Technology Marketing Blog

3 Steps to Move Closer to the Ever Elusive Marketing ROI

2013-05-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

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

Social Marketing Guidance for B2B IT Vendors

2013-05-13T08:16:00.001-07:00

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!"

Connectedness - The Missing Metric for Sales Enablement

2013-05-09T07:45:00.000-07:00

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.

Content Trends: Insight from IDG's Tech Media Executives

2013-05-06T19:26:00.000-07:00

A company that publishes over 460 websites, 200 mobile sites and apps, and 200 print titles knows something about media and content. Last week, I had the pleasure of discussing trends with executives from IDC's parent company International Data Group (IDG), the world's leading technology media company.

Here's what I learned about the changing state of communication and content.

The currency of information is shifting:
The primary indicator of engagement is the "quality" time spent with content as well as the meaningfulness of the action that time drives. Someone who is truly engaged in a conversation is more likely to download content. Some content is Core while other content is Candy. Core content gets fewer pageviews but drives more meaningful action while Candy content attracts attention (such as page views or clicks) but doesn't drive much action. Be careful about using easy metrics like page views or clicks as a sole metric as they are easy to manipulate by upping the ratio of Candy content. Clicks are also increasingly useless as a metric as 85% of clicks come from about 10% of people.

New ways to think about social:
Expect social media as a separate category to eventually go away. ALL media is now social with participation ranging from simple comments and sharing to citizen reporting. An emerging model for content is to create high-quality conversations with two or more experts/leaders/celebrities engaging in public dialog about a story then to create an echo chamber around the story by attracting a larger community to listen in and comment. Note that both IDC CMO Advisory service and the IDG media and editorial team find that marketers are still pretty lost when it comes to how to work with the social aspects of communication.

The way we consume content is changing:
My favorite new term is "snackable" content. Audiences prefer consuming in smaller bites. Increasingly, these bites are visual, with mini-videos especially popular. Video is also getting more casual and less edited. Think of a recorded Skype conversation (see the above comment on social). The move to snackable is changing content delivery. The "content event" (spending four months coming up with a big launch of a big story) is declining and is shifting to dripping out small amounts of content on the subject over time.

"Native" media is hot:
A big new trend is native media which is content in an online publication that is labeled as sponsored content (typically thought leadership) that really reads like part of the user experience. This is NOT an advertorial driven by a sponsor. Advertorials are too product-oriented and transactional. Instead, real journalists create the content on behalf of the sponsor. The real journalists are much more reader-focused and in-tune with the editorial voice and policies of the publication. Think of this as joint-venture communication.

Trends in ad-buying:
Real-time bidding for advertising inventory (versus monthly contracts) is the most revolutionary trend in the media industry since publications went online. Fast growing ad categories: selling ads based on audience behavioral context, search ads, newsfeed ads, mini-ads (like Facebook uses).

What we are learning about mobile:
Smart money isn't thinking about whether it's mobile first or not. The key is user first. Publications are using "responsive design" design it once and render differently for different screens – a trend made possible with HTML5. Across all kinds of advertising (not IDG specific) mobile ad revenue is still tiny – only 1% of all ad spending. However, mobile screen time is about 10.1% of all screen time. Will this change? Maybe not. Mobile is driving a different use model. Rather than being primarily an advertising screen, mobile is being used as an authentication point to offer other services. Audiences have different expectations for mobile. They don't consider it to be as open and free as the web. They are more willing to pay for content and services. What is working for mobile monetization: promoted tweets, newsfeed ads; metered content (example, New York Times).

Slide Deck - 2013 Cloud Marketing Trends

2013-04-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

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

Best Practices for Paid Social Media - An Up and Coming Tool for B2B Marketers

2013-04-08T09:45:00.000-07:00

The stigma of social media is something I have been fighting for years. As someone whose education and career has mirrored Mark Zuckerberg's (minus the dropping out of an ivy league school to build a multibillion dollar company and taking it public…so really when I say "mirrored", I mean we are approximately the same age), I feel an affinity to the social networks that have matured as my own career has moved forward. Because of this I have found myself defending the merits of different social networks' "tangible" value to relatives, colleagues, and random people on the subway. So, when I received an email stating I had $100 free Twitter ad credits, I jumped at the chance to see where Twitter has taken their ad platform. While that $100 was great to boost my twitter followers (speaking of which follow me here), retweets, and ego it didn't really answer my questions around how creative B2B marketers are utilizing social networks.

To dive in deeper I tapped the knowledge of 3 digital and social marketing leaders to educate me on how their organizations are harnessing the power of social through "Paid Social" Campaigns. The experts I spoke with are listed below:

Lauren Vaccarello, Sr Director of Online Marketing at salesforce.com

Lauren Friedman, Manager of the Social Community Engagement Team at Adobe

Dan Slagen, Head of Global Marketing Relations at Hubspot. (Now SVP of Marketing at Nanigans)

You can find the full overview and guidance on 'Paid Social' within IDC's CMO Advisory Service'smost recently published document Paid Social Media: A Look into How TopBrands Are Utilizing Paid Social Campaigns. For 3 'take aways' for B2B marketers look no further:

There are Two Kinds of Marketers in Social: The Quick and the Dead: A pillar of social is the fast pace and instant reactions it provides. While moving fast is necessary, leading companies go to great lengths to make sure they are able to move quickly and effectively. The experts I spoke with all emphasized seamless communication across the organization to assure there was no misunderstandings on the current social game plan. Additionally, they each spoke about implementing technologies on the backend to measure the data and output actionable metrics.

Paid Social is a Different Kind of Advertising Buy: Social ad buys are not your father's paid advertising campaigns; marketers must acknowledge this before going head first into a paid social campaign. Social networks are built with the end user in mind; all of the marketers I spoke with emphasized this point. Think creatively when it comes to Twitter or Facebook ad buys, consider leveraging the platforms to amplify a message or push something that will strengthen your community rather than just driving leads.

What Can Social do for Me?: Most marketers have acknowledged and embraced social marketing as a part of their overall strategy. However, that does not mean it is accepted throughout the organization. Before asking for (or putting) advertising dollars towards paid social campaigns, marketers need to answer the question "what can social do for me?" for other decision makers within the organization. The experts I spoke with pointed towards heavy alignment with sales so the reps understand the incoming leads and how to act on them. Some companies put SLAs in place to assure that both Marketing and Sales commit to specific responsibilities. The other best practice is to create a pilot program before committing big dollars and major resources - this way you have specific proof points to set your goals on and optimize off.

What are your thoughts on "Paid Social"?

Does your organization currently run paid advertising on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn?

Do you have any comments to add to what is above?

Sam Melnick is a Research Analyst with IDC's CMO Advisory you can follow him on twitter: @SamMelnick

The State of Marketing Operations 2013

2013-04-05T09:28:00.001-07:00

Companies simply cannot excel at modern marketing without strong Marketing Operations. These professionals reinforce high performance by strengthening processes, technology, metrics, and best practices. A recent study by IDC CMO Advisory Service, in conjunction with MOCCA, found that the Marketing Operations function is flourishing and expanding beyond its original charter.

