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The CMO Advisory Service at IDC is conducting its annual barometer survey. This is the 10 th year of the survey.  All respondents will receive a free copy of the report produced from the results of the survey and an invitation to IDC's exclusive Client Telebriefing. During The CMO Advisory's 2012 Marketing Benchmarks survey we collected data from ~100 of the largest and most influential tech companies, their combined revenue totaled nearly $750 Billion.  The barometer survey provides a "finger in the wind" follow up to the Benchmark Survey providing detailed guidance to senior marketers. Areas of focus include: budget ratios, program spend, headcount allocation, and in-depth insights into key trends in the industry and forward looking roles and programs.    If you are interested in participating:  contact Sam Melnick at smelnick (at) idc (dot) com Below are some answers to questions you might have: Q: A free report and webinar, cool! Wait what type of infor...

With 2012 coming to an end, for many businesses planning for 2013 will bleed into the New Year. Marketers are no exception; in anticipation of the planning cycle each year, the CMO Advisory Service publishes our annual Marketing Planner in August/September, developing the B2B tech industry's leading marketing (and sales ) benchmarking study. To anyone familiar with the industry, you are probably used to hearing that Marketing is transforming . What is so exciting about our Marketing Planner is we are able to provide specific guidance on changes, challenges, and successes within the industry through incredibly accurate industry data and qualitative information provided by you, the senior marketers. Marketers in turn are able to use this information to successfully plan for the upcoming year. I’ve taken the liberty of pulling out some key facts below from our report that are particularly interesting or useful. Feel free to share them and remember to follow me on twitter or check ou...

Data analytics was the big winner in the 2012 US Presidential race. In fact, 11:17 PM (US ET) November 6th was the moment data analytics went mainstream. This was when Ohio was officially projected to go to Obama. It was the ultimate validation for Nate Silver and his data analytics approach to election forecasting. To much fanfare he accurately predicted the results of the election in all 50 states without doing any of his own polling. He used sophisticated analytic models based on data from as many third party polls he could find. To this he added the secret sauce of data analytics - a keen understanding of how different types of data from different sources relate to one another in context. His FiveThirtyEight blog drove as much as 20% of the web traffic to the New York Times website - the 6th most visited US news site on the net - leading up to the election. As a result, data analytics is officially mainstream. Any business leader at any level that does not immediately embr...

The IDC CMO and Sales advisory services held their most recent client leadership meeting in Santa Clara on June 5th. One of the key topics of the day was sales enablement. The ensuing dialog between the sales and marketing execs in the room was as impassioned as it was ineffective. Many of the usual themes were expressed (in the nicest possible way): "marketing leads are crap", "sales doesn't follow up", etc. etc. Whenever I hear this conversation it always sounds like the two sides are talking past one another. Neither really understands how to express their frustration in a way that has any meaning to the other. What's missing are some basic table stakes: Sales  1. Train marketing on sales process. It is impossible to effectively contribute to, much less consistently improve, an unknown process. No marketing team should be expected to deliver effective collateral or leads to a sales organization until they have been fully trained on sales process and met...

What's the most commonly heard word in marketing organizations today? It is “Transformation.” Dramatic transformational change is sweeping through marketing functions in most industries. And the main "change agent" is the customer. Or what we at the IDC Executive Advisory like to call the "New Buyer" . Our customers and prospects today are crafting their own routes to learning about products and services. They are motivated and skilled at educating themselves and learning from peers. They travel through numerous digital pathways in their exploration process. And by the time they come to a meeting with the vendor sales person, they are smart and savvy. They are empowered. Marketers need to ask and answer these questions: Where did our Buyers come from? What do they know already? And above all: How do we  add new value to where they are in the process of discovery about our product or service? The New Buyer dynamic creates volumes of new data and customer intellig...

IBM released the findings of their Global CMO study yesterday and one of the primary conclusions is that CMOs feel unprepared to address key challenges. The most surprising thing is how consistent the feeling is across regions and vertical industries. CMOs generally face the same issues and report very similar levels of "unpreparedness" in the face of them. Top challenges include: data explosion, social media, growth of channel and device choices, and shifting consumer demographics, among others. The findings are based on 1,734 structured in-person interviews with CMOs in large organizations conducted between February and June of 2011.Regional and vertical representation was reasonably well balanced. The sheer scale of the effort and the willingness of so many CMOs to participate indicate a role under siege. In our research, IDC has learned that marketing is undergoing fundamental and painful transformations on several levels: new and expanding datasets, new channels and form...

Who is your customer? It is a deceptively complex question that a surprising number of B2B companies cannot answer. The difficulty stems from several causes: Inconsistent definitions for customer attributes (account name, industry, segment, organizational hierarchy, contact name/email, etc.) Fragmentation of the data across multiple databases and applications Departmental perspectives on customer relationships Lack of an enterprise customer data management approach The impact of all this is a severe slow down in decision making and an inability to optimize critical processes in customer facing functions, most poignantly in marketing and sales. The solution is to define customer creation as an enterprise process – not something that happens only in marketing and/or sales – and the implementation of data standards and governance to support it. This enables marketing to be data driven, but there are four distinct stages of data driven marketing and not all of them lead to success: 1. ...

