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).  

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 are communicating strategies that depend on winning deeper relationships with customers. And that is putting pressure on sales teams to cross-sell at higher levels. So how is that working?

Our Buyer Insight study found that on 13% of executive buyers believe that a salesperson can clearly show they understand their business issues and articulate a way to solve them. And 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 today is filled with well-intentioned but uncoordinated activity all intended to help sales sell.

From within that chaos, an emerging discipline is taking hold. Leaders assigned to "fix the broken things" and their teams are beginning to approach the gap with a new vision and some practical ideas. Making the move from random acts to purpose built plans, and shifting their focus from products and services to customer problems, they are making customer focus a new discipline, not just a catchphrase.

What we are seeing and saying is that it's not about how you go to market, it's about how you go to customer. And if you can get that right, you will be a HERO to your CEO.

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.   

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.