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For so many IT solutions, TCO is the easiest selling point: it isn’t hard to show a company how it can save some money. When you focus on the cost argument too much, though, you miss a golden opportunity to sell based on ROI, too. Every TCO play has an ROI component, and getting there requires no mental gymnastics.

It’s all about moving resources around … prudently.

Let’s assume your solution can cut TCO for a particular platform by 50 percent in dollars and two full-time employee equivalents. That’s a savings — great! Now, your client needs to know what to do with the “leftover” resources. Raise the issue of redeploying both the cash and the bodies to initiatives that will advance the company in the marketplace. The cost savings becomes fuel for a growth engine.

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Do you spend sales appointments talking about yesterday’s news? That’s what everyone else is doing! Make your company stand out: help your clients understand what’s on the horizon. Get them set for the future, and you’ll deliver a far better ROI case — for them and for you.

The cost and return benefits associated with conventional IT solutions are inherently constrained. They are known quantities, innovation that has become standard. To provide outsized value, you need to introduce your client’s to what hasn’t become widely adopted yet, and implement technology that will keep them ahead of the game.

How does this work?

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Organic growth translates to missed opportunities. When you launch your corporate blog, don’t sit back and wait for readers to come to you … and then wait some more for them to step into your sales cycle. Instead, seek them out, and use your blog as a first step in lead qualification.

Combine direct and social media marketing, and you’ll gain a powerful demand generation tool.

Blogs do have a tendency to be discovered (i.e., to gain readers). Whether it’s through searches, a link on your website, a PR effort or tweets and status updates, traffic happens … it just happens slowly. And since high-value readers are likely to be only a small portion of your organic traffic, you could be waiting quite a bit before your social media marketing effort generates any leads. Take a proactive approach, and this changes drastically and quickly.

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Do you spend a lot of time knee-deep in Google Analytics, looking at the rise and fall of pageviews, unique visitors and referred traffic? While it pays to know your audience, focusing too much on the numbers isn’t the best use of your time. To gain more value from your marketing blog, think less about organic traffic growth and more about the impact of your blog on your pipeline.

A corporate blog’s success isn’t measured in pageviews or any other traffic metric. Why not? Well, your objectives are totally different. You aren’t trying to amass impressions to generate advertising views, which is the prevailing model used by most of the blogs you probably read. Rather, you want to attract attention that will translate to inquiries from prospects, who you then hope to advance through the sales cycle.

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There’s only one marketing metric you really need to care about: “cost per income.” Everything else you measure really rolls up to this one number, which tells you how much you have to spend in order to reach a particular profit. This all might seem a tad obvious, but few are managing to this approach.

Instead, IT solution providers often look only at the cost of marketing, eschewing the overall result in favor of near-term expense management. Even holding on to your cash comes at a cost … which is equivalent to future returns. Think in terms of what it costs you to make money, and your marketing efforts will become more targeted, more powerful and more substantial.

Piecemeal marketing doesn’t work — and that’s what you get when you look strictly at cost. Change your perspective: measure by cost of income, and you’ll be committed to generating ROI.

“Large” creeps its way into just about every social media marketing endeavor. Companies want legions of Facebook fans and Twitter followers. And a blog that isn’t highly trafficked and packed with comments almost feels neglected.

Resist the temptation to believe that big is beautiful, and refocus on marketing basics — you’ll get a greater return on your social media marketing investment.

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Technology adoption entails the temptation to expect over-simplification. We want to streamline to the bone, taking anything that even seems excessive out of the equation. Slicing manual intervention completely, sometimes, appears to be the goal. And, this kind of thinking finds its way to the marketing department. Push-button marketing would be great, right? Just let the marketing happen on its own …

The only problem is that push-button marketing doesn’t always work.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a place for the inflexible, the templated, the boilerplate, the procedural. Not every marketing effort has to be people-intensive and high-touch. For every carefully crafted blog post, you may send an e-mail blast to tens of thousands of people. Rather than try to automate everything — or guide everything manually — the best approach is to find the right mix.

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A year ago, the results of this MarketingSherpa survey would have looked a lot different. Nearly half of respondents indicated that “social media is a promising tactic and will eventually produce ROI” and are increasing budget conservatively. This may not seem exciting, but a “cautious” commitment is a commitment nonetheless. Only 17 percent replied that they aren’t going to invest in social media marketing.

Of course, the group of respondents increasing budget “liberally” is small, but that’s to be expected for a relatively new approach to marketing that many are still exploring. For 7 percent to invest fairly heavily in social media marketing is impressive, especially this early in the innovation cycle. The remaining 27 percent is neither increasing nor decreasing, responding, “Social media value is unknown and something we do only as time permits. Why invest more?”

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Right now, the buzz around cloud computing is endless. But, it’s just the latest trend. In the past, it’s been B2B marketplaces, best-of-breed solutions for targeted business challenges and even the internet as a whole. The hidden cost of innovation is that IT solution provider’s need to explain the value and viability of these emerging technologies to skeptical decision-makers who are heavily invested in the status quo. Eventually, you know, today’s innovation will become tomorrow’s legacy platform, but that doesn’t make getting over the hump any easier.

So, how do you approach a CIO or IT director with something new, like private cloud computing solution?

Well, cautiously.

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Too often, we think we know the answer. We know our clients pain points. We know the solutions they need. We know how much they should budget for it. Unfortunately, what we purport to know is rarely what actually happens. Prospects may delay a purchase, alter implementation timelines or even go down an entirely different path. When this happens, IT sales professionals and implementation teams are often surprised, feeling that the change of plan came out of nowhere. If you pay attention, however, you’ll pick up cues along the way that can keep these surprises from arising.

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