EMC and IBM Asia Pacific Receive IDC CMO Advisory Best Practices Awards for Aligning Marketing and Sales

Business Wire, Dec 8, 2005

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. -- The IDC CMO Advisory Service today announced that EMC Corporation and IBM Asia Pacific are the recipients of IDC's CMO Advisory Best Practices Awards for Aligning Marketing and Sales. The entries for EMC and IBM Asia Pacific outline the processes used to develop a joint customer strategy for marketing and sales, and were selected as the winners by the CMO Advisory research team from nominations submitted by technology marketing vendors across the IT industry.

"Tech marketing and sales executives continue to struggle with aligning their marketing and sales organizations," said Michael Gerard, research director of IDC's CMO Advisory Service. "IDC congratulates EMC and IBM Asia Pacific on their leadership in this area, and applauds their willingness to share their insights on this important issue that challenges many IT companies."

The winning entry from Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based EMC Corporation (EMC), outlines the "New Conversations" marketing program EMC launched to target its global accounts. This program created an ideal launching pad for an integrated sales and marketing initiative. EMC sales wanted to better segment customers for highly targeted campaigns while the marketing group supporting global account initiatives wanted to increase marketing efficiency and hit rates. "By strengthening the synergy between sales and marketing, the New Conversations campaign supports EMC's goals to increase our largest customers' knowledge of our full set of offerings, while helping us create cross-selling opportunities and increase our share of the customer's total IT investment," said Bill Raftery, EMC's vice president of Sales and Market Engagement. "Based on the success of this program, it is now being rolled out to other groups of accounts, target segments, and geographies."

The winning entry from IBM Asia Pacific (IBM), describes how the implementation of joint business planning by the sales and marketing teams favorably impacted the results of two high profile IBM regional events. Client targeting for IBM's sponsorship of the Australian Open and IBM Forum roadshow was a fully collaborative process for the local sales and marketing teams. "To fully leverage these campaigns, marketing created sales enablement tools, including a comprehensive intranet site," described Pat O'Donnell, vice president of Marketing, IBM Asia Pacific. "The improved demand generation results for these events demonstrated the clear value of this collaborative approach to the sales and marketing leadership teams."

These case studies are the focus of a new IDC report, Best Practices Winners in Marketing and Sales Alignment: EMC and IBM Asia Pacific (IDC #34428). The CMO Advisory Service Best Practices awards are designed to help technology marketing executives more effectively deploy their marketing programs by providing insights from the successful practices of their peers. The CMO Advisory regularly surveys over 100 of the leading IT vendors to track marketing trends, priorities, investment and resource allocation decisions, and best practices.

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