Looking Back, Briefly: Marketing Operations has been the fastest growing job role in tech marketing over the past few years. When IDC first started its surveys of marketing spend and staffing back in 2003, Marketing Operations wasn't even on the job roster at most organizations. Today, the "MO" role represents about 6.5% of the total staff and it is the fourth largest job "category" for a large marketing department. So, what happened? The rise of this role was the response of the CMO to the general condemnation that marketing was not acting like a business. The Marketing area was perceived as offering up no accounting, and no accountability... but also offering no end to the pleas for more budget. And so Marketing Operations as the "staff accountant" role started to turn up at the larger and more complex marketing organizations. As the MO role really took off, the general job description would include four areas: budgeting and planning; measurement and...

Where should product marketing report into within a technology organization? Marketing? Business Units? Product Management? The CEO? IDC's 2008 Tech Marketing Benchmarks study indicated that product marketing reports directly into marketing at approximately 45% of technology companies. This is by no means a clear trend to be replicated by every company. In fact, based upon years of research at IDC in this area as well as my own experience in the product marketing function, I continue to believe that the correct answer for product marketing's reporting structure is. . . . it depends. Yes, this may seem like a cop-out initially, but there really is some support for my opinion here. The first question to consider is what is your definition of product marketing? IDC's official definition is as follows: Marketing professionals accountable for developing and executing the strategy to increase market share for specific products. Activities include market sizing and opportunity ass...

Many opportunities exist for B-to-B marketing organizations in the social media space. . . .and they're not all limited to what you can do with Twitter, Linked-In and YouTube. Just a few of these opportunities include: Establish a direct, relevant connection with your customers as a source of voice of the customer for new product development (e.g., through an on-line community) Improve customer satisfaction (e.g., enable customers to share experiences on-line by creating a self-running community where customers can interact with and learn from their peers) Increase the speed for troubleshooting and R&D by reducing the distance between customers and engineering Join the on-line technical conversations about your products that your customers are already having, by either leveraging your own community or listening to and participating in other companies' communities Best-in-class organizations are adding a new social media role to their organization to capture these opportunit...

As discussed in my last blog entry, Are you Ready for Marketing's 2010 Annual Planning Process? , the IDC CMO Advisory Practice is “in the thick” of collecting surveys for our 2009 Tech Marketing Benchmarks study. We expect to collect detailed marketing investment data from nearly 100 hardware, software, and services vendors. With this is hand, we will be well prepared to provide our insight and guidance to tech marketers for their annual planning process. I'd like to invite Seth Fishbein, a senior IDC analyst on our team, to provide a preview of some of this research, focusing on CMOs’ marketing automation priorities for the coming year. A more comprehensive analysis of this topic will be included in IDC’s 2010 Marketing Investment Planner, due out in late September/early October. "Thanks Michael. Based upon interviews with leading tech marketing executives over the past month, the following three areas represent some “low-hanging fruit” in the marketing automation space...

Have you started planning for your 2010 fiscal year yet? Our best practices study in planning – people, process and technology indicates that the average marketing planning cycle begins about 6 months before the fiscal year end. (for CMO Advisory Service clients, refer to "Marketing’s Planning – People, Process and Technology, IDC Doc. #216134 ) If you're one of the more mature organizations, planning will be part of the fabric of your weekly, monthly and quarterly team meetings. Regardless, a significant part of this annual process is assessment of your current "operational" metrics and development of next year's projected investment strategy. I define "operational" metrics as those metrics that track your marketing investment strategy, including: 1. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – such as Marketing Budget Ratio (marketing spend as a % of revenue), Program to People KPI, Revenue per Staff, Staff Throughput (program spend per marketing staff), Centr...

I've spoken about sales enablement quite a bit in this blog, and I'll continue to do so as marketers improve their ability to better enable the sales process from an internal as well as an external perspective. With this in mind, Clare Gillan, IDC's SVP of Executive and Go To Market Programs, will share some of her insights in the sales enablement area. . . Thanks Michael. At IDC's recent annual Directions event, I gave a presentation titled "The Year of the Sales Rep." In response to The Year of the Sales Rep notion, an SVP of sales asked me, "Why does this year have to be my year?" "Precisely," I responded. Let me explain. . . . never have we more needed our sales reps to be successful and never have they needed us more — those of us in sales, marketing, and executive management. The crisis in sales is driven not by the economy alone but by an evolution in how buyers buy. Sales organizations, in general, have not kept up. The econom...

