After a sale is completed, all attention turns to implementation. Your client is looking to you to help turn its expenditure into an investment. The deployment and configuration of systems is crucial, of course, to the creation of value for your client. At the end of this process, there’s usually a knowledge-transfer exercise, in which you prepare your client to take full “ownership” of the new environment. This is also a sales opportunity: leave your client ready for anything, and the odds that you’ll be the first call for the next initiative skyrocket.
Training and knowledge transfer often become casualties of engagement fatigue. Both your implementation team and the client are eager to reach the light at the end of the tunnel, at which point the disruption associated with an implementation recedes, and everything returns to normal. Succumb to the temptation to rush training and knowledge transfer, and you assume two risks: client readiness and a tainted solution provider perception.
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Tags: client service, implementation, IT implementation, IT marketing, IT project management, IT projects, IT sales, knowledge transfer, marketing, project management, sales, training | No Comments »
Datacenter “greening” periodically goes in and out of fashion. Usually driven by broader economic factors, IT professionals tend to mull the notion of going green when the broader public debate over energy prices and climate change reaches a fever pitch. With the recent discussion at Copenhagen again bringing climate issues to the front of the global economic community, talk of green has again arisen in the IT world.
The latest from Forrester Research is that regulation won’t drive the adoption of green IT solutions. In a survey of IT professionals at 600 companies around the world, regulatory compliance ranked #7, garnering only 16 percent of responses. Unsurprisingly, cost drivers were most important. Sixty-six percent of respondents indicated that energy cost savings could lead to the proliferation of green IT solutions, with 42 percent citing the ability to cut IT operating expenses.
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Tags: clean energy, clean technology, cleantech, climate change, corporate social responsibility, CSR, datacenter, environment, environmentally friendly, Forrester Research, green, information technology, IT, IT solutions, operating expenses, operational efficiency, operations | No Comments »
Five tips for marketing and selling disaster recovery and business continuity solutions: Disaster recovery and business continuity solutions should be easy to sell. Everybody needs them, and some businesses are required by regulatory bodies to meet specific and demanding standards. They also represent a place where IT solution providers and manufacturers can distinguish themselves because DR/BC is not only a cost, but one that will show a benefit only rarely. So, a company that can shorten backup and recovery times, consume less storage space and lessen demand on datacenter staff is likely to find a willing audience.
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Social media marketing processes emerging: Social media marketing may have trouble shedding its “Wild West” image — which is a shame, given how it’s being used. Even though it feels unstructured and wide open, the reality for most companies is that the use of social media is carefully managed. According to a new study by MarketingSherpa, 68 percent of the businesses surveyed have either a formal or informal process for monitoring target audience dialogue about brands and the competition. Sixty-six percent have informal processes regarding defining objectives for social media space.
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What makes a social media user “friend” a company?: As you begin to enter the social media marketing space, you’ll start to hear about “fans,” “friends” and “followers” — variations on the connections that people make in these environments. These relationships provide a first layer of measurement for social media marketing success, as they define your primary high-value audience.
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You need more than IT expertise to help your clients: If all you’re selling and implementing is technology, you’re going to have a tough time in today’s market. Your clients don’t need technology — well, they don’t need technology without an attendant business driver. This means that you need to have more than a passing knowledge of your clients’ business, and any solution you are selling should correspond directly to a business need. Of course, the more you know about your clients’ business, the better you’ll be able to make the connection between problem and solution.
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Corporate blogging insight: The content funnel: One of the biggest social media marketing mistakes I’ve seen companies make is to emulate the wrong blogs. Whether it’s The VAR Guy or Engadget, corporate bloggers look to popular independent blogs for ideas. To a certain extent, this is smart: the top blogs can have some great features and styles that are worth adopting. But, much of what they do can be unwise (or simply impossible) for you to implement. The reason for this is that different blog types carry their own objectives and constraints.
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Most Popular Keyword: Technology Trends
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The difference between leads and demand: The terms “leads” and “demand” are often used interchangeably — but they are two very different concepts. Most IT solution providers say they’re looking for leads. What they really want, though, is demand.
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If all you’re selling and implementing is technology, you’re going to have a tough time in today’s market. Your clients don’t need technology — well, they don’t need technology without an attendant business driver. This means that you need to have more than a passing knowledge of your clients’ business, and any solution you are selling should correspond directly to a business need. Of course, the more you know about your clients’ business, the better you’ll be able to make the connection between problem and solution.
The first tier of business-to-technology linkage involves the identification of pain points driven by business needs, but this is often too high-level to become an effective differentiator. Instead, you’ll need to dig deeper, gaining ground-level insights from the people who use the systems that you have to enhance, upgrade or replace. If your client sells shoes, for example, you need to know how the shoe business works. And if you have clients in highly regulated industries, such as finance or biopharmaceuticals, business knowledge becomes crucial.
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Tags: differentiation, differentiator, IT, IT marketing, IT sales, IT solution providers, marketing, sales, solution providers, var, VARs | No Comments »
The terms “leads” and “demand” are often used interchangeably — but they are two very different concepts. Most IT solution providers say they’re looking for leads. What they really want, though, is demand.
We all know what leads are. These are the contacts that have been somehow qualified as wanting a particular solution that you sell and implement. When you engage a partner in a lead generation campaign, some combination of direct mail, telemarketing and (increasingly) social media are used to pull together a list of names that you can pursue in order to increase your sales. Too often, a brief qualification process is used, and the vast majority of the marketing effort — in addition to the sales process — falls to the sales team.
