Category: Engagement

  • Reprioritise Point of Sale and focus on Point of Value

    Reprioritise Point of Sale and focus on Point of Value

    How many of our customer realise genuine value when they engage with the people, products, services, and experiences which constitute a brand?

    Too few, according to CX guru and the Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute Bruce Temkin.

    Bruce has recently revisited the case he originally made back in 2010 for organisations to focus on the value customers derive. He argues for a concept called Point of Value to be recognised as the next logical step after the traditional Point of Sale or transaction stage.

    According to Bruce sales without customer value are like a Ponzi scheme. They feel good in the moment, but the long-term outcome is likely to be negative.

    “Too many organizations overly focus on selling their products and services, keeping a tight eye on short term metrics like sales targets,” Bruce writes, “but sales are not necessarily an indication of long-term success. What’s missing from the picture? Value!”

    “If customers don’t get value from their purchases, then they are likely to return them, stop using them, not renew them, and tell others to stay away. Does that sound like a sustainable blueprint?!? Of course not. However, most organizations have a hard time breaking their addiction to sales numbers.”

    Bruce challenges companies to compare and contrast their focus on sales targets versus the usually secondary effort they devote to delivering value.

    “It’s time for organizations to shift their focus from sales to value! If we see an economic downturn, then the focus on value will become even more critical as companies are pushed to target their limited resources at retaining customers.

    According to Bruce a POV mindset would mean the following:

    • A clear measure of customer value that’s used as a critical KPI for the entire business, driving everything from sales commissions to bonuses for the product development teams.
    • Support for customers to help them envision and articulate their POV and match their purchases accordingly.
    • Cross-functional journey teams with responsibility for driving success during the engagement phase for key customer segments, and continuously monitoring any changes in how customers perceive the POV.
    • Product organizations adopting a focus on “designing for value” by prioritizing features and enablement that streamlines the path to POV over new capabilities. Rather than considering feature adoption as a customer success function, product teams are responsible for ensuring that it is as easy as possible for customers to reach the POV.
  • Out of the bottle: Salesforce’s genie

    Out of the bottle: Salesforce’s genie

    Reinforcing the reality that data is the new oil fuelling our digital world, Salesforce, the behemoth of the enterprise tech space, has blended its AI, Customer Data Platform (CDP) and automation capabilities into a new capability called Genie.

    Announced with characteristic bravado and ambition at the company’s Dreamforce jamboree in San Francisco in September, Genie generalises its CDP capabilities across all its Sales, Service, Marketing and Commerce clouds, as well as its Platform, Tableau, Slack and Mulesoft tools, to enable customer experience orchestration in real time.

    Salesforce, which has overtaken SAP to seize enterprise software application leadership by revenue, says Genie connects with the CDP engine to establish a single customer or group of customers with AI and machine learning and connects that data to Salesforce’s Flow automation.

    Examples include serving ads, content or offers; making sales recommendations based on browser behaviour, pulling up historical sales and service data or reacting to real-time maintenance alerts to quickly solve customer problems or deleting or restricting customer data when they opt out of marketing.

    Users can see exactly how the entire end-to-end process is flowing or stalling, from marketing across to sales, service, compliance, and system-of-record transaction management.

    The rebranding of the CDP to Genie was to “make it fun” and, critically, to help customers and stakeholders embrace and understand the value proposition.

    In summary, Salesforce asserts that data orchestration blended with engagement capabilities and genuine AI, results in a so-called “real-time” CRM. Next level stuff.

    Constellation Research founder Ray Wang was quoted as stating, “to take the CDP to the next level, you really have to do it in a very different way. You have to not just think about the data that’s there, you have to think about how everything’s connected”.

    Salesforce claims large companies run an average of 976 separate applications in their businesses, resulting in data fragmentation and an inconsistent environments where value can not flow smoothly.

    Salesforce’s CDP leader Rahul Auradkar was quoted as saying that the company’s own customers had said that their own downstream customers were expecting far more personalized experiences now and in the future.

    “The power of real time is doing the right thing, at the right time,” said Auradkar.

    Let’s see how that promise, oft touted and promised in the CRM world over the years, is delivered.

    Nothing wrong with the ambition. Everyone agrees we need to create a hyper-personalised relationship with our customers, pooling and harmonizing data into what Forbes calls a “a reconciled, comprehensive customer portrait”.

  • The decisive new NPS metric: earned growth rate

    The decisive new NPS metric: earned growth rate

    Is “earned growth rate” the complementary metric which will transform the Net Promoter System (NPS) from being not only the most popular customer experience metric but also the most gamed and abused?

    Bain’s Fred Reichheld has returned to the Harvard Business Review, where he first introduced the NPS model in 2003, advocating for the new metric.

    To calculate their earned growth rates, firms must have systems, process and people that will gather data on the costs and revenues for each customer over time and must ask all new customers why did they buy?

    If the reason is a referral or recommendation, a customer is “earned”; if it’s advertising, a promotional deal, or a persuasive salesperson, the customer is “bought”.

    Reichheld says “we realized that the only way to make the system work better was to develop a complementary metric that drew on accounting results”.

