1) Vendor Marketing
According to IDC* - the B2B IT Marketing spend will top a whopping $45B! How has does that translate to Technology buyers? Most of you already know if you’ve been on email today….how do you like your spam – fried or raw? Cold calls? Unsolicited snail mail? In the last office I worked in, I wandered into the mail room room to gather material from a printer, and was drawn to a dusty machine making noise in the corner. Turns out we still had a fax machine receiving unsolicited marketing materials, and it was cranking away. The recycle bin below it seemed to be reserved just for these solicitations and was bursting with dead trees.
2) Sales People
Maybe this one should be called “Don’t hate the playa’ hate the game” - How many of us really know how salespeople are compensated that call on technology buyers? Yes, we all know they have ‘quotas’ – but what does that really mean to non-sales people, and how does their ‘compensation plan’ relate to how technology buyers are generally treated in the process? Most salespeople have half or more of their total compensation relying on how much of their sales quota they attain. So you can imagine, if a sample sales rep has a total compensation package of $120k – and $60k or more is riding on selling you a bunch of routers – they are going to get aggressive at the end of the month! Vendor sales management will call this ‘creating urgency’ – what I call it is creating enemies – when I really need partners. But cultivating a partnership necessitates patience, credibility, and understanding – which is in direct conflict with how (most) vendors pay and train their salespeople!
3) Noise
Between number #1 and #2 above – there is deafening ‘noise’ in the market. While many white papers and case studies can be helpful – we have to ‘give it up’ – meaning, sign my email address away so I can download something to read for my own research. My reward is then an avalanche of new spam (that is of course if I was crazy enough to use an email address I actually read). Almost every website now has giant ‘peel away’ ads….thank you for the 9,000th full page ad on Virtualization…at least my mouse reflex to the upper right hand button to ‘skip this ad’ has never been quicker. Seems more and more ‘resources’ out there are nothing more than something a product marketer put together. Finding the right partner and provider is getting more and more daunting – and there is less and less time to find them!
4) No Skin in the Game
I read a great blog article by Chuck Musciano, called “Skin in the Game” (http://effectivecio.com/2009/11/09/skin-in-the-game/) which makes a good point – that most vendors don’t put their money where their mouth is! Many contracts today have some SLA’s that have to be met, and when negotiating, the vendor sales team will say that these are ‘painful if not met’ and give us real ‘skin in the game’. In reality – most SLAs don’t come close to getting the vendor truly invested in a successful long term outcome. As Chuck points out in his blog – if your vendor’s failure causes million dollar outages – does a check for a few thousand really cut it?? How about taking the hit along with us! If a vendor’s service fails – the vendor likely will lose future revenue. The IT Exec may lose their job!
5) Trust
Hard to come by these days it seems. Vendors and sales people are under more pressure than ever to deliver results, and IT Execs have less and less time to devote in finding the right partners (of course the irony is IT Execs have less time to devote partially due to #1 through #3 above!). So how can a CIO find the right partner to trust? How can a vendor gain that trust in short order? Most CIOs turn to the only people who they KNOW they can trust – other IT Executives – peers. The old adage – ‘been there, done that’ has never been truer applied here. Fellow CIOs and IT Leaders are paid to get results – so they are all invested the same, and the result is a level of trust that can’t be questioned. Vendors are hindered at gaining trust and credibility out of the gate given how they market to CIOs and IT buyers. Marketing and sales practices that alienate much of the intended audience is a one way street to status quo. Smart vendors would do well to spend their money on organic and word of mouth marketing activity that builds on previous success – not by blasting it on a giant peel away web page ad – but by TRAINING their sales force on the art of building relationships.
AGREE or DISAGREE? WHAT ELSE SHOULD BE IN THE TOP 5? TOP 10?
*Source: Marketing and Investment Planner 2010, Benchmarks, Key Performance Indicators, and CMO Priorities, Oct 2009
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