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Push vs. Pull in B2B Marketing

January 30th, 2013

IDC PMS4colorversion 1 300x99 Push vs. Pull in B2B Marketing

By, Rich Vancil

In the world of retail consumer marketing, a Push strategy would indicate a manufacturer’s ability and monies to motivate a merchant to carry and promote its products. A Pull strategy would indicate that same manufacturer using advertising and promotion directed at consumers, with the objective of having those consumers demand the product from the merchant.

OK, I paraphrased that from marketing guru Phil Kotler in his eleventh edition of “Marketing Management”, which is a classic text. Also in this edition, Kotler states: “The internet will not become a major advertising medium like televison , radio, and print media. Internet users generally do not welcome advertising.”

When Professor Kotler revises that statement in his 12th edition, he might also write about the new dynamics of Push vs. Pull in B2B Marketing !

B2B marketing and selling  in the tech space is heavy on Push. There is a parallel here to B2C Push as described — with regard to the strong channel influence that manufacturers maintain. But the Bigger “Push” is the heavy-handed salesmanship that is directed at the B2B buyer. Marketing spends about half its budget on demand generation programs. And the Sales function spend four times  as much as all of Marketing, trying to persuade buyers.

It is indeed the internet that is changing this dynamic, as IDC VP Kathleen Schaub has written about exetensively in her New Buyer Journey analysis. The self-educated buyer resists Push. In fact, IDC research  shows that Buyers are practically begging their vendors: “Don’t sell so hard!.  So, don’t sell so hard; don’t push so hard. Customers don’t want to be sold to. They want to make self-determined choices.

The mantra for B2B marketers has to be Pull. If we acknowledge that the self-educated buyer  willmake his or her own choices on where to get educated, our job is to attract them to our thinking. The new Pull will continue to be advertising and promotion, but it will be more about helpful Social connections; an emphasis on educational marketing content; and greater demonstration that we have deep knowledge of  the customer’s business issues.

As you think about the next round of your marketing planning and budgets, also think about the general quotient of Push vs. Pull that you have in your overall mix. And ramp up the Pull — the gravitional forces that will hopefully guide your prospects to your way of thinking.

 

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and discussing this topic further on the blog!
Categories: Digital Media Blog, Tech Business & Marketing Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

B2b marketers need to keep sales enablement at the top of their to-do list

January 17th, 2012

BtoB/IDC’s Rich Vancil

What is “sales enablement”? In IDC’s research, we observe the broad and long process of how marketing assets are created, and then how those assets are provisioned and used by the selling teams. IDC’s definition of good sales enablement is: “Getting the right information into the hands of the right sellers at the right time and place, and in the right format, to move a sales opportunity forward.”

Read more… 

Categories: Advertising & Marketing Blog, Advertising & Marketing News | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

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?

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

Market Intelligence on the Move

June 8th, 2011

logo idc eag Market Intelligence on the Move

Rich Vancil

Transformation continues to sweep its way through the marketing function and no “department” within the function is exempt from change. For this month’s CMO Advisor newsletter, we are now focused on the market intelligence area.

Compared to its peer departments, Market Intelligence (MI) enjoys relative stability, as measured by the steadiness of the job description, job security and tenure, and budgets. But there is a groundswell of change — or at least an expressed desire for change. In a recent survey of MI professionals, IDC observes that MI executives are seeking to increase the value they deliver to the organizations they support, and to deliver that value with greater efficiency.

Indeed, it is the sentiment of executives that IDC interviewed that “The market intelligence organization will change more in the next 3 years than it has changed in the past 10 years”. That is a bold statement. To peel it back, here are the top areas of change that the MI profession is seeking to transform.

  • MI executives want to transform their client engagement model and become more “proactive”. In IDC’s opinion, this sentiment stems from MI’s traditional challenge of being a demand-driven organization that is constantly working in “response mode” to numerous requests from their internal customers.
  • The MI area seeks to increase its contributions to corporate strategy and sales enablement.
  • From a process and technology standpoint, MI would like to improve the information “value chain”, from data sourcing to information delivery.
  • MI seeks to provide greater support for long-range business planning.
  • MI seeks to demonstrate more visible / tangible business value for its work output.

