New rules of Marketing & PR @ the Nasscom India Leadership Forum

Just heard David Meerman Scott’s session (http://bit.ly/bODSso) at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum on the new rules of Marketing & PR. David makes some very good points on how the content you are producing should be in a language your buyers understand. I especially liked the part where he spoke about how employees should be allowed to communicate through mediums they are used to (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc). One big takeaway for me from the session was about Electronic gateways. I never thought that electronic gateways (asking for Email ids, etc) are such show stoppers and impact bloggers from participating in discussions. I am going to go back and try not putting up electronic gateways for our upcoming campaigns and see how that goes.

Marketing is evolving rapidly with the advent of these new mediums and while traditional mediums cannot be ignored, organizations are going to have to think out of the box to achieve effective results from these new mediums. Speakers like David open your eyes to some blatant mistakes we make and some of the new rules we need to keep in mind while executing our Marketing strategies.

What do you think are the new rules of Marketing?

Hari Raghunathan
Head Marketing, QEDbaton

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan

Can OSM become the next buzz word?

Over the years, the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) industry has evolved and today they are accepted globally as a mature industry that solves complex business issues. Suddenly you find words like LPO (Legal Process Outsourcing), KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing) floating around, which makes me wonder if OSM (Outsourced Sales & Marketing) is becoming the next buzz word.

Traditionally service providers in the space of Outsourced Sales and Marketing have focused on short-term tactical programs as a result of this, both- service providers & outsourcers have suffered.

When I spoke to a few people in our client’s sales and marketing teams, it was felt that Sales and Marketing are essentially functions which impact an organization’s top line, whereas most of the business processes that are outsourced today are functions that impact the bottom line. True, and definitely a very thought-provoking statement. Would I as the CEO of my organization allow a third-party to decide on my top line growth? Definitely not!

However, Outsourced Sales and Marketing functions, as is the case with most outsourced business processes, are not talking about replacing your existing sales and marketing functions. They are more about enabling an environment conducive to delivering a higher level of productivity and effectiveness within your existing sales and marketing infrastructure. With the increasing dependence on the internet, technology tools, and the emphasis on reducing cost per sale, there are a number of components within the sales and marketing functions that are best left to specialist vendors.

Being in this space for the past 5 years now, we are increasingly seeing a change in the approach service providers are taking to this problem. Starting with very tactical level engagements, today a lot of our engagements are measured in terms of value of pipeline built, and not in terms of meetings delivered. Today, there are new players emerging across of the value chain. Sales and marketing consulting firms who assist companies in creating comprehensive “Go to Market” plans, increasing number of companies specializing in executing B2B “Integrated” demand generation programs, and many players offering technology tools in the sales and marketing space. Right from offering end to end solutions to benchmarking best practices, the OSM space is maturing and evolving just like the BPO & ITO industry.

What will it take for this space to start seeing high value multiyear multi activity deals?

Abhijit Gangoli
CEO, QEDbaton

What gets measured gets done!

I have been trying to get my Marketing team to commit to some form of quantifiable result for the past 2 months; why is it so difficult to get marketing folks to talk tangible business outcome. One would think that the top B schools in the country would have ingrained this into them. Given the pressure everyone is facing in the current scenario how can one justify huge chunks of spend on glorifying your own name (branding) without any business outcome (leads, opportunities, sales). With the advent of Social Media Marketing this problem is getting worse. How does one justify a marketing resource spending the whole day reading blogs, interacting on Facebook/LinkedIn/ twitter?

I read recently in a report by one of the big research firms (Gartner/ Forrester/etc) that Marketing has lost the confidence of the CEO. How does one go about changing that?

Internally, I am trying to come up with a set of measurables for every activity we are undertaking to ensure that we don’t get into this mode of intangibility. I am a strong believer in Peter Drucker’s management principles; “What gets measured gets done”.

Any thoughts on what these measurables should be?