Marketing Operations has been a rising star from its inception. I like to compare Marketing Operations to the structural frame of building. Try to scale without steel girders and you get a weak and wobbly high-rise. Your marketing will also be weak and wobbly without Marketing Operations. IDC first recognized Marketing Operations in 2005 in its annual Tech Marketing Benchmarks study. Then, Marketing Operations represented 2.5% of the total marketing staff. The team became a fast-rising star – driven by the need for marketing accountability and the addition of marketing automation. In 2012, tech companies averaged 4.4% of their staff in Marketing Operations. IDC believes that the optimal percentage is between 4% and 6% of total marketing staff. Below 4%, a company will lack the necessary operational capabilities for solid management and transformation. Above 6%, a company should examine whether it's time to infuse operational capabilities into other functions rather than holding them in a single role.

IDC's Definition of Marketing Operations: Internal staff responsible for developing and orchestrating the processes and systems required to enable efficient and effective marketing. More specifically, marketing operations staff members are responsible for developing and managing the processes to ensure smooth operation of strategic planning, financial management, marketing performance measurement (including dashboard development), marketing infrastructure, marketing and sales alignment, and overall marketing excellence.

In this new study, called Marketing Operations Expands, IDC finds the Marketing Operations function expanding. It has progressed beyond its early charter of planning and resource management to become an important part of lead management and marketing technology among other areas. More than 70% of survey participants say their role has broadened in the last year and more than 80% say it has become more important. The top six responsibilities for Marketing Automation are: automation, analytics, process improvement, campaign execution, and planning/budgeting. Survey participants, many who are members of MOCCA, the marketing operations professional organization, told IDC that Marketing Operations is also spreading out from its original corporate center to regional teams and beyond its origin in technology companies into new industries.

How should marketing leaders view the expansion of the Marketing Operations role? On the positive side, Marketing Operations can serve as an important and exciting pilot lab for new marketing science initiatives. However, in many organizations, IDC observes that Marketing Operations risks becoming the dumping grounds for not just critical operational tasks, but also for most of the “odd jobs” in the department. Too much expansion, or the wrong kind, results in performance degradation.

For more information on the IDC CMO Advisory Service Marketing Operations Expands research report (which contains important information on organizational structure, skills, job scope, success factors, and much more) check the MOCCA website or contact me at kschaub@idc.com.

Do You Leverage Win-Loss Analysis to Improve Marketing and Sales Productivity?

2013-04-03T11:25:00.001-07:00

As Henry Ford said, "Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently". However, how many of us actually take the time to learn from our mistakes as part of continuous improvement in our customer creation process? No doubt it can be difficult to admit where we have made mistakes, especially if we've lost money in the process! In fact, based upon a recent IDC survey, only 55% of large BtoB organizations have a formal sales win-loss analysis program in place. You may be thinking that you're one of the lucky companies in that list, feeling comfy with the fact that your sales reps are required to check a box in your sales force automation(SFA) system when they lose a deal to indicate the reason for that loss. Best-in-class players in this space will tell you that you're only kidding yourself into believing whatever the sales reps input into the SFA, if they even use your SFA.

If you're in sales operations, then you're in an ideal position to initiate a win-loss program. If you're in marketing, then you're in a great position to increase your value add to sales by helping drive a win-loss program in collaboration with sales operations. Here are a few of the things that best-in-class companies are doing as part of their win-loss analysis process:

Quarterly review calls (or even weekly) to review select wins and losses (a fact-finding culture is key here, and not fault-finding)
Roundtable sessions to discuss wins and losses, including root cause analysis and associated corrective actions
Review of specific wins and losses with the buyer, conducted by an objective team either from within the organization, or ideally, by a 3rd party

A couple of key guidance points in setting up your win-loss analysis process:

Establish accountability for this process. (apply a RACI model and ensure global continuity; tap into your Sales Excellence team, marketing's data analytics team, and your field marketing organization)
Develop, execute and govern the process (collect data from multiple sources, ensure an objective party conducts the analysis, and focus on "fact-finding", not "fault-finding")
Deliver actionable recommendations as a result of this process. (e.g., better identify the buying team as part of account-based marketing activities; improve allocation of sales support resources to target the best opportunities (check out industry benchmarks); rapidly communicate competitive insight to your sales team through social collaboration)

3 Opportunities for Marketing to Impact Sales Productivity

2013-03-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

Call me an optimist, but in my opinion there has never been a better time for marketing to directly impact sales productivity. I'd even go so far as to say that we're experiencing a "perfect storm" for this opportunity - i.e., "an actual phenomenon that happens to occur in such a confluence, resulting in an event of unusual magnitude". Wikipedia More specifically:

Over 45% of the buying decision today (i.e., for large purchases) is being made before a buyer even says hello to your rep. [translation: marketing plays a much greater role today in influencing the buyer's journey, and it is incumbent upon us as marketers to better equip reps for this new buyer 2.0 reality] (click here to learn more about the buyer's journey)
Sales organizations are struggling to make more informed investment decisions, however, in many cases they lack the data and core competencies needed as part of this process [translation: marketing, your internal "customers" have a clear pain point that can be addressed by the "products" and "solutions" that you've been trying to offer them for years]
Sales organizations are beginning to put in place Next Generation Sales Operations teams to drive greater improvement in sales productivity, taking a more strategic approach than in past years [translation: marketing, you now have a "buyer" that is interested in what you have to offer and is willing to collaborate with you at the intersection of marketing and sales - i.e., strategic planning, lead/pipeline management, sales enablement and customer intelligence for sales
At no time in history have we had so many applications focused on improving the interaction between marketing and sales in a more automated and productive fashion - bringing value to sales reps(and channels) in addition to management.

To avoid making this just another blog post about how sales and marketing need to have a group hug, I'd like to get real specific here and focus on 3 opportunities for you, as marketers, to bring more value to the table for your sales organization (click here for more details and the 5 min. video of this post):

Opportunity #1: Sales Resource Planning

Sales is plagued with a lack of information to help them make more informed resource planning decisions. (e.g., overall staff investment, local staff allocations based upon market share and growth) Marketing is in an ideal position to add value here. For example,

Reach out to your VPs of sales in each region to determine how the market segmentation data you are already buying from IDC can be leveraged to help identify the number and mix of sales teams at the local level
Provide your VPs of sales with an opportunity to tap into your marketing analytics team for a territory planning exercise. (start with one region.. .or better yet, one country as a pilot test and a way to demonstrate impact)

Opportunity #2: The Account Planning Process

The most productive sales organizations have shifted their traditional account planning process into the next generation of account planning. . . . . . one which taps into the intelligence of their entire company and ensures that the account planning process is dynamic and supports more tactical opportunity management activities throughout the year. Be there for your sales organization as they make this transition. For example:

Insert your team into sales’ annual planning and regular opportunity management processes, providing in-depth market and customer intelligence that is targeted and relevant to them.
Provide share of wallet data to help sales identify the greatest potential for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities

Opportunity #3: And last, but certainly not least, Sales Enablement – getting the right intelligence to the right sales teams and channels in the right time, place and format to help move an opportunity forward. Bottom line here is to ensure that you treat sales enablement as a strategic initiative and not a tactical maneuver. Improving sales enablement offers the opportunity to increase revenue by 10%! CLICK HEREfor a full overview of what it takes to be successful in this area, including 14 attributes for a best-in-class sales enablement strategy.

