the best of itsma’s 20th annual conference
DESCRIPTION
The year’s biggest event for B2B services marketers is the ITSMA annual conference, which last year’s featured dozens of speakers, workshops, and smaller events and one-to-one consultations. Presenting were experts and pratitioners from ITSMA, Cisco, CSC, EMC, Dell, IBM, Avaya, Thomson Reuters, McKinsey, Harvard, KPMG, Deloitte, and Oracle. The breadth of topics covered by speakers demonstrates that marketing’s responsibilities keep expanding. The number of new tools and technologies is also growing fast, which heightens the importance for marketers of planning well, measuring results, and staying connected to internal and external stakeholders. And for all the focus on marketing technology, data analytics, and digital engagement, the biggest takeaway from the conference may be that old-fashioned person-to-person interaction—with customers, internal stakeholders, and marketing peers—is essential for both professional improvement and personal well-being.TRANSCRIPT
The Best of ITSMA’s 20th Annual Conference
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 2
Conference Kickoff & Opening Remarks
Dave Munn
President and CEO
ITSMA
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 3
Opening Remarks: Five Priorities for Marketers
1. Use metrics that matter – Only half of marketers think metrics are
important, and they often measure
efficiency rather than effectiveness and
don’t link to business outcomes
– Consequently, few CEOs and CFOs use
marketing’s metrics
2. Use technology effectively – Most marketers think tech will be
increasingly critical to marketing, yet two-
thirds are underinvested in it
3. Be relevant and personalized – Overwhelmed buyers respond only to the
most personal and relevant
– Most B2B marketers aren’t yet B2I
(business to individual)
4. Do thought leadership selling – Only one company in five is effective at
using thought leadership to sell
– Marketers need to provide better training,
customization, and support
5. Create a proactive and adaptive
marketing culture – Marketers face constant disruption
– How can marketing leaders become
proactive, collaborative, and better at
anticipating opportunities and threats?
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 4
Marketing as an Accountable Business Partner and Revenue Center
Karen Walker
Senior Vice President
Global Marketing
Cisco Systems
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 5
Marketing as an Accountable Business Partner and Revenue Center
Our new North Star: revenue.
Optimize every aspect of the
portfolio to drive revenue
Over half of marketers have a
revenue goal—and it’s going up
We’re still Mad Men, but are also
Math Men: turning data into
stories that lead to actions
resulting in revenue
Focus first on strategic goals,
then tactics
Learn to be repeatable and
predictable in driving revenue
Make explicit pacts with sales on
rules for leads and follow up
Events are still important, but
merge the physical and digital to
track customer experience and
sales opportunities
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 6
Measuring & Communicating
Marketing’s Value
Nick Panayi
Director
Global Brand &
Digital Marketing
CSC
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 7
Measuring & Communicating Marketing’s Value
Technology brings data, data brings
knowledge, and knowledge is power – With the marketing dashboard, senior
executives see marketing’s
contribution to total contract value
(TCV), updated daily, dynamically
– Drill-down data provides sales with
funnel metrics and individual lead
details
To market smarter, CSC had to build
a digital infrastructure – 45 best-of-breed tools, integrated
seamlessly into a single ecosystem
– A hub and spoke model with the
customer management system (CMS)
as the core brain
The right people are the lynchpin for
success – People understand the information
and context
– People communicate with executives
and sales
Dashboards are great rearview
mirrors; the real value comes from
predictive analytics – Use digital body language to identify
leads before they raise their hands
– Create an index score to predict
impact of a piece of content
Data and analytics enable content
personalization: marketing to
individuals and accounts
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 8
How Buyers Consume:
Content, Knowledge, and
Wisdom
Julie Schwartz
SVP, Research and
Thought Leadership
ITSMA
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 9
How Buyers Consume: Content, Knowledge, and Wisdom
Today’s buyers are hungry for
knowledge. They spend a lot of time
educating themselves. The bigger the
buyer, the more time they spend.
Two trends:
– There is a need for person-to-
person connections
– The role of SMEs is expanding
45% of buyer time is spent talking to
people (versus 55% reading online
and in print)
– Half of this time is spent with peers,
especially those within the company
– The other half is with SMEs, sales,
and at events
Buyers are happy to talk to sales –
76% are satisfied with their most
recent sales experience
SMEs are the top people-based
source for all functions except lines of
business, where they are number two
– Most buyers have good access to
SMEs, but there is room for
improvement
– The most credible SMEs are those
who demonstrate knowledge of the
buyer’s business
Top takeaways:
– Buyers can’t learn it all digitally;
they need to interact with people
– Online, offline, and people-based
interactions need to be seamlessly
integrated
– The people they most want to talk
to are your SMEs – and since there
aren’t enough, you have to find
ways to scale them.
