Institute for the Study of Business Markets

Getting back into Blog – drive time

Well folks: I had abandoned this blog for a while – a very busy first half of 2010.

But it dawned on me, that I have an awful lot of “windshield time” ahead of me in the second half of 2010, so I’ve decided to dedicate some of this windshield time to the blog.

What’s new in B-to-B?

Lots going on in business-to-business right now. 

The chief marketing officers of ISBM including those at GE, Kennametal, Parker Hannifin, Dresser, and others, are working together to forge a maturity model moving toward the “gold standard” of business marketing.  As of now, these folks are sharing this work among themselves, but it promises to help us with a blueprint for what excellence in our practice — especially looking forward to this new “new normal” decade” should be of great interest. 

Social Media and B-to-B — lots of buzz going on now about Social Media and B-to-B but it seems to me that reflecting on our Members Meeting it boils down to a few key principles:

• Social Media of all sorts in the simplest view are just additional channels by which we can reach, chat with, and enter into dialogue with our customers, influential’s, and the market.  Really that’s it — it’s just another channel, with some key differences
• One way it’s NOT different is that without a concrete objective in mind –just “getting into social media” is a good way to waste your most precious asset right now –the time of your best people.
• This channel is essentially out of our control.  As marketers we can choose to participate in this channel several ways:
  • We can observe — tune into conversations that are going on and listen
  • We can participate — enter into the chat, and the rules of the road state that we be very honest about who we are, who we represent, and straightforward communication
  • We can mediate – if there’s a discussion going on, we can choose to enter as mediator, bringing in other points of view
  • We can moderate/instigate — nothing is preventing us from setting up dialogues of our own, but if the audience we’re trying to reach doesn’t find these of value don’t expect much to happen.
  • We can learn –which means the scientific method: develop a hypothesis on some effect you’re looking for and test to learn.

A bunch of real insight on this is coming from Rick Short at Indium, who seems way ahead of all of us in terms of experimentation.  Beyond that, there are insights from Cisco, and DuPont, who have a variety of experiments underway. 

Marketing Sales Interface

This tricky place continues to be an ongoing conundrum.  For some firms this seems to work really well — they have a well-defined demand generation process, with frameworks for thinking through how to resolve issues, and have marketing genuinely be a lever for a more efficient and effective sales force.

For others, it remains a war zone — or worse than that an area of complete and utter disregard of one for the other.

The next ISBM Members Meeting coming up September 15 and 16, we endeavor to shed light on this area.  We are genuinely blessed to have Mr. Marketing — Dr. Philip Kotler of Kellogg and The “Professor of Professional Selling”, Mr. Neil Rackham, together on the agenda to kick off the proceedings.  Cases, research, more — we hope to dig into this area and shed some real light for ISBM members.

BMA Meeting – engage

Before that, business marketers have a chance to listen and learn at the upcoming BMA conference, June 2-4 in Chicago.  This promises to be an excellent conference. Gary Slack and his team have done a tremendous job of presenting a first rate slot of speakers, with plenty of ways to “engage” across the practice.

Keeping things going. 

I’ve discover that as I’ve tried to service this blog that although the media is really quite inexpensive, it takes the thing I have the least — time.

So… as we move forward, I’m going to be gathering sources from many other areas, and stop having me be the gating item on his blog.  I’ll have my students, speakers, researchers, and others on as “guest bloggers”, so I invite you to tune back into this blog and see if you can jump on in, add value, post questions, and revitalize things.

Sorry for the long pause.

Ralph Oliva

Tweets coming:

Ralph Oliva has rejuvenated his blog, and is working on a process to keep it going.  Tune in at http://isbm.peachnewmedia.com

Great new article from Jim Anderson in MIT Sloan Management Review on Pricing

Keep tuned in to ISBM Knowledge Community for fresh content – coming your way via the ISBM “MBA on call” program.