    However, firms will not be able to credible calculate their earned growth rate unless they have their technology, people and process act together and most do not.

    Reichheld acknowledges this issue, but states “it’s time to get serious about measuring (and reporting) the progress … and to recognize that improving the lives of the people we serve is the only way to win”.

  • Slow progress is not good enough

    Slow progress is not good enough

    Now into its second decade, the survey by leading Australian B2B marketing agency Green Hat shows that marketers are achieving only slow progress in digitising and driving commercial outcomes.

    Unfortunately, just 28% of respondents reported having achieved their objectives in the current survey. That’s not good enough. The case for incremental improvement has never been weaker than it is today with the pandemic disrupting our business world forever. Those that not only survive but thrive will be orchestrating leaps forward in the coming months and years, with marketing in the lead.

    Thanks to the pandemic we are all moving rapidly to a digital world, where business, especially business-to-business activity, happens wherever people are.

    Businesses who did not have their digital platform acts together were especially vulnerable during the pandemic-stricken 2020. They struggled to facilitate online commerce efficiently and with the ease. Their vision,  leadership, data, people, process and system silos and deficiencies were exposed by the transparent front door that is their web presence.

    Critically, today’s B2B customers know what good looks like thanks to their own personal commerce experiences with the leading B2C brands. In 2021 all B2B players, must fast forward their digitisation ambitions with their marketers playing decisive roles. 

    Today, no matter what industry you are in, it’s not enough to simply promote your brand and make, market and sell a product or service. You need a digital community marketplace. An integrated, self-service, collaboration environment (web + commerce + marketing automation + CRM + analytics and ERP) where you customers interact, buy (ideally, subscribe), share, engage and learn from one another. 

    In this transformational climate, now, more than ever, we marketers must step up and lead. Marketers have to exercise genuine customer-focused influence and advocacy both horizontally and vertically across their organisations.

    It means, for example, embracing service, supply chain and transaction management as the new marketing. There is little value in assembling and advertising blue sky brand promises if your supply chain is not close to best in class, if your customer service team is an island and your ERP landscape is a patchwork of dinosaur legacy systems with 20th century DNA. 

    The Green Hat report highlights, the despite progress on many fronts, marketing must speed up.

  • Tesla’s “blitzscaling” wins

    Tesla’s “blitzscaling” wins

    Tesla, the company accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy, has recorded its fourth profitable quarter in succession.

    It’s $US 104 million Q2 2020 result again exceeded expectations and confirmed that Tesla continues to stake out its own territory as the world’s most dynamic brand with “blitzscaling” growth fueled by commanding leads in battery technology, vehicle software, solar energy, autonomous driving, data-driven insurance, collaborative social marketing and its “alien dreadnought” gigafactories.

    As leading analyst Dan Ives says, it is “Tesla’s world now and everyone else is paying rent”.

    Tesla’s former Quality VP Philippe Chain recently shared a great culture insight.

    Chain, who has also worked at Renault and Audi, wrote: “what took a single meeting and five days at Tesla would have required a six-month-long process at Renault or Audi. It would have started with a thorough investigation going back to the source of the error, looking for the person to blame internally, investigating a possible blunder of the supplier, etc. Then, a politically delicate sequence would have unfolded to set up a series of meetings and workshops. Multiple hierarchical strata would have been involved, going up probably to the very top of the organization.

    “That is the key to the Tesla Way: expedited, value-driven procedures, implemented with a maximum delegation, and a fast decision-making process in a flat structure.”

  • The platform is now the Salesforce story

    The platform is now the Salesforce story

    Salesforce’s “platform and other” business unit jumped ahead of the core CRM sales and service automation clouds during their FY21 Q1, highlighting how companies are finally getting their digital platform acts together.

    The pandemic is no doubt an accelerator, but the essential truth is that we must all be platform companies today.

    During the his Q1 earnings call, CEO Mark Benioff cited the platform play that new mega customer AT&T is embracing: “every customer touch point: the AT&T truck pulls up to my office or my home, that’s going to be Salesforce; I walk into the AT&T store and that’s going to be Salesforce. I’m getting an email from AT&T and that’s going to be Salesforce; and I’m on the phone with the AT&T call center and that’s going to be Salesforce. We’re going to make sure that they have that Customer 360-enhanced data, and when we’re integrating all that data MuleSoft is going to connect AT&T’s different back-end systems, Tableau is giving them the ability to understand customer preferences and Einstein is going to help them serve more intelligent recommendations and route service cases”.

    AI is a big part of the Salesforce platform story. This good blog post explains how to make AI business use case.

  • Tesla’s Cybertruck (reality ahead of schedule) ignites an earned-media tsunami

    Tesla’s Cybertruck (reality ahead of schedule) ignites an earned-media tsunami

    Tesla’s polarizing Cybertruck is either “the most ridiculous EV ever” conjured up by “electric Jesus” or it is a “stylistically breathtaking” design which will “will set the trend for future pickup designs” as it has “completely changed the vocabulary of the personal truck market” according to the legendary Blade Runner Art Director Syd Mead. Mead’s definition of Science Fiction is “reality ahead of schedule”, a label which can readily be applied to the Cybertruck.

