Reputation to Revenue

HP backs solutions rhetoric with org change and investments

 

Everyone talks about "solutions" these days but few seem to invest in the changes necessary to move beyond the rhetoric. For example, truly developing, marketing, and selling integrated B2B solutions typically requires both a strong focus from the top down and a new alignment from the bottom up.

Far too often, companies talk the solutions talk but fail to walk the walk. They don't invest in new mechanisms to work across business units, new ways to connect with customers, and new skills for selling higher value offerings. As a result, we see companies promoting "solutions" that are really just bundles of existing products and services, launching marketing programs that neglect real customer needs, and falling back on the old feature-function approach to sales that customers long ago rejected.

Walking the Walk

Organizational initiatives at HP over the last several years suggest that the IT giant is indeed walking the solutions walk. HP has developed and sold enterprise IT solutions for years but a renewed push in 2009 led to a much sharper focus on 10 critical areas of business customer need, such as enterprise security, converged IT infrastructure, and application transformation.

As Magdy Assem, Senior Director of Enterprise Solutions Marketing, explained:

"Not everything is a solution. You have to look outside-in to really understand the key areas to highlight. HP and other big tech companies all have tens of thousands of products and even so-called solutions. But you need to know what matters to clients. What keeps them up at night? Then you can focus new resources on these areas, not on everything, and create integrated offerings to address those needs at a higher level rather than just selling a bunch of products."

Customer focus and integrated offerings are critical steps for solutions but perhaps even more impressive are the organizational changes that HP has made to invest in success. "This is a key point for solutions," according to Assem:

"We've been working on solutions for years but you need to go beyond just aligning the organization and actually put a structure in place and hold it accountable. We've done this in sales, in field marketing, and in solutions planning and marketing. These are stand-alone teams that are not part of any product team. This was a big 'aha' for us."

New Organizational Investments

On the sales side, HP has added a new layer of Account General Managers for its top global accounts to serve as leaders in positioning and selling integrated solutions. Instead of just adding incentives for existing teams to sell higher value solutions, the new structure reflects an understanding that companies like HP need senior level sellers to be solely focused on meeting customers' most important business needs.

"To drive growth, we need to sell HP, not just one or two products," says Assem. "This means we have to elevate the discussion and have a business dialogue. You want the top people from the sales organization focusing on the highest value solutions. They can then bring in all the product specialists when they need them."

Along with the new global account leaders in sales, HP has also invested in a substantial sales education and training effort to strengthen the bias toward solutions. This has included the creation of HP Sales University, reorganizing the annual sales kickoff, rethinking training programs, and refreshing sales education curricula to include monthly activities focused on solutions.

Beyond sales, HP has also added new solutions marketing groups in the field to support the new push in the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. "You can't just align the product groups around solutions," according to Assem. "It won't work. You need dedicated people on the larger solution issues so we've added new teams headed by a VP for solutions marketing in each region."

Finally, at the corporate level, HP has added a new team for solutions marketing which Assem himself leads. The team's mandate is to define the key areas of solutions focus, develop and support key offerings, and work with marketing and sales teams across HP's business units and regions to bring solutions to market. The team includes dedicated specialists for each of the 10 major solution areas.

Overall, "this has been a huge investment to address customer needs and drive growth," says Assem. "We needed new skill sets to complement existing skills so we've done a lot of hiring and a lot of shifting within marketing and sales. Ultimately, finding people with business skills and teaching them the technology is a better route to solutions leadership than the other way around."

Return on Investment

Assem is quick to suggest that HP still has a way to go with enterprise solutions, and that the journey thus far has not been painless. "Building bridges and alignment across the organization is always a challenge," he notes. "You can't just add separate new groups or you'll risk duplicating efforts and losing support. And you really have to earn respect. It's never easy telling people a new way when they have been doing this for a living for many years."

Less than two years into the new push, however, Assem can see substantial ROI in three major areas: Average deal size has increased significantly with our global accounts and that's a key metric. We've also seen revenue growth in general with these accounts. Third, we have seen real growth in the solutions portion of the pipeline, which is another key metric for us."

Clearly not every company has HP's deep pockets. But the larger point holds for any organization looking to sell complex, high value solutions: If you really want to talk the walk, you're likely going to have to invest in new people, skills, and teams to move from rhetoric to reality. HP's investments in new groups within corporate and field marketing as well as sales help point the way forward.

