One of our clients’ CIOs found himself totally sandbagged last week, when the CEO asked if the company infrastructure could ‘support social media’.

The poor chap hadn’t a clue. He remembered the Marketing Director talking about Facebook a couple of months back, but his most immediate priority was migrating to the new SAN.

Of course that’s not what you tell the boss, so he assured him it was, and an hour or so later phoned to ask me what on earth the chap was talking about.

Social media has become a huge phenomenon, and marketers are jumping on its bandwagon like there’s no tomorrow, with many thinking that because there’s technology involved, they need the IT department to ‘do something about it.’

But before you put the next big server rollout on hold, it’s worth just looking below the hype and analyzing just how much impact it’s going to have on the business, and what, if anything you really need to do.

Facebook, at the time of writing, has around 850 million members, and a lot of big brand activity with company pages. Starbucks has over 50 million ‘likes’, Coke around the same, FC Barcelona has 28 million. Poor old British Airways has yet to score 300,000.

But what are they getting in return?

Gartner reports that only 16% of companies have yet formulated a business-wide social media strategy, which covers all elements of how a business engages with its many publics, whereas 84% of businesses are doing things ad hoc.

This is a key point for CIOs. Infrastructure projects run in cycles of 18-24 months, whereas social media changes its rules almost overnight. Facebook is just six years old, and is already on its umpteenth software iteration. Each time it introduces a new function the algorithms change.

It also doesn’t help that there’s no customer support to help out if you’ve spent a fortune developing apps to analyze your fan bases, just to suddenly find they no longer work.

So the short answer to the question is; ‘not a lot’. Getting data out of Facebook is extremely tricky, and a lot of brands are finding that having millions of people ‘liking’ them provides very little hard return on investment, as less than 0.5% ever re-visit the company page.

But even though many early adopters of social media aren’t getting the expected ROI, the shrewd ones are. They’re the people who realized early on that the secret to social media success is to build and maintain your own community, and use Facebook and Twitter as recruitment channels to get people into your own domain.

This in turn calls for delivering a very different user experience from a normal corporate website.  Not only does it need five nines availability, instant scalability for spikes in traffic, it will also need a much higher degree of management, as well as a sophisticated CMS to enable user generated content.

Social media will become a key part of a company’s DNA. We believe passionately that it should be an integral part of every outward facing person’s job role, and that you can’t outsource it. But you can learn from the mistakes of others when setting up your systems and processes.

Social media is all about sentiment, so you’re going to need textual analysis to warn you when someone posts a gripe, as well as CRM and BI to understand your fans preferences, and tailor offers to catch their interest. You’ll need ‘sentiment analysis’ to be able to see not just what your own community is saying within your own domain, but also monitor the background chatter about your business on the web.

Even though a lot of people are adopting a wait and see approach, the smart ones are looking carefully at what they might need, working with sales and marketing to understand how their roles are changing, and designing infrastructures that will support them both today and for the foreseeable future.

Social media may not yet be living up to its hype as a marketing medium, but it is going to. And it is going to change your world, so you need to get it right.

By Peter Smith, managing partner of the Hot To Trot Marketing Group, one of the UK’s foremost social media consultancies.

We did it because we’ve seen an explosion in feature-heavy reviews talking about the ins and outs of the product.

Having learned back in the days of my early journalistic career that very few people are actually interested in what’s under the hood, but want to know what a car feels like to drive, this approach feels wrong. It’s not how we write them, and we’ve even seen one customer generate over £1.25m of new revenue of the back of a case study, so our experience is that for a case study to engage it needs to give an insight into the the person we’re interviewing and share his journey with the reader.

But we could be wrong, after all times do change, so we decided to put our money where our mouth is and test the water.

To keep it fair,  we pulled 3 case studies each from 20 IT vendors’ websites, and asked some of the hundreds of people we’ve interviewed in the last decade to give us their opinion of the content, style and approach.

We also went through each study and quantified the content by counting how many paragraphs covered each of the key issues identified in the 2011 IDC customer experience survey as being of interest to purchasers of IT.

Guess what we found ?

As you can see from the chart there is a massive disconnect between what the vendors are writing about, and what their target customers want to read about.

Just  one percent of IT buyers want to read about product features at this stage in the buying cycle. Yet that’s what makes up 90% of the content of the case studies published.

Similarly, IDC found that nearly 30% of IT buyers want to know about how they can use technology to enable business growth. This subject was covered in just 1% of the case study content.

