Pete Jakob of IBM

pete jakob

“Apply plenty of mulch,” says Pete Jakob, addressing a rapt audience of business-to-business marketers. He gives a bemused grin. This is his final tip, following such advice as ‘apply the right feed at the right time’ and ‘follow the instructions on the seed packet’. What he’s talking about is lead nurturing, rather than gardening – although it’s possible he’s talking about both. Broadly considered a thought leader in demand generation, IBM’s marketing transformation leader is using his favourite hobby to analogise his professional passion at a B2B Marketing half-day conference held last September, in a talk titled ‘An organic gardener’s guide to lead nurturing’.

Jakob is hesitant – or perhaps too humble – to describe himself as a thought leader, although the thinking part at least is right, he says after some consideration. Laid-back and knowledgeable, he is only too happy to share his expertise on lead nurturing and his passion for implementing change.

“Where I tend to thrive – and certainly get the biggest kick – is going into areas where change is at the core of it and we’re not quite sure what we should be doing. I think we’re at that point in the marketing industry right now,” he says.

Leading transformation
His new role as marketing transformation leader – which he has held since January – is an evolution of his previous roles at IBM – the company he has served for the past 25 years. “Many of the roles I’ve had have had change at the centre of them in some way, shape or form,” he acknowledges.

A couple of jobs ago, he explains, he was running software marketing for IBM. This position allowed him to experiment more with different marketing models as clients’ requirements were changing. He noticed, on forays into various forms of search engine marketing, that he was beginning to engage with leads much earlier in their buying cycle than he had previously. They were not yet ready to pass on to the sales team, but they had shown interest, he noted.

This evolved into his next job, as response and lead nurturing manager – a position that marked a significant change in approach to IBM’s marketing strategy. Jakob began to restructure the UK marketing team to not only consider the return on different campaign strategies, but also to value all levels of response – not only those that were ripe for the picking.

“If somebody engages in one of our marketing campaigns we should be thinking of that as an honour and a privilege,” Jakob explains.

He began to consider how to process this early stage of interest, and started planning ways to take these leads from initial interest to a point where they’re ready to be engaged with – something that most marketers are only beginning to consider now. This forward thinking placed Jakob on the vanguard of the demand generation movement that is currently sweeping through the industry.

Implementing change
To implement this new focus, Jakob enacted changes on both local and cultural structures, as well as with the development of new technologies to measure the various levels of engagement with campaigns and gather leads together accordingly.

“The start is cultural,” he says. “When planning a campaign, teams must now focus not only on generating a response, but on what to do once they have got the response.” This last step will differ from campaign to campaign, but it is something pivotal to take into consideration in the early planning stages, he says.

“The industry hasn’t focused enough on what to do with response when they get it,” he explains. “[Marketers have] focused too long on executing the tactic and have lost sight of why they were doing it in the first place.”

Automation
The second half of 2009 will see Jakob roll out several innovative demand generation systems internally, “to give the marketing team better insight than they’ve been able to get before,” according to Jakob. Demand generation technology is something that IBM has used for a while, says Jakob. “We’ve been using various platforms over the years (both internally developed and vendor-provided) for outbound emails, web page creation, event registration etc.”

The major benefit, he says, is the ability the technology allows to prioritise the responses to campaigns and automatically pass them to the right team or individual to follow up and develop further. “Given the short ‘half-life’ on a response, we believe that the secret to maximising the ROI from our marketing campaigns is to focus on getting responses quickly to the appropriate person to re-engage with the client, and to automatically provide that person with as much relevant information about that client and their engagement history to make a successful conversation more likely,” explains Jakob.

Overall though, he takes a vigilant approach to technology, identifying it as something to be approached with caution. “Technology alone rarely solves anything,” he says. “Most important is to get your ‘cultural head’ around what you’re trying to achieve, and once you understand that, figure out how technology can help you,” he advises.

“Push it as far as you can without the technology,” he advises, suggesting marketers have a plan in place before employing an automation system. It is something you shouldn’t implement too quickly, he heeds, as good technology can’t make up for bad planning.

IBM’s marketing strategy will never stop evolving, says Jakob. As clients’ needs change, so will marketing techniques and strategies. “Change is a never-ending journey,” he says. “I don’t think you ever reach a steady state.” With the punches the industry will continue to take for some time to come, it will be interesting to see what changes this transformation leader implements next.

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