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 10
Enabling Sales with New
Playbooks, Mobile Apps,
Services-led Offers, and More
Barb Robidoux
Vice President
Services Marketing
EMC
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 11
Enabling Sales with New Playbooks, Mobile Apps, Services-led Offers, and More
There are always two sales that you
have to make:
– Final customer
– Salespeople who talk to the
customer
We created a free IT Transformation
Workshop for the final customer.
Then we actively marketed it to sales
via:
– Playbook available via mobile app
– Annual training program, led by
SME “rock stars”, with pre-work,
role-playing, pitch certification,
application of best practices to real
accounts
– Blog posts with links to materials
– Email to sales by VP America Sales
The workshop had three stages:
survey, benchmarking, and a write up
at the end
30-question survey to benchmark
customers relative to peers
– Facilitated dialogue about next
steps
– Kept tangible to get buy-in from
salespeople who sell products
– Sales loved it; the workshop
qualifies customers, moves them
along purchase journey
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 12
Developing Thought
Leadership Sellers:
Can Marketing Meet the
Challenge?
Dave Stein
Renowned Sales
Consultant, Trainer,
Author, and CEO of
ES Research Group
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 13
Developing Thought Leadership Sellers: Can Marketing Meet the Challenge?
Beware the right-brained sales-person;
logic and analysis work better than intuition
and charisma
To become trusted advisors, salespeople
need to:
– Manage customer’s perception of value
– Think strategically
– Be a better consultant
– Define and position solutions
Which requires:
– Financial acumen
– Research skills
– Industry and customer knowledge
Sales needs help in:
– Communicating value, not features/specs
– Measuring value for each persona within
customer organization
– Explaining the “how” and the “by how
much” in addition to the “what”
– Providing simulations, models, and case
studies to capture mindshare
Seek out the value buyer, not the
commodity buyer, who seeks:
– Long-term solution, not a quick fix
– Long-term partner, not vendor-on-
demand
– Long-term strategy, not day-to-day
tactics
– Planned investments, not lowest prices
– A view of the future, informed by the past
– A desire to lead, not just survive
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 14
Marketing Leaders Panel:
Digital Engagement and the
Evolving Role of Marketing
Facilitated by Jane Hiscock, President,
Farland Group
John Kennedy, Vice President,
Marketing IBM Global Business
Services
Eileen Lynch, Senior Vice President,
Marketing, Thomson Reuters
Roberto Ricossa, VP, Marketing &
Inside Sales, Avaya
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 15
Marketing Leaders Panel: Digital Engagement and the Evolving Role
of Marketing
Business buyers are consumers, too;
consumers now have higher expectations—
which spill into the business realm as well.
Marketers have a difficult job, but can also
be more effective, due to: – Transparency
– Personalization
– The rise of communities of like-minded
people
– Need for two-way communication, not
broadcasting
Don’t just target companies; target
individuals within companies—as well as the
influencers who surround each individual
There is no single content strategy; there are
many kinds of content offering different
value to different people – Learn from online journalists, who create
different versions for SEO, Tweeting, or
clicking into a site
– Salespeople almost need a script. Read your
content aloud. Is it simple and short? Would
you feel comfortable saying the words?
Transparency has had an impact on brand
building: – Brands used to be built through promotion
– Now what happens inside is almost as
visible as what happens outside
– The brand is the culture, the people, the full
operational characteristics of the company
– Marketers need to leverage what’s inside
the walls—especially the people
ROI = return on interesting; to content
consumers, if it’s interesting, they share it
Think beyond leads and pipeline to how
you can enable sales to close deals
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 16
Powering Growth through
Digital Advantage:
The B2B Perspective
David Edelman
Partner
Marketing & Sales Practice
McKinsey & Co.
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 17
Powering Growth Through Digital Advantage: The B2B Perspective
Digital is not about more. It’s about a different way
of engaging with customers and it requires
fundamental shifts in how you approach the
market.
“Digital” is also a misnomer. It’s multi-channel.
Clients want many ways of learning:
– Publishing and webcasts
– In-person speakers and conversations
– Talking to other clients
– Ability to convene people and facilitate meetings
is almost as valuable as the content itself
Think about core content themes used across
channels—that can be repackaged and reused
while presenting consistent themes.
– Spreading diverse content around has less
impact
– Themes should present a strong use case—
unlike what’s found on a hierarchical, catalogue-
like website
– Our theme: powering growth requires creating
some kind of digital advantage; sub-topics
support this larger theme
Services companies used to build the corporate
brand to the exclusion of people. Now customers
want authenticity and transparency—a dialogue
with individuals. Which drives:
– Use of social media
– Speaking through third-party forums (HBR,
Forbes)
– Metrics need to focus on intermediate steps.
There is no direct path from a Tweet to a deal.
– How many followers—and who are they?
– How many new conversations?
– How many face-to-face meetings and with
whom?
