Case Study: How CSC Integrated Strategic Marketing into the Portfolio Management Process

When marketers complain about poor alignment with the business or being treated like a support function, their frustration is often that they are excluded from discussions about the future strategic direction of the company—and from the planning process that determines the portfolio of products and services designed to fulfill that strategic vision.

It seems a simple truth but one that many businesses still haven’t learned: Portfolio management and strategic marketing groups can provide great business value—but only when they are intimately linked to the selection of the products and services that receive investment dollars.

Professional services company CSC understands the importance of these linkages. Strategic marketing is integrated into CSC’s portfolio management process from the beginning. Indeed, CSC’s Corporate Portfolio Management Group, known as Global Service Offerings (GSO), which orchestrates the strategic marketing activity across the organization, plays a role in shaping and selecting investment ideas, from inception all the way to rollout.

“Many times, companies put together their portfolios and then, at the end of the process, they throw it over the wall to marketing and say, ‘Here, make a silk purse out of this,’” says Brigid Quinn, the GSO global portfolio director for CSC. “But now we get involved at the front end, and we are working with a matrixed team from across the organization doing strategic marketing—market analysis, client analysis—to put more rational thought and strategic intent into how we will develop our portfolio. Of course, we’re still creating sales collateral and all the things that marketing traditionally does. But it’s no longer our starting position. We are involved at the front end, in the strategic thought and logic, so we can start shaping the messages earlier and we can figure out how the portfolio all fits together. So by the time we get to doing the collateral, we can do it more effectively and easily.”

And with more credibility. Part of businesses’ reluctance about “inviting marketing to the table” is that it’s not clear what they will receive in return for giving up the elbowroom. In CSC’s case, it’s clear: They can evaluate their solutions from a portfolio perspective and have someone to manage the long and difficult process of developing the overall product and service portfolio.

Though GSO doesn’t have the final say in the portfolio choices, it plays an important role. “When we’re determining what to pursue, portfolio management provides marketing input into that decision,” says Lem Lasher, president of Global Business Solutions and the Office of Innovation for CSC. “GSO is involved right up through making the business case. Then they kind of back off as it goes into development, and then when it comes out of development, they take it and run with it in terms of positioning and publicizing it.”

Sounds simple, but the execution is anything but. Building a successful portfolio management process is difficult enough, but building support for and participation in the process in a company as large and diverse as CSC takes years. As CSC has discovered, for the portfolio management function to provide strategic marketing input and take a key role in planning and portfolio management, it needs to establish the senior executive relationships necessary to gain entry into the process, get funding for finding and investing in new ideas, and become change management experts to get skeptical businesspeople to support it.

Know Your Clients

Buyer priorities are changing—and not just because of the plunging economy. A decade ago, client priorities for selecting IT services providers hinged almost exclusively on qualifications and experience. Customers wanted to know: Is there a methodology? Assets? Tools? A pre-engineered solution? Reference accounts?

When the competitive field based on qualifications leveled somewhat, attention turned to relationships. Can everyone work well together? Do service provider and client cultures match?

Over time, however, even these soft skills also became table stakes. Indeed, in the 10 years that we have been tracking IT professional services brands, the bar for providers has risen consistently.

So, how high is the bar today? So high that providers can afford few mistakes. They must deliver on the promises they make and they must demonstrate a clearer understanding of a client’s business. It goes beyond knowing an industry segment and instead requires an appreciation of a client’s business issues, challenges, and opportunities. Buyers are receptive to trusted partner relationships, so they are likely to commit to a reciprocal investment with providers to make the union work.

Marketing has an important role to play in building these trusted partner relationships. Marketing is best equipped to do the deeper research necessary to reveal and understand client issues.

• Differentiation is an endless challenge. In tough economic times characterized by shrinking customer budgets and longer sales cycles, seeking differentiation makes intuitive sense. Professional services firms differentiate by being the best at something and having proof. It is harder for services firms because of the intangibility of what they provide.
• Market positions morph slowly. Often, clients associate service providers with what they have purchased from them in the past—services and product alike. Therefore, transformation takes time and requires persistence and consistency. Migrating market positions is a good thing, but services providers need to do it with full knowledge of their starting point. They need to map a journey that will take time (even years), monitor progress, and make sure they have permission from the market to move into new territory, with proof points along the way.
• Service provider preference is less tied to awareness and more tied to impact. A noticeable change has occurred in the correlation of awareness and preference. Once, they were tightly linked; today they are not. Buyers are more sophisticated now and have access to more information than ever. Therefore, the companies with the highest awareness/mindshare are not necessarily the most preferred.
  Further, in this market there are clear leaders and followers. The leaders stay the same year after year. The followers shift, reflecting changing strategies, intensity of their marketing programs (many do not sustain marketing investment), and buyer needs/market trends. Buyer needs are certainly driven by trends such as enterprise infrastructure, security, business intelligence, and so on. It behooves service providers to stay attuned to buyer wants and needs and to plan their business and marketing strategies to best maximize their brand positioning.

Why Our Client Aren’t Listening to Us ?

