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 02/26/2012 - 02/28/2012 Miami Beach FL

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 02/29/2012 West Hollywood CA

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 03/01/2012 New York NY

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 03/04/2012 - 03/06/2012 San Francisco CA

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 03/07/2012 San Jose CA

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Tech Marketing Guide to B2B

News, video, events, blogs about Social Media Marketing for high tech business-to-business from IDG Knowledge Hub.

Tech Marketer's Guide to B2B

News, video, events, blogs about Technology Business and Marketing for high tech business-to-business from IDG Knowledge Hub.

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What It Takes to Cultivate and Keep High-End Business Clients

January 30th, 2012

Personal Branding Magazine, Feb. 2012

By Howard Sholkin

What It Takes to Cultivate and Keep High-End Business Clients

The business-to-business (btob) segment of our economy is sometimes overlooked but it is fundamental to how businesses and organizations buy goods and services to operate each day.  Some of the country’s largest corporations are primarily btob such as GE, IBM, Boeing, Raytheon, and Oracle.

I interviewed two executives focused on btob markets:  Michael Friedenberg, president & CEO, IDG Enterprise with media and event brands including CIO, Computerworld, InfoWorld, and Network World; and David Bernstein, associate publisher, BtoB for marketers and Media Business for the media industry.

Relationships, communications, and commitment

While Friedenberg and Bernstein serve different markets, they share some similar views.  They both emphasize the importance of relationships, communications, and commitment by high-end clients to repeat business.  “A high-end customer uses at least two media platforms including digital, events, custom solutions, and/or print,” explained Friedenberg whose clients include the largest technology vendors and agencies who serve them.  He said these clients have an in-depth plan to reach their prospects in IT, security, and finance professions, the same people who are IDG Enterprise readers, site visitors, and event attendees.

Bernstein, a media sales executive for 17 years, looks for a customer who wants to reach marketers across industries and who “regularly uses BtoB to meet marketing objectives and to do their jobs better.”  Bernstein adds that a high-end customer is not necessarily a high spender.  At IDG Enterprise, “The high-end customer spends 13 times more per year than the average customer,” noted Friedenberg. While high-end clients make up 30% of IDG Enterprise’s business, at BtoB the high-end represents more than 50%.

Not Just Order Taking

Both executives underscore the need for expectation setting and consultative selling.  “Continual conversation on goals and objectives and how we can work together to drive results for our customers forms the basis for a high-end relationship,” according to Friedenberg, a 20 year sales and management executive in technology media.  For Bernstein “communication is not just asking for the order but also working with clients as an extension of their marketing team.”  Friedenberg echoed those comments when he said; “With trust and an open dialogue our customers let us ‘inside’ to understand their challenges and allow our team to propose new programs to meet the marketers’ goals.”

Both recognize the strategic partnership that goes with high-end clients where services and advice play key roles.  For example, at IDG Enterprise, Avaya grew into a high-end account starting with online advertising and in-person events.  “With Avaya’s willingness to try different tactics to tell its story,” Friedenberg explained, “Avaya and IDG developed a custom program, the CIO Debate Series, which includes buyer research, multimedia content, IT executive participation, and the social web.”  He mentioned the adage that it is five times more expensive to find a new customer than to keep an existing one.

Finding High-End Clients

IDG Enterprise and BtoB mix direct selling with a variety of marketing programs.  BtoB leans on newsletters, print and online ads, the social web, and in-person events to find the next high-end client.  IDG Enterprise prospects with a blend of corporate, product, and field marketing programs via newsletters, social media, email, and events.

Neither Friedenberg nor Bernstein mentioned a marketer’s title as a high-end indicator.  As Bernstein pointed out, “in this economy all prospects need to be considered high-end potential because a small opportunity can ultimately grow into something big.”

 

Categories: Tech Business & Marketing Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

So the web will die, but what exactly will it be replaced by?

December 9th, 2011

Memeburn 

He says that fundamentally the web is a waste and inefficient. It fails to take advantage of the incredible processing power and storage abilities of the powerful gadgets and computers we use. It makes no sense to leave these out of the equation. Rather the best use of the technology at our disposal today is to use both the internet and the processing power of our devices — what Colony has dubbed the “app-internet”.