Hari Raghunathan

Head Marketing, QEDbaton

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/salesleads

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/hariraghunathan

Outsourced Sales & Marketing: Managing Multiple Vendor Environments

Managing Multi vendor environments can prove to be a herculean task and will not always yield the desired results. Organizations globally invest huge amounts of resources to manage vendors to derive the best ROI from them. Not always does it actually result in improved ROI. The typical challenges that Sales & Marketing teams face when outsourcing to multiple vendors are

Inconsistent Service Delivery Levels

Every vendor has a different level of service they provide. When outsourcers face issues with the level of service provided there needs to be a well defined escalation matrix to fall back on. Given the maturity of the Outsourced Sales & Marketing space, not every vendor has it that well defined. Added to this, often there is no mechanism to check whether the issues raised have been resolved or the service levels expected have been met.

Lack of Business Intelligence

One of the biggest challenges that a multi vendor environment poses to organization is retaining Business intelligence. Data is spread across vendors and it’s hard to get an overview of the Sales & Marketing organization’s activities. Outsourcers often receive very different reports from each vendor and data aggregation & analysis becomes a time and labor intensive process.

The key to managing the multi vendor environments effectively is to use a combination of technology (centralized data), metrics definition, tight looped monitoring & best in class engagement models.

Nitin Pangam

Director- QEDbaton

Outsourced Sales & Marketing: Vendor Selection & Management

In a recent survey we conducted, we asked respondents about the factors that governed their decision to outsource Sales & Marketing activities. An overwhelming, 70% of the respondents mentioned that the top reasons for going with a vendor were that

• The vendor brought fresh views & objectivity to the activity
• The vendor had knowledge of best practices, better defined processes & technology

The ones that were not in favor of going with the vendor reasoned saying that

• They had lesser control over the outsourced activity
• Vendors had a problem with delivering complex pitches
• In house resources helped retain knowledge within the organization

We have come a long way in the Outsourced Sales & Marketing (OSM) space. Today, technology enables outsourcers to retain control over the vendor’s activities and ensure that they institutionalize the intelligence that the vendor’s teams are capturing. There are a variety of vendors specializing in activities across the spectrum. Leveraging the right set of vendors in executing your Sales & Marketing strategy goes a long way in deciding the outcome of your activities. Selection criteria play a huge role. Over the years of having worked with multiple companies in this space, I have seen that the top criteria to consider while outsourcing Sales & Marketing activities are as follows

• Does the vendor understand my Sales & Marketing strategy for the year?
• Does the vendor have the knowledge of the best practices of these activities?
• Does the vendor have well defined processes for every activity?
• Does the vendor have the right measurables to measure the success of every activity?
• Does the vendor have the right tools to measure them and report?

You might find that not all vendors will score on all fronts across activities. This gap will lead you to choose multiple vendors to manage your Sales & Marketing activities. Vendor Management emerges as a problem. Read about how to manage multiple vendor environments for Sales & Marketing activities in my next post.

Nitin Pangam

Director- QEDbaton

The rationale behind allocation of Sales and Marketing budgets

 

• Do tech companies get it right?
• Do Activities drive budgets or do budgets drive activities?
• Is ROI measured across activities??

 

I recently was a part of a workshop our sales team conducted with a prospective customer. In our workshops with customers, we typically try to understand their overall sales goal for the year and try to work backwards towards the activities they would need to conduct to reach that goal. We also have certain benchmarks for the ROI they can expect from a certain activity and the budget they need to allocate towards it.

The workshop went off well, but the process of allocating budgets to every activity was painstakingly long. We had to convince the customer time and again that some activities had to have the budget we were suggesting, whereas we felt that ROI on some activities did not justify the budgets. This got me thinking about how budgeting is typically done in technology companies.

Traditionally, it appears that Sales budgets have always been given to the P&L stakeholders in an organization. In a technology company this typically is a SBU head or a Geography head. P&L Stakeholders then divide the budget across functions and functions plan activities based on the budgets allocated to them.  This allocation is also done on the basis of what activities the Sales or Marketing organization wants to undertake, which may not always be based on the historical ROI of the activity. Which brings us to how should it actually be done?

