Yes, believe it or not Covid-19 has created yet another "new normal" - Digital Marketing. Actually Digital Marketing has been very much "in vogue" for years now Covid-19 has turned that good old dimmer switch to a light switch yet again - it's here to stay! A while back I hosted a webshop with AppSmart - "Digital Marketing 101 And The 5 Steps To Build Your Digital Marketing Machine" You can view the 34 minute webshop here.

In the webshop we covered these top 5 items,

1. The need for you to create, articulate and document a "must-have" brand/message aka value prop that "makes sense" in our "new normal" Hint: It has a lot to do with Digital Business Transformation (DX) and Customer Experience (CX). How do you think you are doing here?
2. The need for you to uber focus on and target verticals/sub-verticals (that are financially viable today) and the Business Managers. To what extent are you uber focused and engage with Business Managers?
3. The need for you to update your existing website to be simple, articulate your "must-have" value prop, speak to your target prospects and be digital marketing enabled. Is your website all tech speak with a TON of words and no Call To Actions (CTAs)?
4. The need for you to have remarkable content. Content is King and always will be. You can do many things right in Digital Marketing but if your content is sub-par it's all for nought. Remarkable content is hard to create. How is your content, OK or remarkable?
5. The need to have the resources and tools to execute on Digital Marketing campaigns. It's like going to the gym - if you don't put in the effort and use the equipment your results will suffer. Do you have the resources and tools to effectively make Digital Marketing work?

At the end of the webshop we offered all attendees a FREE Digital Marketing Assessment to determine where the partners "scores" themselves on these 5 items.

LET ME KNOW IF YOU'D LIKE TO DO A QUICK ZOOM CALL AND REVIEW YOUR RESULTS AND HOW YOUR SCORE COMPARES WITH YOUR PEERS.

A few major disruptions have recently occurred in the technology and business world,

• Cloud computing has emerged to become the most dramatic technology evolution in the past 20 years since when the internet first emerged in the 90’s. At it's core, one of the main benefits cloud provides businesses is the ability to deliver "business outcomes" to Business Managers.
• The internet and cloud have teamed up to cause the demise of the traditional marketing and sales playbook where “interrupting” prospects is (was) the name of the game. Today the buyer is now in control of the sales process known as the buyers’ journey, 1. awareness, 2. consideration 3. decision. Marketing and sales is now executed in the digital world and according to IDC, 65% of B2B buyers have already researched and made a purchase decision before they contact a sales rep.
• Technology purchases have moved out of the IT department to the Business Managers of an organization. According to Forrester 65% of new technology decisions are made by Line of Business Managers looking for cloud-based solutions to help achieve their desired business outcomes. Cloud Solutions Providers (CSP) are taking the lead in providing cloud-based business outcomes solutions to these Business Managers.

Yes, the cloud world is heating up. And an even more resounding yes to the marketing world heating up - even more? And for the cloud-focused IT Solutions Provider it's a double whammy!! How the hell is a cloud-focused IT Solutions Provider going to execute on this new world of marketing (let's call it marketing 2.0 for the heck of it) required to add great recurring revenue cloud business?

I think we all know how a very large percentage of the 10's of thousands of the IT Channel/IT Solutions Providers (VAR, MSP etc) came about starting decades ago. In case you dont,

Many, many, many of these were started by a guy/gal that became tired of "working for the man" at a vendor (Cisco, Avaya, HP, you name it) or at an existing large IT Solutions Provider and said "heck I can do this myself" and/or they were part of the latest RIF. So he or she hung up a shingle, brought on some clients they knew and that trusted him/her and next thing you know, over time the client base grew, they now had a handful of staff and "voila - a nice little business emerged". And do you know that virtually everyone of these guys/gals say today "it's the best decision I've ever made"

Cloud is growing faster than expectations!!!

Cloud vendors are pushing very hard for their channel partners to get in the cloud game and to start taking marketing seriously!!!

Channel partners are seeing cloud being consumed by their clients without them!!!

Oh.....yesterday's marketing won't get you where you want to go today.....today's marketing will....it's called digital aka inbound marketing - all based on the "buyers journey".

Here's how I see it,

The cloud-focused MSP or cloud focused IT Solutions Provider (what ever label you want to use) isn't going to cannibalize their current revenue streams coming from their non-cloud clients by aggressively introducing cloud to them - so if they are serious about cloud they need net-new clients for their cloud solutions and services. 

Same thing with the "born-in-the-cloud" guys - they obviously need net-new clients for their cloud solutions and services.

Problem, it's going to be "next to impossible" for most all of these guys to properly execute on today's digital marketing aka inbound or marketing 2.0 needed to fill their funnel of their cloud solutions and services with their lack of expertise and resources to consistently create, execute and manage digital marketing campaigns.

"Treat every end of month like it's the end of the quarter, every end of quarter like it's the end of the year and every end of year like it's the end of your life"

Wow! That's a blast from the past. I can't tell you how many times I've heard those words and also shouted them out while trying to grow a start-up to go public and even more so after we went public. I still here it but only 1/2 as much - with one of my two set of clients,

Say what? Yes, that's not a typo. Is marketing and selling Business2Business becoming more Educator2Persona? B2B is where a business has a widget well designed (hopefully) for the needs of another business and the marketing and sales goes something like this - go find the target business, find the decision maker, influencers, evaluators etc, sell your value proposition, go through a sales process and you'll get some percentage of those deals - so a business selling to a business.

There – I said it – the IT sales rep as we know it will become extinct over time. Let me be a bit more specific here... I am referring to the expensive, bag carrying, face-to-face outside direct sales rep. Overtime they will go the way of the dinosaur - actually it's already happening.