We invite our readers here to search this site for the term China to get a good sense of the various activities by the Chinese government and the China based organizations.

Obviously, this is an interesting development on many levels when a foreign government opens a branch bank in the US – but from a B2B marketing perspective, this helps drive home the point about globalization and the need to not have blinders on when identifying key markets. The questions to ask here are all about your strategy of identifying key prospect accounts and begin engaging with them. It does not always have to begin in the US where these branches and US operations are located.  Rather, it should extend from the relationship of the parent company in China.  Has your organization establish that database with a global view?

If not –  it is time.

You can get the full Global 5000 database on this page

We still live in a world where many B2B sales and marketing personnel continue buying leads from email and list providers and then use those leads to try and sell.  Reading the article, this cycle will see diminishing value and results. Just as many consumer products and services have turned to the buyer being in charge of the buying process and sell cycle, B2B is headed that way. It’s a matter of time.

Following this path means that the company and primarily marketing, needs to ramp up the engagement with the marketplace and build the relationship.  It is the R part of CRM. While the use of CRM systems has grown by leaps and bounds, many still view them as a way to manage the lead pipeline and flow of opportunities. Where it should be a way of managing and building the relationship, it is still more about the selling.

At the heart of these systems is the database of companies and contacts. The more data you have about the prospective account the sharper the focus you can have on crafting your message and understanding what they care about. Having a robust database of company info with a number of elements beyond the basics is critical to this goal of deeper relationships. The basics of industry, size, revenue are a given. Add to this an indicator of the prospect company’s social activity or a buzz tracking metric, reputation score or any number of data fields that enhance your knowledge of that company. For those in the technology market, adding data about their technology environment from companies like Harte Hanks or HG Data can go a long way to fine tuning your approach.

Other data elements can be attached to the company database including information about benefit plans, patents that are held — a wide variety of data elements are possible. Here’s where social media plays a big role and marketing needs to crank up the presence and exposure. It is today’s version of The White Paper.  Show the thought leadership and share the knowledge to develop the market engagement.

The formula that seems to be developing is to have a strong database with deep analytics that gets mined and continually refined accompanied by a content strategy to build an audience of prospects from those targeted companies in the database. It is very targeted and much more of a pull strategy than a push and sell approach. It seems contrary to all that we learned over the years but it will help us concentrate and target.

From the earlier days when the term BRIC was created and emerging markets started to be tracked, we all knew China would grow in increasing importance. And we continue to read examples like the Apple success.  Expect to see the trend continue. Still, many companies have not yet ventured there or still expect that the day of China’s equal place at the table is still some time away. Not true

To get a picture of business in China, we took the China based companies in The Global 5000 (currently 155 of them) and created a profile with some key stats:

• The 155 companies employ 20,395,000 or 131,000 on average
• Total revenue for this group exceeds $3.5 trillion – $23 billion per company
• Revenue per employee is $174,330

• Total training spending for these firms is approximately $1.9 billion or $12.8 million in training budgets per company and $93 spent per person

• IT budgets for these China based companies is approximately $90 billion – $582 million per company and $4,400 per employee spent on IT

• For marketing, the spending is approximately $246 billion which equates to $1.5 billion per company and $12,000 per employee

To take a look at some differences (and similarities) we took a look at 4 major geographic areas with Global 5000 companies – USA, China, Japan and a group of countries in Europe, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. For each of these, we looked at the total of our key spending metrics that include corporate training, IT spending and marketing spend.

Adding up those spending totals by major industry groups within each of the geogrphies provides a good proxy for B2B priorities and focus.  Here are the top 5 industries for each region with the % of spending in each.

USA

1. Financial Services 20.6%
2. Retailers & Wholesalers 13.9%
3. Technology 12.7%
4. Oil & Gas 9.1%
5. Consumer Goods and Services 8.9%

China

1. Financial Services 26.6%
2. Oil & Gas 17.6%
3. Industrials/manufacturing 10.8%
4. Technology 10.3%
5. Basic Materials 8.5%

Europe

1. Financial Services 36.0%
2. Retailers & Wholesalers 9.4%
3. Industrials/manufacturing 9.2%
4. Oil & Gas 8.5%
5. Technology 7.2%

Japan

1. Financial Services 27.0%
2. Industrials/manufacturing 22.0%
3. Technology 12.8%
4. Transportation 12.5%
5. Retailers & Wholesalers 5.1%

Looking across these groups, there is no doubt that the money and financially related industries drive all the economies. There may be even more differences if we drilled down further by other countries and get below these top level industry groupings … but they provide an interesting look at markets,

Taking all three of those spending categories and adding them together, we get a total expenditure estimate that shows a market opportunity for industry suppliers. Totalling those dollars up by country can create a targeted priority list of countries with the best B2B potential. The dollar amounts shown here are in Billions of USD for the Top 25 countries.

