytics (Data as a Service)"

Source: IDC 2013

The DNA for Success is in the Data 
IDC defines channel enablement as "developing the right competencies in the right partners to deliver the right solutions to the most profitable customers." Ultimately, the goal is to provide a scalable model to identify high ROI best practices and propagate them throughout the partner population at a very granular level. There are three ways in which manufacturers can capture the partner data needed to support the analysis:

• Contractual obligation: Requires significant time and effort from partner account management, is limited to the largest partners, and is periodic at best. 
• Operationalized data capture: The partner platform should be thought of as a SaaS offering that provides a wide range of functionality but also collects data on every partner interaction. The ideal platform will consolidate all of the interactions with partners by offering personalized access to content and transactional systems, as well as execution platforms for marketing, sales, and support. By virtue of this consolidation, it captures an increasingly large portion of partner interactions and thus provides a great deal of valuable data to inform channel marketing and management. 
• Data as a service: Externalize partner performance data and make it available to partners in a way that captures even more data from more partners. The level of detail they get depends on the level of detail they provide. As a result, they can get actionable insights on how to better manage their businesses and market, sell, and support specific solutions. The database is in a virtuous cycle of enrichment. They should be able to get insight into a wide variety of strategic and tactical questions such as: 
• How many people do I need in marketing, sales, technical, and support roles? 
• What level of skills and training should they have? 
• What marketing activities are most effective? 
• What sales methodologies and plays are most effective at what stage? 
• What manufacturer resources and networks should staff be utilizing most frequently? 

While data is the crown jewel, there are significant people, process, and technology prerequisites for success. To find out more please see IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model or contact me at gmurray (at) idc (dot) com.

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Solution Marketing: Just What Is a "Solution"?

"How do we progress from offering products to offering solutions?" This urgent question has reached the top of many technology CMOs' initiative list. When IDC interviewed solution marketing experts for the newest report in our CMO Advisory best practice library, they confessed that that the first issue to tackle is agreement on what is a solution.

IDC predicts that by 2016, more than 80% of technology purchases will significantly involve the line-of-business buyer, who will specifically drive 40% of all purchases. These business-oriented buyers have little patience with technology that can't be easily connected to a business problem. The new buyer increasingly disdains "raw" products that require substantial work to integrate into something usable. The new buyers seek to buy offerings that are closer to meeting their actual business needs (aka "solutions").

While the specifics about just what is a solution varied among the experts IDC studied, the gestalt of the answer can be easily grasped by comparing a raw turkey and the complete holiday dinner that it will someday crown.

Consider the Turkey Dinner
In the analogy of the raw turkey and the complete dinner, the raw turkey, as a single component to a completed dinner, is like most standalone technology products. People can't eat raw turkey. If guests were to be served a raw turkey with no intervention from cooks, they would be sadly disappointed. The raw turkey certainly has value! However, its value is to the cook — not to the ultimate consumer, for whom it is inedible. Technology products, like raw turkeys, solve important operational problems for the builders, or cooks, of the ultimate solution.

Just as the raw turkey must be cooked and incorporated into a meal before it can be really appreciated by a guest, so must a great deal of preparation work be conducted before most technology products are useful to the end user (the customer's business). Only when enough product components (ingredients) combine with sufficient services so that the end result actually solves a business problem can you really call something a solution. Service work can include planning, consulting, implementation, integration, customization, and training as well as providing financial assistance, overcoming legal or standard hurdles, and more.

Avoiding the Bundling Trap
Companies who want to offer solutions must be especially careful not to fall into the bundling trap. Bundling can be an effective strategy for some situations, but a bundle is not a solution — and companies should not fool themselves into thinking these two strategies are interchangeable. Expanding on the turkey and completed dinner analogy, to host a successful holiday dinner, customers need all the components for the full meal — ingredients, recipes, and equipment to produce it. Then they also need to set a table, decorate the house, put music on, and be ready on time. A good host is concerned about the whole dinner experience for the guests, not just whether the turkey comes out right.

If a company supplies only operational-level technology (e.g. raw turkeys), it must figure out how all the other elements can be put together in a way that can be easily used by the customer. The company must partner with other suppliers and provide orchestration among them.

