Technology Marketing

Join Me And Your Fellow Sales Enablement HEROes In San Francisco!

Bradford Holmes — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:42:50 +0000

We are putting together our final plans and the Sales Enablement Forum for 2012 is shaping up nicely. Here is a brief video update on the theme and our speakers and why I believe this is a can't miss opportunity for you and your team.

I hope to see you in March. Thanks, Brad

Upcoming Keynote On Channel Enablement At Distree EMEA Next Week

Peter O'Neill — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:48:48 +0000

Peter O'Neill here. I've been invited to speak, again, at the annual Distree EMEA event in Monte Carlo next week. Now in its tenth year, Distree gathers together top executives from tech industry vendors and distributors plus, in recent years, retailers from around EMEA for three days that include a trade show, presentation sessions, and meetings to discuss industry-specific channel topics. The 2011 event drew 950 delegates from 127 tech vendors and over 400 distributors. One of the event highlights for everybody is a process to request and set up formal one-on-one meetings between the various players, similar to our own one-on-one sessions at the Forrester Forums (only their software is better). A total of 5,000 such sessions are scheduled: some at tables in larger rooms around the trade show, many others in private meeting rooms elsewhere in the conference center. I still have some slots open for those of you who are interested and are going to the event.

My keynote presentation continues on from my speech last year (still being watched on YouTube, I am told) where I described what changes we see happening in the channel due to recent industry trends. The title is "The Emerging Engagement Channel Model" and leans heavily on Tim Harmon's October reports with his permission. I will discuss the effect of industry trends such as cloud, consumerization of IT, app stores, and "Apple takes a bite at B2B business" (see below for the agenda).

Calling All Sales Enablement Leaders, Wherever You Are: SE Forum 2012

Bradford Holmes — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:02:10 +0000

I have the privilege of talking with many of our clients and, surprising as it may sound, many don't have titles that match their real jobs! Who does these days? Maybe the CFO. So, as we gear up for our second annual Sales Enablement Forum, I want to make sure we don't miss inviting any of our Tech Marketing friends who do a little enablement on the side, or a lot of it as their full-time focus, title or not...

We chose the lead image for this year's Sales Enablement event to grab your attention because we believe you can truly be a HERO to your CEO. But it won't be an everyday task - it will take new skills and strong powers!

Vendor CEOs today want deeper relationships with customers to become their trusted suppliers. And that puts pressure on sales teams - and those who enable them - to cross-sell at higher levels. Is that working?

Our Buyer Insight study found that 13% of executive buyers believe that a salesperson can clearly show they understand their business issues and articulate a way to solve them. When we ask vendor CEOs, "Are you satisfied that your sales force is getting your company to its strategic objectives?" the answer is a resounding "No."

This is the strategy to execution gap that takes up a lot of sales and marketing energy today. It is also filled with well-intentioned but often uncoordinated activity intended to help sales sell.

There is hope! An emerging discipline is taking hold. Leaders assigned to "fix the broken things" are beginning to approach the gap with a new vision and some practical ideas. Moving from random acts to purpose built plans, and shifting the focus from products and services to customer problems, they are making customer focus a new discipline.

Yes, Content Must Be Managed Internally As Well

Peter O'Neill — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:46:08 +0000

Peter O'Neill here. My first report on content management came out last week and it has already generated several conversations - please keep those comments and inquiry requests coming. Content management was also a significant part of a one-day workshop I delivered to a client in Lisbon last week. They offer eProcurement and eMarketing software-as-a-service. So an interesting discussion we had was, "Do you need different content as a SaaS provider compared to a product vendor?" We concluded that the information would be the same, but the sense of urgency about delivering digital content to a SaaS audience is greater than a more conventional buyer community, which changes the content style and vehicles. This question is on my 2012 research calendar and will be the basis for a report later in the year, so I would love to hear your opinions on that one.