So perhaps then it’s hardly surprising that our reader panel, which ranged across the buyer spectrum from CIOs to techies, came back with incredibly low scores on almost all the case studies we gave them. The highest rated  got just 4 out of 10.

Their universal conclusion was that case studies represent a key source of information for them, but hardly any vendors tell them what they way to know.

That’s a massive, missed opportunity.

One IT vendor we discussed this with last week said they’re not surprised by the results because, in his words,  ”lots of IT companies have cut back on their budgets and now get the product managers to produce case studies rather than pay for a professional job. The result is lots of technology descriptions with one or two anodyne quotes from the customer.”

Last year Gartner released a report that stated that 90% of IT purchasing decisions were made following web research. Often this was up to, and including, final vendor selection, without any involvement of the vendors being considered.

That’s an important point – all the effort going into lead generation, telemarketing, events and so on is wasted if your prospective customer’s first contact isn’t good. Your website is the first place prospective buyers will visit to find out whether or not they should consider doing business with you.

What you publish there is critical.

Customer case studies are still widely recognised as one of the most important ways of proving your credentials, but if they focus on technology, rather than how people use it to overcome their business challenges, then they’ll have the same impact on your website visitor as a loud-mouthed sales person who steamrollers their customers and insists on talking about what he wants to tell you.

And we all know how successful those sales people are.

Or not.

Proponents for that tactic argue that no-one reads much beyond a couple of frames, so if you have lots going on then, in theory, the negative post will get lost pretty rapidly.

We don”t advise you to do that, or even worse, delete them.

A couple of months ago, one of our clients felt very tee’d off with their car dealer when his wife was pressured into paying out over £1600.00 for service items that her car did not need. He complained on the manufacturer’s
Facebook wall and found an hour later that his comment had been deleted.

The same happened when he reposted the complaint – with no response from the manufacturer or the dealer.
So he blogged about the experience, and reposted to the manufacturers’ wall hourly for the next two days, linking to his blog.

Each time his post got taken down within an hour.

What the manufacturer didn’t know was that he drove over 400 people to the blog, of whom around a quarter said they would now drop that manufacturer from their shortlist.

100 new car sales lost at an average of £40k per sale? I’d say that was a very expensive approach to social media, especially in this market.

If you are taking social seriously, then you should have 24×7 monitoring and a dedicated, empowered team able to respond to the problem and calm down the unhappy customer.

The important thing is to get the conversation out of the public domain as soon as possible, and make sure that the complaint is seen to have been answered in near-real time.

24, 48 or 72 hours later is not acceptable.

Mega brands like Coke and Starbucks boast Facebook fan numbers in the multimillions, but the level of engagement across the top 300 brands is dropping like a stone.

In just nine months, their average fan engagement levels have halved from over 1.2 percent to 0.6, despite Facebook membership increasing by over 50% over the same period.

Which means that the marketing industry’s current approach to social marketing, is actually turning customers off!

That’s not surprising. Companies that have been around a while tend to fall into a fairly standard, command and control, pyramid structure which lays the dead hand of established practice on any truly innovative idea.

Within these companies the role of marketing is pretty well defined – to get campaigns out the door and ultimately drive up sales, and there’s a strong pressure to recycle content across all media.

Which is fine if your fans haven’t already seen the same thing in four or five other places, which the volume of sharing and re-tweeting makes extremely unlikely if the content is at all interesting.

What is the point of social media?

Although in time we’ll all get offers throughout mobiles, social isn’t about driving sales. It’s about reputation. It’s about opinion. It’s about opening your company up to customers. It’s about being happy to take criticism and learn from it.

That’s a lot of attitude change for any company to deal with.

Last month just 7% of companies polled in a Gartner survey think they have social sorted out, even though over 80% are involved in it.

In part that’s because of the newness of social, but a lot of the slowness is down to companies trying to work out what the heck they’re going to do – Who’s going to own it? What are the rules? How do we control what’s said? In-house or Outsource?

In short – what do we do next?

Are you socially engaging ?

One of the most interesting points we’ve found is that over 90% of the discussions companies are having about social focus on ‘How do we do this?’ rather than ‘What are we going to offer our fans?’

The key word that comes up in every conversation we have about social media is ‘engagement.’ But they don’t teach engagement on marketing degrees or CIM courses. In fact most marketers dread the thought of having to deal with customers on a regular basis.

