New Updates to High-Tech B2B Marketing Capabilities Model: Customer Community Management, Sales and Channel Enablement

Please, welcome the new entrants to  High-Tech B2B Marketing Capabilities Model. They are:
(1) Customer Community Management; 
(2) Sales Enablement; and 
(3) Channel Enablement.

According to Edward Hadley who cites the Forrester Research, Inc. report released in June 2012 customer community management accounted for 9 percent of all high-tech marketing expenditures in 2012, while channel and sales/field enablement - for 8 percent correspondingly. Backed by the money they are no more the buzzwords only, sir!

Those terms are not coined in Wikipedia yet. You will scarcely find scholar papers on them. Several years will pass until you will read about them in the textbook. But companies allocate budgets,  hire people and develop job descriptions for them. They are part of volatile competitive landscape already. And let's review them with all due respect. 

In Which Industries are Startups Blossoming?

High-tech industries are not equally friendly for establishing startups. Red Herrings Top 100 Lists provide good evidence for such notion. Rough analysis of the lists compiled for 2012 shows that 9 out of 27 featured industries were accountable for 80% of mentioned startups. Computers, software, internet, SaaS, and mobile are at the top.

Below see the table with the detailed results.

Top Trends in New High-Tech Product Design and Development Practices

Agile innovation, trend watch, customer collaboration – those are some of the widely discussed approaches that are believed to boost high-tech product development. To get higher rates of idea generation and idea conversion into successful products high-tech companies experiment with their new product development (NPD) processes. Here is a brief look at some currently emerging and maturing NPD trends screened by twitter hash-tags. 

Twitter tags to discover what's happening in this field on the general level are: #prodmgmt #npd #newproduct #innovation #RandD

More precise understanding of what’s hot in high-tech product development practices can be achieved by the narrow watch of the discussions in five trendy areas that are listed below.

Top 10 Chemical Manufacturing Companies: Facebook and Twitter Penetration, October 2012

What are the current achievements of top global chemical manufacturers in the penetration of social media?

See the results of screening the biggest chemical manufacturers in terms of market capitalization against the criteria of their relations with markets via Facebook and Twitter. Only those companies that have both Facebook page and Twitter account and use them for communications with clients are considered.

Total market capitalization of companies included into the list reaches 263 billion dollars. Overall, featured chemical companies attracted 173607 likes on Facebook and 77136 followers on Twitter so far.

The ultimate leaders in this October 2012 rating are Sherwin-Williams, Du Pont, Monsanto, and Syngenta.  

High-Tech B2B Marketing Capabilities Model v 1.1

This is a new release of High-Tech B2B Marketing Capabilities Model that encompasses the recent results of professional discussion at B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn. This discussion sparkled in the response to the question "How are you finding NEW customers today?" suggested by Barbara Kuntz from Miyachi Unitek. More than 50 marketing executives and experts shared their views and experiences on the topic. They have mentioned 31 marketing capabilities that high-tech companies might consider to develop and incorporate at B2B markets.

Would You Call Your Industry High-Tech?

What industry does your high-tech firm belong to? Is it high-tech, medium-tech or low-tech industry? The paradox is that you can find high-tech companies in every industry, but you can hardly call every industry high-tech. 

Is this really important? Yes, it is. Because your high-tech marketing strategy should be different for each case. 

The major difference will be in customers, competitors and technology development patterns. Moreover, your high-tech industry might turn out to be mature or emerging. 

By definition, high technology industries are intensive in terms of science, research and innovation. Mature industries are high-tech when they rely heavily on knowledge-intensive technologies, for instance, biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, nuclear physics, optics and photonics, materials engineering, mechatronics, electronics, artificial intelligence. Among such mature high-tech industries are aerospace, automotive, energy, software, computers, office machinery, electrical engineering, electronics, electrical equipment, ICT, telecommunications, scientific instruments, environment/green technologies, health care/medical devices, and pharmaceutics. At the same time new technologies can emerge independently into new industries, as well. This might be the case for nano-technology that can give a thrust to nanorobotics, for example.

High-Tech B2B Marketing Capabilities Model v 1.0

• What are you doing to achieve your marketing objectives?
• What are you doing to outperform your competitors?
• What are you doing to find, engage and retain customers?

Those are not the easy questions even for well-established corporations, while for high-tech B2B startups and SMEs they are the real challenge. The reason? Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of high-tech markets. 

There might be different tactical answers to these questions, but the fundamental is the only one:  continuous improvement of marketing capabilities.

Intel Inside: How to Go Viral and Get 100K+ Likes on Facebook in 7 Days

High-tech b2b firm can be really cool. It can become legend, love mark and even a religion. 