2012 Tech Marketing Priorities – From 50 Tech Marketing Execs

Stephen Davidson — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 23:18:45 +0000

Understanding the priorities of fellow tech marketers is a great way to tune one's own 2012 initiatives. Over the past two months, my Forrester Technology Council colleagues and I have spent quite a bit of time surveying and talking with members (~ 50 tech CMO's and VP's of Marketing) about their priorities for 2012. Before the champagne pops up here in Boston, I wanted to share a few of the priorities my colleagues and I are hearing most about for 2012:

Lead-To-Revenue Management Automation Made In Europe

Peter O'Neill — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:38:45 +0000

Well, it finally got published by Forrester! Peter O'Neill here and my long-promised overview of lead-to-revenue management (L2RM) vendors "Made in Europe" got out last week. We were delayed because I had to wait for my US colleague to publish on some of our research ideas on L2RM automation in her introductory report, to which I refer in my report - and she had to negotiate her text around the wishful thinking of around 45 different vendors, all of whom have their own view of a L2RM architecture. That meant that my research done in the summer of this year may look a little out of date. But I fully expect to be able to update this report for Q2 2012 in response to many other European software vendors briefing me on their experience with tech marketing customers.

Anyway, without any further ado, here is the list of European vendors I did feature. The report goes into more detail, of course, on each vendor. I have also included a list of those North American L2RM automaton vendors who have offices in Europe.

Brand Advice For B2B Tech Marketers: Q&A With Siegel+Gale

Stephen Davidson — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:22:59 +0000

"Branding & rebranding" is rising fast on the list of priorities for tech marketers in 2012.

Over the past few months, my colleagues and I in the Tech Marketing Council have been engaging in a rising number of client discussions around the topic of "brand." These conversations with our CMO and VP of marketing clients have come in a few different flavors:

Branding for Emerging Firms. Small, but not startup, vendors seeking to create better brand position and differentiation to take on the established sector players. (e.g., David and Goliath)
Rebrand for Maturing Firms. Midsize growing tech companies ($250M+) with designs on being the next $1B+ firm in their sector. (e.g., "Good to Great")
Post M&A Brand Integration. Both emerging and large tech firms are working to integrate newly acquired companies, personnel and products. (e.g., House of Many Brands)

To help our members better address these branding challenges, we reached out and talked with Jason Cieslak, managing director of Siegel+Gale's West Coast operations. He has extensive experience working in technology. Here's some advice we were able to glean from an interview with him:

Steve: When it comes to emerging vendors looking to "punch up" their product and brand differentiation, where should they spend their time?

Strategic Content Management Will Make Marketing More Predictable

Peter O'Neill — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:02:09 +0000

My first job, writes Peter O'Neill, after university was as a business analyst at Ford Motor Company, assisting an executive who sat on the monthly Project Appropriation Committee (PAC) where investments were approved. I learned to calculate the time-averaged rate of return and net present value for a project, proving it was better to invest in it than keeping the money in the bank. My executive ran an organization called General Services, which in those days (1978) included generating our own electricity within the factory complex in Dagenham, England. Now they take their power from the national grid and the generating plant is no more.

Now this is not a discussion of cloud computing and where enterprise IT will end up. What I most remember from those monthly PAC briefing books at Ford was the marketing project submissions. They also had documented TARR and NPV numbers. They would predict that by investing a sum of money in a promotional campaign (e.g., a special car model, dealer incentive, discounts), their market share would go up by, say, 0.7 percentage points - Ford was the UK market share leader in those days at around 30%, selling mostly company cars to businesses. I often checked out whether or not the predicted market share change actually happened and it mostly did - marketing was able to quantify its contribution very well indeed.

Will A New Service Provider Type Emerge For Digital Marketing?

Peter O'Neill — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 16:46:47 +0000

Peter O'Neill here. I took advantage of an invitation to dine with around 15 CIOs this week in Frankfurt and our topic of conversation was "Managing The Online Customer Journey." This is the regular event organized by CIO Magazine, and I go along, calendar permitting, when I am invited to present or if the topic interests me. In this case, my fascination was to hear what these CIOs think about the prevailing trends of IT consumerization and social media.

But I was most interested in their ideas on how marketing aligns with the IT organization; a concept that I've encountered a lot recently in my engagements with tech marketers as well as working with tech automation vendors in their go-to-market activities. Forrester has published a lot on this recently, led by my illustrious colleagues Nigel Fenwick and Luca Paderni who serve the CIO and CMO, respectively.

