Join Me And Your Fellow Sales Enablement HEROes In San Francisco!

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Bradford Holmes

We are putting together our final plans and the Sales Enablement Forum for 2012 is shaping up nicely. Here is a brief video update on the theme and our speakers and why I believe this is a can't miss opportunity for you and your team.

I hope to see you in March. Thanks, Brad

Upcoming Keynote On Channel Enablement At Distree EMEA Next Week

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Peter O'Neill

 

Peter O'Neill here. I’ve been invited to speak, again, at the annual Distree EMEA event in Monte Carlo next week. Now in its tenth year, Distree gathers together top executives from tech industry vendors and distributors plus, in recent years, retailers from around EMEA for three days that include a trade show, presentation sessions, and meetings to discuss industry-specific channel topics. The 2011 event drew 950 delegates from 127 tech vendors and over 400 distributors. One of the event highlights for everybody is a process to request and set up formal one-on-one meetings between the various players, similar to our own one-on-one sessions at the Forrester Forums (only their software is better). A total of 5,000 such sessions are scheduled: some at tables in larger rooms around the trade show, many others in private meeting rooms elsewhere in the conference center.  I still have some slots open for those of you who are interested and are going to the event.

My keynote presentation continues on from my speech last year (still being watched on YouTube, I am told) where I described what changes we see happening in the channel due to recent industry trends.  The title is "The Emerging Engagement Channel Model” and leans heavily on Tim Harmon’s October reports with his permission. I will discuss the effect of industry trends such as cloud, consumerization of IT, app stores, and “Apple takes a bite at B2B business” (see below for the agenda).  

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Calling All Sales Enablement Leaders, Wherever You Are: SE Forum 2012

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Bradford Holmes

I have the privilege of talking with many of our clients and, surprising as it may sound, many don't have titles that match their real jobs!  Who does these days? Maybe the CFO. So, as we gear up for our second annual Sales Enablement Forum, I want to make sure we don't miss inviting any of our Tech Marketing friends who do a little enablement on the side, or a lot of it as their full-time focus, title or not...

We chose the lead image for this year's Sales Enablement event to grab your attention because we believe you can truly be a HERO to your CEO. But it won't be an everyday task – it will take new skills and strong powers!

Vendor CEOs today want deeper relationships with customers to become their trusted suppliers. And that puts pressure on sales teams – and those who enable them – to cross-sell at higher levels. Is that working?

Our Buyer Insight study found that 13% of executive buyers believe that a salesperson can clearly show they understand their business issues and articulate a way to solve them. When we ask vendor CEOs, "Are you satisfied that your sales force is getting your company to its strategic objectives?" the answer is a resounding "No."

This is the strategy to execution gap that takes up a lot of sales and marketing energy today. It is also filled with well-intentioned but often uncoordinated activity intended to help sales sell.

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Yes, Content Must Be Managed Internally As Well

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Peter O'Neill

 

Peter O'Neill here. My first report on content management came out last week and it has already generated several conversations – please keep those comments and inquiry requests coming. Content management was also a significant part of a one-day workshop I delivered to a client in Lisbon last week. They offer eProcurement and eMarketing software-as-a-service. So an interesting discussion we had was, “Do you need different content as a SaaS provider compared to a product vendor?” We concluded that the information would be the same, but the sense of urgency about delivering digital content to a SaaS audience is greater than a more conventional buyer community, which changes the content style and vehicles. This question is on my 2012 research calendar and will be the basis for a report later in the year, so I would love to hear your opinions on that one.

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2012 Tech Marketing Priorities – From 50 Tech Marketing Execs

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Stephen Davidson

Understanding the priorities of fellow tech marketers is a great way to tune one’s own 2012 initiatives.   Over the past two months, my Forrester Technology Council colleagues and I have spent quite a bit of time surveying and talking with members (~ 50 tech CMO’s and VP’s of Marketing) about their priorities for 2012.  Before the champagne pops up here in Boston, I wanted to share a few of the priorities my colleagues and I are hearing most about for 2012:

  • Demand management wins out across the board.   In years past, the top priority for our tech marketing members centered around "driving leads into the funnel."  In 2012, tech marketing execs still care about driving leads, but there is an increased desire to trade lead volume for better lead quality.   Quality that comes from strong nurturing activities to help leads move from the top of funnel into the middle and ultimately into a position where they are "sales-ready."  A vocal number of members expressed commitment to building a more comprehensive demand management process where they would balance their lead nurturing and lead generation initiatives appropriately.  
  • Brand/rebranding comes into vogue.  Many of our members have put brand and/or rebranding at the top of their lists for 2012.  The need to create greater market differentiation against competitors and to build market awareness in new markets (e.g. verticals, geographies) were cited as the top reasons for steering funds, resources and time in brand or rebranding initiatives.     
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Lead-To-Revenue Management Automation Made In Europe

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Peter O'Neill

Well, it finally got published by Forrester! Peter O'Neill here and my long-promised overview of lead-to-revenue management (L2RM) vendors "Made in Europe" got out last week. We were delayed because I had to wait for my US colleague to publish on some of our research ideas on L2RM automation in her introductory report, to which I refer in my report - and she had to negotiate her text around the wishful thinking of around 45 different vendors, all of whom have their own view of a L2RM architecture. That meant that my research done in the summer of this year may look a little out of date. But I fully expect to be able to update this report for Q2 2012 in response to many other European software vendors briefing me on their experience with tech marketing customers.