Solutions require a much more complex go-to-market proposition than products. However, the upside is that solutions offer an even higher value to the customer. By helping customers to have a delightful experience, you create a loyal customer who is more willing to pay a premium and become a proponent of your brand.

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Benchmark your Marketing Organization with IDC Research - 2013 Tech Marketing Benchmark Survey

Here at IDC's CMO Advisory Service we are in the field with our 11th annual Tech Marketing Benchmarks Study. I would like to offer an invitation to participate to marketing executives across the industry. 

Have you ever wondered, "Is my marketing organization receiving enough budget to compete?" or "Exactly how much should I be spending on marketing automation?" If so, IDC's CMO Advisory Service's benchmark survey has been helping senior marketers answer questions like these for over 10 years!

Below are the essential "need to knows" around our survey and further down I'll dive into all the great value of benchmarking your marketing organization. Let's get started:

What are the benefits?

• Complimentary copy of our 2014 Marketing Investment Planner to benchmark your company's marketing data against the industry's data.
• Receive an invitation to our client only telebriefing held by IDC Analysts. 

What is needed? 

• Email me (smelnick (at) IDC (dot) com) to get our survey instrument and taxonomy.
• Complete the survey and send it back in a timely manner ('due date' to be discussed).

What is the Quality of Data and Confidentially?  

• This is the 11th year IDC has fielded the Tech Marketing Benchmark Survey and will include participation from many of the 100 largest tech companies - this depth and expertise is unmatched. 
• All responses are 100%, no questions asked, confidential. We take this part very seriously.  

Bonus to all Participants

• All participants will be eligible for our 2014 Chief Marketing Officer ROI Matrix and will have access to their placement on the Matrix. A great way to easily compare your marketing progress against the rest of the industry's. 

Need More Information: View this excerpt from Kathleen Schaub's excellent post, IDC Tech Marketing Benchmark: Behind the Scenes. It explains all the intricacies (and value of benchmarking).

Why do companies benchmark? A benchmark provides context for decision-making. You spend a million dollars a year on social marketing. So what? If your CEO asks you this question, what will you say? Tech marketers tell us that they like to benchmark for the following reasons:

• Improve the quality of annual planning: Last year’s program budget and gut feelings are no longer sufficient input

• Gain insight into critical trends: Learn what industry leaders and competitors are doing – and how you stack up

• Reallocate costs: Identify areas of overspending and opportunities for better value

• Transform with confidence: Answer questions such as how much to invest in new areas like social marketing or how should I re-organize my department?

• Drive with data: C-level executives increasingly expect marketing leaders to manage their business with the same level of operational excellence as other corporate functions.

• Get an independent view: Benchmark data provides IDC analysts with a wealth of information that make guidance to clients personalized and accurate guidance

Feel free to reach out and let's have a discussion whether it's the right time for your organization to participate!

Email me at: (smelnick (at) IDC (dot) com) or find me on twitter @SamMelnick

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3 Steps to Move Closer to the Ever Elusive Marketing ROI

Here at the CMO Advisory Service, we recently closed up our 2013 Barometer Study which includes data from senior level marketers working at some of the largest Tech companies in the world. While there are a lot of great insights from this study, these senior level marketers made it very clear that their highest priority is "Proving Marketing's Value", or in other words, that always elusive marketing ROI. While this quest(ion) is nothing new to marketers, as our industry continues its transformation, marketing ROI is becoming an even more pressing topic. We see this truth in our surveys, we hear it from clients, and it is actively being discussed at industry events. This year we launched our  Chief Marketing Officer ROI Matrix (see the image to the right) in an effort to give participants a look into their own return on investment from marketing and continue the conversation. There is no easy answer here (otherwise my days would not be quite as busy), but I have 3 steps senior marketers can take to move closer to measuring marketing ROI.

1. Identify what matters and what does not

This might seem obvious, but to successfully prove value, first it must be understood what is providing value.  Often when we speak with clients we remind them that tactics are important, but without strategy on the front end those tactics may be wasted energy. Before creating a substantial dashboard or reporting tool, take the time to understand which data or measurements are going to further the case and which are white noise. Once done, not only will the organization be better able to prove ROI, but it will be able increase effectiveness.