My fascination with the topic is that I see a new business opportunity for savvy systems integrators. I am calling it the "emerging digital marketing service provider," and I will focus my next Forrester Teleconference on this observation next week. That provider will need to be tooled with marketing creative skills plus IT skills and services and it will sell to the CMO and CIO equally: a new market coming together out of the marketing budget and the IT budget, as the figure shows.

Top-Performing Tech Marketers and Their Webinars

Peter O'Neill — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:33:43 +0000

Hurray! Peter O'Neill here, and it's great to be back in my home office for a couple of weeks after some hectic weeks of travelling. During the last weeks, we've hosted research reviews in several cities; we met over a hundred tech channel professionals to match our 2012 research agenda against their topics of interest; there has been other client business; and we held our latest Marketing & Strategy Forum in London. This is the third year that I have been involved in our EMEA Marketing Forum, always in London. Perhaps we might want to go somewhere else in 2012 -- there are already so many marketing events in that city, and I've noted that over half of the attendees were from outside the UK. Please let me know if you have any ideas of where to meet.

I am also waiting here at my desk with bated breath for the preliminary results of our latest Marketing Organization and Investment (MOI) survey -- I cannot wait to see how things have changed since our last marketing-spend benchmarking exercise last year. Our team wrote several reports off the Q1 2011 survey (e.g., I discussed how European tech marketing is different and why) showing how tech marketing executives were spreading their resources among eight different categories. In the next quarter, in addition to updating those reports, we also hope to be able to be able to map and understand the marketing differences between small, medium, and large tech vendors.

In recent months, we've had a last look at the Q1 2011 MOI data and were able to make several significant calls about how top-performing vendors (those with a growth rate of 10% or more over their market segment peers) have been investing compared to the average performer. We have been using these slides in our Marketing Forum presentations as well as in our published reports.

Understanding Your Customers’ Habits Can Make A Difference

Stephen Davidson — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:59:40 +0000

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of hosting a Technology Marketing Council Roundtable for a number of Austin, Texas-based members. Gathered around the table were VPs and senior technology marketers from AMD, IBM, Planview, OpenText, Socialware, Troux Technologies, and a soon to be renamed Austin Ventures startup.

Always with an eye toward seeking out relevant and thought-provoking ways to push the thinking of our members, I invited Art Markman, Ph.D., Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology and Marketing from the University of Austin, and Principal Advisor Tyler McDaniel from Forrester to talk about how companies can make themselves into a habit with their customers. While there were a number of great insights and peer conversation, I wanted to share my top two takeaways:

Takeaway No. 1: Getting Your Customers To Act Without Thinking. We all develop habits and rituals that become automatic and instinctive. The marketers in companies like Starbucks and Apple spend a lot of time and treasure examining these habits so that they can seamlessly embed their products and services into the lives of their customers. They've learned that utilization happens far easier when there's instinctive action over contemplative thought.

The lesson for B2B tech marketers - it's time to break our habit of building campaigns that tell customers to "think of us often" and design a new level of marketing that makes customers instinctively act without thinking. Through careful study (see next takeaway), it's feasible to start laying down consistent, repetitive messages that over time will trigger customers to instinctively act on our products and services versus actually having to think about them.

The Tech Marketer's Guide To The Social Media Platform Universe

Kim Celestre — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 22:11:36 +0000

A few months ago, our research team embarked on an important quest: to help B2B tech marketers make sense out of the confusing ecosystem of social media platforms and tools. This ecosystem is fraught with vendor consolidation, technology integration, platform expansion and a multitude of amusing buzzwords. Tech marketers have enough to worry about these days without spending time (time that they do not have) trying to navigate around the chaotic landscape.

Three months later, I am happy to announce that tech marketers now have a simple guide to help them identify the categories of social media platforms that are currently available to meet their needs. One word of caution: This Market Overview report is merely a snapshot of the social media platform landscape. Since this report was published, some of the vendors we briefed have notified us of recent acquisitions and major updates to their platform offerings. This is a very dynamic landscape that our team will continue to monitor throughout the upcoming months. Stay tuned for additional research on this topic. And perhaps we will have some new buzzwords to decipher as well.