Read more… 

Categories: Tech Business & Marketing Blog, Tech Business & Marketing News | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Symptoms of a Sick Sales Funnel

November 17th, 2011

idc Symptoms of a Sick Sales Funnel

 

 

IDC, Kathleen Schaub

Can you believe that the sales funnel is 112 years old? Hmmm. Seems like a lot has happened since then. No wonder the ole’ funnel is showing signs of wear. IDC research shows that the time it takes for tech companies to create a B2B customer has increased by 15% in the past year. Is it time for a fresh approach?

The sales funnel first appears in a 1925 book by Edward K. Strong called The Psychology of Selling and Advertising. Strong attributes the funnel’s invention in 1898 to Elias St. Elmo Lewis, a sales manager for National Cash Register (NCR). St. Elmo Lewis, who later helped found the Association of National Advertisers, called his sales funnel AIDA for the four stages of “awareness, interest, desire, and action”.

The traditional funnel uses an industrial era paradigm that treats a buyer like a widget. With the right machine, a vendor can manufacture that widget into a product called a customer. In the industrial model, the marketing team works awareness at the upper funnel when buyers aren’t too interested. As soon as there is serious interest, marketing sends the “lead” down the assembly line, handing off to a sales rep whose must fabricate an opportunity and produce revenue.

The problem is…the traditional funnel doesn’t work that well anymore.

Alarming evidence of sick sales funnels show up in the data. Tech vendors now take an average of 19 months to create a large account customer, an increase of 15% in just the last year. Some of this lengthening is certainly due to uncertain economic times. Greater risk aversion has increased the size of the average buying team from 5 people to 6. But we can’t blame everything on the economy. Buyers, IDC finds, don’t like this slowness. They want vendors help to shorten the cycle. According to the IDC Buyer Experience study conducted earlier this year, buyers want to push for a 40% reduction in the time to buy.

Poor funnel health also shows up in unsustainable conversion rates. Research from IDC’s 2011 Tech Marketing Benchmark and 2011 Sales Productivity Benchmark reveals that it now takes over 1000 marketing awareness targets to get one sale.

Symptoms of a sick funnel. Beyond the data, tech vendors are experiencing the effects of their sick, out-dated, funnel approach. Here are some common symptoms companies complain about. Does your company experience any of these symptoms?

      1. Bickering: Sales and marketing teams bicker over the number & quality of leads.
      2. Bad Data: You don’t have the right data to judge performance, predict the pipeline, and refine strategy
      3. Wrong Tools: Sales people don’t have the tools needed to sell, in spite of the fact that they have access to a tonnage of content.
      4. Failed sales: Sales people fail to convert most leads. Marketing has no idea what sales plans to do with leads.
      5. Funnel Gaps: Prospects fall out of the pipeline, but you’re not sure when or why
      6. Silos: Sales team thinks it’s a waste of time to provide feedback to marketing and your marketing team rarely seeks input from sales.
      7. Missing Messages: You can’t nurture buyers because you lack the right content

We need a new funnel framework. Much has changed since the sales funnel’s 19th century invention. Business is far more sophisticated. The Internet and social media have dramatically changed the way buyers buy. IDC CMO Advisory has guidance for a funnel makeover in the form of a new Customer Creation Framework.

Here’s an introduction to that framework in an IDC webcast called, “Transforming Lead Management: How the new buyer is killing your funnel (and what to do about it).” (The webcast is recorded. Register and you can get the replay.)

Categories: Tech Business & Marketing Blog

Building the Big Tech Brand: Dell and Xerox

November 7th, 2011

IDC, Rich Vancil

The last two years have been hard times for tech marketers: there has been major pressure to transform execution, coupled with a significant reduction in the rate of budget growth. This is truly the “We are being asked to do more, with less” situation that marketers casually complain about. But this time, it is reality.

Despite the headwinds, I have been very impressed with the major brand campaigns that Dell and Xerox have been able to execute.

Both Dell and Xerox have spent billions for a major make-over of their product portfolios: acquiring and developing significant Services and Software capabilities. So much has changed at these companies that the brand perception no longer matches the product reality.

Brand perception simplified is: “What do you think of, when you think of Dell?” And, “What do you think of, when you think of Xerox?”. When I think “Dell”, I think of several cardboard boxes of new PC gear lying in my driveway, fresh off the UPS truck. When I think “Xerox”, I of course think “copiers”.

Changing a company’s brand perception is extremely difficult if not impossible. For how many years has our US auto industry been trying to change the negative brand perception for a now vastly improved product line? It has been, arguably, two decades. And still today, the brand perception does not yet square with the product reality.