Key Fact: 27% of B2B companies report they have not yet used predictive analytics to improve any marketing activities.

2. Communicate inside and outside of your department

As transformation continues within the tech industry it is creating a ripple effect to companies and then departments within each company. This means lots of change, and change can often mean confusion. Not only are marketers pushing to prove their worth, but they have to compete with this ongoing confusion. To overcome this issue, communication is a must, both within the marketing organization and across the entire company.  It is key to receive buy-in from stakeholders and make sure the steps taken are continuously aligned with expectations. It also means communicating the actions taken (and why they were taken) to staff or superiors. Remember, over communicate, as in times of turmoil "value" can be a moving target.

Key Fact: In 2013 senior marketers expect 2/3 of the marketing technology budget will come from the marketing department – the rest from IT, Sales, and other areas. Communication across these departments is key. 

3. Benchmark your progress

Identifying what provides value and then communicating as progress is made towards measurment are two great steps. However, when it's time to share the work, comparisons and baselines will be needed. The first step is measuring your own progress. How have the KPIs improved and what can be expected in the future? The next question will be, what is the comparison to competitors? Finding ways to benchmark and measure progress internally and externally will help tell the story of value added and improvement. It will also set standards and targets to shoot for, without these benchmarks there is a risk of flying blind.

Key Fact: Close to 100 tech companies participated (For Free) in IDC's Chief Marketing Officer ROI Matrix and benchmarked their marketing ROI against their industry peers. To participate this year contact smelnick (at) IDC (dot) com.

What other steps would you recommend to prove marketing value or even derive that elusive marketing ROI number?

Do you think this is fools gold and there are other areas marketers should be focused on?

Let me know your thoughts!

You can follow Sam Melnick on Twitter: @SamMelnick 

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Social Marketing Guidance for B2B IT Vendors

As you continue to invest and execute in your Social Marketing, step back for just a moment to think about how "Social" fits in your overall marketing-mix.


It is helpful to first look at the overall marketing function. There are two major rivers of information that flow into and out of the marketing organization. The first is the flow of data that informs the "in-bound" product management process, wherein customer requirements are continuously gathered and prioritized. The second is the flow of "out-bound" product marketing work-effort, wherein products and services are presented to the marketplace.

Social marketing is the process of applying social listening and social communicating as a new and value-adding element to those in-bound and out-bound information flows. For example the in-bound product management process has been traditionally informed by customer councils or user groups; where new product ideation would happen one idea at a time, and one customer at a time. With Social product management, crowd-sourcing for voting and ranking of new features can speed up this process by orders of magnitude. SAP today has a robust Social crowd-sourcing engine called IdeaPlace that does just that.

Social Marketing begins with good Social Listening. This involves tapping into the blogs or forums or communities where your customers are present; the virtual places where they are actively becoming self-educated about potential IT product and services. If you can be a good listener, you will then "earn" the right to contribute to the conversation, perhaps by connecting those buyers with information sources and tools to further their self-education journey. B2B IT vendors are placing their bets on this. Just in the past few months I have observed Dell and HP make an overt organizational change by placing their Social Listening function into their existing and formal Market Intelligence functions.

So: Listen first. Become an excellent listener before you begin to insert your voice in the communications stream as a contributor. There are many examples of this in B2B, and it is accelerating. Dell gets a lot of play as a listening expert and deservedly so: they were a first-mover on this capability more than six years ago. HP now has a Chief Listening Officer (CLO) role. Cisco has been so successful in social media training for its employees that they are now starting to sell this to their customers. Intel just told me that they are now listening in over 50 languages. The list goes on.


To punctuate this last point, some research might be useful. IDC conducts an annual survey on "How Buyers Buy." We seek to understand: Where do buyers go for their product education? What media types are most frequently accessed? What is the pathway of their digital journey? What is their preferred content types or subject matter? On this last point, buyers tell us that their preferred content sources are (in rank-order): information that comes from peers; then information that comes from independent third-parties; and third, information that comes directly from the vendor.



