Musings of a Marketing Maven

As com­pa­nies bleed rev­enues, prof­its and jobs, it’s ironic that peo­ple are debat­ing the death of B2B mar­ket­ing or its obso­les­cence. And yet I’ve been in sev­eral con­ver­sa­tions over the past week on this topic.

I think a bet­ter fram­ing for the con­ver­sa­tion, rather than death or obso­les­cence, is B2B marketing’s strate­gic rel­e­vance and value con­tri­bu­tion to the cor­po­ra­tion and the marketplace.

I believe that B2B mar­keters need to rede­fine their roles and fig­ure out how to con­tribute more directly to rev­enue growth, mar­ket share gains, bet­ter mar­gins – while solv­ing mean­ing­ful cus­tomer prob­lems and nur­tur­ing 2-way cus­tomer relationships.

I find it frus­trat­ing that so few com­pa­nies are will­ing or able to invest in the infra­struc­ture that mar­keters need for faster learn­ing, bet­ter cus­tomer insights, or ways to prove account­abil­ity and mar­ket­ing ROI on their tac­tics. Clearly, mar­keters are strug­gling with how to make a com­pelling case for these invest­ments – and face a reluc­tant, if not hos­tile, recep­tion from the peo­ple who con­trol the company’s purse strings.

There are numer­ous indi­ca­tors that B2B mar­ket­ing is strug­gling to sur­vive, or prove its con­tri­bu­tion to the cor­po­ra­tion. For­rester reports that B2B mar­ket­ing bud­gets, par­tic­u­larly for tech ven­dors, are fac­ing cut­backs in the range of 15–25% for 2009. Lay­offs abound, with deep cuts in mar­ket­ing jobs and a cor­re­spond­ing impact on exter­nal mar­ket­ing ser­vices firms.

The other day a for­mer senior mar­keter from Microsoft men­tioned that even the term “mar­ket­ing” is falling out of favor, espe­cially in smaller or mid-tier busi­nesses. He described the migra­tion of clas­sic mar­ket­ing activ­i­ties from the mar­ket­ing depart­ment to other busi­ness func­tions, and opined that the more strate­gic the func­tion, the less likely it was to stay within the hands of mar­keters. He also cited a report he’d seen some­where that CMOs, on aver­age, earn lower salaries than their C-level coun­ter­parts; or appear at lower lev­els on org charts – clas­sic indi­ca­tors of power within a corporation.

Some Root Causes

It’s easy to iden­tify some of the self-inflicted causes of marketing’s dis­re­pute. A recent sur­vey by the CMO Coun­cil reveals that the major­ity of com­pa­nies have no for­mal pro­grams to turn “the voice of the cus­tomer” into revenue-generating oppor­tu­ni­ties for the com­pany. It’s too easy to focus on telling (or broad­cast­ing) rather than lis­ten­ing and engaging.

Sadly, I often see B2B mar­ket­ing depart­ments con­sumed with sales sup­port tac­tics, at the expense of time (or money) for more strate­gic insight-building activ­i­ties that could offer a more last­ing con­tri­bu­tion. Things like deep cus­tomer insights or the abil­ity to spot under-served mar­kets and iden­tify real cus­tomer pains.

Too often tech mar­keters are infat­u­ated with their prod­ucts and tech­nolo­gies, and lose sight of the need for deeper cus­tomer intel­li­gence or mean­ing­ful engage­ment mod­els. Caught up in feeds and speeds, they lose sight of the need to con­nect to the buy­ers’ pains and rea­sons to buy, or how to archi­tect the true solu­tion to the customer’s need – espe­cially when mul­ti­ple par­ties need to col­lab­o­rate on that solution.

In love with their own prod­ucts, do mar­keters mis­in­ter­pret what it means to “romance the brand?” Do they not under­stand that con­sumers and buy­ers are now in much more pow­er­ful posi­tions, and there­fore mar­keters need to fos­ter trust-based rela­tion­ships or deliver on more authen­tic value propo­si­tions con­nected to value – as per­ceived by the customer?

Despite all the hype about social net­work­ing, it’s still sur­pris­ing how few com­pa­nies have any insti­tu­tion­al­ized processes for lis­ten­ing and respond­ing to what cus­tomers are say­ing. Every­one knows that word-of-mouth refer­rals or rec­om­men­da­tions from trusted peers are highly influ­en­tial for buy­ing deci­sions, and yet:

Despite over­whelm­ing agree­ment on the impor­tance of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and word-of-mouth, senior mar­keters admit their com­pa­nies are fail­ing to take deci­sive action to inte­grate cus­tomer voice and expe­ri­ence into key busi­ness and mar­ket­ing processes.

Source: A 2008 sur­vey by the CMO Coun­cil, spon­sored by Sat­metrix, the Net­Pro­moter Company

When I ask clients why they don’t do this, the answers vary: no one is respon­si­ble for this, it’s too hard, it could threaten our busi­ness model, we can’t afford the infra­struc­ture to make this pos­si­ble. Etc., etc.

Another major con­trib­u­tor is mar­keters’ reluc­tance to embrace account­abil­ity and met­rics (mar­ket­ing per­for­mance mea­sures) as a way of life. More on that later…

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