The Holy Grail of the Repeatable Sales Process: Is Repeatability Enough?
Most of us are familiar with Mark Leslie’s classic Sales Learning Curve and its implications for building the early salesforce at an enterprise startup. In short, it argues that too many startups put “the pedal to the metal” on sales hiring too early – before they have enough knowledge, process, and infrastructure in place – […]
Why is Good Customer Service So Difficult?
This could easily be a rant based on some recent customer service experiences but I’m going to avoid that and instead look at what companies are facing today in trying to meet customer expectations. I read recently that Comcast has finally appointed a VP to try and address their extremely poor customer service (I’d say […]
Marketing in 2014 – Part Two
In Part One of this series I listed 6 issues that are causing disruption and change in marketing. In this post let’s focus on inbound marketing and the shift to a more content marketing focus and away from outbound or broadcast marketing tactics. This fundamental shift is often the underlying issue with most of the […]
To Pre-Meet Or Not To Pre-Meet: That Is The Question
I once asked one of my board members which CEO ran the best board meetings across his portfolio companies. His answer was, let’s call him, Jack. Here’s what he said about him: Jack got the board deck out 3-4 days in advance of the board meeting Jack would call him — and every other board […]
Making Better Business Decisions Part 3
In part one and two of this series I spent a fair bit of time discussing the drivers for building a sense and respond, data driven business. The concept, I think, is pretty obvious when you put it into the…
Building a Customer Experience Strategy
This sounds like an ambitious post and I guess it is, but let me say up front that there is no “one size fits all” answer to how to build a customer experience strategy. There are though, some things that you should consider and some tips that are working for some of my clients. What […]
Leveraging Innovation Management for Competitive Advantage
If you’re coming to CRM Evolution next week in NYC, you might notice that one of the sessions I’m doing matches the title of this post. Of course this isn’t the first post I’ve done on innovation, this one, for…
The Path to Co-Creating a Social Business: The Early Adoption Phase
The figures vary but in the last several years a major change has begun in organizations around the world. Sometimes the efforts are small and unsanctioned, sometimes they are big and bold, but increasingly businesses are employing social media strategically to engage deeply with both their workers and customers. We see this all the time […]
Social Business Maturity
Companies are adopting social technologies across a broad range of enterprise activities from new ways for employees and partners to collaborate to more effective methods to engage customers and prospects. In a recent IDC social business survey we found that 41% of the respondent companies had some type of social project underway. Companies that are […]
The Entropy of Social Networks: Google Plus vs Facebook?
Yes, we have a new social network and I am a proud profile carrying member of the new elite created by an artificial scarcity of invites. A technique now pretty much a requirement for launching anything new that’s social with 2 benefits, the obvious bu…