IDC's 2013 Chief Marketing Officer ROI Matrix: Are you a Marketing Leader, Achiever, Contender or Challenged?

2013-03-12T09:42:00.000-07:00

IDC's 2013
Chief Marketing Officer ROI Matrix

If you are a B2B Marketer you've read the articles, heard the pundits, and attended the conferences - marketing is transforming. This is not ground breaking news. However, what you probably have not seen is a tangible and holistic way to measure your organization's marketing performance. Today you are in luck.

IDC's CMO Advisory Servicehas just released our Chief Marketing Officer ROI Matrix. This Matrix not only provides measurement on Marketing ROI for those companies who participate in our annual benchmark survey, the recently published reportalso provides fact based analysis, actionable recommendations via IDC Analysts and best practices from leading marketing organizations.

For the down and dirty on the report view our press release

For some quick and interesting facts from the study look no further, you are in the right spot!

You must have the muscle (ie: budget) to move the needle.

#CMOFact: As a percentage of revenue, Marketing Leaders spend ~3X more on marketing than the Challenged http://bit.ly/CMOROI Tweet This!

It is important to note these properly funded Marketing organizations were not just blessed by their CEO with a strong budget, they first proved their worthiness. The first step to earning your budget is to be efficient and effectivley track the dollars given to your department. Leading companies spent years optimizing (and wisely spending) their budget before earning a larger piece of the pie.

"Marketers, tear down these walls!"

#CMOFact: Marketing leaders staff Campaign Mgt roles at 5.4% of their staff. http://bit.ly/CMOROI Challenged staff at 1.7%... Tweet This!

The quote was once said by Ronald Reagan…ok, maybe he didn't say that, but we are seeing leading marketing organizations aggressively staffing areas that promote communication and knock down proverbial departmental walls. Leaders staff Campaign Management, Sales Enablement and Marketing IT at a significantly higher rate than the challenged. They also staff MarCom and Executive & Admin positions at much lower rates.

Remember who keeps the lights on and bust your…you know…to make their lives easier.

#CMOFact: Marketing challenged spend 22% of their program budget on digital. http://bit.ly/CMOROI The leaders spend 33%! Tweet This!

Within tech we often think of innovation as tied to R&D and the product; however leading companies are actively innovating their marketing tools and strategy. The buyer has changed and no matter how good your product is, if the value proposition is not delivered in a way that 'speaks' your buyer's language you will risk losing business. Leading companies are pushing boundaries through new and innovative digital strategies and cap spend in areas like Email Marketing and Events.

This is research the team is excited about and truly believes it will help marketers continue to improve their organizations. What is clear from this research is the gap is widening between the marketing teams that "get" the marketing transformation (the Marketing Leaders) and the ones still wallowing in traditional ways (the Marketing Challenged). Continue working hard and using all the resources at your disposal to stay ahead!

For more information about the Chief Marketing Officer ROI Matrix and a complimentary executive summary email me smelnick (@) IDC (dot) com. To be considered for the 2014 Chief Marketing Officer, you guessed it, you should email me.

You can also download the full report here and don't forget to join the discussion on twitter by using hashtag #CMOFact

Oh, one last thing… Follow me on twitter: @SamMelnick

Innovation is a Core Competency of a Successful CMO!

2013-03-05T05:37:00.000-08:00

And this was clearly evident as several CMOs shared their success stories at Mass Tech Leadership Council's recent 2013 Marketing Summit. CMO's and other marketing executives shared valuable insight on how to do "more with less" - the theme of the event. Sure, as marketers we've been using that term at least since the Internet bust ~13 years ago; however, we've come a long way since then. Not only has marketing slimmed down from a staff perspective, but more importantly, we've developed a laser focus on being more relevant to our buyers and internal customers. In addition, we've developed a healthy obsession with metrics to demonstrate our value to the organization and better manage our precious budget. But even with this greater maturity, the worst thing we can do at this stage is lessen our drive for innovation. Here are just a few of the key insights from this summit to help you and your marketing team keep innovation at the forefront of your marketing strategy and tactics:

Content is King: Be a source of value for your buyers, even if your content strays from your product offering

Inbound marketing offers a significant opportunity for marketers to connect with customers, however, content used as part of this strategy must be of high value and relevance in an increasingly crowded (and noisy) environment
As Andy Zimmerman of Brainshark indicated, "We focus on idea generation content with our buyers." - Andy gets the fact that as marketers, we need to set the vision for our buyers and help them be successful in their job and career.
"A BtoB Marketing organization must be a content machine. A key success factor is to hire domain experts, or at least those that will become domain experts and trend watchers. These individuals must communicate about your key topic to your end users and influencers - it must be their passion." Christina Inge, eZuce

But Don't forget to market your content: A "build it and they will come" strategy is a sure path to failure otherwise.

Yes develop great content, however, market your content "gorilla" style. . . . no, I don't mean "Gangnam style" J
Brainshark leverages "micro-campaigns" to get the greatest leverage out of their content, using email and other marketing channels
Try the pathways that are less followed. Yes, some will fail, but that is the cost of innovation. (e.g., direct mail, new social media channels, etc.)

Your web site is still the front door to your company, so don't fall short in your first impression with your buyers

IDC's CMO Advisory Service indicates that 45% of a big ticket buyer's decision is made before they even say "hello" to your sales rep - and the web site is one of the top places they go as part of their decision process prior to meeting with your rep (in addition to their peers of course)
Develop customized and high quality messages and content to your buyers on your site, and ease the process for them to get to that information. "Message to someone while on your site, think customization." [Zimmerman, Brainshark]

The power of a successful trial or proof-of-concept cannot be underestimated!

Mike Ewing, CMO of LogMeIn, said it well, "A couple of years ago it was all about trial transactions with buyers; now, we need to allow buyers to achieve value through our trial interactions."
One CIO I spoke with at a recent IDC CMO & Sales Advisory meeting indicated, "We did a $3M deal driven by a $50K proof of concept chance that a vendor took on us."