Our sense is that MI professionals have a good future vision of their role; one where they are highly efficient, driving strategic as well as tactical business value, and are highly valued by their internal clients across the organization for information and “insights” that positively influence business outcomes.

There are two areas that I believe are the best place for MI Transformation steps to begin. These are echoed by my colleagues at IDC and also validated by our surveys with MI executives. I will describe these and also take a bit of “analyst license” and provide some operational suggestions.

1. Improving support for corporate strategy and long term business decisions. I think that MI professionals would love to get out of the heavy load of short-time, fast response calls for bits and bites of data. What they would like to do is be involved in longer term, meatier analysis that is served at higher levels in the organization and that support important business outcomes. But MI is constrained by their people and processes.
The process changes I would suggest would be first; provide more technology and training for self-service for the run-rate of short and tactical requests. Second, consider greater off-shoring or right-shoring of the “back office” analysis roles within MI, and thereby create more roles for higher level “management – consulting” type MI personnel who can interface with executives for the longer-cycle, more complex projects.

By the way, on the right-shoring of MI tasks (moving the non-client facing anayltical tasks to lower cost countries), many of the largest tech vendors are on this march right now.

2. Sales Enablement. In IDC’s many surveys of Selling Productivity, we see that very high salaried sales executives spend a large amount of their time searching for or re-creating information that will support their preparation. OK, so what function in the organization that is NOT the sales function is good at finding and organizing and delivering information? Market Intelligence! I think it would be a natural for the MI area to provide greater and more cost effective support for many sales-preparation activities. As an example, almost every MI function has a portal for serving and managing information assets. Why couldn’t those same portals – or a version thereof – be used for sales assets? The time spent on searching for information assets is one of the most wasted and most common activities of salespeople.

Advisor pic Market Intelligence on the Move

Recently, I have been writing on similar transformations in related business units such as marketing operations, and we are also seeing some related changes taking place within sales operations. For every part of the marketing organization, the pressure is on to be efficient and drive positive business outcomes. IDC believes that there is a bright future ahead for MI leaders (and their teams) that understand the transformation that is under way and can begin that journey with concrete and bold new steps.

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

Tech marketing budgets get re-fueled for 2011

May 23rd, 2011

BtoB/IDC’s Rich Vancil

Thank you to BtoB magazine for the invitation to blog! As a starting blog, I will stick to what I know best—the status and direction of tech marketing budgets and investment priorities. For those who don’t know my work, it is “heavy” on the research, based on IDC’s deep audits of the marketing budgets at most of the world’s top tech brands.

Tech marketing budgets have finally emerged from the grip of the 2008-2010 recession, and the average marketing budget for a large tech vendor will increase by 8% this year. Good news. Read more

Categories: Advertising & Marketing News | Tags: , , , , ,

Essential Guidance for 2011

March 21st, 2011

logo idc eag Essential Guidance for 2011

Rich Vancil

March 21, 2011

Building the Intelligent Sales & Marketing Organization.

IDC’s best and brightest analyst teams were assembled in Boston and San Jose during the past two weeks to present their latest insight and guidance for creating the global intelligent economy; focusing specifically on the impact of social, mobile and virtual technologies on this vision. Morning speakers discussed how to position for the third wave of IT industry growth driven by mobility, clouds, big data and intelligent industries. In the afternoon, one of the many tracks included presentations by IDC’s Sales and Marketing Advisory team about the vision of the intelligent sales and marketing organization and they key success factors required to achieve this vision. A few key take-aways from each of the presentations in this track are provided below.

