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IDC has made a new report avail­able on Slideshare: Sell­ing in 2009: 10 Ways to find, Win and Keep the Money (embed­ded below). It takes a long hard look at the year ahead and what it means for IT com­pa­nies want­ing to sur­vive and thrive in the year ahead. It is pre­dom­i­nantly US-based but many of the rec­om­men­da­tions are just as valid in Europe (though the tim­ing may be out by six months or so).

While it gives a slightly mixed pic­ture of just what tech com­pa­nies are up against, there are some clear take-outs for sales and mar­ket­ing peo­ple. It makes some pretty plau­si­ble, pretty harsh pre­dic­tions, including:

1. Sell­ing strate­gies that worked last year will not work in 2009
2. Com­pa­nies that sig­nif­i­cantly reduce their sales and mar­ket­ing invest­ments in 2009 will be gone by mid 2010
3. Com­pa­nies that blame their lack of sell­ing on the econ­omy will also fail by mid 2010
4. Sales organ­i­sa­tions will be asked to do more with less (no news there)
5. Com­pa­nies that shift head­count to inside sales will pro­vide sim­i­lar lev­els of cus­tomer touch at lower cost…and dri­ver higher cus­tomer satisfaction
6. Sales organ­i­sa­tions that bol­ster ded­i­cated invest­ments in lead qual­ity and demand gen­er­a­tion will be rewarded with sig­nif­i­cantly higher sales productivity

There’s more in the report but that gives a fair indication.

It’s inter­est­ing that over 60% of respon­dents feel as con­fi­dent or more con­fi­dent about the prospects for sales in the next six months ver­sus the last six months. IDC them­selves project rev­enues on the whole as either stay­ing flat or increas­ing mod­er­ately (although the more com­mod­ity end of the hard­ware mar­ket doesn’t look so pretty).

The scari­est thing in there for me is the con­tin­u­ing lack of align­ment between mar­ket­ing and sales. On hardly any mea­sure did respon­dents rate their align­ment at over 50%. For­tu­nately, the one area that rated (slightly) over the mid­way mark is demand gen­er­a­tion as this will be a crit­i­cal fac­tor in the com­ing year or two.

At Ban­ner, we’ve seen the rapid change of focus into demand gen­er­a­tion activ­i­ties in the last six months. Our timely part­ner­ship with Elo­qua has cer­tainly paid off as has the suc­ces­sion of peo­ple we’ve sent on train­ing as we’ve recently seen a shift into mul­ti­ple projects involv­ing con­tent cre­ation, sales enable­ment, demand gen­er­a­tion and lead nuture.

While these could sim­ply be a sign of the times, I per­son­ally believe that these kinds of pro­grammes will form the bedrock for the major­ity of tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies’ activ­i­ties for some con­sid­er­able time to come. And while this may be dri­ven by nece­sity right now, in the long term it could pay huge div­i­dends for tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies that get it right.

[slideshare id=923821&doc=idc-2009-sales-barometer-top-ten-predictions-1232120663160379–3]

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