Hire and sustain an analytics team within your marketing organization

I don't mean a simple database analytics team. You need individuals that can not only analyze data, but more importantly, can extra value from that data that is relevant to your business, and communicate that value/insight in a simple and cohesive manner to drive impact in your organization. No easy feat.
"Two top steps for a CMO to secure a solid relationship with their CEO?. . . set clear expectations and base your strategy and results on METRICS." as indicated by several CMO panelists at the event. . . . And you'll need a "crack team" of marketing analysts to help accomplish this objective.
IDC: "50% of new marketing hires in 2013 will have technical backgrounds." IDC's CMO Predictions for 2013

Marketing Mix

The "right marketing mix" varies by company and is dynamic throughout the year.
Don't be afraid to experiment with different marketing strategies and tactics: "As with any VC firm, the CMO must leverage a diverse set of marketing tactics to 'beat the market'", Ellie Mirman, HubSpot.
Consider viewing your marketing investment allocations from different perspectives:

IDC CMO Advisory data: "B2B Tech CMOs are spending approximately 30% of their budget on digital marketing programs. This is up from 12% in 2009."
"80% demand gen of investment; 10% thought leadership; 10% sales acceleration." Mary-Katherine McCarey, Ipswitch
"57% acquisition (new logos), 13% retention, 30% other." Melodye Mueller, NaviSite

Please share your comments below, or feel free to reach out to me directly at mgerard@idc.com to continue the conversation on what it takes to consistently deliver value as a BtoB CMO.

The Secret to Marketing to the Line-of-Business Executive

2013-03-03T16:41:00.000-08:00

Many technology companies have directed their marketing and sales teams to look for business beyond the traditional IT customer. The secret to marketing to the line-of-business executive is to think like they do. Huh? Is this a secret?

Imagine you have a cute little terrier that you love dearly but who chews up everything in sight. You fear that you will have to give the dog away if he keeps wrecking things. As a super-busy person you rarely have time to read articles, however, one of the articles below will stop you in your tracks. Which one?
       a) Animals around Our Home
       b) Dogs: What do they do every day?
       c) Why We Love Terriers
       d) How to Stop Terriers from Destroying Your Home

You know that the answer is D. And if each of the authors had a dog training business, which one are you most likely to contact?

Everyone gravitates toward things that they believe are made "just for me" and ignores things that are made for "someone else". It doesn't matter if you are trying to get the attention of the Chief Marketing Officer, the Vice President of Human Resources, the head of pediatric medicine, or a terrier owner. The more completely you enter to your customer's world, the more likely you are to be successful with them.

Do the Work
It's a matter of simple economics. As the busy owner of the errant terrier, you do not want to waste your precious time reading articles that are of marginal value (Animals around Our Home?). Nor are you willing to do the heavy cognitive lifting needed to mine a useful nugget from a broader purpose article (Why We Love Terriers?).

If you want to attract and serve the line-of-business customer, then YOU (or at least someone in your company) must do the heavy cognitive lifting learning about your customer's world. YOU must spend your precious time (and money) to customize your offerings and messaging for them. There is simply no other way. Someone has to build the cognitive bridge between your world and your customer's. Your customer will not do it – so that leaves only you.

Avoid the "Vertical Slap"
Line-of-business customers will feel annoyed and betrayed if you evade the work of customization by using a technique that I call the "vertical slap". The "vertical slap" gets its name for the unfortunate practice of slapping a picture of a nurse on a regular, old, horizontal, campaign and claiming that you market to the healthcare vertical.

Don't be superficial. Do the work. At least one person on the campaign team has to bring direct experience in the line-of-business focus area. Alternatively, at least one person has to acquire this deep knowledge. (HINT: in addition to understanding the line-of-business, you may also need to invest in understanding the differences between the worlds of different executive levels – for example, a CMO thinks differently than a Director for Marketing).

Don't be cheap. Spend the time and the money. You can either pay up front for customizing content and offerings – or you can pay down the line with low conversion rates.

Actually, the secret to marketing to the line-of-business executive is not a secret. It just takes work.

Push vs. Pull in B2B Marketing

2013-01-28T11:49:00.000-08:00

In the world of retail consumer marketing, a Push strategy would indicate a manufacturer's ability and monies to motivate a merchant to carry and promote its products. A Pull strategy would indicate that same manufacturer using advertising and promotion directed at consumers, with the objective of having those consumers demand the product from the merchant.

OK, I paraphrased that from marketing guru Phil Kotler in his 11th edition of "Marketing Management", which is a classic text. Also in this edition, Kotler states: "The internet will not become a major advertising medium like televison , radio, and print media. Internet users generally do not welcome advertising."

When Professor Kotler revises that statement in his 12th edition, he might also write about the new dynamics of Push vs. Pull in B2B Marketing !

B2B marketing and selling in the tech space is heavy on Push. There is a parallel here to B2C Push as described -- with regard to the strong channel influence that manufacturers maintain. But the Bigger "Push" is the heavy-handed salesmanship that is directed at the B2B buyer. Marketing spends about half its budget on demand generation programs. And the Sales function spends four times as much as all of Marketing, trying to persuade buyers.

It is indeed the internet that is changing this dynamic, as IDC VP Kathleen Schaub has written about exetensively in her New Buyer Journey analysis. The self-educated buyer resists Push. In fact, IDC research shows that Buyers are practically begging their vendors: "Don't sell so hard!. So, don't sell so hard; don't push so hard. Customers don't want to be sold to. They want to make self-determined choices.

The mantra for B2B marketers has to be Pull. If we acknowledge that the self-educated buyer will make his or her own choices on where to get educated, our job is to attract them, to pull them, to our way of thinking. The new Pull will continue to be advertising and promotion, but it will be more about helpful Social connections; an emphasis on educational marketing content; and greater demonstration that we have deep knowledge of the customer's business issues.

As you think about the next round of your marketing planning and budgets, also think about the general quotient of Push vs. Pull that you have in your overall mix. And ramp up the Pull -- the gravitional forces that will hopefully draw your prospects into your atmosphere.

Why Participate in IDC's Marketing Barometer Survey

2013-01-22T07:45:00.000-08:00

The CMO Advisory Service at IDC is conducting its annual barometer survey. This is the 10^th year of the survey. All respondents will receive a free copy of the report produced from the results of the survey and an invitation to IDC's exclusive Client Telebriefing.

During The CMO Advisory's 2012 Marketing Benchmarks survey we collected data from ~100 of the largest and most influential tech companies, their combined revenue totaled nearly $750 Billion. The barometer survey provides a "finger in the wind" follow up to the Benchmark Survey providing detailed guidance to senior marketers. Areas of focus include: budget ratios, program spend, headcount allocation, and in-depth insights into key trends in the industry and forward looking roles and programs.

If you are interested in participating: contact Sam Melnick at smelnick (at) idc (dot) com

Below are some answers to questions you might have:

Q: A free report and webinar, cool! Wait what type of information will they contain?

A: The results of the survey will be used to analyze the direction of marketing resource expenditures and priorities during the next 6-12 months. So questions like the following will be answered:

How aggressively are marketing budgets increasing or decreasing in my sector this year?
What marketing staff positions or programs should I look to invest in?
What up and coming areas should I be looking into this year to create a world class marketing organization?
What are next week's Powerball numbers? (Ok we won’t answer that question, if we knew we probably wouldn't tell you…sorry).

Q: Who should take the survey?

A: Marketing executives who are in a position of responsibility for worldwide marketing practices.

Q: How long will it take?

A: Depending on several factors, as quick as 15 minutes!

Q: I can’t get this done today, when do you need to have it completed by?

