The Marketing Practice

Former Global Head of Shared Infrastructure at Reuters on supplier marketing

Keith Mitchell spoke at a recent Sales & Marketing Forum, sharing his views on the supplier marketing that has been targeted at him in the course of his career. We knew that Keith wouldn’t pull any punches in front of an audience of senior IT marketers, and we weren’t disappointed by his forthright views and examples.

Below is a summary of the key areas and points covered by Keith at the Sales & Marketing Forum; if you would like to run through these and our wider decision-maker research in more detail please do get in touch.

Keith’s experiences
Keith has over 20 years’ experience in the IT sector, having worked in retail banking and for organisations such as Dixons, as well as for Reuters and a number of other international companies. Talking about his perceptions of suppliers and their marketing activities, he had also canvassed a number of his peers to see if his views were typical of the CIO community.

General attitudes to supplier marketing
One of Keith’s central points was that suppliers are ideally placed to take advantage of the ‘vulnerability’ felt by CIOs. He simply does not have the time to proactively find out what is on the market and, as a result, information is always warmly received since he relies on suppliers to educate him. Successful suppliers trickle feed information through that he can re-use and leave him looking like a hero.

What he really values in a relationship is intimacy – needs to come across particularly from existing suppliers that they show real understanding, give him value, keep things relevant – anything that doesn’t just treat him as a regular revenue stream.

Supplier selection
Keith also had a number of interesting points about experiences of selecting new suppliers – for example, he was open to suppliers being introduced via business units and gave examples of how they were then included in the shared services rosta. But equally, there were examples where suppliers attempted – and failed - to win business by approaching from the top down.

The effect of successful marketing from new suppliers was generally seen in recommendations from people on his team or highly personalised approaches based on his current issues.
 
Channel preferences
Again, Keith came back to the issue of intimacy – preferring plain text emails with a personal feel, going to conferences only if he can influence the agenda, signing up for webinars if they are just for him and his team…

He also discussed his preferences for events, peer-forums and communication with new technologies. A lot of these opinions tie in to our wider decision-maker research which we would be happy to discuss in more detail.