Musings of a Marketing Maven

Finally there’s a prac­ti­cal resource for peo­ple who want the best of both worlds: what’s worth keep­ing from tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing, com­bined with the ben­e­fits of the emerg­ing Mar­ket­ing 2.0 toolkit. Thanks to IBM’s Sandy Carter, there’s now a great resource for B2B mar­ket­ing strate­gists and prac­ti­tion­ers, The New Lan­guage of Mar­ket­ing 2.0. I def­i­nitely rec­om­mend it.

‘ANGELS’ Frame­work for Ener­giz­ing Markets

Her book lays out a com­pre­hen­sive plan­ning and exe­cu­tion frame­work for “ener­giz­ing mar­kets,” based on prac­tices that Carter and her team at IBM have honed while mar­ket­ing SOA and Web­Sphere on a global basis.

She calls it “ANGELS,” a cutesy acronym for her suc­cess formula:

• A: Ana­lyze the mar­ket to ensure you’re start­ing from a solid under­stand­ing of your best oppor­tu­ni­ties around the world, and that your planned offer­ings will be a good match to the market’s needs and your orga­ni­za­tional capabilities.
• N: Nail the strat­egy – make sure your busi­ness strat­egy, value propo­si­tion, busi­ness model, value chain focus, etc., are all aligned and rein­force each other – and allow you to deliver the promised ben­e­fits of your value prop.
• G: Go to Mar­ket – develop a solid and cohe­sive GTM plan, inte­grat­ing the global busi­ness needs but adapted for local require­ments and chan­nels; make sure you’ve got the opti­mal mix of tra­di­tional and new media (includ­ing social media) tac­tics to meet the busi­ness objec­tives for your mar­ket­ing fun­nel and sales pipeline. Plan and exe­cute an inte­grated GTM cam­paign end-to-end – and don’t neglect your mar­ket influencers.
• E: Ener­gize your chan­nels and com­mu­nity – make sure you’ve got the right reach and cov­er­age for your iden­ti­fied tar­get mar­ket seg­ments. Be sure to develop pro­grams and resources that will sat­isfy the needs and wants of the chan­nels and com­mu­ni­ties that are part of your mar­ket ecosys­tem, whether those com­mu­ni­ties include online groups, pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tions, uni­ver­si­ties, etc. Ensure you pro­vide the right “enable­ment” to acti­vate your part­ners so they can achieve their busi­ness and pro­fes­sional goals. Make it fun and prof­itable for them to do busi­ness with and through you.
• L: Leads and rev­enue – make sure you have an effec­tive fun­nel man­age­ment sys­tem and rev­enue engine, closely aligned with the sales func­tion (and its pipeline man­age­ment processes). Ide­ally, set up mech­a­nisms that enable you to track and opti­mize tac­tics while the cam­paign is in flight, thanks to what the author calls “in-process met­rics.” (She describes some of IBM’s best prac­tices, based on the mar­ket­ing automa­tion plat­form and met­rics sys­tem used by IBM Cognos.)
• S: Scream – lever­age the tech­nol­ogy at your dis­posal, but don’t for­get to “wear your pas­sion on your sleeve.” Share your excite­ment and your pas­sion for the mar­ket­place, new trends and oppor­tu­ni­ties with your cus­tomers, influ­encers and part­ners. In “scream­ing,” shift from broad­cast to dia­logue mode (even if that seems like an oxymoron).

In the course of describ­ing this frame­work, the author shares a num­ber of IBM’s own case stud­ies, as well as high-level views of their own plan­ning tools and approaches. This alone makes the book well worth the price!

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