This was my takeway after contributing to the panel discussion at the Melbourne session of marketing guru Jay Baer’s Sitecore-sponsored ANZ tour last month.

If your target is “too busy” to return calls and/or respond to email traffic, then you are not sufficiently relevant.

Jay’s high concept is “Youtility”, marketing he describes as “so useful people would pay tor it”. He says we have to be prepared to “embrace the power of eventuality”. “Relationships come together over time, typically these are micro interactions,” Jay says. “Eventuallity” may be the right way forward, but it requires a high degree of organisational and cultural maturity and patience.

Here are Jay’s principal bullet points:

• Audience attention is fragmented
• Marketing and customer service has converged
• Marketing is now a spectator sport
• Stop trying to be amazing and start being useful
• If you are useful, your customers will keep you close
• Stop aiming at “top-of-mind” awareness and move to “friend-of-mind” awareness
• Relationships must be based on trust and value
• Smart marketing is about help not hype
• From friction to research
• We hyper research everything because we can
• 67% of the B2B purchase process is conducted online – Sirius Decisions
• Relationships are created with info first and people second
• If people have to call you to buy from you, you are doing it wrong
• The better you teach the more you will sell
• It is way easier to get caught now. The truth will always come out.
• Trust is the filter through which all business success must pass
• Differentiate with transparency
• Humanity is the ultimate trust builder
• 92% trust recommendations from friends and family. 47% trust advertising – Nielsen
• Don’t’ just change the message – change the messenger

The data has been drawn from the company’s 2015 B2B Marketing Outlook report:

• Marketers are allocating on average 28% of their budgets to digital
• 75% will spend more or the same on inbound compared with outbound
• 38% are satisfied with their marketing automation investments
• 75% say content marketing is a significant/very significant component of their strategy
• 52% are not getting satisfactory lead follow up from the their sales teams
• 20% are getting some form of social media ROI
• And, no surprise, marketing ROI is the number one challenge

According to the marketers surveyed by Forrester, few of their C-suite colleagues refer to marketing data when making strategic calls.

That’s a worrying reality for anyone with the word marketing in their title.

Marketers are failing to inspire executive leadership, according to Forrester.

Only 8% of the surveyed marketers in the report claimed that their CEOs used any marketing numbers when making decisions.

CFOs are taking even less notice, with just 4% using marketing numbers.

Marketers’ peers aren’t much better. Forrester found that only 10% of business unit and divisional leaders rated marketing data as worthy of consideration.

Even Sales isn’t engaged, with only 15% taking note of Marketing’s numbers.

No wonder B2B marketing budgets are typically stuck at around 2% of revenue.

And when you think about it, why should CEOs, CFOs and general managers be interested in disconnected operational data points such as email response rates, brand awareness stats, website traffic and trade show scans?

Unfortunately not enough marketers are both genuinely moving the revenue needle and demonstrating that they are.

Marketing needs to move from vague goals to specific targets driven by hard data:

Source: June 2013 “Measuring and Communicating Marketing Performance” Forrester ITSMA/VEM webinar.

Last week, in San Francisco, company founder Phil Fernandez told the 2800 delegates at his customer conference, the Marketo Summit, that an integrated marketing platform was the long-term objective.

Fernandez cited Marketo’s alliance with marketing budgeting company Allocadia as evidence of the company’s commitment.

Together with other possible partners, such as the content management specialist Kapost, there were plenty of evidence that the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle could come together for Marketo.

Whilst the sign posts are pointing in the right direction, more detail would have been welcome during the keynote, which was interesting but not compelling.

Together with Datarati’s Will Scully Power, I presented the Ansell case study to a good crowd of 320+ in one of the conference’s supporting sessions.

It’s no surprise, but we’re all facing similar challenges:

• Marketing and Sales alignment is an ongoing challenge for all of us
• Inside Sales is a critical success factor to ensure leads are filtered before any hand off to Sales.
• The accurate attribution of revenue to marketing is a process of continuous optimisation and refinement.
• Don’t use marketing jargon with the C Suite and Sales people. Communicate to them in the vernacular they use when discussing their priorities, e.g. revenue growth, not opens and clicks on links, for example.

It is interesting times in the still relatively new marketing automation space.

Before the conference, Marketo announced their plans to raise $US 75 million in an upcoming IPO. This has brought to the foreground the speculation about who may buy out Marketo. Late last year Oracle acquired Marketo competitor Eloqua.

Salesforce.com. Microsoft and SAP are all seen as potential acquirers of Marketo. If it happens, what would that mean for the integrated marketing suite vision?

Investment firm Jordan Edmiston Group (JEGI) has recently released what they call a Sector Insight Brief into the developing EMM application stack, which can be described as a technology infrastructure that supports a synchronized approach to marketing strategy, development, delivery, and measurement, across the marketing mix.

“Demand is strong, and budgets are sizable, for a new class of digital marketing services required to build and maintain the stack,” the JEGI brief states.

“These services actually look more like technology consulting and IT services.  The outlook for growth in this new services category is attracting new providers to the market and is driving continued growth in the stack and a vibrant M&A market.”

Between 2010-2012, four companies (“The Big Four”) have invested over $20 billion in marketing technology M&A: Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce.

Here’s how JEGI pictures the developing stack:

Not sure about all the acronyms? Here’s the EMM lexicon: BI (Business Intelligence), CEM (Customer Experience Management), MCM (Marketing Content Management), WCM (Website Content Management), DAM (Digital Asset Management) and MAM (Marketing Asset Management.

How’s your stack shaping up? Are your vendors and professional services partners up to it? Does your own team have the necessary skills and appetite to engage? And top management?

As Forrester Research’s Robert Brosnan said in a 2012 report, “marketing today is impossible without significant investments in technology”.