What about you? How are you investing in people and organization to grow your solutions business. Please let me know in the comments.

 

B2B ads worth spreading

The always interesting TED announced the winners in an intriguing new competition the other day: Ads Worth Spreading. Building on the nonprofit's overall mission, Ideas Worth Spreading, TED decided to try and make a virtue of necessity. Advertising supports the free site; why not challenge advertisers to create ads compelling enough that people actually want to watch them and tell their friends to watch them, too. 

It wasn't an original idea. Super Bowl marketers, among others, have always tried to get people to seek out and pass along their creative flourishes (Apple's 1984 Macintosh ad is still my personal favorite). BMW made a huge splash in the ad world in 2001 by commissioning top Hollywood directors to create short, high production value films promoting the ultimate driving machines. More than 2 million people registered on the BMW film site, and an incredible 94% of them recommended the films to others. Most agencies today at least hope their productions will catch the popular imagination and go viral.

So what's the B2B connection? For more and more B2B firms, thought leadership and educational content are the new advertisements. We're cutting back on traditional ads and shifting resources to content marketing (white papers, expert video interviews, ebooks, blogs, and the like)  in hopes of getting our customers to pay more attention, raise their hands as "interested," and accept entry into our shiny new lead nurturing systems.

But here's the question: Are these "ads" really worth spreading? If you pulled together a group of your customers and asked them to review your thought leadership content side-by-side with that of all your competitors, would they pick yours among the winners? Would they rush to their email, Twitter, and Facebook accounts to tell their friends and colleagues that they simply must check out your new white paper or ebook?

Am I setting the bar too high? Perhaps, but consider how often you spread the good word about ads that cross your laptop or iPhone. Not very often, right? If your educational content is not good enough for you to pass along, why should it be for your customers? And if it isn't, how are they going to convince the myriad other people in their firm that ultimately need to agree that your solution is worth the investment?

Do you agree? Is your thought leadership worth spreading?

Is sales enablement dead?

Sales Enablement is a huge topic in B2B these days. You can spend all day every day and still barely scratch the surface of all the dialogue, debate, and events exploring the "real" meaning of sales enablement, who is doing it well, what tools are most useful, and how social media will revolutionize the whole process. (Forrester's upcoming forum is a great example.)

The activity makes sense. We all know the B2B sales cycle keeps getting longer, more and more people are involved in big purchase decisions, and lead nurturing is incredibly important. We know that crafting custom solutions is essential if we're going to avoid fighting over discounts with procurement folks on the other side of the table. Our sales teams need to know more, do more, and be ever more capable of having the right conversations with the right buyers and influencers at the right time.

And this isn't just talk. Sales enablement is a big area for investment. According to IDC, ITSMA, and other analysts, sales enablement is a top priority for many marketing leaders. It's one of the few areas of increased spending (along with digital marketing, of course) amid relatively flat marketing budgets. Sales enablement companies like SAVO are growing like gangbusters.

So, this is great news for marketers, right? We're drilling into what sales really needs and making a difference.

Well, I wonder. In today's world of B2B solutions, is sales enablement even possible?

The practical reality for many B2B organizations is that sellers don't really sell anymore. What they do is help people buy once those buyers have made up their minds it's time for a purchase. 

Buyers today have all the information. They have extremely smart and sophisticated teams that know far more about what they need than any sales person. They talk to peers across their industries to learn more about what's working and what's not -- and which vendors are worth considering and which are not. Along the way, in fits and starts, they decide it's time to invest in a new solution. Then, and only then, they start to talk with vendors and potential partners to see if you can deliver what they need.

OK, you know this, too. It's not news to say that buyers are in control and that they set the pace. So is it just semantics when I suggest that sales enablement is dead and the real issue is buyer enablement?

Surely we cannot just get rid of our sales forces, spread the good word about our solutions, and wait for buyers to show up. Indeed not. Especially in the world of high-end solutions, sales teams are more important then ever to helping buyers move from defined need and interest to crafting specific solutions that deliver clear value, and then closing the deal. 

As sales guru Neil Rackham noted recently at ISBM's conference on marketing and sales alignment, sales people increasingly need to move from value communication to value creation. They can't just talk about the value of your offerings, they have to work with customers to help create the solutions. 

To help this process along, sales people need a huge amount of help, i.e., enablement! As the analysts keep pointing out, too few sales people are well equipped for these kinds of consultative conversations and too few buyer executives find any value at all from our sales people. 