We marketers are not talking to our clients in a candid, direct, and understandable way. Instead, in far too many cases the marketing in our industry can become so, well, grandiloquent that our communications confuse rather than clarify and alienate rather than disarm prospective clients. We’ve all seen it: Websites and brochures promising “synergies” via “new paradigms” by “leveraging” “capabilities” to “drive essential advantage” with “next-generation solutions” for our “multipolar world.” You get the point …

The Deeper Issues of Marketing-Speak

The problems with messages like this are deeper than we think. Here are some of the problems we’re causing with our language:

• Customers aren’t just confused—they’re offended. Clients think they're being had—that marketing is trying to bowl them over with vagueness and ambiguity. It isn’t just that we’ve been unclear. Clients think we’ve been manipulative, and they think it's disrespectful. In fact, in one instance it led a client to refer to a competitor’s marketing department as the “designated corporate liars.”
• Big prices + lack of specificity = frustration. We are selling complex, expensive products and services. Customers want us to solve their specific business problems, but often they don’t see what our messages have to do with them and the resolution of their business problems. They look at our messages and ask, "How does that solve my data integration problems? I've got a very discrete issue that needs to be addressed, and yet you're talking in this hyperbolic language. You’re selling a blender as a ‘produce integration apparatus,’ and that doesn’t build trust.”
• The sin of inclusion. We try to satisfy everyone in all our different markets, verticals, and geographies. But by doing so, we satisfy no one. Our marketing becomes diluted and so inclusive that it no longer means anything. These issues combine to create the Thesaurus Effect, where marketers reach for big words to hide the fact that they don’t have anything specific to say in the first place. We can’t be specific because if we are, it could be contradictory across some of our various markets. And so our message is further diluted out of fear that we not offend anyone or leave anyone out.
• All marketing-speak sounds the same. The very language that we think differentiates us from our competitors—our value propositions—makes us all sound the same to customers. At Cognizant, we went through a rebranding exercise that caused us to look at each of our primary competitors and compare all their value propositions (something that our clients do all the time). But if you remove the logos and fancy type fonts, they are all indistinguishable. It's as if the marketing teams for all the firms in this industry were given the same 12 words (think of those word magnet games on refrigerators) and then were given the task of jumbling them together.
• Marketing-speak makes the purchasing decision more difficult. Clients can’t compare what they can’t understand. At Cognizant, we look at our sales pipeline on a very active basis, and it turns out that we are running into the same six competitors with great consistency because our industry has become very consolidated. Our clients are coming back to us and are saying, "It's really tough at the initial phase to understand what really distinguishes you guys"—meaning "you guys" collectively as an industry. We are making the purchasing decision more difficult for them.

Five Types of Content that Salespeople Will Actually Use.

Dynamic PDF:-

One type of content that we see working well across industries is a dynamic PDF that can be customized easily by the salespeople.

It took us a little while to understand why the PDFs needed to be dynamic, however. At one of our auto industry clients, marketing created these nice one-page PDFs describing how great doing business with them can be. The salespeople had said it was just the sort of thing they needed.

But when marketing sent out the PDFs, no one in sales used them. Through a little bit of analysis, we discovered that it was because the one-pager directed the prospects to call the company’s 1-800 number. That meant that the seller who dropped off the one-pager with the prospect didn’t get quota credit. So there you go—the things were never used. By quickly understanding that simple dynamic, we created a customizable version of the exact same PDF that allowed the seller to drop his or her contact info in there. The salesperson got the call (and the quota), and adoption went through the roof. Also, about 10% of the space on the PDF was targeted to the local region. So by pulling in our customer’s own data, Boston got a slightly different version than San Francisco. It was really easy to automate that small amount of customization with some basic demographic information from each city.

Industry updates:-

Salespeople don’t want a deck with 100 slides, they want one page with everything they need to know. One of our customers sells business process outsourcing, but their processes cut across 18 different industry verticals. Plus, they have 20% turnover per year in the sales force. They needed a way to ramp up new salespeople quickly so that they could have intelligent conversations with high-level people in those different industries.

So they went out and aggregated data from sites like Hoover's First Research to determine the three most important things on the minds of the top decision makers in, for example, the banking industry. Those turned out to be three things: control costs, maintain profitability, and reduce risk for the customer and the institution.

Then our client created a slide containing ways to talk about its value proposition in the context of those three top issues. And it included three open-ended questions to ask, along with things to listen for in the response. This is what salespeople want.

Competitive intelligence documents:-

Most companies’ competitive intelligence lies in the brains of the product experts. We need to be able to get that to salespeople when they need it. Here it is definitely not about quantity but about quality, and it doesn’t have to be beautiful, either. Salespeople need to quickly know, “What do we know about these guys, why do we beat them, and why do we lose to them?” All marketers and salespeople need to be able to deliver the elevator pitch about all their competitors.

Solution brief:-

If you want a solution sell, you need materials to support the solution sell. One pharmaceutical company we work with whittled down the list of things their drugstore customers care about to five. One of them is growing market share in their pharmacies. So the pharmaceutical company developed a one-page solutions brief that talks about everything the company does to help pharmacies grow market share. On the brief is a coaching tool link that includes a conversation prompter, a diagnostic questionnaire, and links to correspondence templates such as an intro email follow-up letter and status email to support further conversation.

Objection-handling sheets:-

Buyers always have objections to your products and services, such as the price being too high or the installation being too difficult. You should have a sheet that talks about each objection and offers tips on how to resolve them along with content necessary to answer the questions or problems.