If it doesn’t square up, you have to make a big move. The CMO’s of Dell and Xerox really had no choice but to undertake a major brand re-fresh and re-vamp. They needed to have brand perception start to match the product reality.

I am impressed by several factors in their execution:

1) The Dell and Xerox CMO’s were successful because they presented their case as not a marketing issue, but a company issue.

2) These marketers created the budgets necessary to start the Big job. Major shifts require major monies. Having studied marketing budgets for so long I am convinced there is just no way to do this by shifting around the marketing mix of the run-rate budget envelope.

3) They were able to do this during the time of a recession. With 20/20 hindsight: they get extra points for having a lot more marketplace “voice”, during a time when so many other vendors were hunkered down, scared and quiet.

The era of the Big Tech Brand is coming.

Going forward, our IT Industry will be one of consolidation and scale. It will be a slower growth industry and so the marketing challenge will be one of competitive share gains in addition to new market growth. And perhaps most importantly, the merging of our Business IT with our Personal IT will favor the biggest and best brands — as the power of consumer “pull” will become a major factor in the IT decision equation.

Think deeply about your brand!

Does it square with product reality?

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Key Findings From IDC’s 2011 Tech Marketing Benchmarks Study

September 21st, 2011

j ferrantino m Key Findings From IDCs 2011 Tech Marketing Benchmarks Study

Joseph Ferrantino, Research Analyst, CMO Advisory Service

Between May 15th and July 31st, 2011, IDC’s CMO Advisory Group fielded its 9th annual Tech Marketing Benchmarks Study. More than 100 tech companies representing about $850B in revenue responded, making this the CMO Advisory Group’s most successful benchmarking study to date. The average revenue for companies in this data set is $9.5B, and these data include companies ranging from less than $500M to about $100B. Technology hardware, software, and services companies with both direct and indirect channel strategies are represented in the database. The following are some key findings from IDC’s 2011 Tech Marketing Benchmarks Study.

Marketing investment growth in 2011 is lagging revenue growth at 3.5% and 6.5% respectively. Moreover, the 3.5% marketing investment change figure is significantly lower than tech marketer’s sentiments in January of 2011, when they reported expectations of an 8% increase to marketing budgets. In past years, IDC’s CMO Advisory Group has observed that marketing investment growth generally tracks revenue growth, but that trend has not re-emerged since the recession. Larger companies in particular are experiencing weak marketing investment growth. Companies with revenues between $3B and $9.9B are reporting marketing investment changes of only 2.1%, and companies with revenues greater than $10B are even less at 1.7%. Smaller companies are investing more heavily; companies with less than $500M, between $500M and $999M, and $3B to $2.9B in revenues have average marketing investment changes of 10%, 8.1%, and 7%. Services companies have the weakest marketing investment growth in 2011, however, with an average of -1%.

IDC’s CMO Advisory Service tracks a series of key performance indicators that marketing executives should monitor closely in their own organizations. The following are some key observations on changes to top-line key performance indicators in 2011:

  • Marketing Budget Ratios, which are calculated by dividing total marketing spend by revenue, are decreasing in 2011 because revenue growth is outpacing revenue growth.
  • IDC’s Awareness-Demand Ratio, which calculates the total amount of marketing spend dedicated to awareness building activities versus demand generating activities is at 52%, which means that the focus this year has shifted to Awareness. Last year, marketers were favoring Demand.
  • Program-to-People Ratios, which show the percentage of total marketing spend that is directed towards programs, have increased year over year to 60%. The main contributor to the increase in this ratio in 2011 is the increase in Awareness generating activities such as Advertising, which are more program-spend heavy.

2011+Tech+Marketing+Benchmarks+Webinar+V1 Key Findings From IDCs 2011 Tech Marketing Benchmarks Study

Digital Marketing Program spend–defined as display ads, search ads, email marketing, digital events, company web sites, search engine optimization, and social networks–continues to increase rapidly. In 2010 digital marketing accounted for 19.3% of total program spend, but in 2011 this number has risen to 26.4%. Advertising program spend, which includes display ads and search ads in addition to traditional advertising mediums, has also increased year over year. This finding is consistent with the overall increase in Awareness activities. Marketing organizations are also allocating more spend to web site content and development this year, which is now 8.2% of the total marketing program spend mix.

