Survival Skills and Success Strategies: Marketing through an Economic Downturn

This ITAC roundtable was held on Thursday, April 9, 2009.

Panelists:

  • David Flawn, NA Sector Marketing, Capgemini
  • Deborah Brown, Director of Marketing, Ingram Micro Canada
  • Doug Cooper, Canada Country Manager, Intel Corporation
  • Shari Rothman, Strategy and Planning, Americas Marketing, EDS, an HP Company
  • Margaret Stuart, Vice President and Country Director, SAP BusinessObjects Canada

The discussion was moderated by Bob Becker, Principal, SMA.

How are the marketing or sales roles in your organization adapting to new economic realities?

  • Adapting message, make sure we’re talking to current issues and problems.
  • Reprioritizing and refocusing. Thought leadership and creating awareness belong in backseat, with sales lead generation a key priority.
  • In past, focused on branding and conditioning the market. Now focusing on supporting the sales funnel.
  • “Sweating the asset” – how to focus on delivering more value from the assets customers currently have.
  • Launching internal programs to renew vigor and energy within sales teams

How are your tactics changing from last year to this year?

  • Doing some business intelligence first to focus on customers who are really going to listen to our message.
  • Investing in value chain.
  • One-to-one and one-to-few marketing. Not as many events and tradeshows.
  • Sales enablement is very important.

What are some activities you are NOT doing this year?

  • No golf tournaments – people want to see ROI from marketing dollars.
  • Fewer internal meetings and less travel.
  • Have become lean and mean and more conscious of costs.
  • Planning from quarter to quarter now, which is challenging for marketing.
  • Concentrating on interplay between sales and marketing.

How are you tracking ROI? What aren’t you doing because you can’t track it?

  • To attribute a sale to a particular stimulus is tough – most sales are long term. We need to maintain five to seven touch points to generate revenue.
  • Can follow certain programs from beginning to end and know ROI. Others are more difficult – have to look at whole sales cycle.
  • Focusing on account-based marketing, treat a large client as a market of one.
  • Awareness and conditioning is soft and fuzzy and difficult to measure, but are still very important. If we stop that, sales will have a tougher job.

What about the expectations of your senior management for sales and profit growth in a business environment where your target market’s IT budgets are not growing?

  • Need to completely understand what their objectives are. As long as we connect we can work it out together – more of a camaraderie.
  • It’s more important now to be totally aligned with sales objectives and work more closely together - providing sales with all the tools in the kit.
  • We have a better alignment with marketing and sales than we’ve had in years. A healthy change, very practical demand generation focus.

Tactically, how is Marketing communicating with Sales?

  • There is a fair bit of discussion in building communities and maintaining structure.
  • Identifying some standard requirements of business to help us understand whether or not we’re progressing.
  • VAR community: building VAR to VAR communications to gain business and best practices information – learn and share.
  • Implanting marketing within sales organization. Vertical and horizontal markets, high touch interface.

The customer is more critical than ever – what specific tactics are you using to make sure customer loyalty is there?

  • Focusing on securing renewal business.
  • Sales and product training – WEBEX for training, networking, targeting to younger audience.
  • Online initiatives – creating customer communities where customers talk to one another. Product-oriented, learn best practices from peers.
  • Inbound online chat events with experts.
  • Have to suit customers’ schedules. The Web provides lots of flexibility. Helps customers drive value from their investment.
  • Customer advisory boards.
  • Account-based marketing team.

Questions from the audience:

Who is responsible for Business Intelligence within your organization?

  • Have created an entire in-house team.
  • Crosses multiple disciplines including marketing, sales, training, etc.
  • Have a global group and use external vendors.
  • Boils down to making data meaningful for who you are talking to.

What was your biggest mistake as a marketing/sales professional?

  • Not involving sales in marketing plans. If sales don’t buy into plans, might as well trash it.
  • Having no resources to deliver on plan.
  • Creating overly complicated marketing information.
  • Circular marketing talk – test it out on sales people!

What offline marketing are you doing, and how do you measure it?

  • Everyone is saying offline is dead and online is the way to go. But awareness through offline is also hugely important.
  • Limited offline marketing in airports, etc. expensive and primarily used as a recruitment tool.

Does Line of business play a more active role in decision-making?

  • LOB is very important
  • Not starting at IT level anymore. IT may execute but are not always decision-makers.

Wrap Up: Following today’s discussion, what lessons will you take back to the office?

  • “Breakfast is the new dinner”
  • Get in the same boat…network, share ideas
  • “Sweat the assets”
  • Market research and business intelligence

 

 

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