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Tech Marketers: Quick Reminder Strategy Comes First

January 26, 2010

CMO’s at tech companies need to ensure their team is focused on strategy first. I have had recent discussions with many marketing departments at technology companies that cause me a bit of concern. Often, the conversations among these marketers tend t0 focus on what marketing vehicles should be used. I can’t count how many times I heard ‘let’s do a direct mail’ or ‘we should look into social media,’ without a mention of the objective, audience, or – for that matter – the desired result. This concerns me greatly as I believe these marketers have the talent and the know how, but seem to be so focused on the tactical efforts due to heavy influence of a sales team or perhaps their senior management to get something out there.

A common trap inside these corporate marketing departments assumes that when you talk about marketing, you’re automatically talking about tactical marketing – placing ads, generating leads, sending out mailers, attending tradeshows, creating brochures, implementing a follow-up system, and so forth.

There is a failure to realize that the strategic side – what you say, how you say it, and who you say it to – is always more important than the marketing medium of how you deliver it.

The distinction between the two is critical and these marketing folks need to stay focused on their strategies without undue influence from other departments. Now, I am not suggesting that the sales team input is not important. I do believe in alignment, but the conversations seem to shift to marketing tactic versus the bigger objectives. Tactical marketing is the execution of your marketing plan, such as generating leads, placing media, creating marketing tools, and implementing a follow-up system. In other words, it’s the medium in which your message is delivered.

Strategic marketing has to do with the content of your marketing message and starts with understanding your customers and the issues that are important to them, understanding why they buy or make a decision.

Just putting a marketing message in an appropriate medium for your target audience to hear or read is not good enough. The strategy must derive from an understanding of what’s important to to the target audience. Otherwise, this tactical part of the marketing process will be much less effective, resulting in ads that under-perform.

Many companies simply try to craft their sales pitch more before they find out how to provide a solution to their consumers’ needs.

Sorry if this sounds like a rant, the true intent is to remind all of your busy tech marketers to stay focused.

Leave a Comment » | Tech Branding, Tech Lead Generation, Tech Marketing, Tech Marketing Strategies, Tech Marketing Tips, Tech Sales, Tech Social Marketing, Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Tom Jacobs

Tech Marketers: Too Much Proof = Bad Content

January 21, 2010

When developing your content to build credibility for your tech solution it makes common sense to include data to back up your claims. Let’s face it, we are taught throughout our educational years to demonstrate and prove our intended results with documented evidence. There are so many technology solutions competing for share of voice, that incorporating proof data to build credibility in your marketing message should be automatic. Without the backing of data to support your claims, you leave your prospect simply wondering if they should take a chance on your solution.

But how much data? With technology solutions, I have reviewed many “pitches” that incorporate pages and pages of data to prove out their thinking. Marketing teams at technology companies that have adopted the content approach are gathering and analyzing data toward developing their proof points. Certainly they are demonstrating their commitment to content development which is quite necessary for their marketing initiatives. But I am often surprised by the results of this activity. Most often this content is delivered through heavy white papers and elongated sales brochures, powerpoints that can go one for days, all filled with mounds of data and proof points to back their claims.

I am not a tech buyer, but I read a lot of this content and am amazed at the quantity of data and the quality. There are some messages that have an overwhelming amount of data to support their claims, and causes me to become suspicious of their claims. It is almost too good to be true.

We can only comprehend so much. Our minds have limits in our ability to digest information and too much knowledge can undermine the intended message, greatly diminishing the intended credibility.

Developing content should be a critical component to your external marketing initiatives, but balancing the amount of benefits and proof points included within your messaging should consider the audiences ability to comprehend and digest your message. If you are truly attempting to build credibility for your tech solution, limit your messaging to four or five data points that can prove out your claims.