A: To receive the report and an invitation to IDC's exclusive Client Telebriefing participants need to complete the survey by Wed Feb 13, 2013. Also, all of the information must be accurately provided in order to be included in the study and receive the free deliverables.

If you are interested in participating: contact Sam Melnick at smelnick (at) idc (dot) com

Q: I can't answer this question, I need input from my colleagues…help?

A: No worries, if you leave the webpage it will save your progress.

Q: What types of companies participate in this survey?

A: Some of the largest tech and tech related companies in the world participate (again total revenue of participants reaches upwards of $1 Trillion), but plenty of companies who may not have as many 0's in their revenue line, but are growing quickly and have exciting products, do participate and receive great value from the deliverables!

Q: Some of this information is kind of confidential, I want to trust you, but can I?

A: As stated above, the CMO Advisory Service has been doing surveys like this for 10+ years. All answers will be kept confidential by IDC and all data will be aggregated for the purposes of trend analysis. No client or other participant of the study will ever receive your company-specific data and there is no way that any company can "reverse-engineer" the analysis to derive your data input. Your responses will not be used for any other purpose within IDC.

Q: Ok I completed the survey…so… when do I get the free research?

A: Heh, I knew you'd ask this one. You can expect the deliverables to begin coming out around late March. For clients who are attending our March Board Meeting we will have in depth discussion around the barometer findings (want to know more about these board meetings? Reach out to the CMO Advisory Group team or send me an email).

If you are interested in participating: contact Sam Melnick at smelnick (at) idc (dot) com

IDC's CMO Predictions for 2013: The CMO Becomes Master of Data

2013-01-08T11:19:00.001-08:00

Here are our Top Ten calls for 2013.

Please feel free to contact me in 365 days and we can tally up our success rate!

1. The C-suite (CEO, CFO, and COO) will demand that the CMO produce both a strategy and a plan for how market-driven data will significantly contribute to corporate objectives.

2. The CMO and the CIO will begin the year as functional peers and end the year as either friends or frenemies, and per the CEO, the CIO will become more actively involved with the CMO in all marketing automation decisions that have cross-functional implications.

3. The automation outlay could approach 10% of marketing's discretionary budget in 2013, with two-thirds of the total outlay coming from marketing and one-third coming from IT; for "best practice" organizations, this will shift to 50:50 by 2014.

4. Even with their new partnership with the CIO, many CMOs will find that their positions are in jeopardy as they failed to produce a robust data analytics function — or even a game plan to get there.

5. Starting in 2013, after the CMO realizes that he/she does not have the skill sets in place for data analytics proficiency, 50% of new marketing hires will have technical backgrounds.

6. Eight out of ten companies will report that most social media initiative growth is taking place outside of marketing.

7. By the end of 2013, 5% of CMOs will shift to a "mobile first" strategy.

8. Content isn't king — it's a wild beast; In 2013, CMOs will be pragmatic, shifting focus less on big platform projects and more on linking access to audience needs.

9. The demand for greater insight into the revenue impact of marketing and sales will require that older CRM systems be replaced, creating infrastructure disruption.

10. High-tech pipeline conversion metrics will continue to improve; expect a 20% improvement in target-to-deal ratios and a 10% reduction in time to create a customer, with both due to better automation and analytics-driven process improvement.

Oracle Buys Eloqua: Expanding Marketing Footprint

2012-12-21T06:15:00.004-08:00

Eloqua's Fit in the Oracle Application Portolio

Eloqua is being brought in as the 'centerpiece of the marketing cloud' solution within the broader Customer Experience Cloud offering. The Customer Experience Cloud is Oracle's comprehensive go-to-market strategy for its CRM offerings that it introduced in mid-2012. Additionally, Eloqua will be leveraged with integrations to Fusion CRM and ultimately extended into vertical offerings. There is overlap with the previously acquired Market2Lead product in terms of campaign capabilities but Oracle spokesmen stated that Eloqua would be the primary product and Market2Lead would be integrated to it.

Market Reaction

First and foremost, Oracle is serious about its CRM business. According to IDC market numbers, Oracle has led the worldwide CRM applications market since its purchase of Siebel, holding 11% of the market in the 2011 shares data. However, both SAP and Salesforce.com are within two percentage points of that share fueling Oracle's motivation to maintain and increase the distance. The current battle ground of competition within the CRM applications market is being fought in the marketing automation segment where, as this IDC Data Map shows, the traditional transactional vendors hold much smaller footprints.

This acquisition immediately brings to mind the question, 'what will Salesforce.com do now?' Not only was and is Eloqua a key partner of Salesforce's, the company relied on it and similar partners to provide this capability to its customer base. Salesforce.com's acquisitions in the marketing arena to date have been focused on social marketing capabilities. While Oracle was explicit in stating that the product, like the other components of its various applications offerings, is capable of being used in a heterogeneous environment, Salesforce.com won't be happy long sharing its customer base Eloqua today, has a significant number of Salesforce.com customers in its base as well as Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Marketo may become far more attractive to Salesforce.com as the new year begins.

Conclusion

Overall, the latest acquisition by Oracle signals a commitment to building a fully comprehensive product offering for its CRM business that covers all the major elements of the CRM applications market. For Oracle the coming year will be one of bringing integrations and proof points to market. For the other marketing automation vendors with broad marketing capabilities, specifically Adobe, IBM and SAS, there will be more of a trade-off for customer evaluating products between a CRM suite solution and best-of-breed.

#CMOFact: IDC 2013 Marketing Investment Planner

2012-12-10T13:45:00.004-08:00

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.

Brand Strategy Reminders, Regardless of the Size of Your Company

2012-12-05T10:55:00.000-08:00

There was something for everyone at MassTLC's recent marketing seminar - "On Brand: What Does it Take?"; if you're building a brand at a $1B+ company like PTC, or fighting your way up the ladder at a smaller company like Actifio or Verivo Software. Here are some of my keys take-aways:

1. Something for everyone to learn (or to be reminded of)

You need buy-in from executives: The CEO and his/her team need to admit that there's a problem with your brand strategy, and they're on-board to fix it.
Be realistic about the costs involved in branding:

"The rule of thumb that we used was 2.5X the cost of our marketing investment over a 5 year period."[Jill St. George, PTC]
Brand investment is even more critical today with the more mature Buyer 2.0. IDC recommends 50% of all marketing investment be spend on awareness building.
Launch activities will touch many aspects of your customer creation process (e.g., collateral, web site, presentations, videos, training)

Set targets for your branding effort

"Prior to our rebranding effort, only 40% of our company understood our brand. Our target penetration is 75%."[PTC]
"# analyst briefings, web site activity metrics, social metrics"[Parna Sarkar-Basu, Verivo]
"increase in revenue per sales rep, time to rep. productivity, # and quality of inbound leads"[Michael Troiano, Acitifio]

Don't forget about the importance of keeping sales in the equation!

"Stay close to sales! They can make or break you." [Actifio]
Include sales executives and sales operations on your team

Tell it with stories: Nothing speaks louder or sticks with influencers and buyers more than a good, relevant story. Drop the MBA speak and industry terminology that all of your competitors have, and capture the essence of your company and value it provides in a story. And most importantly, get your entire organization to communicate these stories.

