Last week I attended an event put on by Market Connections, Merritt Group and the Professional Services Council. It shared the results of a survey focused on the business development and marketing practices of B2G contractors. It was an informative session looking at what’s working, what’s not, which tactics are ascendant and which are on the wane.
After opening remarks from PSC’s president and CEO David Berteau, Aaron Heffron, president of Market Connecti0ns, gave an overview of the survey results. I’ve included some slides from the presentation at the end of this post. In addition to those results, I found it interesting that 51 percent of respondent companies had a separate reporting structure for business development and marketing, while 38 percent had both channels report to one senior executive. Only four percent had BD reporting into marketing, and six percent had marketing report into BD.
Market Connections found that of the winning contractors, 61 percent kept their departments separate. I’ve seen clients be successful both ways, with the key criterion being how well the two departments collaborate. On that front, the survey found much work needs to be done. Only 19 percent of respondents felt strongly positive about their collaboration on marketing assets and materials, and only 13 percent felt that BD provides feedback to help marketing better understand customer needs.
Unfortunately I was not surprised by these numbers. I’ve seen this disconnect in StoryTech engagements with B2G contractors. It’s why our team spends time building strong relationships with internal client subject matter experts (SMEs) on both teams, so we can access their expertise and make sure our content marketing addresses customer pain points and solutions.
After the overview, there was a panel discussion featuring:
- Jay Hauck, General Dynamics Information Technology, Vice President, Communications & Marketing
- Kim Hower, Nutanix Federal, Director, Public Sector Marketing
- Lisa P. Veith, MAXIMUS Federal, Senior Vice President, Business Development & Marketing, Federal Services
- Sean O’Leary, Merritt Group (moderator)
Some of my takeaways:
Lisa – used the term “light selling” to describe her approach, which I really liked. It’s another way of phrasing what I typically call the thought-leadership approach, educating first before presenting your solution.
Jay – talked about the importance of account based marketing, and also noted how the marketing/BD collaboration responses were much more negative from marketing than from BD. This made sense to me, since marketing needs more input from BD than the reverse to be effective.
Kim – talked about how noisy the market is, and how she’s looking for tactics that can demonstrate a high level of quality engagement with a prospect. She also stressed that events are still very important, but it’s fewer events than in the past, companies have to be very focused and strategic with their investments.
For the record, MAXIMUS has the marketing and BD departments together, while GDIT and Nutanix has them separate. Not only was the material interesting, but I also re-connected with many friends and acquaintances in the audience. For anyone providing services to B2G contractors, it was time well spent.
See above for the most popular tactics used by B2G contractors. And see below for more on the business challenges and the tactics typically seeing increased budget spend. Click on a slide to magnify. For the full report, you can go here to download, courtesy of the sponsors.
Who the respondents were
BD Challenges
Marketing Challenges
Tactics getting more budget dollars