This is why social marketing should be such an important part of the B2B marketer's tool kit. If vendors can help prospects to connect with peers as part of their education process; they will be viewed favorably by those prospects. The social media are the best tools for doing this.


A mis-step to avoid…


B2B marketers entering the social media environment will often start listening and communicating with the most popular social tools: Twitter; Facebook; and LinkedIn, to name a few. These are all fine tools and readily at-hand. But the question is: are your customers and prospects using them? IDC research shows that B2B buyers who are evaluating complex products and services are most likely tapping in to the technically-oriented social communities and blogs. And so lesson number one is: "Hang out where your customers are hanging out!"

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Connectedness - The Missing Metric for Sales Enablement

Enablement programs for B2B sales and channel resources tend to focus on activities – trainings, certifications, portal visits, most popular assets, most posts per person, ratings, etc. These are all indicators suggesting enablement resources may have been consumed. But they don’t do a very good job of measuring one of the most important objectives of enablement - changing behavior. New platforms that integrate publishing, process, and social capabilities are making it possible to track behavior patterns in the context of specific business processes. Hidden in this data are the daily habits that differentiate our best direct and indirect sales resources. Sales enablement professionals need to find this data and share it with the rest of their sales audience.

This is a particularly crucial for the on-boarding process. Regardless of whether you’re training a new/replacement sales rep or bringing on a new partner and their employees, connectedness is a key metric that you need to capture and track. It is the only way to continually optimize behavior. You can capture financial and operational data with most of the content management, CRM, and marketing automation technology out there. But these systems are not explicitly designed to capture patterns of behavior. Even those with social networking capabilities are not being used effectively in this regard.

Sales enablement professionals need to use social networking as a basis for propagating best practices. The measurement should span not only person to person networking, but also track community membership, links to all manner of resources from internal portals, as well as communication with subject matter experts, peers and mentors. To be most effective, this capability should be deployed within a process driven platform for sales enablement, as opposed to an old school portal based on a publishing model. These new platforms go beyond simply providing access to content. They are process driven and deliver content, sales plays, transactional capabilities, and more all in the context of the company's go to market strategy. In addition they have or are easily integrated with enterprise social networking capabilities which are crucial to facilitating and capturing how people interact with all the great resources they contain. 

There are two key dimensions the connectedness metrics should include – the number of connections to the right resources and the cadence of communication. For example:

•          Which internal portals/systems do they log into – how often?
•          Which SMEs do they interact with – how often?
•          Which internal communities have they joined – how often do they visit and contribute?

This data can be invaluable in helping new reps and partners become more effective faster. What behaviors do our “A” reps and best partner reps exhibit? The intention is not to gratuitously boost hits and visits to marketing collateral, but to find the right level of connectedness for different types of reps. Being able to show other reps and partners that they can boost performance by making simple behavioral changes like subscribing to certain resources, joining communities they didn't know existed, or increasing the frequency of communication is the path of least resistance to effectiveness.

Today many large high tech companies report it takes a year to get a sales rep fully up to speed with the pipeline needed to meet quota in the following year. Clearly there can be a lot of process, product, market, customer, competitive, etc. knowledge that needs to be transferred. But don’t neglect to transfer the behaviors that will help them  best utilize the resources the organization has offer.

For more information on IDC's sales enablement research, please contact me: gmurray (at) idc (dot) com.

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Slide Deck - 2013 Cloud Marketing Trends

There is no arguments that the cloud software industry is currently top of mind for many, in fact enterprise companies are even receiving their share of love. While the industry as a whole has our attention, what about marketing departments at these companies. 

How are CMOs at these fast growing cloud organizations managing their marketing budget? What are they worried about? and what are their priorities for the rest of the year?

Within IDC's 2013 Marketing Barometer survey we received answers from marketing leaders within cloud organizations. In this presentation you will see the high level findings comparing these cloud marketing departments to more traditional 2nd platform companies.

I would love to hear your thoughts on these initial findings and how your marketing organization is working to compete in this fast growing market (whether as a pure play or just one of many product lines).  

For an extended deck with further analysis please contact me directly at smelnick (at) idc (dot) com or reach out to me on twitter: @SamMelnick

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