Are you struggling with selecting social media platforms and tools? I look forward to your comments!

Important Insight: BT Buyers’ Social Media Behavior Continues To Evolve

Peter O'Neill — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:06:12 +0000

Last week Forrester published a further report in my name (Peter O'Neill here) based on some great insightful work done by my illustrious researcher colleague Zachary Reiss-Davis. We had discussed this type of analysis the last time I was in our San Francisco office the other month but he did all the work. Our Q1 2011 US And European B2B Social Technographics® Online Survey For Business Technology Buyers marked the third year we've conducted this survey, so it is interesting to observe some trends over that period of time by looking at the Social Technographics® ladder profile in more detail. Interesting conclusions we could make from our drill-down include:

Many Creator* behaviors are not engagement after all (see below), they are broadcasting opinions
Critic* behaviors are often collaborative - and this demonstrates the biggest growth
Collector* behaviors are actually somewhat misleading - they are not really "collecting"
While the high Spectator* numbers might imply that most people are just browsing, that is wrong
Joiners* and Conversationalists* behavior is tailing off as decision makers fail to see the value

The last point, which implies that using Twitter may not be so compelling after all for social media BT engagement, is particularly useful for me as an analyst. This week I have yet another an inquiry scheduled with a tech marketer to discuss this question: "I am currently using Twitter but could use some guidance on strategy." Once again, I will discuss Forrester's POST concept and recommend that we review the potential audience and their social media preferences before deciding upon which technology to deploy.

Sneak Peek At 2012 For Tech Marketers And Strategists

Daniel Klein — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:19:35 +0000

Last week at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto, CA, a select group of senior tech marketing and strategy executives from a who's who list of tech titans joined Forrester analysts Andy Bartels, Chris Mines, Peter Burris, Tim Harmon, Ellen Daley, Manish Bahl and Kim Celestre for our 2012 First Look event to understand the key trends and marketing best practices that they must employ in 2012 and beyond.

While I can't deliver 4 hours of content in one blog post, I'll start by outlining my three key takeaways. Curious about other trends or marketing best practices for 2012 not listed below? Leave a comment and we'll do our best to address them.

Takeaway #1: Emerging markets are still emerging (aka small) compared with the largest IT market - the US.

While there has been a lot of excitement (rightfully so) in fast IT spend growth markets such as China (17% year-over-year growth), India (21% year-over-year growth), and Brazil (28% year-over-year growth), the relative size of these markets are still a small percentage compared with the US. For example, the IT spend in China is only 15% of what it is in the US, while the percentages are even smaller for Brazil at 6% and India at 4% compared with the US.[i]

WIM (what it means): Tech marketers and strategists with a global remit must keep both relative size along with growth in mind as they balance their investment, program activities, and other resources in 2012.

Takeaway #2: IT consumerization means big changes for marketers.

Kosten Metreweli, CMO Of Zeus Technology, Talks Demand Management And Lead Nurturing

Stephen Davidson — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:22:13 +0000

"If you think demand management and lead nurturing is just automating your process to create, track and passing leads over to sales -- you'd be wrong."

This is an edict from Kosten Metreweli, CMO of Zeus Technology*, during a presentation he gave to a group of CMOs and VPs of marketing in Forrester's Technology Marketing Council regarding his approach to generating demand and lead nurturing. For those who don't know Zeus -- the organization is now part of Riverbed Technology and is a cloud-based elastic application solution that helps IT organizations deliver fast, secure, and scalable web applications with the economics of cloud (ex: BBC, Disney, and Domino's Pizza).

Kosten acknowledges the importance of a solid marketing automation infrastructure, but emphasized that effective technology marketing professionals also need to:

· Take ownership for ALL revenues (yes, all)

· Have tight alignment with sales (not just the leadership)

· Study, define, and evangelize the target personas (don't admire them just within your office)

· Map the content strategy to the funnel -- from prospect -- to deal -- to customer success (oh, and by persona too)

· Build effective "sales plays", not collateral or presentations (yes, really)

· Track, track, and evangelize progress (with all stakeholders)

You're already doing this? Great, keep at it! If you're not, here are three keys to his (and Zeus') success that Kosten shared with us: