Reputation to Revenue

Marketing to key accounts: It's all about the relationships

I was interviewing a Key Account Manager for a large tech firm the other day, and was struck by her comment that she wanted the firm's marketing people to be much closer to her customer.

This is a large global account we're talking about, with a big account team and numerous multi-million dollar deals worldwide.

Sales people tend to be extremely protective of their accounts. They "own" the relationships; the stakes are huge, and they rarely want anyone else in the neighborhood (except when it comes to delivery, of course).

But here's the thing: This key account manager understood that marketing could potentially play a huge role in sustaining and strengthening the business with her account -- and she was frustrated that it wasn't happening. 

Most important, the content and events that she saw from marketing were simply too generic. She still used some of it, but mostly she had to rely on her own team's efforts or colleagues managing other big accounts to get the specific information, contacts, and ideas that were most valuable to her account.

On the marketing side, meanwhile, I know that supporting the key account teams is at least rhetorically a priority.

As with many B2B firms, a relatively small number of key accounts generate a big percentage of revenue for this company, not to mention critical market insight, references, and the impetus for product and solution innovation. The marketing folks certainly understand this. Nevertheless, they are not able to provide the kind of focused support that that the account teams need. 

I wrote recently about four keys to success with account-based marketing. Looking back at that post, however, I realize I neglected an even more basic point: Marketing people need direct relationships with the key accounts. 

Only by having direct relationships can you get a real feel for the client's business environment, operations, needs, wants, language, and so on. It's an obvious point, but how often do we produce marketing content, organize events, and build sales tools without being grounded in those direct relationships? It's no wonder sales people ignore so much of our carefully crafted work.

So, what do we do about it?

The simple answer is go out and build those relationships.

OK, sure, but how do we do that?

Certainly you can't go around the account manager. That's a no-no. But you can put in the time with the account manager to work out a relationship-building program.

Sitting in on client review sessions is one easy step; working with the account teams to organize executive briefings is another (if your executives aren't willing to do these briefings for your most important accounts, you've got larger problems to worry about!). And, of course, organizing more substantial account-based marketing programs is an even better way to go.

It all takes time, and it all takes some serious relationship building with the account manager and team, too.

But the benefits can be enormous: Deeper insight into what your key accounts need, clearer direction for marketing programs and sales support, and tighter alignment with key account teams that are driving a great deal of the company's success.

How close is your marketing team to your key accounts? What's working in your relationships with key account managers? I'd love to hear in the comments. 

Note: Originally posted on the Solutions Insights blog.

Photo credit: Rob Young

Why is customer-centric marketing still more talk than action?

Michael Shrage’s recent Harvard Business Review post, Great Customers Inspire Great Innovations, got me thinking:

Why, amid so much evidence of the power of customer-centric business, are so many companies still mired in inside-out operations? Why do we hear so much talk but see so little action?

Shrage’s post reminds us that behind most great innovations lie customers and clients that made those innovations possible. "Busicom, a scientific calculator company, for example, commissioned Intel [in 1969] to design a chipset for its new programmable calculators. That led directly to Intel’s breakthrough creation of the microprocessor." On a much broader scale, "Wal-Mart’s incessant and relentless demands for ‘everyday low prices’ transformed every supplier it touched."

Shrage’s post also reminded me of an essential book from way back in 2003 by IT industry analyst David Moschella, Customer-Driven IT. Taking off from the familiar point that the tech industry was always led by vendor-based innovation, Moschella outlined the fundamental shift underway in the early 2000s toward customer-driven innovation in industries ranging from media and financial services to health care and education.

Ranjay Gulati’s more recent Reorganize for Resilence provides similar testimony, evidence, and examples of the power of customer centricity for solutions development, marketing, and sales (you can watch my partner Steve Hurley’s interview with Ranjay on our new YouTube channel).

Shrage, Moschelle, and Gulati are actually making a critical point beyond the normal blah-blah about listening to customers and strengthening relationships. As Shrage notes, even this approach (which is typically more talk than action) is not enough. Rather:

"The essential question is who are the customers that come with the problem sets and parameters that push you to rethink, or redefine, your business? Which customers and clients does your firm celebrate as innovation partners -- and why?"

What amazes me, though, is why B2B marketers aren’t investing more in serious programs to build key customer relationships, generate deeper customer insight, and build stronger customer collaboration at least as a foundation to help drive that necessary innovation.

After all, it’s not just academics and pundits like Shrage, Moschella, and Gulati pounding their fists. IBM’s latest survey of more than 1,500 large enterprise CEOs around the world showed that 95% of top performing organizations identified getting closer to customers as their most important strategic initiative over the next five years.

It is happening to some extent, of course. In B2B technology, where I spend most of my time, a number of companies are putting some real money where their mouths are. For example:

• IBM's three-tiered program to engage top CIOs reflects a substantial investment in a sophisticated approach to help drive innovation as well as loyalty and advocacy
• CSC's WikonnecT community for the insurance industry represents a sizable commitment to customer collaboration that similarly helps generate innovative offers
• The EMC Community Network, bringing together thousands of customers, partners, and employees for ongoing conversation, support, and solutions development, is built around the efforts of a dozen-member corporate team with dozens of other community managers across the company

More often, however, I see situations where the rhetoric far outpaces the reality:

• A large IT services firm aggressively (and expensively) using Twitter and other social media primarily as just another channel to pump out corporate-designed messages and content
• A large enterprise software firm touting its launch of a new "community" but doing none of the spade work to make sure any customers actually care
• A large technology equipment provider with nary an executive relationship program in sight

Needless to say, all three of these companies, like most of their peers, prattle on endlessly that "we're all about the customer."

For B2B marketers interested in moving beyond the rhetoric, there are some obvious next steps:

• Invest in social media, but make sure there's a heavy focus on listening and engaging; social media is first and foremost a tremendous vehicle for customer insight
• Invest in executive relationship programs, such as customer councils and peer networking events, but make sure there's no selling 
  
• Invest in key account programs, but as much for the insight and collaborative innovation as for hitting near-term numbers
• Invest in program integration and information sharing; customer insight is of little value if locked in separate silos 

If all this investment means cutting back in other areas, well, that's the price of truly changing strategy and priorities.

As always, though, it's the mindset that matters most.

I was reminded of this for the umpteenth time last week while pulling together some research around customer reference programs for a client. Most tech companies have a reference program, but far too many are focused transactionally on getting customer testimonials and promoting success stories. There's relatively little attention to actually learning more about customer needs, strengthening relationships, and building collaborative innovation (with some notable exceptions, of course).

These are your best customers, folks! If you're stuck in selfish transaction mode with them, there's a long way go to in getting to customer centricity.

Am I right to be so critical? What's working for customer-centricity on your end?

Photo credit: everywhereisimagined

 

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

Four steps to strengthening B2B customer connections

 

IBM's hot-off-the-press 2010 CEO Study confirms again what solutions marketers already know: getting closer to customers is a strategic priority. An overwhelming 88% of large enterprise CEOs told IBM that getting closer to customers is a top business strategy for the next five years, placing it at the top of the list. An even higher number of the best performing CEOs, 95%, stressed the point.  

Is this really news? Isn't this just Marketing 101?

Well, sort of. The idea is basic, but making it happen, especially in large organizations, is not so easy.

The CEO imperative makes sense. Big company CEOs are struggling mightily, as the IBM report notes, with "the complexity of operating in an increasingly volatile and uncertain world."

In this context, and especially from a B2B perspective, close customer connections are essential to:

• Gain deep insight into customer wants and needs
• Gather input and advice on potential new offerings
• Uncover new opportunities and co-create solutions
• Obtain references, testimonials, and proof of value delivered

Creating and sustaining those trusted connections is extremely difficult, though, when our customers are overwhelmed with their own professional demands and tune out most of our marketing.

Social media brings promise of new and potentially more effective ways to build and maintain vibrant customer connections, both individual and communal -- but understanding how to turn that promise into reality is far from clear.

Meanwhile, face-to-face connections remain essential for key customers, especially at the executive level where so many of us need to be working. But our sales people have less time for relationship building and often little credibility in the executive suite. Beyond sales, it is difficult to know which face-to-face programs are worth funding.

A final challenge, especially for large organizations, is simply managing, coordinating, and building synergies across the wide range of programs and activities designed to strengthen customer connections.

Knowing this is a CEO priority, however, should make it at least a bit easier for marketing leaders to push forward with efforts to do what we all know is so important.

Here are four steps to consider:

1. Do an assessment. It's hard to even keep track of all the ways we're already connecting with customers. Research, sales, services, and delivery are obvious, but we also have thought leadership programs, social media and networks, executive relationship programs, reference management, key account management, customer councils, collaborative solutions development, and probably many more. Take stock of all these initiatives. Look at funding and staffing. Review effectiveness in terms of customer insight and relationship growth. Benchmark the competition. We need a baseline to identify gaps and next steps and to help build a vision of where we need to go.
2. Put someone in charge and build a cross-organizational team. We're already doing this with social media (hopefully!), but customer connections is an even bigger deal. We need someone with the big picture in mind and organizational partners and resources available to improve coordination, integration, and information sharing. We're not building relationships for their own sake, and we're not doing it just for sales either. If no one has accountability to ensure efficiency and effectiveness across the range of relationship-oriented programs, it won't happen.
3. Build executive commitment. The CEO wants to get closer to customers but is the rest of the leadership group on board? Are they setting the right examples and the right tone for their teams? Operationalizing the commitment to customer connections requires real investment and, as important, TIME. We need to push and prod and support senior executives to make the time to work on key relationships, participate in customer councils, and send the message that these initiatives are indeed a top priority.
4. Provide incentives. Companies that take customer satisfaction seriously put serious incentives in place to support the right behavior. Improving customer satisfaction is not the same thing as strengthening customer connections and relationships, but the principle certainly applies (as it usually does with any strategic initiative). Set specific goals, measure results, and then reward the folks in marketing, sales, service, and delivery teams for hitting their relationship growth targets.

What would you add to the list? What's working for you?

Photo credit: Marc_Smith

Lessons from IBM's CIO community program

Everyone selling high value solutions wants to engage C-level executives. 

They're the ultimate decision makers. They can provide deep insight into both their own companies and emerging issues in your markets. They can give you the most powerful references and testimonials. 

Of course they're also the hardest to reach. 

Most B2B solution providers have some sort of executive relationship program, often with some combination of advisory councils, executive briefing centers, executive dinners and seminars, and similar initiatives. And most of these companies struggle mightily to make these programs work and gain substantial value from them.

Karla Bousquet, Director of Executive Client Marketing at IBM, provided some useful insight from IBM's experience during a webinar today organized by Farland Group (full disclosure: I used to work with Farland Group principals when we were all at Truman Company).

Most important, according to Bousquet, is beginning with a clear understanding of what senior executives (CIOs, in this case) truly value:

• Engaging with their peers and extending their professional networks
• Influencing the direction of organizations or initiatives that are important to them
• Gaining justification for their business direction and intuition
• Sharing best practices and lessons learned from peers and experts they trust

They're busy, they don't really care about your products, but they are anxious to learn and grow, most especially with their peers.  

In this context, IBM has taken a strong community approach to serve CIO (and IBM) needs, with four core objectives:

• Establish a shared agenda for engaging with peers and influencing IBM's strategy
• Deliver on IBM's belief that customers play a key role in driving new ideas and innovation
• Provide CIOs with access to experts and expertise across IBM and its partner ecosystem
• Work with CIOs to share success stories that demonstrate business value with CIO contribution

Each of these objectives responds directly to one or more of the things that executives value most. It's difficult to succeed with any community initiative if you don't focus first on providing relevant value to would-be participants. It's doubly difficult with the busiest and most sought-after executives.

To make it work, IBM has developed a tiered program, with three distinct initiatives:

1. Board of Advisors (20-25 CIOs). This is the most strategic of the three, and involves IBM's top executives as peers with CIOs from their most important clients. The primary focus is on providing advice to IBM on the company's strategic direction, something that the participating CIOs have great interest in given their enormous stake in IBM's success.
2. CIO Leadership Exchange (200+ CIOs). Initially an annual event, IBM is working to build more of an ongoing community with this larger group of CIOs from top global companies. The focus here is on sharing of best practices and success stories within a highly accomplished peer group of technology leaders.
3. Center for CIO Leadership (2,000+ CIOs). Focused on advancing the profession, this mission-driven organization, for which IBM provides lead sponsorship, emphasizes the development of leadership skills for current and future CIOs 

The tiered approach helps in organizing IBM resources and responding to different types of CIOs with different levels of relationship to IBM. Underlying each of these programs, though, is a consistent focus on delivering the value that executive participants demand:

• If CIOs want to engage with peers and extend their networks, make sure to prioritize peer exchange and access to experts in every aspect of community and program design
• If CIOs want to influence the direction of your organization, make sure to empower them and allow them to do this, even if it means listening to dissenting views
• If CIOs want to justify their business direction and intuition, create serious opportunities for collaboration and dialogue, along with providing relevant research and perspective
• If CIOs want to share best practices and success stories, ensure a private and safe environment to enable them to do this with relevant and credible peers

It's not rocket science, but it's not easy either. It means letting go of the desire to pitch and sell, and committing to the hard work of listening, facilitation, and collaboration. It means having the patience to emphasize the longer term benefits at some potential expense to short-term gain. Most of all, it means truly putting customer interests first, something we all talk about but all too often fail to deliver.   

Permission marketing turns ten

Seth Godin today marked the tenth anniversary of his hugely influential book, Permission Marketing. Along with Cluetrain Manifesto, Godin's first book captured perfectly the seismic shift in marketing that was just then (1999) beginning to be understood: markets are conversations, interruption marketing is dying, buyers are in control, marketers abuse customer trust at their own peril, the Web opens up everything. And this was all years before anyone ever heard of blogging, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter.

Thanks Seth!

P.S. You can still get the first four chapters free at permission.com.

MIT and the new physics of marketing

Today's New York Times had a fascinating article about changes in teaching introductory physics...which got me thinking about the changes we're working through in marketing.

Like most universities, M.I.T. has traditionally taught introductory physics in large lecture halls. Professors worked for years to hone their lectures like the finest stage performers.

"But now," Sara Rimer explains, "with physicists across the country pushing for universities to do a better job of teaching science, M.I.T. has made a striking change."

"The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning..... Already attendance is up and the failure rate has dropped by more than 50 percent.

M.I.T. is not alone. Other universities are changing their ways, among them Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Harvard. In these institutions, physicists have been pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning."

So what's the marketing connection?

Marketing, especially for high value business solutions, is becoming more educational than promotional. This is not exactly a news flash; the best business marketers have been working for years to shift from pitching prospective customers on the merits of their products and services to providing insightful and useful information about the business challenges their customers and prospects are facing -- and thereby generating interest and credibility around the solutions they might provide.

To do this well, however, marketing can't just exchange their old-fashioned promotional approach for an old-fashioned lecturing-at-students educational approach. Business buyers today do want to learn about issues, challenges and potential solutions from their would-be suppliers and partners. But they don't just want to listen to you pontificating up on stage. They want to roll up their sleeves, work with their peers, and figure it out together.

So the challenge for marketing, at least in the B2B solutions world, is to take a page from M.I.T.'s book: less large lecture halls, more small seminars; less talking at, more working with. Online and social media tools and channels, of course, make this easier to do. Without a core commitment to "interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning," though, business marketers could be left on stage with declining attendance and an increasing rate of failure.