Leave a Comment » | Tech Lead Generation, Tech Marketing, Tech Marketing ROI, Tech Marketing Strategies, Tech Marketing Tips, Tech Sales, Tech Social Marketing | Permalink
Posted by Tom Jacobs

Tech Marketers: One Leadership Goal Drives Successful Sales Enablement

January 13, 2010

There’s a fundamental shift happening in technology marketing around the globe today, as the formerly adversarial relationship between sales and marketing is being replaced by a new level of collaboration driven by the need to achieve shared goals. Marketers face increasing pressure to provide sales with content that meets a specific need at a specific point in the sales cycle and at the same time marketing departments are challenged to reduce customer acquisition costs. This means that marketers need to shift from supporting, to enabling the sales team.

CMO’s at many technology companies are implementing more refined sales enablement programs to better the alignment of these two departments. But here is the bottom line, these sales enablement programs, no matter the intention of both sales and marketing are only going to be successful with the appropriate leadership in place. Too often, marketing and sales attempt to align with each department head calling the shots and driving the strategy with their department needs in mind. This tends to cause confusion and hampers the process.

ITSMA’s most recent study Sales Enablement Practices and Trends: Increasing Marketing’s Impact suggests sales enablement needs to fall under a unified leadership in order to be the most effective. It helps assure that the burden to improve performance will be shared fairly between marketing and sales. It also creates a single point of authority and accountability for improving the processes that marketing and sales share. Julie Schwartz, from ITSMA details six reasons as to why sales and marketing need to share the accountability and leadership for effective sales enablement efforts:

Integrate a split buying process. Many companies still treat the buying process as having two separate and distinct pieces, with marketing generating leads and then handing leads off to sales. But marketing and sales should collaborate to move the customer/prospect through the entire customer buying process, not just hand off leads.
Create a single system for tracking leads. One of the best ways to encourage collaboration between marketing and sales is to integrate a marketing automation system with sales’ CRM system to track lead generation and nurturing. But that kind of integration requires leadership.
Reduce indirect selling activities. Shared leadership would also help eliminate the inefficiency that’s occurring right now in the sales process. Salespeople spend 23% of their time on indirect selling activities (lead generation and tracking, planning, account management, creating presentations, customer research, after-sales service, etc.). This is time that could be better spent in front of customers.
Make marketing accountable for that reduction. If sales enablement is all about reducing the cost and effort to move a prospect through the buying process, marketers need to be taking steps to reduce the time that salespeople spend on activities that marketers could be doing more efficiently. But until more marketing organizations become accountable for reducing the time sales spends in indirect selling activities, improvements are less likely. We found that just 11% of marketing organizations are held accountable for doing this now, whereas 37% are in the planning stages. A strong, shared marketing and sales leader could convince the other 51% to get started soon.
Help marketing improve its most effective programs. In our survey, marketers told us that the three most effective sales enablement activities are reference programs, ROI/price justification tools, and client briefing centers. To be effective, all these programs require close collaboration between sales and marketing.
Know what the other hand is doing. We found that companies that are succeeding at sales enablement use quantitative metrics to gauge the impact of sales enablement activities, such as:
- Number of closed deals influenced by marketing
- Number of opportunities in the pipeline
- Number of sales-ready leads generated

If we are going to close the gap between marketing and sales and truly reduce the cost and effort to move a prospect through the buying process, it’s time for marketing and sales to get together.

Leave a Comment » | Tech Lead Generation, Tech Marketing, Tech Marketing ROI, Tech Marketing Strategies, Tech Sales | Permalink
Posted by Tom Jacobs

Is Facebook Really a B2B marketing tool?

January 11, 2010

I have a constant internal debate over the use of Facebook as a B2B marketing tool. I truly believe in social media as a B2B marketing channel. LinkedIn, Twitter and other popular sites relevant to technology have proven to be quite effective as listening devices, and communication channels. But when it comes to Facebook, I have some comfort issues as I perceive Facebook as a more personal oriented forum. This may be due to the fact that my family uses Facebook to communicate with their friends and other family members. Most of the activity is very much oriented towards their organization and coordination of personal activities.