Over the last couple of decades marketing departments have become ever farther removed from the people they’re trying to influence. An IBM study in October found that over three quarters of CMOs will use research to tell them what people think, yet less than a quarter read their own Facebook pages, where the public express themselves in spades.

To many marketers the practicalities of content and engagement are an alien language – they’re simply not used to the 24×7 demands of a social website.

To make social work, marketers need to focus on people not numbers. They need to consider how people will react to what they see, how they are going to make their sites compelling, and how they are going to build communities.

Facebook isn’t the answer

99.95% of fans never revisit a brand page they have ‘liked’. Within a couple of weeks Facebook’s Edge Rank filters out news from pages that you don’t visit, so the millions of likes on the top pages are pretty much worthless.

To build a social community you need to go beyond Facebook and Twitter. Yes they’re a great front door, but the key is to use these sites as bait, as a way to invite fans to take their relationship with you to the next level, and join a dedicated community website with a 24×7 editorial team driving it.

What you offer when the fan first arrives at the site and how you keep them engaged, will make the difference between them joining your community and becoming a brand advocate, or simply clicking away never to return.

That’s all about content, which is a significant challenge to marketers, as it requires the skills and creativity of a publisher.

Get it right and you’ll build a massive and loyal fanbase, but you’ll have to change a lot of established practices along the way, or outsource, which means finding a partner that can bring a range of skills to the table – content, creative, event management, software and data, customer service and empathy for the brand.

Outsourcing is always a tricky one because the CFO will demand a Return on Investment, and concrete revenue from social is notoriously hard to define.

Perhaps that’s why so few marketing organizations are prepared to commit the budget to do social properly, even though within the next couple of years an effective social community is going to be the most powerful tool in the marketer’s box.

The growth of companies like ASOS, Amazon and Zynga, compared to the decline of traditional retailers like Currys and Comet, shows what happens when a new business model lands, and established businesses ignore it.

Is social going to do the same to your business, or are you going to take the plunge and beat your competitors to the post?

He’s right – a click on its own means nothing. Unless there is some engagement to follow, then the click has little value.

Now this may seem to fly in the face of current digital thinking – after all many digital campaigns are focused purely on getting a target number of clicks. Even worse, many are paid for on that metric, but the realities are that the measurement of success by click is as daft as the measurement of PR value by AVE.

We’re seeing the same thinking taking root in social media – “Get me 100,000 Facebook ‘likes’ is a common cry, but according to Peter Jackson, Business Strategist at the 77 Agency, this too is a false metric. “ It’s easy to get 100,000 likes, the challenge is to get 100,000 of the people the brand would like.”

Because so many advertisers are convinced that clicks are a good measure of online branding, creativity, and successful campaigns, are stifled. Too much emphasis goes into the generation of clicks/likes, and not enough into the experience enjoyed by the users when they get there.

Brian Solis of the Altimeter group showed a very interesting presentation at the SMiCS summit in Monte Carlo contrasting the publicity put out by a large US airline. He ads show a caring stewardess, smiling captain and so on.

By contrast, the word cloud of sentiment about that particular airline showed words like ”unreliable’, ‘late,’ ’uncaring.’

Most unsettling for the company concerned was the discovery that the most prominent word blaring out from the stack was ‘Crap.’

A disconnect between the glitz of marketing and the reality of the product or service is not new, but if marketers are to get the best out of their marketing spend, especially online, they need to lift their eyes from the click/like metrics, and focus on the engagement.

comScore has recently published a very interesting whitepaper -”How Online Advertising Works: Whither The Click?” . This shows that the primary effect of online ads is just the same as any other broadcast medium – it just creates exposure for the brand. The act of clicking through cannot be seen as a measurement of the impact or effectiveness of the ad.

They also came up with some very interesting statistics and point out that two-thirds of internet users do not click on display ads. They also show found that just one sixth of internet users account for 80 percent of all clicks.

There is also a marked age split – clickers tend to be young, often below 18, and almost always less affluent than the non-clickers who predominantly make up the advertisers’ target market.

By contrast to the apparent disconnect, the Comscore research also shows that display advertising does have a notable effect on user behaviour. The research, which covered 139 campaigns, showed a general increase in web traffic across the advertisers’ sites of around

We’ve also come across some research by MediaMind, Microsoft Advertising, and comScore, which confirms that good engagement positively influences brand metrics.

