Sober advice for B2B marketers, and a dilemma

If you're like me, you sign up for a bunch of webinars but rarely get around to listening in. The invitations sound good, but when the day comes around they're ultimately not worth the time. You can always do a quick scan on the slides.

I am glad I listened to last week's BtoB 2009 Outlook webinar, though. Nothing earth shattering, but some good solid and sober advice for the difficult year ahead. And a real dilemma, to boot.

"Flailure is not an option"

Most important, as Mark Gambill, CMO of tech reselling giant CDW, noted: "Flailure is not an option." That's not a typo; Gambill highlighted the tendency of companies to start flailing around in a downturn, starting and stopping marketing initiatives and wasting precious resources on marginal activities.

Instead, Gambill suggested a clear-eyed analysis of your most important customers and your most important market opportunities, and then using both a scalpel and an ax on the marketing budget to trim the fat from essential programs and hack away at the non-essential ones. In other words, focus, focus, focus.

Organizational Priorities

Taking an organizational perspective, Rich Vancil, VP of the Executive Advisory Group at IDC (which includes a CMO Advisory program), had four useful recommendations:

• Use the downturn to permanently eliminate or reshape entrenched silos of program costs (e.g., isolated events or campaigns not part of a broader, coordinated program)
• Limit staff cuts: large firms have already been cutting staff for several years, and it's far easier to decimate organizational effectiveness now than it will be to rebuild it later on. (Mark Wilson, VP of Corporate Marketing from Sybase, noted in the same session that he's investing more in in-house talent now, using the downturn to bring inside resources that he had been paying heavily for with agencies and other outsourced services).
• Initiate aggressive content audits to weed out useless and off-message materials (this one is near and dear to my own heart, given how critical great content is to all marketing programs and how much bad content continues to pervade most marketing organizations).
• Identify and create marketing shared services to eliminate duplicative costs and tools (and, I would add, to enhance cross-company integration and coordination). 

Be Provocative

 

Finally, Mark Wilson from Sybase, stressed another point always worth remembering: in difficult times, it is especially necessary that your basic messaging really take a stand. Yes, it's important to emphasize that you can help your customers save money, but first you have to stand out from the crowd. Be provocative, bring forward your legitimate internal experts, and work those core messages across the spectrum of media and social channels. 

The Dilemma

Now the dilemma: Both Vancil and Kate Maddox from BtoB magazine cited recent budget surveys to show, not surprisingly, that marketers are cutting back on awareness-oriented activities in favor of lead generation and sales support. As Vancil put it, the biggest cuts are coming in the areas furthest away from revenue generation. This would seem to make all the sense in the world, which is why so many companies are doing it. 

At the same time, dramatic changes on the buying side (i.e., former and prospective customers are mostly not buying what they used to) suggests that companies really need to rethink what they're trying to sell, what value they can provide, and how they're going to market. 

To me, this suggests the need for some greater investment at the top of the funnel, such as market research and analysis, development of new solutions, fundamental value propositions, and market segmentation. It's easy to skimp on these activities when times are tough and budgets are shrinking, but the risk is pushing harder to sell things that customers have no interest in buying. In this case, all the provocative, interactive, social, leveraged lead generation activities in the world will make little difference. 

So what's the answer? We need to focus on generating revenue now, but unless we back up the funnel and make sure we're aiming the right direction the leads we bring in won't do the trick. What do you think?

Photo credit: Renaissancechambara