News The Integration Imperative is now available online at Professional Services Books' NEW online bookstore! Suzanne will be a featured panelist at the Association for Accounting Marketing's 2010 Summit June 22-25, 2010 Suzanne will be a speaker at the 2010 Frontiers in Services Conference, considered to be the world's leading annual conference on service research. It is co-sponsored by the American Marketing Association. June 10-13, 2010, Karlstad, Sweden The Integration Imperative reviewed in the SMPS' "The Marketer" February 2010 Suzanne authored "Transforming Your Law Firm into a Competitively Effective Marketing and Business Development Engine" The Lawyers Competitive Edge December 2009 Suzanne was named one of professional services' "top 12 gurus" December 2009 Suzanne was interviewed by Anna Farmery "The Challenges of B2B Marketing" The Engaging Brand Blog January 2010 Suzanne was featured in RainToday's podcast "Firms Must Break Down Marketing and Business Development Silos-An Interview with Suzanne Lowe" January 2010 Read a summary of Suzanne Lowe's newly published book The Integration Imperative. New from the Expertise Marketplace™ Blog I'm part of Patrick McKenna's ENABLE Program Who Becomes a Legend? PSF marketers' best weapons for leading change? Facts and Data! Are law firms responding to the marketplace? See all the posts at the Expertise Marketplace blog Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed for regular updates. (Need RSS help?) Subscribe Did a colleague forward this newsletter? Sign up to receive your own copy. "I LOVE your newsletter. I think it’s the best one I get. Full of real content and yet not too long. Kudos!" Diane Schmalensee, Facilitator and President of Schmalensee Partners Recent Issues Reconnecting Marketing and Business Development with the Business January 2010 Cultural Imperatives: A New Lexicon, Formal Shared Accountabilities and More Explicit Expectations December 2009 Integrating for the Clients' Sake! November 2009 You can order The Integration Imperative from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or your favorite online bookseller! You can order Marketplace Masters from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, your favorite online bookseller, or CEO-READ.

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About this month's issue

For this newsletter’s fifth case study on The Process Imperative, I’ll showcase IBM Global Technology Services. I’ve featured this story to illustrate how even the world's largest business and technology consultancy can take baby steps to do things differently.

Through a set of still-evolving structural and cultural initiatives, IBM’s services division has made substantial progress toward erasing the disconnect between marketing’s lead generation activities and IBM’s sales pipeline. This work has resulted in a better linkage between the company’s service marketing investment and its sales return on investment.

Suzanne Lowe
President, Expertise Marketing

Author, Marketplace Masters: How Professional Service Firms Compete to Win

Author, The Integration Imperative: Erasing Marketing and Business Development Silos - Once and for All - in Professional Service Firms

Connecting Marketing with the Needs of the Sales Teams

Nowhere else is the disconnect between marketing and business development more obvious than in the handoff of leads to the business development pipeline of a professional or business-to-business service firm. What does this handoff look like in large global businesses? Within the complexities of a highly matrixed, far-flung organization, who is responsible for keeping the company’s valuable leads moving smoothly through its marketing and business development pipeline?

When this case was written in early 2009, IBM (NYSE: IBM) boasted a stable of nearly 400,000 employees operating in 170 countries worldwide and overall annual revenues of nearly $98.8 billion. IBM Global Technology Services group, whose pretax income represented 37% of the overall company’s revenues, offers a range of services that help people link business and technology. Its consultants provide full outsourcing, infrastructure outsourcing, product support, security services, service-oriented architectures, and technology services that help customers be more “green.” (Since the writing of this case, IBM has also committed itself to its “Smarter Planet” initiative.)

In 2007 IBM's executive leaders declared their intention to participate in the world’s growth markets and improve IBM’s productivity. How? By ensuring that IBM would become a globally integrated enterprise.

For Mary Garrett, former vice president of marketing for IBM Global Technology Services (and currently the marketing leader of the overall company’s sales division), this mandate meant one thing for her group: to better link marketing—and the leads it generates—with sales.