    The armada of YouTubers (fans & haters) and financial analysts (longs & shorts) who cover Tesla’s every move flicked their keyboards into hyper drive immediately after the event on November 21. Excerpts of the launch, in particular vision of the car’s side windows being “unexpectedly” fractured (but not penetrated) by a metal ball thrown by lead Tesla designer Franz von Holzhausen, dominated online, clocking millions of views. Whether engineered, spontaneous, or perhaps both, the video was primed for amplification. In the following hours and days, Tesla keywords spiked into official “breakout” hockey stick territory on Google Trends, blitzing the social media landscape, harvesting massive $$$$ in “earned media”.

    As of Sunday, November 24, Tesla had captured 187,000 pre-orders online, essentially a place in the likely two-year queue in return for a refundable $US 100 deposit. Even if a significant percentage never transition into full orders, the number is impressive. Tesla’s Elon Musk was quick to assert that all this was happening with “no advertising & no paid endorsement”. Anyone serious about marketing automation knows what to do with tens of thousands of people who have paid $US 100 to complete an online form! These people have definitely opted in.

  • Cultivating profit & planet, shareholders & stakeholders

    Marketing today is the key to customer success. This mission has never been more significant and more challenging. Today we marketers must have a digital sense, a purpose sense and, most critically, a business sense as our companies and institutions strive to balance shareholders and stakeholders, profits and our planet.

    Yet, how many of our colleagues will agree with us and proclaim that marketing is the most important function? How many indeed? Not enough. Especially not enough of our C-level and Board-level people, those legal and financial leaders, who typically occupy those positions.

    We need everyone engaged and committed, not simply compliant, if we are to deliver the best end-to-end customer experiences across our businesses, from operations, to customer service to sales, from multi-channel to omni channel.

    In attempting to make this customer first vision happen, how many people will marketing have to interact with? Everyone, almost. Yet how many of those people will report to marketing? Very few.

    This reality means we must generate impact without direct authority. It means we have got to be incredibly good at mobilizing. We can’t just be doing marketing, we must be leading marketing.

    • Mobilising our boss
    • Mobilising our colleagues
    • Mobilising our team
    • Mobilising ourselves

    Unfortunately, doing this, generating positive momentum, is typically difficult in most traditional, hierarchical, matrix-structured, geographically distributed organisations populated by silos.

    In this complicated landscape marketing is often not truly aligned with the business.

    All too often there is a trust deficit, a credibility gap.

    In marketing we are talking about the future, which is what we must do. However, what we have claimed about the future often has not been realized. Too often we have focused on our perceived need to build tomorrow’s brand whilst not aligning with the business around the commercial imperative to generate demand today. In contrast the people in Finance and Operations, are mostly focused on the factual present and the past.

    Too often we are not talking the business language of our colleagues? What Chief Executive talks about Google analytics vanity metrics, or is genuinely interested in our augmented reality trial campaign or gets animated about our new Customer Data Platform. Maybe the CEO should get interested in the CDP, but the other stuff?

    What Sales leader gets excited about MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads)? Shouldn’t we be focused instead on SALs (Sales Accepted Leads), our marketing-sourced leads that the sales team is agreeing to own and progress?

    And don’t we understand why customer service gets irritated by our shiny new brand campaign that promises a bright blue sky when they know the reality for too many customers is thunder, lightning & gale-force winds?

    To close this trust gap we must align with the Chief Executive and the organic growth goals, that critical intersection where customer and company needs meet. Marketing must balance the inevitable tension between shareholders and stakeholders.

    This means we must first close the skills gap. Marketing leaders must build a team with the best mix of creative, analytical and leadership skills – and then foster trust and excellence.

    Marketing must be important to everyone, especially the Chief Executive. Marketing cannot be the discretionary operating expense budget number that is the first to be sacrificed when the EBIT target, our profit target, is threatened.

    Fundamentally, we must inspire and credibly measure our impact. Profit and planet. Shareholders and stakeholders. This is how we ensure that we build a great marketing-driven, values-based, genuinely diverse company, that people want to work with not for, want to subscribe to rather than buy from. The marketing-led companies who get this right will out perform their peers, grow faster and deliver sustainable profits. And marketing will have a seat at the top table, recognized as the most important function.

  • Friction-generating “old-school” online forms are well past their use by date

    Friction-generating “old-school” online forms are well past their use by date

    It is supposed to be easy, but all too often completing an online form is an ordeal. English comedian Michael McIntyre explains the challenges and frustrations we typically experience when attempting to complete a form.

    There’s got to be a better way. AI can and should make a difference. Here’s Salesforce’s take:

    The smart chat bot application Drift has coined the phrase “onversational marketing”, which it claims is about meeting the buyer when they are ready, capturing, qualifying and connecting at double-digit conversion rates.

    https://youtu.be/EPPXgQgWfDk
  • CMO, CRO or CCO?

    CMO, CRO or CCO?

    The Marketoonist Tom Fishburne says there’s a crisis of confidence in marketing, which has traditionally been “saddled with high expectations, but with limited levers to actually deliver”. A title change and a broader mandate may be the answer. Regardless, “we have to continually earn our seat at the table”.