Last month marketing leaders from top technology, networking and professional services companies gathered in California at ITSMA’s 2013 Marketing Leadership Forum to share insights on where marketing is helping their companies grow. All major Indian IT services companies were represented, including: Genpact, HCL, Infosys, TCS, and Wipro, among others.
What ideas generated the most discussion? The big themes were around marketing alignment with the business, not just sales but also the broader C-suite, IT and Finance. Also prominent were the use of data and analytics to optimize marketing and predict results; improving marketing measurement with a greater focus on outcomes versus activities, and; leveraging marketing technology to advance lead management and nurturing.
Touching on these themes were presentations by IBM, McKinsey, Dell, DocuSign, Juniper Networks, HCL, Unleash, Vision Edge Marketing, and ITSMA’s Julie Schwartz.
The Changing Nature of the CMO as a Systems Thinker. Katharyn White, the VP of Marketing at IBM Global Business Services, argued that systems thinking can help CMOs achieve their traditional mission in new and more effective ways. The three marketing imperatives – knowing the customer, choosing what to market and how to market it, and protecting the brand promise – haven’t changed. But the world has. The rise of mobile, social, and data, as well as shifts in customer demographics, have altered the way marketers act on these mandates. In particular, marketers who know how to apply analytics to individual, interaction, transaction, and company-level data can understand customers as individuals more accurately than ever before, as well as create a “system of engagement” that maximizes value creation at every touch.
Unleash the Power of Social Media with Central Governance and Local Execution. Both IBM and Dell described how thousands of individual social media interactions that occur every day can reinforce and multiply the power of the brand. IBM’s Katharyn White talked about the strong linkage between culture and brand, and how social media can make this linkage visible to the world. Richard Margetic, Dell’s Director of Global Social Media, showed how a mix of central oversight and local execution can manage the risks of social media while leveraging the power of the company’s 100,000-plus employees.
Proving the Value of Marketing with Predictive Analytics. A theme that emerged from two of the presentations was how marketing can gain credibility with a predictive approach. Anubhav Saxena, SVP & Global Head of Marketing, Strategy, and Alliances at HCL, showed how marketing was able to develop models to predict which deals will close in a given quarter. The models are based on marketing and sales interactions, and the predictions have a high level of accuracy. This modeling capability is one factor that has helped marketing develop a strategic presence and earn a seat at the senior management table.
Meanwhile, ITSMA partner Laura Patterson, with Vision Edge Marketing, emphasized the value of measuring marketing’s contribution to business outcomes, not just in the past, but in the future as well. Most marketers measure activity: website traffic, number of leads, number of conversions. But what the C-suite really cares about are big metrics like revenue growth, market share, and customer value. By constructing “value chains” from marketing activities to business performance, the marketing function should be able to come to management with “if-then” statements linking investments in marketing campaigns to incremental revenue.
Accelerate your Sales Pipeline with Marketing Automation. When it comes to proving marketing’s value and relevance, there’s nothing like finding, engaging, and growing customers. Meagan Eisenberg, the VP of Demand Generation of e-signature company DocuSign, talked about how she took a technology-enhanced approach and tripled the sales pipeline. The key elements of the program were:
- Capture leads with thought leadership assets – articles, papers, slide decks, webinars, events – created quickly and opportunistically, often with the help of sales and internal experts.
- Map the buyer’s journey to your sales cycle
- Based on simple lead scoring techniques, develop dynamic content to move buyers through the pipeline
- Match content to the appropriate stage in the funnel – top, middle, and late.
- Measure what works and what doesn’t – and act on it.
- Finally, keep the process as simple as you can.
Remember Antoine de Saint Exupery’s dictum that perfection is attained not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed. The simpler the process is, the easier it will be for a small group to operate at a large scale and have a big impact.
Simplify your Portfolio to Enable Greater Sales. Matt Hurley, Vice President of Services Marketing and Portfolio Management and Juniper Networks, demonstrated how simplifying the services portfolio can help salespeople better understand, communicate and sell the companies offerings. The initiative had three stages: listen, analyze, execute. First, there were interviews of sales, customers, and partners. Then an analysis was done of the gap between the current and the ideal portfolio. The execution phase involved rolling out a roadmap modeled on a pre-existing and widely known corporate strategy framework. The advantage of modeling it on an existing plan was that everyone in the company already knew it, and only a minimal amount of education needed to be done. The result: a new understanding by sales about when and how to sell services within the company’s existing product framework.
For more forum highlights, search on the Twitter hashtag #itsmamlf13