But language matters. It reflects our mindset. And our mindset needs to change. 

Buyers are in control; that's not going to change. Traditional selling is less and less effective, and often even counterproductive. Helping buyers craft solutions and invest in real value for their business is the way we should be thinking about our work.

For marketers, then, it's not so much about enabling sales, it's really about collaborating with sales to enable the buyers. More investment can help, and new tools can be useful, but I think the starting point is clarifying exactly what it is we're trying to do.

Do you agree? Is this a meaningful distinction or just a pointless word game? I'd love to hear how you're approaching the issue.

Photo credit: Dan Perry

The continuing rise of Account-Based Marketing: Four keys to success

Over the last 10 years, more and more B2B firms have invested in account-based marketing: treating individual accounts as "markets" and devising focused campaigns just for them.

Back when my partners and I were developing some of the early methodology for account-based marketing in the early 2000s at ITSMA, it was a tough sell. We had seen strong results from ABM pioneers, such as Accenture, IBM, Xerox, and HP, but the costs of doing ABM were clearer to many marketers than the benefits. It is, after all, a pretty labor-intensive approach, and it requires a lot of negotiating with sales and account teams. Much easier to just spam the market with generic emails, webinars, brochures, and the like.

As marketers began to appreciate the value of more focused approaches, however, such as vertical industry marketing, as well as the critical importance of their top accounts, ABM began to take hold. By 2005-2007, many of the top B2B tech and IT service firms were experimenting with ABM. We were going great guns at ITSMA with research, workshops, an ABM Council, annual ABM awards, and, of course, direct consulting and training to help companies get started and succeed.

What many marketers realized was that developing highly targeted programs for individual accounts yielded a great many benefits, both externally and internally. Externally, ABM can generate substantial improvements in customer relationships, brand perception, solutions proof points, revenue, and profitability. Internally, ABM can help prove the value of marketing, improve relationships with Sales, and strengthen focus on core customer challenges and potential solutions.

New research from Alterra Group suggests that ABM has also gained traction in professional services. According to a recent survey, some 86% of consulting and other professional services firms are now using some form account-based marketing, and looking to further increase spending on ABM in the years ahead. Large majorities of survey respondents further suggest that ABM has a higher ROI than other marketing approaches, and provides significant benefits in terms of retaining clients, increasing revenue and profit, and attracting new clients.

Not surprisingly, the research also found that companies investing more in ABM and paying more attention to program metrics are achieving greater results. (One would certainly hope so!)

I know we're all focused heavily on figuring out how to "socialize" everything in marketing these days (with good reason) and, especially as the 4th quarter looms, on doing whatever we can to help close sales before the end of the year. If you've let your ABM efforts lag, however, or not yet begun to invest in the approach, the Alterra Group research should be yet another set of data points convincing you to keep ABM front and center.

From our own experience, I'd like to suggest four critical success factors that go beyond simply spending more money and measuring results:

• Deep Research: Companies starting out in ABM often skip the hard work of preparation in favor of jumping right into outbound tactics, such as special events, collateral, and briefings. The real power of ABM comes from digging deep into an individual client's business situation, strategy, options, and operating environment as a precursor to really thinking through how you can help. Don't skip this step!
• Client Collaboration: The best ABM programs are not only transparent to the client (i.e., you don't hide the fact that you're making a special effort) but developed directly with the client. Actively involving client executives in research, brainstorming, thought leadership, relationship building, and solutions development is a huge win-win. The client knows you're serious about investing real time and resources in understanding their needs and crafting customized solutions. You get the tremendous benefit of the client's insight, brainpower, and feedback to help keep you on track and develop solutions you might never have even considered.
• Sustained Focus: ABM oriented to specific bids or quarterly results may be effective, but its greater potential comes in transforming the entire relationship with the client. Accenture, one of the first ITSMA award winners for ABM, turned a lot of heads in presenting its two-year ABM plans for top clients, but had transformative results to show for it. Thinking and planning longer term enables more ambitious strategies and much more substantial results.
• Solutions Orientation: I've mentioned the "S" word a few times already. One of the big differences between ABM and traditional account planning is that the latter typically focuses on selling more of whatever is on the shelf and doing it as fast as possible. Don't get me wrong; good account planning is incredibly important. But stepping back to do the deep research, collaborate with clients, and think about a longer term transformation of the relationship literally mandates that you also step back from current inventory, put yourself in the client's situation, and think anew about what really is going to make a major difference for them.

Is ABM here to stay? Let's hope so; it's one of the most effective approaches we have in B2B marketing. Making sure we do it the right way, however, is the real test, and shortcuts are not likely to show such great results.

What do you think? Are you implementing ABM? What's working for you?

Photo credit: hapticflapjack

The four engines of B2B marketing success

A friend recently had the good fortune not only to take over marketing for a successful B2B firm, but to do so with a mandate to build a new strategy that ensures a much greater impact on the business.

He's a bit like a kid in a candy store: he's got budget to spend, executive support for a more ambitious marketing program, and a relatively clean slate upon which to draw the new strategy. 

The existing program has been pretty traditional, focusing mostly on collateral, events, advertising, and direct support for the sales team. He knows that's not enough, and is definitely interested in doing more with thought leadership and social media, but how best to reshape the overall strategy is not entirely clear.

Asked for some advice, I agreed with a stronger emphasis on thought leadership and social media (which I think are appropriate for all B2B  firms), and I questioned the value of putting so much energy into advertising and collateral. 

More generally, though, I suggested that the strategy focus on the four marketing engines that I think all B2B firms need to have running smoothly to ensure business success.

Four Engines for B2B Marketing Success 

Content Engine:

As the need for more and better content continues to grow, marketing leaders have realized that they need an integrated "content engine" that consistently produces compelling content for every stage of the buying cycle. This includes thought leadership content to help build reputation and interest, educational content to support lead generation and nurturing, solutions and customer success content to support sales conversations, and, of course, social media content to support ongoing connections with customers and others.

Relationship Engine:

B2B marketing rises and falls on the strength of the company's relationships with customers, prospects, partners, and market influencers. For many marketing organizations, though, the objective of building, strengthening, and sustaining key relationships has no clear owner or strategy. A "relationship engine" may sound awkward but the idea is to ensure a comprehensive, consistent, and focused approach to strengthening critical stakeholder connections to increase sales, loyalty, and market insight. This should work across such areas as events, customer councils, account management, references, and social media.

Lead Development Engine:

The increasingly long and convoluted purchase processes that B2B marketers face puts a premium on well organized systems for lead nurturing and management. No longer can we focus on just the early stages of generating leads and then throw them over the wall to sales. More and more, we need to stay in the game with longer term programs to develop and sustain opportunities in close coordination with sales. Content and relationship programs contribute substantially to this effort but someone also needs to own the overall system for lead development, including qualification, scoring, nurturing, and assessment.

Solutions Development Engine:

Like many B2B companies, my friend's firm has a long history of successful products, satisfied customers, and productive partners. At the same time, also like many B2B companies, his firm is feeling the heat from increasing competition, margin squeeze on products, and buying decisions moving higher up in their customers' organizations. The result is a need for higher value solutions that respond more specifically to individual customer needs. Doing this efficiently and effectively means moving past the one-off approach based solely in the field. Instead, marketing needs to guide and support the field in determining top priorities for new offer development, crafting the right value propositions, and routinizing the process with the right stage gates and metrics.

The four engines don't cover every last aspect of B2B marketing, but they come pretty close and they provide a clear framework for building a comprehensive strategy that balances short- and longer-term success. Get each of the engines humming smoothly and results are sure to follow.

What do you think? Am I missing something important? Are all of your engines in good working order?

Photo credit: Imnop88a

Six steps to differentiating your solutions

Aargh! Six weeks to launch, and so much to do. The solutions management folks have spent months putting together the new offering, and now we've got about 87 things to do to get ready on the marketing side. Press release...internal webinar for the sales team...customer presentation...special briefings for the top account leads...white paper...update the public site with descriptions...collateral for the trade show. Oh yeah, and all the social media stuff, too: some blog posts, tweet schedule, maybe a few videos. 

The real challenge, of course, is getting anyone to care. Your customers are inundated with shiny new offers every day of the week, and they pretty much tune them all out. If they're actually looking for a new solution, sure, they might want to chat or at least check out your stuff, but otherwise...forget it.

Unless, of course, you actually make the new offer relevant, compelling, and truly evocative of real value. We all say our new solutions are important and different, but the sad reality is that the vast majority are me-too offerings that fail to connect or excite.

Some of this is inevitable in a world of intense competition. But a great deal reflects that fact that we simply don't put in the time or energy to identify and communicate the true differentiators that actually matter to prospective buyers. We get so caught up in cranking out the stuff of the launch process that we fail to step back and methodically work through why our solutions are better than those of the competition, and how to connect those differentiation dots to the issues our customers care about the most.

It's not rocket science, but it does take some effort, and a formal process helps. Over at Solutions Insights, we've spent a lot of time with companies that do this the right way (as well as many that don't!). Based on that experience, we've put together a quick six-step guide for defining and demonstrating clear and relevant differentiators for solutions that can make or break the launch process. 

Six Steps to Differentiating Your Solutions Offerings

We'd love to know what works for you!

Aren't we past random acts of "selling"?

 

Sigh -- another random call this morning from a telemarketer on behalf of a large tech company: 

Caller: "Hi, this is [name] from [company name] on behalf of [tech company]. I noticed you downloaded some research. Did you find everything you need?

Me: To be honest, I don't remember.

Caller: Well, it would have been in the last 30 days, or maybe the last two months. Do you have any plans to purchase software in the next 18-24 months?

30 or 60 days ago? I can't remember last week. Do $1 apps for my iPhone count? Given the high-priced enterprise applications this company sells, I'm guessing not!

Me: I'm with a small consulting company. I don't think I fit your audience.

Caller: Well the [tech company's] new division specializes in companies from 5-500 employees. Do you have any plans to purchase...

You get the drift. How is this random calling to "qualify" a "lead" based on white paper download a month or two earlier worth anything?

White papers have their place (heck, I write some of them for clients myself!), and telemarketing, properly applied, can certainly have value. But it's hard for me to imagine that this archaic spray and pray approach to marketing and sales does the slightest good for your reputation, your pipeline, or your bottom line.

Aren't we past these random acts of selling? 

Photo credit: vlima.com

The new, new marketing: Health tech coalition may point the way

The buzz in marketing is all about social media, with Twitter as the flavor of the month and maybe even a tipping point in getting laggard companies to finally take the promise of social media seriously. 

I'm all for it, of course. Certainly the hype can get tiresome, and there are huge strategy and organizational questions that companies have to face with social media, but I think we're well past the stage of wondering whether there's real gold in those hills.

But social media was "new" in marketing five years ago. Back then, when I talked with clients about the promise of blogs and communities and the like for "serious" B2B marketing, I got a lot of blank stares and "really?" responses. Those days are long gone, even if many companies are just now dipping their toes into the water.

The new, new marketing incorporates social media values and tactics, but it's much more than that. It's mission-oriented, educational, and problem-solving, while also being conversational and transparent. 

In fact, I've been thinking about yet another acronym to capture the idea: Marketing that MATTERS. it's definitely on the long side, and maybe too cute, but I think the direction is right.

M - Mission-oriented, focused on a larger purpose than just selling stuff
A - Authentic, with personal and organizational integrity, and real people speaking like real people
T - Thought-provoking, with a serious purpose and making people think
T - Transparent (of course), opening the curtain and letting people see inside
E - Educational, helping people learn and solve problems vs. distracting or "just" entertaining them
R - Relationship-oriented, looking for long-term partnership, not just the the one-time sale
S - Story-driven, since that's what we remember and what makes it real

IBM's Smarter Planet campaign (which is becoming more a way of doing business than just a campaign) is a great example of this approach, and the kudos IBM is receiving are well-deserved.

GE's new Healthymagination is another move in the same direction, as was GE's earlier start with its Ecomagination initiative.

Yes these are self-serving marketing programs. Hey, it's capitalism and these are mega-corporations trying to make a buck. But there is a strong element of enlightened self-interest here. They're tackling real social issues; they're raising awareness; they're thought-provoking; they're providing at least some education, and so on. I'm not sure they''d get all A's on a Marketing that MATTERS report card, but I'm choosing to look on the bright side.

Meanwhile, we don't all have the deep pockets of IBM and GE, and have to think a bit smaller in scale.  

A new health tech coalition, the EHR Stimulus Tour, captured my eye in this regard. Motivated by the chance to capture government funding for helping doctors convert to electronic health records (EHR), an alliance of large and smaller tech firms, including Cisco, Dell, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, Nuance, Allscripts, and Citrix is organizing an educational campaign for doctors on the Stimulus legislation and the opportunities and benefits of EHR.