One of the live proofs of this is Intel. Its recent geeky-freaky “How computers were made” post on Facebook attracted 102,5K+ likes in a week since it was published on August 9. Up to the moment 34,069 people have chosen to share the link, while 3,258 commented on it.

To understand better what's behind Intel’s success, here are some telling comments of Intel fans:

Karthika Sathasivam ha ha i am proud to say that i was a physics student.....
Jyotirmoy Deb Nice creativity.....
Omkar Singh 1k resistor and m555 ic
Engr Shahzad Ah hah ! Snakes attack on Single mouse !
Vijay Krishnan K K awesome Intel :-)
Chiranjeeb Sarmah Computers r made only wid NE555 IC along wid only 5 resisters........unbelieveable......!!!!
Allan Soundand Light i think some of microcontrollers have internal resistace so we consider them she males! :D
Vijay Krishnan K K Active and passive components combine to form a circuit :-)
Rouscou Chousko Xaxaaaa the result would be a eight core CPU
Ward Mahayag lol..one ic, resistor i see a color brown,red,red,gold eguals= 1.2kilo ohms.. weeee
Praveen Kumar Vukkalkar Bunch of capacitor and Integrated circute systems...and Intel Inside--Mental Outside
Mahinuwan Gallage NE555 is the precission timer and resistors could be used to change its wave cofficient as of generating out put. Bottom line pulse width could be adjusted using resistors. What else? you cannot do information procesing using those 5R+1xIC???????????????
Ashley Ninetales Saleem-West What 12 year old did Intel get to run this page?
Jay Hernly Wow! 100,000+ of us can't be wrong....heads & tails
Dondi Viernes better run!!!!!!!!! here comes the diode maniacs ahaha!!!
Jonathan Trejo It's a joke people.. lol I can't believe intel posted this. xD

Managerial  Implications?

How to Make Your High Tech Firm Smart in 2 Steps

I wrote recently that high-tech world is a VUCA world. To survive and succeed out there, your high tech firm has to be smart. 

According to synonym.com the adjective smart has seven senses:

 - showing mental alertness and calculation and resourcefulness;

- elegant and stylish;

- characterized by quickness and ease in learning;

- improperly forward or bold;

- painfully severe;

- quick and brisk;

- capable of independent and apparently intelligent action.

Well, I guess that you would like your firm to be smart in all those senses. It must be intelligent, capable and mature. Here's the oversimplified algorithm in making smart your high-tech firm in 2 steps.

High-Tech B2B Marketing Featured Cases: July 2012

• Geek2Geek Marketing. Case Collection featured 18 high-tech b2b marketing cases in July 2012.
• Here is the digest of cases categorized according to corresponding marketing process areas: intelligence, strategy, creative production, campaign, SCM, management.

How to Constantly Improve Capabilities for High-Tech Marketing in VUCA Environment

• High-tech world is a VUCA world
• High-tech companies have to develop marketing capabilities required for operation under volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous circumstances
• Collaborative learning and case method learning can help  high-tech companies in improving their  marketing capabilities

Geek2Geek Marketing

Explaining the meaning of Hightech B2B Marketing to non-specialist is quite a challenge. On one hand, the naming seems to tell the story. And the story is about marketing of high-tech products, services, ideas, and solutions from one business to another. For marketing geeks this is like the Captain’s Obviously statement. Hightech B2B Marketing is a very specific area because it is at the intersection of Hightech Marketing and B2B Marketing. Marketing geeks do not need to be additionally explained that since both Hightech Marketing and B2B Marketing are very special types of marketing, so their intersection is even more awesome. It requires special skills, tools, competencies, if compared, say, to FMCG marketing.

But, on the other hand, explaining all of this to non-marketing aliens is like crossing the chasm. High-tech folks are skeptical about marketing. They believe that a good product sells itself. They think that marketing is naive and simple. 
That's why high-tech geeks are rare guests at high-tech marketing forums. Hence high-tech marketers are closed in their own communities, and outsiders rarely bother to join them.

So maybe the High-tech B2B Marketing story is told from the wrong side?

My Top 5 Innovative Nations in Europe 2011 Watch List

Since I am living in Europe, it’s pretty natural to be interested in Europe’s competitiveness and ability to innovate. And I am interested to know where the "locomotives" of European high-tech innovation are situated today. How successful are they? What do they do? What trends do they set? What can be learnt from them?

What are the Most Important Trends at High-Tech B2B Markets in 2012?

On the eve of 2012 I made a short poll among professional high-tech b2b marketers. The question was: "What do you predict will be the most important trends at high-tech B2B markets that will affect your business in 2012?"