The Future of Selling
For the past couple of years I’ve focused more on marketing and customer service than on sales, but last Fall, Salesforce asked me to put together a presentation on the future of sales for Dreamforce. Just like the other 2 functions, sales is also feeling the pressure of change driven by the 3rd platform technologies […]
Modernizing Customer Journey Mapping – Part One
Customer journey mapping is a common exercise that many consider as key to understanding the customer touch points across all channels for your organization. The question though is how relevant are theses maps today in understanding and building a customer centric organization in the era of the “misbehaving” customer? Often when organizations or people talk […]
Innovation Alone Isn’t Enough
Earlier this week BlackBerry announced that it was seeking a buyer or strategic partner as a way forward and out of its multi-year decline. The path from high flying tech leader to “for sale sign” is a sad one and one that is pretty complex to explain. As with most decline stories there are internal […]
Cloud Applications, Packaging for Simplicity and Value
A Salesforce.com announcement today on product packaging got me thinking about the way cloud vendors package and sell products. Actually I guess a better way to say that would be, I’m thinking about how customers want to consume cloud apps. The way we think about apps is in general, colored by a lot of legacy […]
A Tale of Two Bridges
If anyone is wondering why I’ve been quiet lately, I’ve been away on holiday. I just returned from the trip this week and I was thinking about a story that I heard over the past weekend from a tour guide, as we explored the Scottish West Highlands. Actually we were in Edinburgh, and on 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 […]
Is there value in enterprise gamification? – Part Two
In part one of this post we looked at what enterprise gamification is and some of the methods and techniques that can be used. In this post I am focusing on what types of things you can actually do with…
Technology and the Effective Marketer (Part 3)
In part three of this series I’ll focus on customer intelligence driven marketing and the proper use of data. In the “information economy,” data is created at an unbelievable pace, but to make some reasonable business use of that data is challenging. The concept of being a data driven business isn’t new, but there are […]
Technology and the Effective Marketer (Part Two)
In part two of this series I’ll focus on the comprehensive marketing technology solution and then in part 3 we’ll look at customer intelligence driven marketing, the customer data value chain and the technology that underpins that approach. One of…
Subscriptions, Social and CRM
“Who is the customer?” It’s a great question and one that my managers liked to ask when I was a young sales representative. Like all great questions, it got to the meat of the matter with an economy of words that impressed as much by the brevity as for the meaning. The customer’s identity is […]