• USA $1,728
• Japan $614
• China $345
• UK $285
• France $284
• Germany $274
• South Korea $118
• Italy $112
• Netherlands $111
• Canada $100
• Switzerland $98
• Spain $90
• Brazil $75
• Australia $68
• Taiwan $62
• India $62
• Russia $52
• Hong Kong $46
• Mexico $37
• Sweden $36
• Belgium $34
• Singapore $22
• Denmark $20
• South Africa $20
• Malaysia $19

One area of spending we looked at is IT. Taking available data on the % of revenue spent on IT across a number of verticals, we applied those percentages to the revenue of each company in The Global 5000 database. From there, we totaled those IT dollars for each major industry group. Overall, these represent over $1.2 trillion of IT budgets. Here are the spending totals by industry for the largest companies in the world.

• Financial Services – $460 billion
• Technology Providers – $148 billion
• Industrial Manufacturing – $141 billion
• Oil & Gas – $136 billion
• Health Care – $69 billion
• Retailers & Wholesalers – $60 billion
• Business Services – $53 billion
• Basic Materials – $47 billion
• Food & Beverage – $42 billion
• Utility Services – $41 billion
• Transportation – $36 billion
• Consumer Goods & Services – $24 billion
• Construction – $12 billion

One of the benchmarks/metrics we have gathered is the corporate spending for training & education by various industry verticals. The level of spending can be a low of $20 per year per employees in the agriculture industry to over $400 in the transportation industry where pilots or engineers are required to be certified and training is continuous.

When we apply these varied metrics to each of the companies in The Global 5000, the total spending for training and education comes to $17 billion . . . an attractive market. Looking at the details, there are country and industry differences that can help training companies select appropriate targets.  For example, we compared these 3 Global 5000 industries to assess the spending on training & education:

• Airlines $452 million
• Banking $3.36 billion
• Chemicals $148 million

Taking a look at 2 different countries and totaling the training spend for Global 5000 companies headquartered in those countries, we can see another way to evaluate this subsegment. In this case, we totalled the spending for China and Germany

•  China  $1.9 billion
• Germany  $1 billion

With these modeled estimates as part of each Global 5000 company record, any number of sub-segments and markets can be evaluated as part of the overall $17 billion large enterprise market.

Each company record in the Global 5000 has standard data fields for industry, address of HQ, number of employees over 5 years, reported revenue for 5 years. Starting last year, we added a count of employees having LinkedIn profiles for each company and now the addition of spending estimates for IT, Training and Marketing.

These estimates were based on secondary research and reported findings were IT and Marketing spend as % of revenue were available. The training dollar estimates were based on dollars spent per employee.

For more information or questions, please contact us.

One metric that can be used is to look at the revenue of the leading companies — The Global 5000. These companies represent approx $43 trillion of revenue, a major footprint across the globe. If we assume that B2B sales & marketing want to sell to these companies, most of the decisions will eventually be made at HQ … the home country of these corporations.  If your organization’s sales mirrored the global B2B market, the breakdown would look something like this:

• US 35.7%
• other Americas 3.2%
• EMEA 32.1%
• AsiaPac 29.1%

Every company will group their geographies differently and of course their business results, target markets and customer base will be different. Here are some examples of companies and their % of revenue by geographic regions:

Oracle Corp

• Americas 51.5%
• EMEA 32.3%
• AP 16.2%

BASF

• North America 20.6%
• Europe 53.1%
• AP 20%
• ROW 6.4%

United Tech

• US 52.6%
• Europe 21.8%
• AP 16.2%
• Other 9.3%

Sojitz Corporation

• Japan 67.7%
• Americas 4.4%
• Europe 3.4%
• other Asia 20.8%
• ROW 3.7%

Accenture

• Americas 44.2%
• EMEA 42.6%
• AP 13.3%

We have added a field in the database for social media profiles. Across the entire set of companies, 9.8% of the of the employees have linkedIn profiles.

Looking at various regions, we would expect North America based firms to be at the top of the list. Across the regions, the social media % is:

• North America 17.4%
• South America 5.1%
• Europe 9.4%
• Asia Pac 2.7%
• Middle East/Africa 5.5%

As we look at industry sectors, the summary of social media profiles looks like this:

• Basic Materials 5.5%
• Business Services 21.9%
• Construction 6.3%
• Consumer Goods 7.8%
• Financial Services 12.2%
• Food & Beverage 6.8%
• Health care 22%
• Industrials 6.9%
• Oil & Gas 6.1%
• Retailers & Wholesalers 4.6%
• Technology 25.1%
• Transportation 3.8%
• Utilities 2.8%