Ideally, Sales & Marketing teams need to prioritize activities based on the past ROI they have received from that activity. They need to correlate this to the revenue goal they have for the year. All of this needs to culminate into what output they expect from every activity and the measure for it. An example of this is

Demand Generation Activities

Output	Measurable
Number of Leads	Cost per Lead
Number of Opportunities (RFP’s)	Cost per Opportunity
Number of Sales	Cost per Sale

A similar breakdown should be done for every key activity, whether it is events sponsorship, a social media initiative or an inside sales campaign.

Once these measurables are in place, an analysis of the historical conversion rates of different activities needs to be measured and benchmarked. E.g. the conversion rates could be typically “Lead to Opportunity ratio”, “Opportunity to Sales ratio”, “Leads to Sales ratio”. Activities should be prioritized based on the data that emerges from this analysis and budgets should be allocated accordingly.

Sales & Marketing heads can then go to their P&L Stakeholders and demand the budget, if the revenue goals need to be met. The comfort factor here is that since every activity has a measure, the ROI has a better likelihood of justifying the cost!

Nitin Pangam
Director – QEDbaton

Sales Priorities vs. Marketing Priorities

Sales Organizations have always been measured on the universal parameter, “Revenue Generated”.

On account of this single yardstick, Sales Organizations have traditionally been focusing on following up with only those leads that are BANT level leads (Budget- Authority-Need- Time frame) and ready to buy in 0-6 months. For all practical purposes, Business Development managers in most IT services organizations are more of “Order takers” rather than solution providers.

In the same light, Marketing too has come under tremendous pressure to generate leads at a rapid rate. Many a times, this results in premature or poorly qualified leads being passed on to the Sales teams. Sales teams continue to use the 0-6 months buying time frame as a yardstick to decide the fate of the lead. And this is where the conflict begins- Sales begin their never-ending complaints that Marketing just does not give them enough good quality leads, AND in turn Marketing blames Sales for not being able to convert the leads that are given to them.

What is often not considered is that, a substantial portion of these so called “Poorly qualified” marketing leads do go on to buy a solution within the next 18-24 months. However, most of them are not tracked by either Sales or Marketing. And therefore they eventually go on to buy from competition! So how does one avoid this leakage from his/ her organization’s sales funnel?

1. Design a lead scoring system that classifies sales ready leads which go to Sales and the others which remain with Marketing to nurture till they are “Sales ready”.
2. Use of Marketing Automation platforms, which allow for automated lead nurturing, scoring and campaign management.
3. Deployment of a robust lead qualification engine in the form on an inside sales team, that would ensure that every lead is qualified and “Sales ready” before being passed on to the Sales team.

Not only does this ensure deeper Sales and Marketing integration, it also facilitates better conversion, lower cost per sale and a deeper brand recall in the market place.

Abhijit Gangoli
CEO, QEDbaton

Lack of Integration between Sales and Marketing Organizations in Technology Companies

How many times have you heard a Sales guy complain that Marketing just does not generate enough good quality leads? The truth is that sales guys always want to pursue the hottest leads (0-3 month’s opportunity time frame) and invariably side step the other leads that come their way. Marketing on the other hand invariably passes on a lot of leads that are not completely qualified. Marketing blame Sales for not being able to convert the leads coming their way. Added to this, if you take the industry stats into consideration; i.e., 80% of all leads will not buy immediately but go on to make a buy decision in 12-24 months it becomes extremely important to develop and nurture every lead that comes your way. How do you solve this disconnect?

Having worked with multiple customers on these issues, I have seen that the three most important aspects to sorting this issue out is to do the following

1. Establish a Lead Scoring mechanism to segregate leads coming from all sources
2. Pass on only Sales Ready leads (0-6 Month Timeframe) to Sales guys
3. Move all other leads into a Structured Lead Nurturing Program through Marketing

Once this mechanism is in place you ensure that Sales only is pursuing what their priority is and Marketing is ensuring that the organization does not lose out on any opportunity. The lead nurturing program also gives marketing the opportunity to showcase the organization as thought leaders in their space.

Abhijit Gangoli
CEO, QEDbaton