Executing for Marketing Excellence in 2011 by Rich Vancil:

Start – or accelerate – your social business transformation

  • With communication cycle-times dropping and the purchase decision influence continue to shift to buyers, a shift to “social business” is imperative for your success;
  • 41% of businesses have already implemented an enterprise social software solution
  • Focus on building “peer-to-peer” connections, not “vendor-to-customer”

    • Make a deeper investment in intelligence and operations

  • Drive marketing operations and market intelligence initiatives and investment down through the organization, across the business units and into the regions
  • Better establish and govern the processes for sales enablement and data quality to improve sales intelligence and their ability to leverage insight and resources.

    • Build a better budget (IDC CMO and Sales Advisory clients should refer to IDC’s combined marketing and sales investment benchmarks data)

  • As marketing budgets recover, allocate new investments with the needs of a new reality – digital marketing is here to stay, and is only increasing in its ability to drive awareness building and demand generation; and greater alignment with sales will require continued investment in campaign management, sales enablement and lead management extending into what has traditionally been considered sales’ domain.

    • Building the Intelligence Sales Organization by Michael Gerard:

    Listen to your buyers:

  • Technology buyers indicated a desire to reduce their buying cycle time by 40%.
  • Two-thirds of the delay between desire vs. actual buying cycle time is the result of buyers’ internal funding and decision-making processes; however, vendors’ sales teams can impact this part of the delay!

    • Drive sales to be more strategic by investing in a next generation sales operations team which focuses on – sales strategy, productivity and automation. Team with marketing, your learning and development organization and IT to gaps in sales intelligence – customer intelligence for sales and sales enablement.

    Push the limits on sales performance measurement

  • Establish a sales analyst function to better measure sales productivity
  • Improve data quality with the aid of other parts of the organization
  • Analyze the sales pipeline, rep performance and the impact of sales productivity improvement initiatives to help impact strategic and tactical decision-making

    • The Sales & Marketing Automation Imperative by Gerry Murray:

  • Investment in sales and marketing automation continues to increase as companies recognize the value of technology in adapting to new market realities
  • However, sales and marketing need to better align across their own teams as well with other parts of the organization to create a more holistic experience for customers (e.g., marketing, sales, finance, services, support)
  • Your company should establish a customer data czar, with team members in sales and marketing, to execute and govern data quality processes.
  • Evolve to a more comprehensive sales enablement platform (i.e., beyond a content portal) centered on integrated customer experience management

    • Clients of IDC’s Sales Advisory Service [http://www.idc.com/eagroup/sales.jsp] and CMO Advisory Service [http://www.idc.com/eagroup/cmo.jsp] should contact us for a full overview of any of these areas as well as access to our latest research schedule and listing of published research.

    Please do provide any comments on this topic below or reach out to us to participate in upcoming sales and marketing research.

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

    Update on Social Business Transformation

    March 1st, 2011

    logo idc eag Update on Social Business Transformation

    Rich Vancil

    Update on Social Business Transformation

    Figure1a Update on Social Business Transformation

    Social Media in the B2B world has got a bit of a bad rap right now. Let’s frame the problem. The obstacles might be spoken (or whispered) as:

    • “These new communication platforms, and this social media movement within our company…is …who knows? Well, let’s just keep an eye on it. Let’s see what develops. But for the time being these are…
    • NOT the valid business-communications media we should be using to communicate with the serious audience we wish to reach. ”

    These obstacles may be over-observed.

    Let’s broaden the definition and talk not about Social Media, but about “Social Business Transformation”. The real Transformation lies not in what you see: with Twitter or LinkedIn or FaceBook. For personal networking, these tools may be the whole game: you are involved in connections that are one or two links deep. But at the enterprise level these tools are merely the surface layer. Social Business Transformation is about deep communications adaptation; changes in culture; new rules of engagement; shifts in organizational centers-of-influence; and then (lastly) the associated tools and technologies that enable communications on the surface.

    IDC is digging deeper to uncover this major trend and transformation in business communications. “Social” will continue to press its way into the enterprise – into our lives as business professionals.

    With my research partner and IDC’s Social Business expert Erin Traudt, IDC has just completed a series of interviews with IBM about their own Social Business Transformation We are impressed with IBM’s accomplishments.