Dwell time is a key metric in these studies, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, they show that a good experience on the website makes them stick around longer and increase their interest in finding out more – by well over a third.

So despite the hype, and the easy numbers, once again the message is that marketing isn’t a numbers game – it’s all about creativity, relevance, and that old chestnut – customer appeal.

What a shame they don’t teach that in college.

At one of the presentations we counted 156 people in the room – an incredible turnout for most first-time events, let alone one that wasn’t much more than a concept just seven weeks ago!

During the day we’ve had lots of great feedback from our press party, and some outstanding press coverage – feel free to click on the headlines for the links, and enjoy…

Nicola Clark from Haymarket – writing for Marketing and Brand Republic has already put up five articles which have appeared on both sites…

Apple ‘headed for tablet monopoly’, claims software chief

Very nice roundup of the event, quoting MicroStrategy Founder & CEO Mike Saylor. It was also the most read article on Marketing’s site yesterday…

Brands accused of ‘anti-social behaviour’ on Facebook and Twitter

Another top-scoring magazine story – again getting highest reader ranking, this one picked up on Brian Solis‘ excellent presentation…

Facebook urges brands to adopt social CRM

Tim Campos from Facebook – kicking off the MicroStrategy World/SMiCS2011 joint keynote, gave an interesting perspective on how social and business are inevitably going to interlock. Nicola sums this up nicely in this piece – again one of Marketing’s top stories of the week…

Guess pushes for social and e-commerce combination

Mike Relich from Guess? gave a very powerful presentation on the way that Guess? is driving its social activities. Fashion-friendly Nicola was obviously impressed…

Negative reviews drive sales, claims marketing expert

Don Peppers - undoubtedly the star speaker, set the audience alight with both his presentations, and Nicola has picked up on a key aspect of this – the danger that brands will be swamped by social media if they don’t get it right…

Andreas Dittes- Video highlights

Andreas is one of Germany’s most prominent bloggers with over 50,000 readers,  and has made a great video snapshot of key speaker moments.

The DailyDOOH

This bunch of great reporting is from DailyDOOH, the UK’s leading Digital Out of Home publication, who also did a sterling job of tweeting. You can follow the string at #smics2011

One such group, which has spawned from Linked in, serves the Pharma industry, and with over 60,000 members, boasts a far higher readership than any trade publication. It also has the benefit of being global, and, perhaps in a nod to conventional publishing, offers a range of sub-groups that focus on specialist sectors within the industry.

This particular website has a long way to go in terms of editorial management, and reducing the overtly commercial nature of its offerings, and in fainress its web design is a bit patchy.

But if I were still running a publishing company it would probably be keeping me awake at night because groups like this aren’t facing the horrendous entry costs that are traditionally associated with launching a new publication, yet if they get their act together could seriously threaten my business model.

It wil call for a complete re-think of the way that we have traditionally published, especially in terms of deadlines, issue dates, content management, reader engagement and revenue generation. But if you look at it from an advertiser’s perspective, and were able to sell advertising opportunities based on hard, trackable numbers, as well as take advantage of some of the seriously clever stuff you can do on the web, which we, and other agencies, are already doing for our industry clients, then the possibilities are boundless.

It’s a wake-up call that while the publishing industry is busily debating the do’s and don’ts of digitising PDFs or creating new editions, people with no publishing background are merrily launching wholly new enterprises that could creep up and steal the industry’s lunch from under its noses.

The most recent casualty to seek the protection of the US courts is Summit Business Media, who are seeking to effectively restructure $135m of debt having failed to reach agreement on its latest plan with about a fifth of its creditors.

On paper, Summit’s management team has done pretty much everything that could be expected of them since the bottom fell out of their market in the last quarter of 2008. They disposed of all their ‘non-core’ businesses, closed anything that wasn’t making a profit, and reduced headcount by nearly a third.

Summit is far from alone, joining such luminaries as Ziff Davis, Penton and Cygnus in seeking to turn around their business by removing a large debt burden.

Some of the numbers are truly staggering – Penton’s debt mountain was nearly $300m. For an industry that has always been one where you generate the bulk of your revenue before even producing the product, that kind of compound loss suggests something is seriously awry.

The key point that this unhappy position underlines is that it’s getting a lot harder to run B2B publications profitably. This drives another critical question-  ‘how are trade and tech publishers going to evolve their business model to match the needs of 21^st Century clients?’

