ERP Marketing and Italian SMEs

The growing relevance of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has raised much attention in the academic literature, business practice and media. Current literature and thought are primarily focused on two aspects of this phenomenon: the economic and organizational impact of the adoption of ERPs inside a firm, and the best way to manage that adoption. While these research questions are certainly critical, our aim stands upstream: to explore the marketing activities of ERP vendors, checking if the marketing tenets for BtoB selling are followed or not. The study of suppliers' marketing approach - rather than adopter's practices - may explain a good part of success/failure of ERPs diffusion and adoption. We conducted a survey on nearly 150 installations of ERP in Italian SMEs. The results showed that the marketing competencies of vendors are not extensively developed or, if anything, are not fully leveraged. In particular, often vendors are too focused on selling ERP solutions to existing and known customers, refraining from searching for new clients, and therefore failing to explore the extension of the potential market to its fullest. The marketing tenet of relationship is here myopically applied, keeping suppliers too tied to their current customers. A further finding is that few suppliers are willing to involve network partners in the sales stage, preferring to deal with customers by themselves. This is contrary to the dictates of literature that see each BtoB relationship embedded in a network. The implications of our research are that part of ERPs diffusion and success is determined by the marketing abilities of suppliers, rather than low demand or failure in adoption processes by clients. Marketing competencies of suppliers-resellers should be fostered in order to allow ERP producers to really reach their market.