ITSMA’s annual Marketing Leadership Forum provides a great opportunity for senior marketing executives to share ideas about the incredible changes washing over the B2B technology and services marketing landscape. Last month’s Forum in Napa, CA, was certainly no exception.

1. Key Takeaways

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ITSMA Commentary
ITSMA’s annual Marketing
Leadership Forum
provides a great
opportunity for senior
marketing executives to share ideas
about the incredible changes
washing over the B2B technology
and services marketing landscape.
Last month’s Forum in Napa, CA, was
certainly no exception.
Marketing agility was the core theme
for the event, and the 60 participants
at the Forum agreed overwhelmingly
that their organizations had to
accelerate their transition to more
agile ways of working.
At the same time, we had some
great presentations and discussions
about a number of other critical
topics, including digital
transformation, thought leadership
and content marketing, customer
experience, and big data.
Following, are my key takeaways.
Key Takeaways
from ITSMA’s
Marketing
Leadership
Forum
David C. Munn
President & CEO, ITSMA

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ITSMA Commentary
Mona Charif, head of marketing for Dell
Services, provided a case study on the
move to agile in her organization and the
successes they have had shifting market-
ing campaigns to a scrum-based approach,
incorporating multiple short sprints.
Rather than spending months planning,
developing, and finally executing major
campaigns, Dell’s agile approach high-
lights micro-campaigns with constant
review, iteration, and adjustment for
improvement.
Some firms, like Dell, are borrowing
techniques from agile software develop-
ment, but others are doing just as well with
homegrown approaches. What really
matters, as Julie highlighted during the
discussion, is leadership focus on “being
agile”—emphasizing agile attributes such
as collaboration, experimentation,
transparency, continuous measurement
and adjustment, and “learning fast.”
(Check out our recent Viewpoint with Scott
Brinker for more on agile.)
Agile Marketing:
Being vs. Doing
ITSMA’s Julie Schwartz presented new
research showing that the vast majority of
B2B marketers see agility as a key to future
success but most of us are at the beginning
of the agile marketing journey (see
Accelerating the Move to Agile Marketing
for details).

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ITSMA Commentary
Maintaining focus on a few core strategic
priorities is really difficult amid the tyranny
of the urgent and the constant churn of
new tools and tactics. Indeed, even though
Forum participants agreed that agile is
clearly one of those strategic priorities,
there was some concern that the move to
agile itself poses a risk of getting too
caught up in the process of rapid iteration
and losing sight of longer term objectives.
But there is no risk at all that marketing
leaders will lose sight of the scope and
urgency of digital transformation. This is
literally all-encompassing for marketing,
including both how we operate and what
we bring to market.
Melissa Lemberg, global partner with IBM’s
Interactive Experience group, outlined
three essential challenges that marketing
(and all business) leaders face in working
for digital transformation:
● Prioritizing, designing, and executing
compelling digital experiences
● Integrating new technologies and data
quickly, cost effectively, and securely
across the organization to emphasize
actionable insight and responsive
operations
● Finding and developing expertise in the
new ways of working internally and
across increasingly complex and fluid
partner and customer ecosystems
Digital Transformation: All-Encompassing… and Now
Digital Reinvention Drivers
Cloud
Cognitive &
Analytics
Mobile
Internet
of
Things
Social
Security
New
Focus
New
Expertise
New
Ways
to Work
Actionable
Insight
Responsive
Operations
Orchestrated
Ecosystems
Restless
Talent
New
Business
Models
Market
Activation
Experience

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ITSMA Commentary
These two interrelated topics remain clear
priorities for virtually everyone in the
room. The challenge, of course, is doing
this effectively in markets already flooded
with content and characterized by
increasingly complex buying and decision
processes.
In theory, most of us understand what’s
required: High quality, compelling content
that differentiates our brands,
demonstrates our expertise, and speaks
directly to buyer challenges, opportunities,
and requirements throughout the buyer
journey. In practice, well, that’s a different
story altogether!
Jonathan Copulsky, CMO of Deloitte
Consulting and Chief Content Officer for all
of Deloitte, provided several of the most
memorable takeaways in this area:
● “Just because you can, doesn’t mean
you should.” Don’t just add to the noise
and “never yield when it comes to
quality,” which certainly isn’t easy amid
the constant demands for quantity,
coverage, and speed
● Focus on a few “big ideas” with long-
term campaigns to build reputation, lead
share of voice, and provide ongoing
support for strategic opportunities and
relationships
● Test and learn with creative,
channels, and partners. Deloitte has
had success, for example, with MOOCs
(Massive Open Online Courses) on 3D
printing, journalistic-style podcasts, and
a collaborative data visualization
initiative with the MIT Media Lab and
Data Wheel.
Thought Leadership and Content Marketing:
Simple in Theory, Difficult in Practice
Deloitte’sThoughtLeadership
Shift: Five Keys to Success
1. Strategic Focus
2. Research Beyond Surveys
3. New Platforms
4. Strategic Partnerships
5. Test and Learn
(See our recent interview with Jonathan
for more on Deloitte’s thought leadership
program.)

