Key stakeholders in your target accounts don’t live in a bubble – they have access to a massive amount of information about potential solutions, your company and your competitors.  In today's buyer world, the marketing team is hugely important to achieving success in strategic accounts. Some of our observations: 

• In most cases there are multiple buyer personas involved in the process, and content needs to address each stage in each buyer's journey - whether it's the business person looking for solutions to their business problem, the FD checking for return on investment or the IT person looking for ease of integration with existing corporate systems.
• Systems need to enable sales teams to recognise everyone involved in a deal and create a plan to work with all appropriate contacts. 
• Sales and marketing alignment is key issue.  In a competitive environment with high sales revenues, each lead potentially has a high value.  Therefore, having a clear agreement on lead nurturing, lead handover and lead recycling processes is key. Otherwise those valuable leads can be lost.
• Strategic selling and inbound marketing are the dream team here.  (Read more in our blog.)

Some observations from us:

• IT services companies are often aligned to major vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco, Alto Networks etc and therefore may have access to marketing development funds for business development. However, because of their size some find they don't have the right resources and expertise to take advantage.
• Lead Generation (particularly as companies do not change IT service providers often), customer acquisition costs and customer retention are all challenges.
• IT service companies really need to understand their buyers.  If they are selling to smaller companies the buyer tends to lack dedicated IT resources and is looking for fast response times and solutions to business issues.  In a larger company, the head of IT may be looking for an IT service provider who has a deep knowledge of their chosen infrastructure, can dovetail into their existing team and help guarantee performance levels for their users.
• Since referrals work so well, engaging customer speakers at technology provider funded events often work well in this marketplace.  Using events as a focus for driving content marketing plans, data acquisition strategies and lead generation activity works well in IT services businesses that are short of marketing resources.