So when I step back and think about Facebook as a B2B marketing vehicles, I start to question how B2B content is going to be relevant in this type of environment. Perhaps if you are a smaller business, this may be a valuable social media choice, but when you think about enterprise based technology, even though your tech buyers and clients are probably on Facebook, are they there for personal reasons? Do they want to participate in business banter or is Facebook more of a respite from their busy work day?

But here’s my observation– most of the really good examples out there are of B2C companies using Facebook to reach their target audience. There are far fewer concrete examples of successful use of B2B companies using Facebook. And I’d caution that it’s not a very good tool for B2B companies to use – as least not right now, anyway.

Why? One simple word: blocking. Those of us who dabble around in social media all day from our laptops, iPhones, or the comfort of our Web 2.0-crazed agency jobs can easily forget that many people work for companies who block Facebook at work. For B2B companies, their target audience is usually (obviously) other companies, but more specifically, it’s the decision-makers within those other companies. This could mean purchasing managers, marketing managers, IT managers or the C-suite. You can have the coolest Facebook fan page in the world for your business, but if none of your target audience can actually access it during the day while they’re at work (and making those decisions about whether to use your company’s product or service), then it’s probably not the best way to engage your potential customers.

It’s not as easy to see how Facebook might be useful in the business-to-business marketing context beyond personal connections and networking. That’s in part why the B2B answer to social networking is often “We are all on LinkedIn (or Twitter)”

What do you think?

3 Comments | Tech Branding, Tech Lead Generation, Tech Marketing, Tech Marketing Strategies, Tech Social Marketing | Permalink
Posted by Tom Jacobs

Tech Marketers, it is time to evaluate your lead nurturing efforts

November 30, 2009

Whether you have a lead nurturing strategy in place or you are about to incorporate this strategy in to your lead generation activities, now is a good time to evaluate your nurturing approach.

A quick recap of the definition of lead nurturing: In a complex sales cycle, nurturing is a relationship-building approach utilizing multiple media to provide relevant information to prospects and engage in an ongoing dialog until qualified prospects are deemed “sales ready.” A smart nurturing strategy shortens the sales cycle and improves return on investment from lead-generation activities, so it is important to reconsider or re-evaluate your nurturing strategy frequently.

If you read about the effectiveness of well thought out lead nurturing efforts, you may have come across data that suggests some lead nurturing programs can yield anywhere from 15% to 200% in additional, new qualified leads. Close ratios are higher. Sales pipelines open up and are stronger. Average sales cycles are shorter. One company determined that its nurtured prospects bought from 100% to 250% more than those that were not nurtured. Lastly, many nurtured prospects cited greater overall positive impression of the company. Bottom line is that a properly planned lead nurture strategy can drive results.

Ardath Albee, a known B2B Marketing Strategist, recently outlined some basic evaluation criteria to evaluate your lead nurturing efforts. These are great thought starters and should be discussed among your team responsible for lead nurturing.

3 steps for evaluation that will help you create a baseline for building an effective nurturing program.

First – About your customers:

Who buys from us?
Why do they buy from us?
What do they need to know to make a purchase decision?
Who influences our buyers?
What could stop them from choosing to buy?
Is one kind of customer more ideal than another? Why?
What’s your best foot-in-the-door sale?

Second – Evaluate your prospect database:

Who’s in it?
Did THEY opt in or did YOU opt them in?
How do the prospects in your database match up with what you know about your customers?
How are you getting more prospects to opt in?
When’s the last time your database heard from you?
What topics have they responded to?
What’s your opt out rate?

Third – Audit Your Website:

See Ardath’s recent blog post about how to audit your web pages.

How much information on your website matches the answers to the questions in the About Your Customers step above?
What can be improved?