Photo credit: Nicholasf

Marketing as service

Drew Neisser, CEO of the interactive agency Renegade, has a useful post today on "marketing as service". The basic idea, a variant on my constant focus that marketing needs to provide legitimate value to all stakeholders, is when marketing "no longer talks at you but actually does something for you, then it becomes a service." 

As an example, Drew cites Samsung placing mobile charging stations at airports to help travelers recharge on the road: "Samsung gets meaningful exposure, airports get happier travelers and consumers come to recognize Samsung as a helpful & reliable 'mobile' resource. The exchange of value is crystal clear."

He then goes on to critique a superficially similar effort from Kraft, which highlights heating up bus shelters and providing samples of Stove Top Stuffing to "warm up" cold commuters this month in Chicago. Sounds okay at first, but Drew's point is that Kraft is doing this in just 10 bus shelters in Chicago, while putting more energy into traditional bus stop shelter advertising all over that city and 49 other cities as well. 

A more substantial commitment to marketing as service, he suggests, would be scrapping the advertising and providing the actual service more extensively in cold weather cities nationwide. "Commuters would be thanking Kraft by the bus load and telling all their friends how the kind folks from Glenview warmed them up on a frigid morning. Cities would be competing to get the Kraft bus shelter program as a way of encouraging and rewarding the use of public transportation."

Marketing as service is far from an alien concept in the B2B world. Business software companies provide free demos and trial versions; many companies have user groups and customer councils; and most provide thought leadership content in an effort to help business leaders make more informed decisions. 

But how much of this activity is really just a come-on to paid versions or a thinly veiled sales pitch rather than authentic provision of value -- or, as in the Kraft example, just a token effort amid a much more extensive promotional campaign? To what extent are you really trying to serve?

(Thanks to Paul Dunay for linking Drew's post on Twitter. Follow Paul yourself for a steady stream of great links.)

A balanced approach for 2009

The normal strategy in a downturn is to hunker down, focus on cost cutting and short-term revenue generation, and ride out the storm until the good times return. Marketers often talk a good game about recessions being great times to invest in marketing because costs are lower, your competitors are scaling back, and you can lay a much stronger foundation for the future. But the reality is that few companies are bold enough to actually do that (if you're working for one of those exceptions, congrats!). As one friend who runs interactive marketing for a large services firm told me, "If my budget next year is flat, I'll be jumping for joy."

Most often, the hunkering down approach for marketing translates into cutting back on "brand  building" and pouring whatever resources are available into lead generation and sales support. This tendency is exacerbated by the fact that relatively few heads of marketing can quantify the value of brand, as noted in a new study by ANA and Interbrand (see BtoB's writeup here). If you can't quantify it, it's a lot harder to justify spending.

The shift to short-term sales is understandable enough, but I see two big problems here, even leaving aside the larger question of investing more in a downturn.

First, for companies selling high value services and solutions, your buyers are finding you much more than you're finding them. If you're not keeping up a steady pace of thought leadership, influencer relations, and general issues-based conversation in the market, you're losing out on critical channels for building interest, inquiries, and referrals that can turn quickly into leads.

Second, your sales people increasingly depend on the company's awareness, reputation, and differentiation for the credibility they need even to get into a preliminary conversation with time-starved prospects. This is especially true when times are tough. Recessions typically accentuate market bifurcation: Business buyers flock either to the lowest price providers or the (perceived) most reliable quality brands. Unless you're willing to go the commodity pricing route, cutting back on brand building can leave you stuck in the uncomfortable middle.

So, looking ahead to 2009 (and even the rest of this quarter), certainly look to minimize unnecessary costs, improve lead generation and sales support activities, and focus that much more on those activities with the biggest return. But please don't equate this with putting brand building aside. A more balanced approach is critical even to shorter-term results, and it will of course put you in better shape when the good times do return. And if you're one of the fortunate few that really can increase investment to take advantage of the downturn, I'd love to hear your story!