2. Large companies

Strive to be a "branded house" and not a "house of brands": As Jill St. George from PTC pointed out, managing a company with many disparate brands can be significantly more costly than having a single, corporate brand. And certainly let's not forget the confusion that a house of brands brings to your sales teams and customers as you're attempting to expand your market share and share of wallet at specific customers.
Leverage your resources: PTC outsourced much of their brand strategy and design work (e.g., customer and employee interviews, surveys, design work) to Lippincott. A smart move for any large company in order to rapidly leverage resources versus trying to support this type of significant effort internally, not to mention the expertise that can be attained by working with this type of firm.
Align your branding strategy with your sales enablement strategy: Particularly in large organizations, your key to success will be rolling out a 1 to many strategy, and your sales enablement team(s) in marketing and sales can help here.

3. Small companies

Time is of the essence! The good news is that you don't have as much to do as a larger company in rebranding your organization. The bad news is that you don't have as much time or resources to accomplish your goals. Think "months", not "years".
Stay connected at the hip with your sales team: Go on sales calls with the reps, if they like it or not. Test out your ideas, messages and stories with different folks on the sales team.
Align your metrics with the company's and sales' targets. There's little time, resources or patience for brand studies, brand awareness metrics or market share analyses at a small company. Hard line your team's metrics into sales productivity, sales pipeline and revenue targets.

Please share your thoughts below, or email me at Michael Gerard.

FutureM: For Marketers, Times They are a Changin’

2012-11-15T10:51:00.000-08:00

I attended FutureM in Boston a few weeks ago and the main take away was: Marketing is changing quickly and organizations must grow and adapt, otherwise they will fall behind.

IDC’s CMO Advisory Service has been advising this for some time, but as I read more blogs and attend more marketing based events like FutureM, the reality of overarching change is becoming obvious. IDC’s data points to this as well; investment in Digital Marketing within the Enterprise Tech industry has increased from 12.6% of budgets in 2009 to 29.2% by the end of 2012* - we expect this trend to continue.

Below I have outlined 3 sessions that did a great job of highlighting the change that is taking place. I then took particularly interesting or relevant quotes and expanded on them.

The Future of Social is Action and ROI

“Social has to be collaborative between agencies and the brand – It has to be done for consumer insight and you cannot do it for the sake of just doing it.

- Anthony van Dijk, Brand Manager, Global Gillette Venus Base Business, Gillette

This quote hit home with me – as social, and digital in general, continue to mature, marketers must engage with their agency around these topics. However, don’t just check off a box by giving them the set of keys to your online presence and communities. Hold your team and agency accountable; have a specific plan and goals. Almost as importantly, don’t just give your agency a mandate to improve social, work with them and guide them as your brand and goals change. Social is often instantaneous, you cannot expect the undertaking to be a straight line trajectory – be ready to adjust and if you’re expecting deliverables from your agency give them the best chance to help you succeed!

Understand IDC’s guidance for B2B Social Marketing by downloading our report: “Despite the Hype, B2B Social Marketing Is Still in Its Infancy: 2012 Guidance for New Investment Dollars and Staff”

The End of Depth? Marketing Complex Services and Products

“The buyer is on a journey and the vendor is not invited.”

- - Joe Chernov - VP of Marketing, Kinvey

This was one of my favorite quotes of the entire conference - it was provocative and goes against much of what we have been taught as marketers. If you take a broader view, Joe is right, this isn't your father’s “buyer” the tools and knowledge available today have changed everything. Rather than Sales or Marketing holding all the information, social networks, forums, and the rest of the internet can provide the Buyer with a large majority of answers. As IDC has reported in our recent publication, The 2012 IT Buyer Experience Survey: Accelerating the New Buyer's Journey, marketers and sales must be aware of this new reality and adjust their strategies and tactics. Additionally, my colleague Kathleen Schaub wrote a great blog post on Operationalizing Your Buyer's Journey. The report and post both are great places to start on this topic!

DataXu’s Data Brew: The Data-driven Power Shift

“Good professionals let the data speak, if you don’t have good data – don’t make a decision!”

- - Chuck Hollis, VP -- Global Marketing CTO, EMC Corporation

Discussion around Analytics and Big Data resonate strongly with me - they are hot topics in the marketing world and can provide immense value. Our group always urges marketers to utilize data any chance they can. However, it is easy to get caught up in the excitement of trying to quickly move projects forward while using data as a guide. Chuck’s quote reminds us to be honest with yourself and be honest in your decision making process, don’t make a decision based on data unless it is telling a clear objective story.

For more information on data driven marketing download IDC’s study “Data-Driven Marketing: A Survey of Marketing Automation Maturity in Global High-Tech Companies”

-------------------------------------------------------

While these quotes give a quick glimpse into a few sessions at FutureM, the entire conference is a reminder that there is a lot of change in Marketing and many technologies and companies can be a huge asset in this transformation. Don’t ignore this change, take time to educate yourself even if it is just a few hours a week to demo a new product or service or view an interesting webinar. Ultimately, as a marketer if you don't start swimming, you risk sinking like a stone.

You can follow Sam Melnick on twitter: @SamMelnick or contact him at smelnick (at) IDC (dot) com

*Source: IDC's 2012 Tech Marketing Benchmark Study (full results to be published this quarter)

Data Analytics wins 2012 US Presidential Election

2012-11-08T08:13:00.001-08:00

Data analytics was the big winner in the 2012 US Presidential race. In fact, 11:17 PM (US ET) November 6th was the moment data analytics went mainstream. This was when Ohio was officially projected to go to Obama. It was the ultimate validation for Nate Silver and his data analytics approach to election forecasting. To much fanfare he accurately predicted the results of the election in all 50 states without doing any of his own polling. He used sophisticated analytic models based on data from as many third party polls he could find. To this he added the secret sauce of data analytics - a keen understanding of how different types of data from different sources relate to one another in context.

His FiveThirtyEight blog drove as much as 20% of the web traffic to the New York Times website - the 6th most visited US news site on the net - leading up to the election. As a result, data analytics is officially mainstream. Any business leader at any level that does not immediately embrace its power is putting his or her career and company in jeopardy.

Data analytics works. It does not produce miracles, but it does produce results that far outperform human judgment on its own. The Obama campaign employed an army of retail data analytics wonks to beat the Romney campaign in every battleground state. They did it by applying analytic techniques proven in the supermarket industry:

Standardizing records: Unifying the customer (voter) database
Widening perspective: Combining diverse data types: demographics; buying/voting history; response by media; donation/activity by trigger (celebrity dinner), model (contest) and method (mobile); group/church membership, social networking activity (Reddit), etc.
Judicious targeting: Carefully identifying the potential for influencing voters that could influence the election. Not worth targeting easily influenced voters if they don't live in a county that can help swing a state. Not worth targeting difficult to influence voters even if they live in a critical county. This is essential for achieving impact and ROI.
Media mix modeling: which media channels have the greatest impact on which kinds of voters?
Action oriented outreach: Understanding the specifics of why and how certain people act and designing multiple outreach experiments (progressive offers, channel mix, social references, etc.) based on that.
Openness to innovation: data driven models may point to approaches that are counter intuitive for some decision makers. They can seem risky and mysterious. They will not be right all the time. Controlled risk is part of the evolutionary process to effectiveness. Without a tolerance for experimentation however, you will not develop a data driven culture, you will in fact kill it.