I call them ‘clients’ because the relationship has to change and be more in line with the sort of relationship other suppliers of marketing services supply.

Back in the dim and distant past when yours truly was in the elevated position of running a B2B publishing business, our income primarily came from three sources – classified ads, display ads and events. We had two groups of stakeholders – readers, who were considered to be the most important as without readers we would never attract the other group – Advertisers.

The publishing industry at the tail end of the 20^th Centry did little to charm advertisers, certainly it was not a service-led industry.

All of which was fine as long as competition was limited. In our own group we had both the market leader and immediate competitor in three of the sectors we covered. This made it very had for another publisher to intrude and break our hold, as the cost of carrying a competitive launch long enough to dent our ability to control the ad market was prohibitive.

Such a monopolistic situation does not pervade today in any market, especially since the ability to become a publisher and command a weekly audience of many thousands now requires little more than a strong opinion and modest fluency with WordPress.

But very few of these ‘bloggers’ generate advertising revenue. In fact advertising income has fallen dramatically across the board – as can be seen from the poor profit performance of several key players.

Advertiser fatigue is often quoted as one of the principal reasons that B2B publishers are struggling – after all it’s the same group of companies who fill their vacancies and take stands at events as run full-page ads.

But in reality marketing budgets have been growing steadily.

The difference is that these budgets are being spent in a much more controlled and measurable way – display advertising in B2B is now viewed as a very costly way of reaching an audience that may or may not (a) see your ad, and (b) actually be in your target buyer profile.

The arrival of e-shots, click-throughs and interactive web pages has meant that advertisers can now measure the effectiveness of their campaigns in hard numbers rather than ‘Opportunities To See.’

Remember also that buyers today are far better informed than at any time in history, thanks in no small measure to the Internet, with analysts like Gartner reporting that 90% of all purchase decisions are now made based largely on Internet research.

The traditional B2B publication is playing a decreasing role in that scenario. Advertisers will now spend much more in building and maintaining their won websites – becoming self-publishers.

The publishing industry’s historic reliance on the three pillars of revenue – advertising, circulation and events has been under threat for a very long time, yet few have met the challenge head on, and now it’s a headlong rush to find new ways to connect audiences and advertisers.

There are definitely ways that this can be done. Reed now takes far more revenue from recruitment ads than it ever did ten years ago when 200+ pages of classifieds were a regular feature of its mainstream weeklies. By creating totaljobs.com they not only gave themselves a very effective route to preserve revenue, they also created a market leader that has seen off many other competitors and taken share from other publishers.

The digital challenge for publishers today, especially in B2B, is to find new ways to add value to the reader experience to bring them back into the fold and be able to monetise their reader relationship to the advertisers’ benefit.

This means new products, new cost models and above all new thinking.

Outbound telemarketing is rapidly becoming the least admired form of customer engagement, yet on a debate on Linked in this week over 150 people have argued in favour of driving sales people to do it, even though the evidence is that it’s not producing the numbers.

The discussion – to which I have contributed the piece below, reminded me of my own early days way back when I started out in my media career selling recruitment classifieds for a national newspaper.

The way we were all taught was very formulaic – we called it the Thomson Method, and it was built around cold calling, but door to door.  We were all sent out every morning to over our ‘patch’ and had a fixed calling cycle so that every day we knew – as did the boss — where we were going to be, even though 99 times out of 100 we wouldn’t have any fixed appointments.

Because it was a daily newspaper we were expected to be back in the office by 4.00pm, having made at least four face to face calls, and brought back two sales. At that time we’d hit the phones and fill the space left for the next day’s paper.

They had stuck with the same method religiously for years because it had worked, and everyone in management had come up through the company, so was trained in that way of thinking.

Before joining the newspaper  I had just spent over a year selling Radio advertising, which at the time was still seen as ‘not mainstream,’ so we had employed far more creative and effective methods. There was one memorable campaign brought in by one of my colleagues who having failed to convince the media buyer, ended up challenging him to a game of Spoof for the business, and winning it!

The media buyer then used all the arguments that he himself had dismissed just ten minutes earlier, to convince the client of the rightness of the decision!

However, on this long-establidhed national paper, such methods would have resulted in summary dismissal. So even though I appreciated learning about structure, organisation and controlling the sale, trudging around in my first week, which was on-the-job training being shown the ropes by the sales manager, I was horrified at the thought that these poor customers had been forced to listen to a succession of green, young reps reciting this dreary dirge.