1 Comment | Tech Lead Generation, Tech Marketing, Tech Marketing ROI, Tech Marketing Strategies, Tech Marketing Tips, Tech Sales | Permalink
Posted by Tom Jacobs

Marketing your technology to the C-suite

November 24, 2009

“We need to sell up to the C-Suite.” This is the ongoing discussion and challenge among all marketing folks in technology. The thought that if we can get our message beyond the day-to-day executives that we currently have a relationship with, the sales people will have a better business outcome. Although the C-suite is a very important audience and can certainly influence the purchase decision, as a marketer, you cannot ignore those day-to-day executives. In many cases they have the direct line to the C-suite and can determine if your message is C-suite worthy.

Reality in many cases is that each prospective organization has very different protocols in terms of the C-suite influence. Many CEOs, CIOs and CFOs rely on these day-to-day executives to make smart decisions and at the end of the day they trust their talents. This would then suggest that the C-suite audience is simply going to forward your information right back to the day-to-day folks or perhaps simply discard your message. Worse yet, is if you have not developed your content specific to a C-suite audience you can potentially create a perception of irrelevance among this highly sought after group.

Should you be marketing to the C-suite…I believe yes!. There is still great value in creating awareness and building credibility for your technology solutions among the c-suite audience. But as with all other strategic marketing efforts these C-suite focused activities should be integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts against the day-to-day executives.

If you are looking to penetrate or increase your share of corporate budget and provide long-term value to a company you would be wise to plan your approach both tactically and via content development. Do some homework against each account. Meet with your sales team and map out the authority of the day-to-day executives as well as the influence of the C-suite. Find out how the organization tends to make decisions. Figure out who is actually involved in the decision-making process. What information do they need? When do they need it? Who are the influencers?

Using this information, develop a content strategy to nurture both the c-suite as well as the day-to-day executive. Have your content developed so you may react appropriately based on response or feedback from these two targets. Every touch point should add value to the conversation and continue to build your credibility.

Keep in mind, you need to prove your worth to those who will immediately benefit: the day-to-day business-unit executives. With the right messaging and ROI, they may take the results directly to the C-suite, which will increase the impact of your C-level messaging. The effectiveness of your messaging to th e c-suite will increase if it is delivered by the very team they trust.

Leave a Comment » | Tech Branding, Tech Lead Generation, Tech Marketing, Tech Marketing ROI, Tech Marketing Strategies, Tech Marketing Tips, Tech Sales | Permalink
Posted by Tom Jacobs

2010 End user sentiments from Gartner

November 16, 2009

Unable to attend this meeting, I was fortunate enough to have one of our clients pass his notes on from a recent Gartner summit regarding IT end user sentiments. The information was collected by Gartner and reflects the forward thinking of many IT buyers and decision makers for the upcoming 2010 year. Although most of these thoughts are a bit random, I always appreciate the chance to peek inside the mindsets of the tech buyers. I think the pattern here suggests that there is opportunity for tech marketers to identify how their solutions fit within the context of the current conversations.

For tech marketers to take advantage of these opportunities, you must build the content and prove out your solutions as they relate to what is on the it buyers mind.

IT end user sentiments in 2010:

* 6.9m jobs lost since 2008 in the US, and unemployment is still rising.

* The IT industry is exiting its worst year ever.

* Healthcare, Utilities and Government will be the first sectors to recover.

* While the IT industry is on its way to recovery, we expect that by 2012 we will only be at 2008 revenue levels.

* 60% of CEOs surveyed think IT is holding the business back.

* In 2009 1m servers will have their replacement delayed, which means increased risk to the enterprise.

* The age of the IT industry’s hardware is increasing because many companies are delaying the purchases of servers, PCs, etc. So we need to plan for increased equipment failure rates.

* The top 3 focus areas right now are cost management, growth and risk management.

* Pattern Based Strategies—this is a hot theme, and the most profound of all. It’s about implementing a framework that seeks models and looks for leading indicators in the marketplace and then exploits them (e.g. CPM, business analytics).