It's not a huge effort, and probably not one that will last for years. Tactically, though, the campaign covers a lot of useful ground in a well-designed and integrated way: a focused audience, an educational approach, a combination of live road show events and a resource microsite, a presence n Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, a set of webcasts, etc. And the alliance approach itself is a nice change from the normal solo or traditional channel approach; it adds to the "we're all pitching in to solve the problem" idea.

The program and the EHR push in general are not without controversy (see, for example, here). In looking at the bright side, though, I see enormous potential for business-society win-win with this kind of marketing approach. I wouldn't give these guys all A's either, but the Mission-orientation is a good start and the campaign provides a useful model to consider.

What do you think? And what about "Marketing that MATTERS" idea? Does that make sense, or is it just another dumb acronym?

New research and paper on "Four Steps to Solutions Growth"

I'm pleased to announce the launch of a new Point of View series with my partners at Solutions Insights.

Over the next several months, we'll release a series of short, research-based perspectives on how companies can improve performance in their solutions businesses.

Our first Point of View, Adjusting to the New Reality: Four Steps to Solutions Growth, is available now. It outlines four initiatives companies can take to accelerate solutions growth through the rest of 2009 while also repositioning their organizations for longer-term success.

Based on new research with our partner ITSMA, the Point of View highlights findings from a survey with more than 30 B2B solutions providers on four critical initiatives:

• Improving the solutions development process
• Reorienting value propositions and messaging
• Enhancing customer connections
• Better equipping the sales force to sell solutions

For example, we see that companies are looking mostly to develop more packaged and "mass-customized" solutions rather than relying mainly on fully customized, one-off solutions. Only 16% of the companies surveyed are looking to increase the number of highly customized solutions.

You can download the Point of View pdf here. I'd love to know what you think.

It's all about lead gen now...or is it?

 

Rich Vancil, head of IDC's CMO Advisory Service, provided a great state of the tech marketing union this week at the IDC DIrections conference in Boston. It's not great, of course, with IDC projecting 10% marketing budget cuts for 2009 -- which pretty much validates what I've been hearing anecdotally from clients and other friends across the industry.

More important, as Rich pointed out, is the reshaping of marketing budgets in response to the downturn. Cuts are not coming across the board in most companies; they're focused especially on the top of the funnel. The deepest cuts, according to IDC, are coming in branding, advertising, sponsorships, and "big tent" events (conferences and trade shows). 

The other area of real cuts (although not as deep), is what Rich called "the brains of the operation" -- marketing strategy and operations, PR and AR, marketing and customer intelligence, and product, industry, and solutions marketing.

Further down the funnel, spending is either flat or even increasing. The closer you get to sales, not surprisingly, the better the budget picture looks. IDC sees modest increases this year in lead management, sales enablement, and, of course, actual selling.

Writ large, it's a shift from marketing operations and building awareness to generating demand and directly supporting sales. In better times, Rich noted, the balance is typically 50-50; it's now skewed heavily toward generating demand and enabling sales.

Again, nothing shocking here; pretty much every marketer I talk to says it's all about lead gen right now. If you can't point to a direct, near-term impact on revenue, don't bother bringing it up.

Personally, I think a lot of marketing groups are going overboard in shifting priorities. Iunderstand the pressure to move the needle on sales. I just don't agree that cutting into the brains of the organization is the best way forward.

As such, I was heartened to hear Eric Andrews, head of worldwide demand generation for IBM, take a different tack. During a marketing executive panel the same day, Andrews stated that IBM's biggest marketing initiative right now is "driving brand and differentiation across all audiences." 

Building on its new Smarter Planet theme, IBM is investing heavily in advertising, content development, and, perhaps most important, customer conversation about the broad business issues under the Smarter Planet umbrella: energy, water, transportation, health care, and so on. 

The effort is certainly aligned with sales, and, in fact, the company is pushing additional marketing resources into the field to get closer to sales. But the important point is that IBM is leading with brainpower, with ideas, with thought leadership, and with brand. In an environment where buyers are tuning out every type of sales pitch, and looking for every reason NOT to buy, it is only by engaging them with new thinking and new ideas that you really have a chance to get into the conversation in the first place. And without that conversation, forget about the sale.

In the end, it's too easy to just say "we need more leads." Of course we all need more business. But what really matters, and what will make or break our results, is how we go about it.

What do you think?

Photo credit: dierk schaefer