Thirty years on I can still remember, and slightly shudder at, the way we were taught to engage the customer:

Walk up to reception. Smile at the receptionist and ask to be put through to the prospect. Do not give anything other than your name.

Then when the receptionist is struggling to introduce you, ask if you can speak to the prospect and reach out for the phone.

When the phone is passed over to you, smile into the phone and in a confident but not commanding manner say the following:”Good morning/afternoon , Mr./Ms. Prospect. There are two reasons I’ve come to see you today. One is to show you how to recruit a better candidate, the other to reduce the cost of doing so. Now shall I come up and see you in your office, or would you like to come down and meet me here in reception?”

We still get the odd call like that today, and I am wryly amused when I pick it up because at least the guy has been given some training, but despite having enjoyed terrific success selling Radio, including bringing in a campaign that still runs today, I just found this method failed wholly to engage.

Even worse was that the objection handling approach was so bombastic it was more likely to alienate the prospect.

After a month of using their method, and admittedly generating the required two ads per day, I still found it really uncomfortable to use this approach, even though there was definitely an opportuity for the publication to grow its sales in the patch I’d inherited.

So it was time to step back and look at it with a marketeer’s eye.

The paper’s method of identifying sales prospects was to go through that days’ competitors and call up the advertisers. So we had an almighty stack of back issues, which came home with me over one weekend.

Three months’ worth of back issues yielded a mine of information about who advertised most regularly, which types of jobs and in which papers, and after a long weekend  yours truly had a detailed map of the advertisers in my patch – some of whom we didn’t even have records of, but which formed an excellent basis for a calling plan.

The approach – while still cold – was markedly different.

Instead of trying to browbeat them into an immediate sale, I’d approach the receptionist and tell him – in those days a good three-quartesr of them were ‘him’ and many were uniformed commissionaires who had been NCOs in the army.  If they were in uniform, I’d greet them by their military rank – which always went down well, and invariably we’d have a short and friendly chat about where they had served, and how civvy street wasn’t a patch on the forces. These details were always noted in the customer file, so the next time I went in I’d have a tidbit to share or a question about the wife’s lumbago, another friendly chat then ensued.

Having created that bond, I’d then ask them if they could help me out  by calling up the prospect and explaining that I was passing and had called in hopefully to see if I could make an appointment to talk to them about reducing the cost of their recruitment ads. About half of the prospects would happily fix a meeting for the next time I was passing, the majority of the rest would come down and see me immediately without me having to rip the phone out of a grudging old soldier’s hand.

The next stage was to go through the history of their ads in the competing titles and show how for certain specific job types, we could get better quality of response. This led on to setting up a plan that allowed them to come to us first and benefit from a discount in return for committing to a certain level of business.

To anyone in management today this sounds like common sense, but of course I wasn’t allowed to discount, being just a humble ad rep, and the manager would have had kittens if I’d suggested it, but I’d watched the more experienced guys slashing rates by 60-70% after 4.30 just to get an ad away, so knew that by working the system in the customer’s favour with about half their ads booked after the discount watershed at 4.30 pm,  we could get the business at a good price and keep the customer coming back for more.

Because they were advertising jobs, they usually knew two or three weeks before the ad was due to place, so we’d work out a plan for the coming month, book about half of them in advance, and I’d know to call on certain days, or they’d call the office and leave a message for me to call them back, which I’d do after 4,30, agree a discount with the boss, and bring the ad home.

It didn’t hammer the rate card one bit –  my overall discount worked out at less than 20% against rate card.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, after three months this lead to me hitting top salesman seven months in a row.

Fortunately for me the sales manager was off sick for six of those months and recuperating for a further two, and as I was hitting top numbers the sales director left me to get on with it.

However it all came horribly unstuck when the sales manager got back into the saddle and came out with me one day!

He was horrified, and told me this had to stop – “Do it our way or not at all’ was his approach.

I explained that my way was to treat every customer as a key account and that I had quadrupled the revenue and volume off the patch, so it obviously worked.

Sadly, despite the evidence of both volume and yield, he would not be swayed and told me in no uncertain terms that (a) I wasn’t experienced enough to handle that level of deal, (b) I had grossly exceeded my authority – even though every single discount was individually signed off by management, and (c) I could be subject to disciplinary proceedings for breaking the rules.