* What’s the new normal? Regulatory oversight will increase dramatically because of all the bailouts.

* There will be a demand for increased accountability and transparency all the time now.

* Increased scrutiny of IT is a good thing—it gives you more data to work with and forces you to see where IT is contributing.

* Bloated apps portfolio is the big pink elephant in the apps space. Apps are growing at 4-7%/year.

* Apps portfolio management needs to reduce costs and risks.

* IT starts with an inventory of apps (you do have one, right??!).

* Start by assigning a business owner, use data (eg. Cost, utilization and risk) to justify its existence.

* The “Collective” is a major force out there. Don’t ignore it or try to control it. It’s pervasive and galvanizes around the social network and is very influential (e.g. YouTube and Facebook). You can’t halt it.

* Whether the company allows it or not, people are doing social networking.

* Don’t miss the early signals about what’s coming (e.g. Wall Street).

* Don’t view your strategy as linear—that blinds us to emerging patterns, and that takes a behavioral problem and makes it worse with a systems problem.

* Finance’s biggest challenge is how to forecast results.

* Don’t ignore The Collective—it’s something we can’t ignore and it helps with early pattern detection

* We need a performance measuring system that plans, simulates and forecasts performance at all levels of the organization.

* Security. Don’t try to protect yourself as much as possible. Ask yourself what you will do to protect yourselves and what you won’t do. You can’t protect against everything.

* Risk management’s philosophy is to protect against reasonable threats. Accept risk to perform well.

* You must have Transparency for the Return to Growth in the new business environment.

* Like IT, security must measure its impact on the business.

* If all you focus on is cost, then everything you look at will be an expense.

* Balance cost, risk and growth to be successful.

Leave a Comment » | Tech Marketing, Tech Marketing Strategies, Tech Marketing Tips, Tech Marketing Trends, Tech Sales | Permalink
Posted by Tom Jacobs

Market your technology like a publisher

November 12, 2009

For many years, tech buyers have responded to countless surveys informing us that they are actively involved in exploring information that will help them solve a problem in the early stages of their purchasing cycle. They use this discovery phase of their purchase cycle to identify new solutions, providers and ensure the content of what they find is credible. This discovery takes place across the various web outlets, trade magazines and even document sharing among peers.

In the old days, before the growing influence of web content, trade publications played a major role in proving industry relevant information. With ad spends down, many trade pubs are struggling and some have even closed down. This leaves a potential void in relevant information the tech buyers still seek to scope their upcoming solutions. This is a marketing opportunity for all technology providers. Filling the current and future void by creating the content to ensure your organization remains relevant, credible and has an authoritative voice within your technology space. I am not suggesting that all trade pubs will be out of business, but as a marketer, you have a great opportunity here to connect with various levels of tech buyers if you develop your marketing strategy like a publisher.

Chris Koch, the Director of Research and Thought leadership for ITSMA, recently outlined the publisher process that technology marketers can adopt and utilize to fulfill the demand for relevant content among tech buyers. As he points out having process that simulates a publisher can ensure your content development remains relevant to the buying audience.