    To boil it down, here are three observations for Social Business Transformation success:

    1. Tap in to the Professional Ego.

    You say that you enter into a web community because you want to “connect”. But I would suggest that most of the energy behind any personal or business Social Media activity has a strong element of: “Here I am!” None of us would enter a single Social keystroke unless we wanted to satisfy an ego need. The need to feel important. And, (fingers-crossed), the desire to be recognized! By extension, would not the math argue that if we spend nine or ten hours each day at the workplace, that this dynamic should be a more powerful force in the business world (“Look at my great new technical workaround!”) than in the personal world (“Look at my cool new postcard collection!”)

    The IBM developerWorks website is a technical resource for the IBM developer community. Established in 2000, it is now one of the largest IBM sites, with over 4 million unique visitors per month. It is a resource where developers in the IBM ecosystem offer their knowledge and skills. About one-half of the content on this vast site is posted from outside of IBM: developers, partners, and customers. Why does it work? Professional ego! But it takes time and investment. developerWorks has been an eleven-year work-in-progress for IBM.

    2. You can’t force interaction.

    The viable and vibrant IBM communities we have studied are years in the making. It takes significant time and investment to devlop a community to the point where it is somewhat self-sustaining. One IBM executive noted that Community development is like planting a tree where the first year of nurturing, watering and pruning requires almost constant attention. And more than one IBM community that we examined was several years underway and still under active investment mode. It is also notable that each Community only becomes self-sustaining because of the external contributions (see above). Our estimate would be that for every one community that is self sustaining, that there are hundreds in “push” mode (hoping that our voices will be heard and enjoined).

    “If the people don’t want to come, all the marketing in the world won’t stop them”.

    3. Construct and Adhere to Policy.

    This is interesting. I think we all are a bit attracted to the Social Media because we can express ourselves in a way that allows us to put our corporate toes across the corporate line, if even for an instant! However, the successful sites that are viable today are here in part to some basic and sensible policing. We have to. We all need to protect our customers, to do the best by them.

    Our sense is that sustained and successful Social Business Transformation efforts are going to be more powerful than we have ever imagined. Good examples (such as with IBM) are already in place. Of course there are challenges; but these obstacles will over time be trumped by the benefits (see Figures).

    How is your company coming along on its own Social Business Transformation?
    - Rich Vancil

    

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

    Centralized vs. Decentralized Marketing

    November 19th, 2010

    The debate over the effectiveness of corporate, centralized marketing or decentralized, field marketing has been raging for years. Some vendors switch back and forth or settle on a combination.

    IDC’s Rich Vancil says the complexity of marketing programs requires a more centralized approach. IDG Strategic Marketing Services Director Howard Sholkin asked Rich about how a corporate program is more personalized than field initiatives that are closer to prospects?

    WATCH HERE

    Categories: Advertising & Marketing Research, Advertising & Marketing Video | Tags: , , , , , , ,

    IDC Recommendations for 2011 Plans

    November 15th, 2010

    There’s a gap between marketing spend and IT vendor revenue in 2010. Spending is a few percentage points behind the revenue growth according to survey responses by marketers at large tech companies. IDC’s Rich Vancil says the difference is greater than it should be and marketers need to address it.

    As you plan for 2011, Rich lists key considerations. Watch the video to learn what they are… WATCH HERE

    Categories: Advertising & Marketing Research, Advertising & Marketing Video | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

    Marketing 2010: What It Tells You About Planning for 2011

    November 8th, 2010

    The acceleration in spending on digital marketing requires new approaches to program management. IDC says agile marketing processes are worth considering. IDG Strategic Marketing Services Director Howard Sholkin asked IDC Vice President Rich Vancil what should marketers learn from this year and apply as they plan for 2011?

    WATCH HERE

    Categories: Advertising & Marketing Research, Advertising & Marketing Video, Digital Media Research, Digital Media Video | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,