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Disaster recovery and business continuity solutions should be easy to sell. Everybody needs them, and some businesses are required by regulatory bodies to meet specific and demanding standards. They also represent a place where IT solution providers and manufacturers can distinguish themselves because DR/BC is not only a cost, but one that will show a benefit only rarely. So, a company that can shorten backup and recovery times, consume less storage space and lessen demand on datacenter staff is likely to find a willing audience.
But, there are factors that can frustrate the DR/BC sales effort. There’s plenty of competition, making it harder for our voice to be heard and causing sales fatigue to set in among CIOs and other IT decision-makers. Further, the technologies that can have the greatest impact can disrupt IT — and end-user — operations, a situation that many IT departments seek to minimize. So, what’s intuitively an easy sell can become rather complex.
Here are five ways to tip the odds in your favor:
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Tags: archiving, backup, backup and recovery, business continuity, CIO, compliance, data storage, disaster recovery, DR, HIPAA, IT buyers, IT marketing, IT sales, marketing, operational efficiency, regulatory, ROI, sales, Sarbanes-Oxley, server virtualization, storage, storage optimization, storage virtualization, TCO, virtualization | No Comments »
Virtualization the key to enterprise IT savings by 2014: The penetration of virtualization technologies is still low, but that only means it has room to grow. By 2014, according to a new report from Citrix, virtualization will dominate IT enterprise savings — and thus the agendas of CIOs. Citrix surveyed more than 700 CIOs from around the world and found that virtualization has led to IT cost savings of 16 percent, and they expect it to hit 27 percent in 2014.
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Skip paid search: SEO is the way to go: Okay, maybe it’s not that easy. There are some serious benefits to paid search advertising with search engines, such as predictability and control. And, it’s easier to measure your paid search marketing ROI. But, the quality of the leads that come to you this way aren’t nearly as high as those that come via search engine optimization (SEO).
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Corporate blogging Insight: The content funnel: One of the biggest social media marketing mistakes I’ve seen companies make is to emulate the wrong blogs. Whether it’s The VAR Guy or Engadget, corporate bloggers look to popular independent blogs for ideas. To a certain extent, this is smart: the top blogs can have some great features and styles that are worth adopting. But, much of what they do can be unwise (or simply impossible) for you to implement. The reason for this is that different blog types carry their own objectives and constraints.
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IT sales call: Best time is Tuesday at 9 AM: At enter:marketing, we schedule a lot of appointments for our clients. Through the demand generation and lead cultivation programs we run, we’ve learned a considerable amount about how IT buyers prefer to be engaged, the best survey questions for triggering interest and even when they want to talk. What we’re about to show you isn’t the result of some survey: it’s live data. Real. These insights are based on the actions of IT buyers.
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Fill your IT marketing blog in five easy steps: The hardest part of maintaining a marketing blog is coming up with content … and producing it. Many attempts are abandoned simply because tier advocates didn’t realize just how much work it would involve. Doubtless, blogging is labor-intensive, but there are ways to make it much, much easier to keep your blog fresh without turning it into your full-time job. You have content all over the place and just need to put it to work for you.
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Most Popular Keyword: technology trends
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Social media marketing nabs 11% of online marketing budget: There’s more to online marketing than banner and text ads. The latest study from MarketingSherpa estimates that paid search is good for 21 percent of online marketing spending and is topped only by the company budget, which picks up 27 percent on average. Social media is clearly no longer the object of dabbling, securing 11 percent of the online marketing budget: beating out search engine optimization (SEO) at 10 percent, online display advertising at 6 percent and other online marketing at 6 percent. But, social media marketing still hasn’t caught up with e-mail marketing, which claims 19 percent of the marketing budget.
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One of the biggest social media marketing mistakes I’ve seen companies make is to emulate the wrong blogs. Whether it’s The VAR Guy or Engadget, corporate bloggers look to popular independent blogs for ideas. To a certain extent, this is smart: the top blogs can have some great features and styles that are worth adopting. But, much of what they do can be unwise (or simply impossible) for you to implement. The reason for this is that different blog types carry their own objectives and constraints.
Think of content as a funnel. At the top is the widest sent of information available, the ability to write about any subject dealing with any company anywhere in the world. At the bottom is the narrowest of topics, tightly defined in order to appeal to the smallest of niche markets. This is how blogging works, with the mass media sites having the greatest flexibility in terms of the content they can use and corporate blogs having to hunt for ideas that are focused on promoting their capabilities while remaining sensitive to their clients.
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Okay, maybe it’s not that easy. There are some serious benefits to paid search advertising with search engines, such as predictability and control. And, it’s easier to measure your paid search marketing ROI. But, the quality of the leads that come to you this way aren’t nearly as high as those that come via search engine optimization (SEO).
According to the latest study by MarketingSherpa, SEO was responsible for both the highest quality and quantity of search engine-driven leads, with shares of 30 percent and 37 percent, respectively. Paid search on Google did post a noticeable 32 percent of leads by quantity, but it was only good for 16 percent by quality. Meanwhile, paid search on the other major search engines resulted in only 6 percent of leads by quality, compared to a similarly meager 9 percent of high-quantity leads.
Commit to a solid SEO strategy (which can be helped along considerably by blogging), and you’ll earn stronger leads in greater quantity.
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[Source: MarketingSherpa]
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