Identify the target reader. Publications fail if they don’t grasp exactly whom they are trying to reach and why. Marketers need to do a similar kind of segmentation.
Create an editorial calendar. As Chris points out every good publication has an editorial calendar. Identifying the reader’s needs, forecasting discussion trends and uncovering the gaps of content you will need to develop are great benefits of putting a calendar together. This calender can initiate numerous content ideas as well as drive some tactical recommendations. Probably the most important piece of the process!
Research the reader. Most magazines do annual reader surveys to ask subscribers what they think of the magazine and what could be improved. Through these surveys, they construct archetypes of the typical reader. Marketers can replace offers with survey questions once in a while to help build an understanding of timely issues to drive future content.
Interview the players and the experts. Journalists aren’t experts in the fields they cover, but they’re experts at finding those that are. Marketers need to talk to subject matter experts inside the company, influencers outside the company (analysts, academics, bloggers, journalists), and customers. All you need to do is ask questions and the content will flow out of these people.
Audit content. When surveying readers, magazines also ask whether readers like specific articles and subject areas covered in the magazine. Marketers need the same feedback from customers and from salespeople. If you don’t have the money to do research, consider adding a review button or comment feature to content.
Diversify content. Most magazines are a mixture of long and short, graphic and text-heavy stories. Marketing content needs to be similarly diverse.
Cycle through top reader interests. Magazines develop a short list of topic areas that matter most to their readers and hit those topics regularly as part of the issue planning process. Marketers need to develop a similar list as they plan their content calendars.
Be timely. Editors always try to leave room in the planning process for the timely, exclusive scoop—the story that identifies an important trend before others do. For marketers, being timely means having content that matches every stage of the buying cycle, so that you have a chance for an “exclusive” at each stage.

1 Comment | Tech Branding, Tech Marketing, Tech Marketing Strategies, Tech Marketing Tips | Permalink
Posted by Tom Jacobs

Tech Marketers: Reach the Influencer with Video

November 10, 2009

One of the most difficult challenges technology marketers face is reaching the influencers of a technology purchase. In most cases, technology marketers have a house file or have purchased a list identifying a key contact at the prospective company. But as we all know, there are multiple persons within an organization involved in purchasing large technology solutions. Reaching these “other” folks has proven difficult for many marketers.

One solution to reach the important influencers in an organization is to utilize video to create a more viral approach beyond the one or two email addresses or contact information you may have. Whether you embed video in your emails or post it on a site and link back to it in your email, the video is a great vehicle to create conversation. Of course, you need to ensure that embedded videos are sized correctly so you do not hamper the delivery with an enormous file size.

Video content can be developed to drill down to a technology solution benefit and communicate in an engaging manner. If your technology solutions have more complexity to them, break up the content into more concise parts and use them in a series. As long as you create relevant content addressing business issues, your video can have potential pass along value, with the ultimate goal of reaching those individuals beyond your original contact information.

Your sales team can follow-up sales calls with an embedded video in their email with language to encourage forwarding this or the link to additional colleagues within their organization. Back end tracking can capture viewers information and allow your sales team to follow-up with any new contacts.

Leave a Comment » | Tech Marketing, Tech Marketing ROI, Tech Marketing Strategies, Tech Marketing Tips, Tech Sales | Permalink
Posted by Tom Jacobs

Tech Marketers: CIOs Planning for Positive 2010

November 6, 2009

The year 2010 is looking positive for the industry as CIOs forecast their budgets and spend levels. This provides some positive news after a very difficult 2009.

The challenge for tech marketers is to ensure you have strong market presence to ensure your credibility against your tech solutions. I have suggested in previous posts that a fully integrated marketing communications plan with relevant content and messaging will be necessary for many technology companies to once again gain mind share. Let’s face it, many technology companies reduced their marketing spending last year (rightfully so) causing a much-needed dedicated effort towards rebuilding their market presence within their respective space. Now is the time to get aggressive.

Based on a recent CIO IT Economic Impact survey conducted by CIO.com to gauge how current economic conditions are impacting IT spending plans, 257 tech purchasing participants forecast very encouraging signs for the upcoming year. Some of the highlights include:

Over 70% of IT budgets will either Increase or stay the same

Question: Will your overall IT budget increase, decrease or remain the same in the next 12 months compared to the past 12 months?

moneyspend 40% Increase

34% Remain the same

26% decrease

Spending Increasing Across all Product Categories

Question: What areas will your budget increase in the next 12 months compared to the past12 months?

New Project Spending on the Rise

Question: In the next 12 months, what percent of your total IT budget do you anticipate will be devoted to operations & maintenance related projects versus new?

budgetchart