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Hey, want to know the easiest way to bring in new customers? Directly target their needs by providing resources and services to help them with their projects. Okay, that’s consultative sales 101.

The challenge is, most of high cost sales resources are spent trying to figure out what those needs are and when these resources should be spent on addressing needs. Luckily, today’s marketing capabilities have the power to identify decision makers and their needs very efficiently. Leveraging this information to target buyer needs with value-added resources is a powerful path to net-new customers.

IT buyers are educated, leverage online resources and are always seeking out information. They have the ability and desire to be in control of gaining information for their projects. This is the opportunity. Marketing programs should be designed to connect with these buyers, collect sales intelligence with what they need and lead them into effective sales engagements.

This approach has awesome power in eliminating wasted time for both the sales person and the prospect.  The prospect immediately views the company as a company they want to work with because of their added value and expertise.

A few weeks ago, we discussed what to look for in a marketing partner. While it’s always best to shoot for the ideal, it’s also prudent to know what to avoid. There are many mistakes waiting to happen, and being able to spot the warning signs can save you time, budget and a whole lot of aggravation.

Here are five characteristics to look out for — and actively avoid — when checking out a potential IT marketing partner:

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Is your blog filled with the content you want to see there? That’s probably a mistake, according to the latest survey from MarketingSherpa. Too often, IT marketers are publishing what they think is appropriate, instead of using the materials that are most likely to drive a prospect to click and enter the sales cycle.

Most marketers have a clear bias toward educational content and free research reports, with 92 percent believing the former will drive clicks and 86 percent supporting the latter. Best practices content? Marketers lean on it 79 percent of the time.

The reality is much different.

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You need to connect with the CIO or IT director, of course, when you are selling a solution. Also, you’ll need to show the CFO the value to what you are proposing. Getting a new system’s ticket punched by these two executives is standard practice in IT sales. But, there may be another angle. If your client has a risk manager and you don’t know him — find a way to get on his calendar.

We’re still pretty early in the millennium, but if the first decade is any indication, the next thousand years will be the domain of the risk manager. Financial busts have become commonplace, and natural and manmade disasters (including those resulting from terrorism) have caused profound loss. With these threats looming, businesses need to conceive of a broader set of business continuity/disaster recovery solutions than they did in the past — while also gauging the systems and applications needed to help them identify, monitor and remedy financial risk.

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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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Since self-service information doesn’t always lead to the correct conclusions, as we discussed yesterday, your prospects need your help, whether they realize it or not. They need competent sales professionals and, at times, pre-sales engineers to walk them through the intricacies of a situation to ensure the right solutions are identified and implemented. Without this layer of support, IT buyers who are smart but pressed for time will not always plunge into the details, leaving major causal problems undiagnosed and, post-implementation, not remedied.

Perhaps the greatest challenge faced by IT buyers is that they can sum up a situation quickly and have the strength of reason and experience behind them. This can impede further inquiry and discussion … and result in an ineffective implementation and unhappy client. So, the sales professional needs to begin the process of engaging the IT buyer early, in order to help him move past any preconceived notions that could make a project unsuccessful.

Your prospects will be most interested in answers to the questions they have — even if there are greater issues underlying them. Use their immediate concerns as a starting point, and then guide the dialogue in a manner that gives you a platform for addressing any related or underlying concerns.

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“Are you free on Tuesday at 9 AM?”

This question tips the odds of getting an appointment with an IT buyer in your favor. Yes, it’s a bit specific, and there are other times that work as well. Thursdays at 2 PM are pretty good, too.

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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The “trusted advisor” line is nothing we all haven’t heard a gazillion times before. Every IT reseller wants to play this role for a client. It isn’t a differentiator any more. Take this approach, and you’ll join the crowd of IT VARs trying to win a prospect’s business … and it will feel like you haven’t done any marketing at all. Don’t let this happen to you. Rather than follow the pack down the trusted advisor road, be ready to demonstrate that you understand your client’s or prospect’s needs and are uniquely positioned to address them. Once this happens, you doubtless will become the trusted advisor.

What IT buyers really need are answers. They are contending with disparate infrastructures, rapidly increasing storage needs and staffs that aren’t growing fast enough to manage the workload – if the staffs are growing at all (let’s not forget what the broader economic situation is like right now). Quite simply, your prospects have clear, distinct challenges that they have to overcome in order to meet the needs of their end users. So, they are most likely to respond to IT resellers who can help them with real solutions that are delivered cost-effectively.

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In the average IT VAR’s arsenal of marketing tools, events are a perennial favorite. They give you a chance to meet clients and prospects face-to-face, develop relationships and gather the information you need to advance toward a sale. Unfortunately, you’re not the only reseller who knows this. So, calendars fill up quickly, and IT buyers need to make choices. Your goal is to make them see the value in your event above the others and drive swift, decisive action.

To win a spot on an IT buyer’s calendar, your invitation needs to stand out. Tight, high-impact copy and a compelling design are crucial – but these aren’t always enough to differentiate your event. Below, you’ll find three ways to make your event invitation more actionable.

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Budget season is upon us. With last year finally etched in stone, IT marketing departments are looking for the best ways to put their cash to work in 2010. Though companies are beginning to invest more in technology, marketing budgets at IT manufacturers and resellers alike are still being managed cautiously. So, riskier approaches are likely to struggle for a share of this year’s allocation.

With this in mind, attitudes toward social media marketing are shifting, suggesting that this activity is no longer viewed as high risk and of nebulous value. The latest survey by MarketingSherpa shows that nearly three quarters of respondents have a positive view of social media marketing at budget time, which means we’ll likely see more businesses committing to it this year – and those that have moved in this direction already are probably poised to dive deeper.

Of course, specific perceptions vary.

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