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ITSMA Commentary
Penny Delgadillo Valencia, SVP of Global
Audience Marketing at SAP,
complemented the thought leadership
session with a useful outline of a
comprehensive, integrated
communications framework to address the
increasingly complex, business buyer-
driven decision process for most
technology solutions today. Highlighting
the rise of the business buyer with more
and more technology solutions, Penny
stressed three essential points:
● Segmenting and understanding
audiences both by business role (e.g.,
heads of marketing, sales, service,
finance, etc.) and by vertical industry
● Creating meaningful content for all of
your audiences throughout their often
circuitous buyer’s journeys
● Ensuring that all this messaging and
content still represents one overall SAP
voice to the market
Wayne Cerullo, founder of B2P Partners,
added valuable insight on why and how to
find and market to the champions within
our customers that are typically necessary
to orchestrate buying decisions.
And John Hall, CEO of Influence & Co.,
reminded everyone that in-person events
remain among the most effective content
marketing tactics even amid the digital
revolution.
Thought Leadership and
Content Marketing:
Simple in Theory, Difficult
in Practice (Continued)

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ITSMA Commentary
As Steve Pinedo, vice president, Oracle
Global Cloud Customer Success, noted, the
shift to the cloud is driving dramatic
changes in customer expectations for
technology based solutions, with new
demands for immediate and frictionless
support and value at every stage of the
relationship. From a marketing
perspective, this puts customer success
front and center, and makes reducing
customer churn the number one KPI.
Chris Williams, head of marketing for
Amdocs, echoed the customer success
priority, noting that marketers should help
lead the way in shifting from measuring
things like solution performance and
service level agreements to a new focus on
business outcomes and value received.
That’s easier said than done, of course, but
essential nonetheless.
Caroline Robertson, head of services
marketing at Cisco, highlighted the
importance of customer experience from
the very first point of contact. For
marketers, she suggested, a useful
question is this: “What are you doing to
make your services easier to buy?” Given
that most of us obsess about making
services easier for our sales forces to sell,
it’s a subtle but potentially profound shift
in thinking.
Customer Experience:
Yes, It’s Marketing’s
Responsibility
Another valuable discussion at the Forum
explored the centrality of customer
experience and customer success amid the
increasing shift to subscription and as-a-
service business models. While Melissa
Lemberg from IBM stressed the
importance of marketers creating
compelling digital experiences for
customers, a panel discussion with
marketing leaders from Amdocs, Cisco,
and Oracle dug into the details of why and
how to shift to “experience-based
marketing.”
ITSMA’s
Six Stage
Buyers
Cycle
Customer
Success Stage 2.
AWARENESS
Stage 3.
INTEREST
Stage 4.
CONFIDENCE
Stage 1.
EPIPHANY
Stage 6.
TRUST
Stage 5.
LOYALTY

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ITSMA Commentary
As Stryker noted, the entire history of
computerized information being used for
business decision making is less than 50
years old. Before the shipment of the first
browser in 1993, about 1 billion gigabytes
of data had been created and stored to
describe consumer and business behavior.
By 2003, with the rise of the Internet that
total had increased to about 5 billion
gigabytes. Today, we collect and store
more than 25 billion gigabytes of data
about business and consumer behavior
every day!
The explosion of big data for business has
literally overwhelmed the capabilities of
businesses to manage it, and the biggest
question we face as marketers is as
simple—and hard—as what do we want?
The answers are all there waiting to be
discovered. We just need to know what
questions to ask. Do we want to analyze all
available data to determine ideal buyers?
It’s possible. Do we want to know where
our ideal buyers are traveling, what apps
are on their phone, and how often do they
use Amazon at home. That’s possible, too.
Monetizing the existing and new data from
our customer activities? Privacy issues to
consider, but doable. Integrate multiple
data feeds in real time from public and
private sources to optimize service
delivery? Sure.
What do we want?
Big Data: We Ain’t Seen
Nothing Yet
My final takeaway is about big data. It’s
certainly not a new topic for marketing;
we’ve talked for years about the
opportunity and need for marketers to
capitalize on big data and analytics for
more targeted, insight-led, and predictive
programs and initiatives. A short history
lesson on big data presented by Dr. Charles
Stryker, founder and CEO of the Venture
Development Center and one of the
world’s leading experts on big data,
however, was eye opening with
regard to the opportunities
we can still barely imagine.

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ITSMA Commentary
Final Thought
Balancing the art and science of
marketing remains as important as
ever. Yes, big data and new
marketing technologies create
tremendous opportunities for us to
understand, target, track and
support customer and prospects in
more precise and automated ways
than ever before, but the art of
strategy, thought leadership,
collaboration, and creativity are just
as critical to success in our fast and
wildly changing markets.
Contact
David C. Munn
President & CEO
ITSMA
dmunn@itsma.com
+1-781-862-8500, Ext. 117