Anyway, without any further ado, here is the list of European vendors I did feature. The report goes into more detail, of course, on each vendor. I have also included a list of those North American L2RM automaton vendors who have offices in Europe.   

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Brand Advice For B2B Tech Marketers: Q&A With Siegel+Gale

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Stephen Davidson

"Branding & rebranding" is rising fast on the list of priorities for tech marketers in 2012.

Over the past few months, my colleagues and I in the Tech Marketing Council have been engaging in a rising number of client discussions around the topic of “brand.” These conversations with our CMO and VP of marketing clients have come in a few different flavors:

  • Branding for Emerging Firms. Small, but not startup, vendors seeking to create better brand position and differentiation to take on the established sector players. (e.g., David and Goliath)
  • Rebrand for Maturing Firms. Midsize growing tech companies ($250M+) with designs on being the next $1B+ firm in their sector. (e.g., “Good to Great”)
  • Post M&A Brand Integration. Both emerging and large tech firms are working to integrate newly acquired companies, personnel and products. (e.g., House of Many Brands)
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Strategic Content Management Will Make Marketing More Predictable

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Peter O'Neill

 

My first job, writes Peter O'Neill, after university was as a business analyst at Ford Motor Company, assisting an executive who sat on the monthly Project Appropriation Committee (PAC) where investments were approved. I learned to calculate the time-averaged rate of return and net present value for a project, proving it was better to invest in it than keeping the money in the bank. My executive ran an organization called General Services, which in those days (1978) included generating our own electricity within the factory complex in Dagenham, England. Now they take their power from the national grid and the generating plant is no more.

Now this is not a discussion of cloud computing and where enterprise IT will end up. What I most remember from those monthly PAC briefing books at Ford was the marketing project submissions. They also had documented TARR and NPV numbers. They would predict that by investing a sum of money in a promotional campaign (e.g., a special car model, dealer incentive, discounts), their market share would go up by, say, 0.7 percentage points – Ford was the UK market share leader in those days at around 30%, selling mostly company cars to businesses. I often checked out whether or not the predicted market share change actually happened and it mostly did –  marketing was able to quantify its contribution very well indeed. 

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Will A New Service Provider Type Emerge For Digital Marketing?

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Peter O'Neill

 

Peter O'Neill here. I took advantage of an invitation to dine with around 15 CIOs this week in Frankfurt and our topic of conversation was “Managing The Online Customer Journey.”  This is the regular event organized by CIO Magazine, and I go along, calendar permitting, when I am invited to present or if the topic interests me. In this case, my fascination was to hear what these CIOs think about the prevailing trends of IT consumerization and social media.

But I was most interested in their ideas on how marketing aligns with the IT organization; a concept that I’ve encountered a lot recently in my engagements with tech marketers as well as working with tech automation vendors in their go-to-market activities. Forrester has published a lot on this recently, led by my illustrious colleagues Nigel Fenwick and Luca Paderni who serve the CIO and CMO, respectively.

 My fascination with the topic is that I see a new business opportunity for savvy systems integrators. I am calling it the “emerging digital marketing service provider,” and I will focus my next Forrester Teleconference on this observation next week. That provider will need to be tooled with marketing creative skills plus IT skills and services and it will sell to the CMO and CIO equally: a new market coming together out of the marketing budget and the IT budget, as the figure shows.

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Top-Performing Tech Marketers and Their Webinars

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Peter O'Neill

Hurray! Peter O'Neill here, and it’s great to be back in my home office for a couple of weeks after some hectic weeks of travelling. During the last weeks, we’ve hosted research reviews in several cities; we met over a hundred tech channel professionals to match our 2012 research agenda against their topics of interest; there has been other client business; and we held our latest Marketing & Strategy Forum in London. This is the third year that I have been involved in our EMEA Marketing Forum, always in London. Perhaps we might want to go somewhere else in 2012 — there are already so many marketing events in that city, and I’ve noted that over half of the attendees were from outside the UK. Please let me know if you have any ideas of where to meet.

I am also waiting here at my desk with bated breath for the preliminary results of our latest Marketing Organization and Investment (MOI) survey — I cannot wait to see how things have changed since our last marketing-spend benchmarking exercise last year. Our team wrote several reports off the Q1 2011 survey (e.g., I discussed how European tech marketing is different and why) showing how tech marketing executives were spreading their resources among eight different categories. In the next quarter, in addition to updating those reports, we also hope to be able to be able to map and understand the marketing differences between small, medium, and large tech vendors.

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