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 18
Engagement in the Era of
the Millennial
John Della Volpe
Founder & Managing
Partner, SocialSphere
and Director of Polling at
Harvard’s Institute of
Politics
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 19
Engagement in the Era of the Millennial
Millennials are the largest generation in history—one-
third of the global population and about a trillion dollars
in the US economy.
– They give back. They’re connected to society. They
value relationships.
– Ideal of sharing online is deeply embedded. They
have shared online every day of their lives.
– They expect everyone to be connected all the time.
It is easy to find a lot of information about individual
people who are online: age, race, location, clothing, PC
or Mac, music, political affiliation, and so on.
– For instance, a prominent early voice from the Arab
Spring in Egypt— who now has a half-million Twitter
followers—was Alya el-Hosseiny.
– Angry at America but also loves lasagna, Nirvana,
and The Simpsons.
– Alya is a window into thousands of like-minded
Egyptians.
The job of marketers is to find the Alya’s that matter to
their organizations.
– It’s a win-win, since you need their feedback to
shape the future of your project, and they want to be
recognized and play a role.
– Bring them into your CRM system and court them as
key influencers.
– Count their readers and aggregate the number of
impressions that they can drive.
“Orbit” measures elements driving online influence:
– Onsite engagement (broadcast or dialogue?).
– Reach of audience (1,000 followers puts you in the
top 5% of Twitter users).
– Bias (point of view).
– Influence (likelihood of retweeting).
– Topicality (frequency of creating engaging content).
Tweaking elements where you’re weak—for instance,
engaging rather than simply broadcasting—can
increase your influence.
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 20
Marketing Leaders Panel:
Leading Marketing Change
and Transformation
Facilitated by Bev Burgess,
Senior Vice President, ITSMA
• Julie Johnson, Executive Director,
Industries & Marketing, KPMG
• Steve Pinedo, Vice President,
Services Marketing, Oracle
• David B. Lee, Vice President,
Marketing, Strategy & Sales Enablement, Dell Services
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 21
Marketing Leaders Panel: Leading Marketing Change and Transformation
As products and deployment options
proliferate, it’s difficult for customers
to put them all together into a
coherent whole; that’s an opportunity
for marketing
Learn what your peers in sales do
– At Frito-Lay, executives board a
delivery truck to learn what the
salesperson—the delivery person—
has to know and do
– Deals and customer relationships
are our trucks. Commit to sit in front
of a customer throughout the sales
cycle. Learn what the salesperson
goes through—what enables and
what disables.
– Try to go arm-in-arm with sales to
customers saying, “We’re in this
together. Our metrics are the
same.”
Focus on stories—and never leave
out the “how” part. Not just victories,
but how the victory was achieved:
– The value proposition
– How it was communicated
– How the competition was disarmed
– How they can do it themselves
Create formal mechanisms to enable
voice of the customer such as Net
Promoter Score and Customer
advisory boards; map everyone
against those metrics
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 22
A Sampling of ITSMA Articles and Research
Strategy &
Market
Planning
How Buyers Consume Content, Knowledge, and Wisdom
Elevating Brand Perceptions: How TCS Reframed its Peer Group
ITSMA’s 2013 State of the Marketing Profession Address
Repositioning for SMAC: Seven Rules for a New Era
It’s a Marketing SMAC-down: Why You Need to Reposition Your Company
Marketing Transformation: Are We There Yet?
How Marketing Can Lead: The CMO as a Strategic Systems Thinker
Marketing for Impact: Five Strategic Imperatives for Growth
Portfolio
Management
From Complex to Comprehensible: Juniper Transforms the Services Portfolio
How Marketing Can Facilitate the Go-to-Market Strategy
Internal &
External
Communications
Professional Services and Solutions, 2012 Brand Tracking Study
How Dell Mobilized a Disciplined Army of Social Media Ambassadors
How to Market to Traditional and B2B Social Buyers
Triple Your Pipeline, Cut Churn, Expand Your Reach: Lessons from DocuSign
Sales
Enablement
ITSMA Online Survey: Thought Leadership Selling: How to Help Sales Influence Customers with Ideas
Microsoft’s ABM Metrics: Making the Case to Scale Up
Marketing
Operations
2013 ITSMA/VEM/Forrester Marketing Performance Management Survey: Increasing Marketing’s Relevance to the Business
Why You Need a Chief Marketing Technologist
Clean Up Your Data: Best Practices in Data, Modeling, and Metrics
Adopting Marketing Technology: Six Best Practices
Creating Great Marketing Dashboards
Realizing the Promise of Marketing Technology
Services Marketing Budgets and Benchmarks: 2013 Budget Allocations and Trends
For more ITSMA research, visit ITSMA’s Online Library at http://www.itsma.com/research/online-library/
The New Face of Marketing | Highlights | PN5311 | © 2014 ITSMA. All Rights Reserved. 23
Thank You
David C. Munn President & CEO
ITSMA
+1-781-862-8500, Ext. 117
For more information, visit www.itsma.com