IDC’s CMO Advisory Service has also observed changes to marketing staff allocations in 2011, see below for some highlights:

  • Web site content and development is not only a key area of program spend investment–marketing departments have also increased their staff allocations in this area to 5.6%. IDC believes that this is a positive change, since IDC’s 2011 Buyer Experience Study revealed that the first place prospects turn to for information is a company’s web site.
  • Marketing operations has experienced growth for a number of years, but this trend seems to be leveling off as the position matures. Marketing operations currently accounts for 5.3% of total marketing staff which is a decrease from last year’s allocation. IDC does not believe that companies are actually reducing marketing operations staff; the cause of the year over year decrease is a combination of other staffing categories increasing more rapidly and an IDC taxonomy change to include a new category called marketing IT.
  • The CMO Advisory Group has been championing sales enablement for the past few years. In 2010 sales enablement accounted for 3.1% of the total staff mix, but since then this allocation has risen to 3.7%.

These are only a few of the findings uncovered by IDC’s 2011 Tech Marketing Benchmarks Study. For more information, or to participate in upcoming IDC studies please contact Joseph Ferrantino at jferrantino@idc.com.

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The Publisher Within: How to Identify and Capitalize on Content Marketing Assets

April 12th, 2011

There’s no lack of information in company websites and that is the problem. IT buyers told IDG Connect that they look for different content (shorter is better) from consideration to final purchase whether it’s a white paper, case study, podcast, or interactive tool. In the buyer research respondents said they find what they want less than a third of the time, half of their success rate of several years ago.

In a BtoB webcast in April 2011, IDG Connect’s Bob Johnson talked about the research and how it applies to marketers creating content and Colleen Buckley explained HP’s “clean sheet” project to substantially change content in its website. Ted Kohnen of Stein Rogan + Partners described the difficulties of content everywhere and presented examples of a few integrated campaigns.

This presentation is available until July 12, 2011.

Listen to the webinar

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In 2011, prepare for a shift from social media to social business

January 25th, 2011


Matthew Yorke, President IDG Global Solutions

The social web and related marketing services dominated programs with major technology marketers in 2010. While social began to emerge in 2009, it became a major revenue source and requirement by brand-name marketers.

We expect the growth of social advertising, social listening/analysis, and social content as advertising services to continue in 2011. A recent eMarketer report validates the trend: in 2011, four out of five U.S. businesses with 100 employees or more said they plan to use social media marketing. Recently, Google said the future of online display advertising is social display advertising. We fully expect 2011 to be the year where we stop talking exclusively about social media and start talking about social business.

The mobile train arrives

As for key opportunities and challenges ahead, the mobile train finally arrived in 2010 … the hype long since departed. 2011 will be the year when mobile advertising in all its forms becomes serious business. IDC predicts mobile advertising in the U.S. alone will be a $2 billion business.

Worldwide, more than 330 million smartphones and 42 million tablets will be sold. These new hyper-connected devices, which in the case of tablets will offer rich and vibrant brand experiences for advertisers, will shift consumption habits and take more and more of consumers’ time. The challenge for media companies and advertisers is where to invest: Is it Apple, Google, Research in Motion, and/or Microsoft?

We expect a lot of experimentation around the traditional website experience, as well as iPad-optimized treatments, app-specific experiences, and paid and free app versions as publishers seek to understand the needs of users and push the boundaries on paid/free content and distribution channels. All of this offers tremendous growth opportunities – as long as the industry continues to innovate.

Increasing importance of data

The importance of data rose in 2010, fueled by ad networks, exchanges and real-time bidding (RTB). One estimate shows almost half of display ads are served by exchanges and sell-side platforms, 33% via ad networks, and only 19% by publishers directly. The shift to automated systems will escalate in 2011 driven partly by efficiencies, partly by the real-time elements, and mostly by data.

But data will not be limited to exchanges and networks. We are entering an era of real-time marketing where data feeds a model of intelligent and actionable insights collected by publishers and delivered to marketing clients. Understanding how to capture and analyze that data will be a big challenge for publishers that need to adapt their work flows. There may be an even bigger challenge if the government responds to concerns about data privacy with new regulations.

Social media, mobile, and data crept up on us in 2010. In the new year, these trends will come together and transform the way media companies reach consumers, how content is personalized for them, and the relationships media companies have with advertisers.

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