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.


According to Wikipedia definition, capability is the ability to perform actions. In order to succeed you have to imagine/preview what kind of actions you will have to perform. But the framework for your maneuver is dictated by your capabilities.  Hence, the urge for developing capabilities required to accomplish the actions. It is widely acknowledged that there is no sense to expect marketing strategies, whatever brilliant they are, to be successfully implemented with inadequate marketing capabilities. Especially, this is true for high-tech markets.

Big events like Building Business Capability Conference prove that capability-oriented management is on the march nowadays. 

Marketing capabilities can be viewed as a combination of knowledge, skills, processes, tools, and organizational practices that are necessary for satisfactory performing corresponding marketing operations according to outlined strategy. 

As the first step to developing a comprehensive capabilities model for high-tech B2B marketing  here is presented the draft version that is the result of the year-long research of marketing management theory, trends and practices of selected high-tech firms.  

High-tech B2B marketing capabilities model v 1.0

Process Area	Marketing Capabilities
Intelligence	Foresight; Scenarios; Trend watch; Client collaboration; Marketing research; Client business analysis
Planning	Business model; Strategy; Brand; Product; Value proposition & pricing; Customer service
Creative Production	Design; Video; Photo; Print; Content; Web; Blogging; Gifts, souvenirs, promotional items
Marketing Campaign	Tradeshows; Web/Social media; Conferences/RTs; Events, roadshow, experiential marketing; Customer training & development; Traditional media; Sales promotion; Leads generation; Sales & CRM; PR; Stakeholder relationship management; Post-sales engagement
Supply Chain Management	Agile chains
Marketing Management	Market orientation; Revenue model; Marketing KPI; Business processes; Coordination of R&D, marketing and production; SCRUM; Learning; HRM; Marketing automation software

See Also:

Sept. 14, 2012 - The revised High-Tech B2B Marketing Capabilities Model (version 1.1)