What Have You Done for Me Lately?

Garrett's earliest epiphany on the integration issue occurred when it became clear that marketing didn’t know enough about the ROI of its efforts. Global Technology Services leaders needed to understand the cause and effect of the group’s marketing expenditures. What’s more, the company didn’t have the right metrics or the best internal mechanisms to show the sales teams exactly what was being attributed to marketing. Garrett explained:

“I could say the marketing team is wildly successful in generating all these leads, but if leads are not getting into the hands of the sellers, I know we’ll have a skeptical sales force that says, ‘You guys think you are successful, but I haven’t made my numbers.’”

Starting in mid-2007, Garrett and the marketing team conceived some new initiatives to more effectively connect the company’s marketing activities with its sales teams’ activities. In particular, the marketing team wanted to improve its pipeline of new opportunities, the associated dollar amount spent to pursue and acquire those new leads, the number of wins the team achieved, and the resulting revenue dollars.

By late 2007, Garrett and her team had unveiled an experimental “Opportunity Identification War Room,” piloted in one geography and in one local business line. They decided to focus on three areas:

• Examining the performance of the different sources of opportunity and of the sales teams. Marketing and sales asked each other, “So, marketing created X number of leads this week. Have they gotten into the hands of the appropriate sellers? How is the group progressing with those leads?”

• Ensuring the most effective distribution of content. The marketing team began to ask, “Do the sales teams know about all the enablement material that is available for them?” They began to discover that, in some cases, good content had not gotten into the hands of the seller.

• Focusing on communicating ahead. Everyone agreed that they needed to improve their engagement and participation with each other. For example, members of the marketing team would say to their sales team colleagues, “Are you familiar with the activities that will be under way in your local region over the next 30, 60, 90 days?”

In the beginning of 2008, from its pilot in one geography and local business line, Garrett and her team rolled out the War Room concept in seven countries.

Designing a Marketing/Sales Integration Approach That Overcomes Structural and Cultural Barriers

It became critical to design a common approach. Key representatives from marketing and sales got together and looked at the streams of work between the "sides" and how these processes linked together. They looked at challenges in three areas:

• What management system will we use to capture and organize marketing and sales business intelligence?

• What content are we going to share?

• How are we going to actually deploy this into action?

Arguably, the structural elements of integration are like rearranging a line of dominoes so they fall into each other effortlessly. The off-kilter pieces are easy to spot and adjust. But the bigger obstacle can be cultural.

IBM's sales teams were legendary for their laser-like concentration on achieving the company's business objectives. Garrett recognized that some of the sales team members were skeptical about working with the marketing team, giving rise to questions such as: What do you do? What value are we getting? Sellers would need proof that changing their strongly held norms would be worth their time and effort.

Some of the sellers’ concerns required marketers to alter their own processes—for example, adjusting the timing of marketing’s development and distribution of client analytics, which the sales group needed earlier in the company’s planning cycles than marketing had previously understood.

Other efforts required marketing to make a concerted communication outreach to sales, in particular, to explain the kinds of marketing activities that would help sellers and show them the potential results. Also, marketers were able to engage sellers in fact-based data discussions centered around the company’s sales management tools. These tools helped both sides have much more productive dialogues about the leads in the pipeline.

Happiness: Never Having to Justify a Marketing Investment Again

Garrett identified three important “lessons learned” that have been equal contributors to the early success of the marketing-selling integration effort: “First, get buy-in from your own marketing teams. Have team members collaboratively develop the programs they’ll present to their sales counterparts. Second, work with a consistent approach. And third, meet Sales where Sales meets. Don’t expect them to come to your party. Go to their party.”

Ultimately, Garrett’s goal was simple: “to never have to justify another marketing investment again.” The job is nowhere near done, but it’s not too difficult to envision the potential outcome. Sales will act on many more of the leads that marketing generates. And then the barriers to effective integration between marketing and sales will begin to crumble. The collaboration between marketing and sales will become a new cultural norm.

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