Disrupting The Game

Category: Data

  • Assembling the Enterprise Marketing Management software stack

    Enterprise Marketing Management is a new class of software applications that is emerging to address the urgent demand that marketing automate and integrate functions from acquisition, through to retention and loyalty.

    Investment firm Jordan Edmiston Group (JEGI) has recently released what they call a Sector Insight Brief into the developing EMM application stack, which can be described as a technology infrastructure that supports a synchronized approach to marketing strategy, development, delivery, and measurement, across the marketing mix.

    “Demand is strong, and budgets are sizable, for a new class of digital marketing services required to build and maintain the stack,” the JEGI brief states.

    “These services actually look more like technology consulting and IT services.  The outlook for growth in this new services category is attracting new providers to the market and is driving continued growth in the stack and a vibrant M&A market.”

    Between 2010-2012, four companies (“The Big Four”) have invested over $20 billion in marketing technology M&A: Adobe, IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce.

    Here’s how JEGI pictures the developing stack:

    Enterprize Marketing Management

    Not sure about all the acronyms? Here’s the EMM lexicon: BI (Business Intelligence), CEM (Customer Experience Management), MCM (Marketing Content Management), WCM (Website Content Management), DAM (Digital Asset Management) and MAM (Marketing Asset Management.

    How’s your stack shaping up? Are your vendors and professional services partners up to it? Does your own team have the necessary skills and appetite to engage? And top management?

    As Forrester Research’s Robert Brosnan said in a 2012 report, “marketing today is impossible without significant investments in technology”.

  • Best Buy’s 2013 Super Bowl TVC: I like it

    http://youtu.be/KgmhhVCLgM8

  • The sales funnel is no longer, and probably never was, linear

    I enjoyed presenting at the Funnel event in Sydney on November 19.

    Organiser Brad Langton and the eConsultancy team assembled a quality B2B agenda, featuring keynotes and four streams of workshop content titled Plan, Attact, Align and Engage.

    In a crowded landscape of marketing conferences, the Funnel was one of the better events this year in Australia.

    My presentation addressed a pivotal theme that Business Technology (B.T.) fluency is not optional for business executives.

    A common threat of the sessions was the changing nature of the sales funnel itself:

    • Today’s funnel does not follow a linear path from awareness through to either closed-won or closed-lost status.Every sales cycle is different and the path taken most often represents a maze.
    • Critically, around 70 per cent of buyer journeys are conducted independantly of any direct contact with Sales teams and Marketing’s traditional influence is limited.
    • People are increasingly relying on their own digital research and peer exchanges (both online and offline) to identify their preferred products and services.
    • In this climate Sales needs to be engaging further up the funnel and Marketing must be generating, recycling and nurturing quality leads that convert.

    As the folks at Corporate Executive Board are saying, “early is no longer early”.

    The best sales and marketing people are now found at the top end of the funnel and are focused on disrupting and challenging customers.

    The dated solutions opening pitch from Sales to prospects is no longer “what keeps you up at night”, but “here’s some critical industry information that you didn’t know and this is why you need to engage with us”.

    Obviously, this is a challenging gambit  but it differentiates in a way old-school solution selling doesn’t.

    Enabled by an integrated customer-facing front end, built on an Internet-native Business Technology backbone, marketing, sales and service, in fact the entire company, must operate as one coherent team, obsessing about every Zero Moment of Truth or customer interaction.

    Here’s my slideware from the Funnel event :

     

  • SFDC’s “social productivity” app Do.com

    Project and issue management is a vexed issue for most of us in matrix environments.

    Do.com is one of many solutions in the space. They’re attempting to differentiate with social features. And I’m giving the tool a trial.

    Part of the Salesforce.com empire, they’ve got a nifty video on YouTube:

    http://youtu.be/7myUgmtFPkc

  • Point solutions are pointless

    Point solutions are pointless

    If we accept that the customer experience is the decisive differentiator in our commoditized world, then we need to move rapidly to an integrated business technology landscape and away from point solutions and isolated systems.

    Today the typical enterprise IT world is a melange of loosely linked, unplanned, customized technologies, operations and interfaces that have grown and adapted over time.

    Too much time and too many resources are wasted in manual approaches where data is transitioned inconsistently and incorrectly.