For decades marketing has been desperately trying to connect with their customers in a controlled, one-way fashion. We had control of the brand, all marketing content as well as the traditional channels that were used to communicate with the market. And even on occasion, we cautiously exposed our executives and engineers to our customers while all the time holding our breath that they didn't say the "wrong thing" that would hurt our image, costing us millions of dollars in marketing investment and countless hours including nights and weekends executing our marketing strategy. It reminds me of a time when I was a product marketer in the semiconductor industry. I would visit customers quite frequently with our lead engineer. In one meeting this engineer exposed our greatest product flaw to one of our key customers. As I cringed in my seat, I expected the ROI from millions of dollars of investment into the brand value of this product to be instantly destroyed not to men...

The Sales Enablement (SE) role is fast taking root at many of our client companies. But it is interesting to see that its position on the organization chart is somewhat fluid. Does the role take root in sales? In marketing? Does it have to make an effective straddle across both functions , or is it bound to get hung up on the fence between the two? Our IDC marketing and sales research teams are surfacing many good techniques for improved sales enablement. Here are some practices specifically for marketing's side of the sales enablement challenge as presented by Rich Vancil, VP IDC Executive Advisory Group. "Thanks Michael. Depending on your resources and ambitions, these SE practices are noted as: easiest, harder, and hardest. Easiest: IDC defines Sales Enablement as "Delivering to the sales representative (direct or channel) the right material at the right place, at the right time, and in the right format, to move a specific opportunity forward." Yes, there are a lo...

There are many ways to track the success of marketing's planning process. One metric that is often mentioned by marketing operations teams is the percent variance of actual vs. budgeted marketing investment. One of a few good metrics to track if your processes and systems have matured to the point of being able to do this. . . even if you use Excel today. What variance is acceptable? I've seen targets range from 2 to 10% variance. 2-3% variance of actual expense vs. budget would be considered "very good" for a 1B+ revenue company. Assuming that marketing budget allocation is optimized throughout the year, it makes sense that managers should motivate their staff to spend all monies that they are allocated; including ensuring that certain percentages of budget are targeted to specific segments, campaigns, etc. This leads to a "use it or lose it" mentality if not an official guideline. The problem with this strategy (or culture) is that market shifts requ...

Five or six years ago I was frequently asked the question "What is the one key metric to track the impact of our marketing investment?" Without even breaching the open-ended topic of what is ROI, I typically responded with my own question of "Do you even know how much you're spending on marketing, let alone what the return is?" In most cases the response would be a simple "no". After working with 100s of companies on analyzing their investment as well as seeing the progress that marketing operations and marketing finance people have made, I can comfortably say that as an industry we have matured significantly in our ability to track marketing investment . . . at least at a high level. (e.g., Marketing Budget Ratio (mktg. spend/revenue), Program-to-People KPI, etc.) I consider these to be operational metrics as opposed to execution metrics. ( refer to past posts for more details re: execution metrics ) Greater sophistication in investment management, wh...

While the notion of shared services is prevalent across many management functions including IT, HR, and finance, it is for many marketing organizations a business technique that is in its infancy. A marketing shared services (MSS) model offers the opportunity for improved service delivery, greater economies of scale, greater concentration and leverage of expertise, and more rapid and effective program/campaign execution. IDC defines marketing shared services as: Organizing two or more areas of repetitive and redundant marketing activities into a fewer number of activity areas that are offered to internal customers at a cost, quality and/or timeliness that is competitive with internal or external alternatives. Marketing shared services result in cost reductions and an overall increase in efficiency and effectiveness of operations. Given the difficult economic environment that we are all navigating through in 2009, tech marketers' who are developing shared services strategy should ...

Well, our 2009 IDC Tech Marketing Barometer results are in; and if you missed the Telebriefing two weeks ago, here are some of the highlights: Marketing Investment: 0.5% Growth for Global IT Spending in 2009, while Average Tech Marketing Investment Drops 10%. Larger companies (>$1B in revenue) will take the greatest hit in marketing budget as they wrestle with significant revenue drops in key parts of their portfolios and continue to improve efficiency. Growth areas still exist within: enterprise social media, security management, mobile data, SaaS, Internet advertising, business analytics and IT outsourcing & BPO to name a few. (source: John Gantz's presentation at IDC's recent Directions event) Marketing Mix: The pendulum of investment swings to demand generation, with sales enablement closely coupled to this priority. (awareness building takes a "back seat", yet remains a key part of healthier companies' portfolios) We've been all talk as an industry...

The press is filled with stories about the demise of traditional advertising and the in-person, public trade show. Sounds quite similar in fact to the predicted disappearance of the "brick-and-mortar" storefront, and the emergence of a new on-line world where we can do all of our shopping in our slippers from the comfort of our home. Well, IDC CMO Advisory's recent 2009 Barometer study does continue to indicate that our traditional marketing mix is in the process of permanently changing. In fact, almost 70% of technology marketers indicate that they'll be increasing their program investment in digital marketing in 2009, while 72% of companies will be decreasing their in-person events spend and 60% decreasing their advertising spend (print, broadcast and corporate sponsorships). What are the top digital marketing initiatives for technology companies in 2009? Corporate web site: No longer simply a marketing billboard, the corporate web site has become the window to...