ISBM Consortia:

Communities of Practice Focused on Specific Areas of Business-to-Business Marketing:

Tracking the State-of-the-Art

ISBM Consortia had their origins in 1996, just as the practice of business marketing on the Web was beginning. Across our Member firms, professionals were exploring how to integrate the World Wide Web into their business marketing practice, basically "making it up as they went."

Realizing that the state-of-the-art in this new discipline was out in the practice, we invited ISBM members focused on the Business Web to a get-together, and the ISBM Web Consortium was born. The Web Consortium model worked so well that-driven by member request-we've added six additional consortia, spanning the practice of business marketing.

The Most Important Ingredient-A Network of Professional Peers...

Consortia attendees agree: the most important outcome is the friends they make at consortium meetings.

ISBM consortia build important networks of professional relationships. Colleagues and friends to call when confronting a problem, before a key meeting, for additional insight, or actually bring into the planning process in their own firm.

How do you build your own network? Do you have the time? Know the places you can go to meet people who can be professional friends and colleagues focused on your practice area? ISBM Consortia enable participants to build strong relationships with people doing similar sorts of things, all in a business-to-business context.

Content of Immediate Value

ISBM consortia are small group (15-40) meetings of B-to-B professionals sharing the same practice, problems, and challenges. The tone is informal, and an emphasis is on networking, developing practical knowledge, cases, benchmarks, and examples. Meetings usually begin with an evening reception, and continue through the next full day. Agendas include:

• An open-ended round-table discussion, where each participant is asked to describe:
  • Their firm/their practice
  • What's going on/new/hot/working
  • Key issues/problems/obstacles they're facing
  • Key opportunities they're seeing
  • News/insights for the group
  • Questions/straw polls
• A "deep dish" case history from a member firm : drilling into their practice, lessons learned, what's worked, what hasn't, etc.
• A presentation from a world-leading thinker, researcher, or analyst . Trends, new tools and techniques-research insights, studies underway, etc.