    This heterogeneous environment isn’t up to enabling a friction-free, flow of customer experience in a world where the distinctions between consumer and enterprise environments are melting away.

    The consumer world is already inter-connected, but at work those same consumers typically cannot collaborate efficiently because sharing is not native to established IT systems, therefore it is absent from most enterprise workflows in traditional IT and business areas, where transactions and databases rule, where processes and the “money apps” (e.g., accounting and finance) have been kept separate because solutions and systems are kept separate.

    Today, however, you need a synchronised customer-facing front end, embracing sales, marketing and service automation and eBusiness, which connects with the transactional back office, and enables genuine engagement and bi-directional conversations amidst a sea of unstructured data.

    Your brand must be consistently experienced over multiple devices and in multiple contexts using an integrated framework that ties together cloud and on-premise tools.

    If your organisation doesn’t have a strategy for bringing together people, processes and data across lines of business then it should get one in a hurry.

    After all, disconnected point solutions are pointless.

    Source: Salesforce.com’s Marketing Cloud presentation 2012

  • Dreamforce leaves Oracle’s Open World behind

    Claiming to have attracted more than 90,000 registered delegates, Salesforce.com’s DreamForce jamboree dominated central San Francisco last week.

    Exuberant SFDC founder Mark Benioff asserted that the event is now the world’s biggest business conference.

    Heavy hitters, such as GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt and Burberry’s Angela Ahrendts, were on the program.

    Virgin supremo Richard Branson was also on stage to add his brand to the list of big names (IBM, HP, Kimberley Clark and Microsoft) that have abandoned Siebel in recent times.

    The hour long “fireside chat” between Branson and Benioff was genuinely engaging. They traversed across a diverse range of topics, from management styles, to Branson’s early days, space travel and Keith Richards anecdotes.

    Check it out here:

    Benioff restated his view that the conventional, mega vendors, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft, are moving far too slowly away from their on-premise business models.

    “You can see how they continue to resist multi-tenancy and shared systems and then they’re kind of moving to there, but they’re kind of not,” Beneioff said. “I think it’s really been a disservice to themselves what they’ve done, and to the whole industry.”

    Indeed, Oracle was miffed that four streets around the Moscone convention centre were blocked off for the duration of the event versus three for Oracle’s Open World which will be held next month at the same venue.

    Financial analysts may query SFDC’s sky high earnings-per-share ratio and their promotion of so-called non-GAAP earnings, but there is no doubt the company is moving forward at a rapid rate.

    Forbes magazine recently rated SFDC as the world’s most innovative company for the 2nd year in the row and for the third year in succession CRM magazine ranked the platform as the CRM market’s leader.

    In the meantime, back in Australia, business technology research firm, Ovum, has issued a report critical of the Australian Government’s “cloud last” policy.

    Confirming Ovum’s view, the Victorian EPA (Environment Protection Authority) proudly announced recently that it has just gone live with the conventional on-premise SAP CRM platform.

    I fully agree with the comment on Delimiter.com.au: “if you’re deploying a new CRM platform in 2012, you’d be crazy not to look at a SaaS option, when you consider the likely evolution of IT services over the next decade”.

    Sorry, but the bureaucrats behind these policies are IT dinosaurs wasting our taxes. Maybe they should have gotten themselves on a Pacific flight across to DreamForce?

     

  • Marketing automation explained

    Trying to get your head around the still relatively new marketing automation field?

    If yes, and even if not, you’ll relate to this excellent Salesforce.com video which explains the concept:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv3d0ErsJG0&feature=colike

     

  • End game for solution selling

    B2B customers don’t need sales people the way they used to. That’s the central premise of a feature article in the July-August 2012 edition of the Harvard Business Review by research and advisory services specialists Corporate Executive Board.

    Today’s digitally-aware customers have become skilled at finding their own “solutions”. As a result, they don’t need sales reps like they used.

    Unlike traditional solution sellers, agile sales people are responding by leading with insights meant to disrupt, challenge and differentiate a customer’s approach to business.

    So, if you are only just weaning your sales crew away from traditional hunter-killer, transactional behaviour patterns and across into the solution-selling game, get primed for another pivot.

    For more on how the Internet has changed the decision-buying process check out Google’s Zero Moment of Truth video:

    Google has a site dedicated to the concept.