Marketers in the world's largest high tech companies are finally acquiring the enterprise data services needed to apply data analytics to long cycle B2B customer creation processes. We are already seeing signs of how significant the impact of these new approaches to marketing and sales can be:

$200M EU lift based on a sophisticated solutions recommendation engine
45% more subscription revenue with no increase in a multi-million dollar marketing budget
Tens of millions of dollars in revenue uplift from simple web behavioral changes

Embracing data driven decision making is now a matter of survival. You simply cannot win against competitors that have faster, deeper market insight. They will beat you in every stage of the customer creation process. Your marketing will be months behind, your inside sales reps will be calling customers already committed to alternatives, your field sales reps will miss opportunity after opportunity to get more revenue from existing customers. Your funnel will collapse, your pipeline will dry up, your renewable revenue will shrink, and at that point it will be hard to recover. Hyperbole, you say? In the great A/B test of who uses data analytics and who does not, stay in the B group at your peril.

IDC EAG group has done extensive research on the key ingredients needed to create the enterprise data services that are a prerequisite for data driven customer creation and has ongoing research into how to create a data driven culture. To find out more please contact Gerry Murray - gmurray(at)idc(dot)com.

Start Operationalizing Your Buyer's Journey

2012-10-25T17:52:00.000-07:00

I was surprised to hear so much talk about the 'buyer's journey' at a recent Sales 2.0 conference. More talk than I often hear at marketing conferences! Having said this, it was clear that many people who talked about buyer's journeys did not know what the term meant.

A hesitant raise of hands at one sales enablement panel showed that a little more than half the room thought that their company used a buyer's journey framework. The panelists didn't buy that answer. Sniffed one, "Most companies lift the sales stages right out of their CRM system and call that a buyer's journey."

What isn't a buyer's journey? It isn't a sales methodology. It isn't build rapport, uncover needs, identify options, propose solutions, and close the deal. It isn't a product life-cycle. It isn't development, launch, grow, mature, decline. It isn't marketing stages. It isn't build awareness, create interest, engage, and persuade. All of these processes can be useful to guide an important function. However, they all describe vendor's journeys – not buyer's journeys.

So, what is a buyer's journey? A buyer's journey is a framework that describes the cognitive process each buyer must personally traverse leading from Apathy (Do I care?) to Commitment (How can I buy this?). IDC's Customer Creation Framework highlights three simple stages of this journey: Exploration, Evaluation, and Purchase. You can break these stages into sub-steps if you like.

In the simplest terms, a buyer's journey is really nothing more than a list of questions. Buyers have different questions at different steps of their journey. If buyers get their questions answered clearly, positively, credibly, and with relevance, they will take another step. If they do not, they stall or abandon their quest.

Let's take the example of some questions on a buyer's journey towards a new car:

Exploration: Is my current car headed for a problem – how do I know? Are there new cars that I would like better? What cars are new this year? What do I really need?
Evaluation: Which cars offer the best value? Which do I find most attractive? Is this supplier trust-worthy? What do the experts say? What do my friends think? How can I test drive?
Purchase: How much can I afford? Should I buy this now? Do I find terms acceptable?

Operationalizing a buyer's journey

1) Collect a list of questions.

Start small. Select just one of your products and its most typical buyer. What questions does this buyer have about the problem? About alternative solutions? About acquiring, adopting, and using products like the one you offer? Finally, what questions might a buyer have specifically about your product? Most companies will need multiple question lists for multiple situations. But don't boil the ocean at the beginning.

Where do you get these questions? Ask your buyers! Ask the people in your company who talk to buyers – sales people, customer support, systems engineers, etc. Listen to social media chatter. My experience has been that you can collect 95% of the questions you need after you have talked to about 30 people who have a broad range of roles and backgrounds.

2) Answer the questions.

If your company has EVER sold a product, then somewhere, someone has the answers to the buyer's questions. It probably isn't the marketing team – but that's okay. Go back the same people and places from which you gathered the questions. Some questions can be answered easily. Others will be thorny. Some questions will have happy answers. Other questions will be evil.

Do not avoid the thorny and evil questions! I like this quote from Robert Frost, "The best way out is always through." Every unanswered question is a place where prospects can get frustrated and where leads will stall or fall out of your pipeline.

You can collect both the questions and the answers in a spreadsheet or an FAQ document.

3) Put the answers on your website and give them to your sales team.

Keep your initial content super simple. Make sure the answers to all the important questions are easily found on your website. Make sure that your sales team has easy access to all of the answers.

4) Improve

Later, you can explore the best way to deliver your answers to buyers – how should the message be voiced? What content types and media work best at different steps and with different buyer personas? How do I best map the buyer’s journey steps to the sales process?

But these are secondary issues. If you don’t first have the answers that your buyer needs, all these secondary questions are a total waste of time.

Hey, Sales & Marketing. . .You're not Meeting Prospects' #1 and #2 Needs!

2012-10-19T09:04:00.004-07:00

What do your buyers value most during the pre-purchase phase for their IT products or solutions? Spending quality time with your sales reps? Doing a feature by feature comparison versus your competitors? Hardly. The top 2 most valued activities by buyers are:

Interacting with your company's technical teams. (e.g., CTO, presales engineers)
Consumption of vendor content à Financial justification/ROI is #1 here

Sure, buyers put "interacting with sales reps" as next in line; and reps are the ones that will be the key facilitators and match-makers to make these activities happen as part of customer enablement. But what's most surprising, are the results that just came out of IDC's 2012 Sales Investment and Productivity Benchmarks study. (click here for full study for Sales Advisory clients) We asked many of the largest BtoB vendors in the world how long it takes for their sales rep to find different types of information within their organization in response to buyers' needs. Can you guess which two types of information took the longest to find to meet buyers' needs? (refer to Figure below)

45% of companies indicated that it takes their sales reps 1 to 5 days or longer to find ROI-related sales assets from across their organization.
39% of companies indicated that it takes their sales reps 1 to 5 days to find the best fit presales person for their prospects.

Yup, that's right, as technology sales organizations, we're having the greatest difficulty fulfilling the top two most valued activities in the buying process for our prospects.