So, in one of those life-changing moments I politely handed in my notice on the spot, together with the keys of the company car, and got the next train home!

Now I’m older and wiser, and come across similarly entrenched management attitudes, especially when it comes to cold calling and telemarketing, but I find that you have to look more carefully to get the whole story.

On the one hand my approach worked in building sales, and I’ll always start by looking at the way the sales team is managed, motivated, trained and resourced to find reasons for failure. But on the other, it posed too much of a threat to the established management approach, and like so many sales people who are focused on today’s targets, they didn’t have the luxury of time, or the vision, to consider a better and more long-term sustainable route to build business.

It was also a valuable lesson, because all my team have been at the sharp end, which means we’ve walked the walk, rather than just studied the theory, so when we work with companies to grow sales through helping them to become more creative, flexible and  customer-focused, we have a much better handle on whether or not the customers will respond well and how to integrate a fresh approach into established thinking.

And the lesson for all of us? Listen to your people – they often know your customers far better than you do, and if they tell you something’s not working look for a different approach – don’t just fire the messenger

One of the most interesting aspects was hearing the CIOs talk about how they are changing their whole operational models to switch to these low-cost always-on devices and the sorts of quite radical changes to their business processes that these devices are driving.

Not the least of these, by a very long chalk, is the way that people are changing the way they buy things. Although the web has been with us for a while, it’s only now that people can access whatever content they want 24×7 in any sitting position they fancy, that it is starting to deliver on the promises of the 1950′s Sci-fi writers.

They foresaw a wholly interconnected world where the entire accumulated knowledge of the human race sits just two clicks away, and no we can actually see it as a reality.

From a marketing perspective, this is a genuine paradigm shift –  instead of creating sales we are now expected to be continually one step ahead of the customer, so that when they do decide to buy, it us to whom they come to facilitate their purchases.

Hold that thought for a second, and it starts to lead you down the road of wondering whether all that money we’ve been throwing at Telemarketing, often for a sub 1% Return on Investment, is actually worthwhile.

It also leads you into a whole new world of lead evaluation, where the numbers game just no longer adds up.

If you want to get an idea of how radically, and rapidly, things can change, bear in mind we’ve only had IPads for about seven months, and in that time Apple has overturned Google and Microsoft’s market leadership in the e-ad space.

From nothing a year ago, Apple now has a 22% share of online advertising revenue in the US.

At the same time we’re seeing Microsoft Shares – and even Google – starting to lose favour as people realise the implications of Apple having effectively created not just a platform, but an entirely new way of enabling communication and interaction.

So this raises a lot of questions – especially for the B2B sector as we watch the big consumer brands fall head over heels to ‘engage’ their customers, which is turning all the traditional ‘One-to-Many’ rules of publicity on their head. Even brands like Coke are engaging directly with their connected customers.

The massive rise in electronic communications means that whereas ten years ago your prospect might have avidly read this week’s edition of Tractors Weekly, or sector equivalent, now he/she is so busy catching up with emails/ Twitter/ LinkedIn, buying tickets for concerts, downloading iTunes or  social networking, that you represent a very real intrusion into their ever-diminishing time.

If your intrusion isn’t actively sought, you’re not going to get their face time – as we can see from the fact that today it takes an average of 15 calls to get through to an unknown contact, compared to just 4, only ten years ago.

Today when people do want to buy something, they use the web to research – extensively – and for many purchases have their minds 90% made up before you ever get to engaging with them. The role of the salesperson is coming down to little more than a hopefully-pleasant order-taker and form filler.

Already we can make major purchases for our domestic lives, from TVs to houses, without the need to interact with a human being, and in many cases these are better-informed decisions than hitherto.

When you’re selling B2B you’re selling to the same people who download from Napster, Skype their relatives in far-off lands, and catch up with X-Factor on YouTube, so why should they react differently just because you’re selling them something from work?

There are straws in the wind that suggest the B2B sales environment is in for a massive change, and it’s going to throw many of the established beliefs and practices out the window.

Here’s a sobering thought. In the UK we have nine different mobile comms brands, and unlike the US they all have to compete quite keenly. Three years ago O2 was #3, having fallen from grace, and set about returning to growth.

In that time it has reclaimed pole position, without any extra contract length, or tarriff slashing, and most notably without outbound telemarketing to prospects.

Makes you think doesn’t it.