A couple of questions to consider as you look within your own organization to resolve these challenges:

Do you know what your buyers' expectations are along the buying cycle, and how you are doing at meeting them? (e.g., Are you leveraging customer satisfaction insight as part of your account planning process? Do you do a win-loss analysis? What does your own buyer experience research indicate?)
Are you providing your best clients and prospects with access to your technical teams when needed and justified? Is your ratio of presales engineers to sales reps high enough? (check out IDC sales staff allocation benchmarks) Are your presales folks productive? (e.g., using teleconferencing to best leverage their time, connecting with sales reps through social media (Social Collaboration for Sales study for IDC clients))
Is your sales operations team collaborating with your marketing team as part of the content and marketing asset development life cycle to ensure that ROI-related assets are being developed to meet your buyers' needs?. . . And how are you ensuring that your reps can get access to this intelligence ASAP when needed? (yes . . . . sales enablement)

Facebook Announces 1 Billion Users – It’s Time for All Marketers to Give it a Go

2012-10-11T06:16:00.000-07:00

A few days ago Facebook announced that their active users surpassed 1 Billion. This is a huge number and like it or not, as a Marketer, you cannot ignore a community of this size. At this point, it is irresponsible to write Facebook off as a fad. Its user base covers all demographics and geographies – chances are, as a business, whoever you are selling to is on Facebook. While I certainly do not advocate for suddenly changing your advertising mix to a 25% Facebook Ad spend or hiring a brand new agency to build a Facebook Page that rivals Coke or Jet Blue, I do believe there are plenty of good ways to start dipping your toes into the giant ocean that is Facebook.

I readily admit that the standard thinking is Facebook is a B2C tool - Facebook is great to reach consumers, however I believe there is something for everyone. B2B marketers need to think creatively, manage expectations and take learning’s from similar communities (think LinkedIn). And if you’re worried that you might be behind the curve or not sure the amount of time and energy to spend on social, through IDC's 2012 Tech Marketing Benchmark Study (full results to be published this quarter), we learned that only 0.9% of tech marketing program budgets are spent on social media. So, while there is a lot of hype around social, we are still in the early days of truly leveraging social as a powerful marketing tool.

Below I've listed three ways you can start utilizing Facebook to make sure you aren't missing an opportunity:

Skunk Works Project

While it’s great to have an agency who can own Social and Digital, having staff internally that are just as skilled is important. Facebook advertising is relatively easy to get started with, so it lends a perfect opportunity to give a key staff member a skunk works type side project and see if they can get value out of Facebook. Let them be creative, see what you can get out of Facebook, a worst case scenario is results are unsuccessful but you have a staff member who learns new skills – this can’t be overlooked in a world that continues to rapidly move towards digital.

Don't Forget Mobile

It’s easy to think of Facebook as a website where people go to when they want to take a quick break from work or inconspicuously “catch up” with old friends, but the future of Facebook is Mobile. In fact Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that 600 Million are Mobile users. With that many users on Mobile already, you can be sure that any major updates to the platform will have mobile users top of mind. Combine that with Facebook’s need to continue to monetize, it’s probably safe to predict there will continue to be new and creative ways to reach your target audience through Facebook’s Mobile platform. Be sure to keep your ear to ground when it comes to Facebook and Mobile, test out new products, you never know when one might be just what you need to reach key targets!

Quick heads up!
For more research on Social Marketing please view our report: Despite the Hype, B2B Social Marketing Is Still in Its Infancy: 2012 Guidance for New Investment Dollars and Staff

Ask For Help

No one is expecting you to be a Facebook expert - it is still a very new platform and it is ever changing. Thankfully, there a ton of innovative companies that work with the platform or leverage Facebook to help large brands reach their goals. Start with your agency, see if they have resources, partners, or experience with building out the type of campaigns you are looking for, if they don’t have the answers, find out what vendors are leaders and schedule a call with them to see what they can offer. You don’t have to go at it alone.

Regardless of what you do remember to measure measure measure. We never advocate aimlessly trying new strategies without a solid plan and a way to track and compare.

Have you had any experiences with leveraging Facebook? Let me know how it went and how you think it can be best used to reach your audience (if at all!).

Sam is a Research Analyst within IDC’s CMO Advisory Service you can follow him on twitter: @SamMelnick.

Back of the Envelope Marketing Budgets

2012-10-03T07:23:00.000-07:00

Here is a simple and I think helpful budgeting rule-of-thumb that a CMO at a $5b software vendor shared with me yesterday:

1) 75% of your budget should be in support of revenue-generation for your current operating year.

2) 15% of your budget should be placed towards efforts that have a 2-3 year time horizon.

3) 10% of your budget should be for activity or initiatives with no time horizon,

-- Rich Vancil

How bright is the silver lining of Salesforce.com's Marketing Cloud?

2012-10-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

At their annual Dreamforce shindig last week Salesforce.com announced the formalization of their marketing capabilities as the Marketing Cloud. Essentially it is a coupling of four key pillars of Salesforce.com's front end:

Customer intelligence: Data.com enriches contact and account information with fresh feeds from sources such as LinkedIn and many others. Enables both sales and marketing to create detailed contact profiles for segmentation, targeting and campaign management.
Social advertising and content management: The recent Buddy Media acquisition provides support for a wide range of social channels (social, web, mobile) and formats including contests, videos, and photos. Users can coordinate their publishing and advertising activity and measure impact throughout the social sphere.
Social listening and analytical tools: Radian 6 monitors popular social services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, as well as blogs, forums, communities and more. Supports 17 languages and mobile access.
Core CRM functionality: Salesforce.com consolidates resources to provide sales reps with a single source that can connect them with other applications, contacts, colleagues and workflows. Pulls data together into account/opportunity context. Delivers reporting data to sales and sales managers and can provide opportunity and pipeline performance data into other systems such as marketing and order management.

Salesforce.com is taking its "Social Business" mantra to heart by building its marketing functionality with a "social first" philosophy. The question is: will this be enough to satisfy Salesforce.com customers (and the company itself)? The answer is probably not. The functionality you won't find in Marketing Cloud is significant - the core campaign management tools, workflows, analytics and more offered by marketing automation vendors (e.g. Eloqua, Marketo, Neolane, Pardot, etc.) Even though there are fewer seats to be sold to marketers as opposed to sales, these two worlds are rapidly converging. The systems needed to automate them will need to do likewise, as evidenced by the tight integration of most marketing automation systems with Salesforce.com and the recent announcement of Chatter for Eloqua.

But Marketing Cloud is undoubtedly only the first step, in fact it's well beyond the first step for Salesforce.com and the only issue going forward is how do they continue to expand functionality in this area? The build or buy equation for Salesforce.com currently favors the build approach as valuations for marketing automation vendors are sky high, at least in terms of an acquisition. Salesforce.com has plenty of time to creep into the marketing automation arena, establish itself as a more serious threat and then re-evaluate its strategic decision around marketing functionality.

In the meantime, marketing automation vendors have their work cut out for them. They must stay well ahead of where Salesforce.com's Marketing Cloud may go. They must continue to grow rapidly, prove their staying power and market value. Customers, however, should have no illusions that Marketing Cloud is an enterprise marketing automation platform in its current state. There is much more to marketing than social engagement especially for B2B models. Waiting for Marketing Cloud to evolve or for social to mature is simply not a choice, there is way too high a price to be paid in terms of market share, growth, and profitability. So if you're considering marketing automation don't delay or change course because of Marketing Cloud. Charge ahead full steam and should the social engagement of Marketing Cloud pop your ROI, by all means add it to your arsenal.