Disrupting The Game

Tag: business technology

  • 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 :

     

  • 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

  • Burberry’s business-technology literate CEO Angela Ahrendts gets it

    Apple has long attracted plaudits for its omni-channel mastery of the customer experience, but there is another brand which should also be regarded as a genuine benchmark.

    And that’s Burberry.

    Impressive CEO Angela Ahrendts is leading a digital transformation of the iconic British luxury brand.

    Burberry’s new London flagship store integrates a compelling digital dimension to the physical retail environment.

    In simple terms, Angela and her team get it:

    Among her objectives, Angela wants to leverage social tools to revitalise the company’s aging supply chain, energise sales and build the brand.

    Check out earlier Burberry posts here and here and spend some time at the artofthetrench.com social site..

     

  • “Digital disruption, when properly understood, should terrify you”

    In an excellent post on Forrester Research’s blog analyst James McQuivey says there are three sources of digital power changing our game:

    • The prevalence of free tools and services that enable disruptors to rapidly build products and services
    • The rise of digital platforms that are easily exploited by aspiring competitors from all directions
    • The burgeoning class of digital consumers ready to accept new services

    This trio has combined to unleash disruptive forces that will alter every business on the planet.

    “Digital disruption isn’t disruption squared. It’s the disruption of disruption itself.”

    McQuivey says executives recognise that digital is a disruptive force, however “ they don’t realize just how big a deal disruption will be when it finally hits them”.

    Read the full post here:

     

  • Are you Business Technology literate?

    Are you Business Technology literate?

    BT
    BT is the future not IT

     

    Business Technology fluent?

    Do you understand how best to engage at the intersection of BT, business processes and people?

    If the answer is “no”, you may need to lift your game and extended your horizon.

    Just as financial literacy is a “must” for any senior executive, today BT literacy is also at the top of the “must have” list.

    Do you appreciate that almost all the disruptive new technology advances have occurred in the consumer space in recent years (think Apple, of course, and Google, Facebook and Amazon)?

    Digital services are being consumed in radically different ways, on new and increasingly mobile devices.

    The old, locked-down, risk adverse, complex corporate technology world is less and less relevant to future business success.

    The leaders in the development of new generation business technology, such as Salesforce.com (the world’s most innovative company according to Forbes magazine for two consecutive years now, 2011 and 2012), Sugar CRM, Yammer and Workday, cite the consumer world as their inspiration with phrases such as “voluntary adoption is the new KPI”.

    So, do you understand the term “multi-tenant architecture”? The significance of HTML 5? And the acronym API (Application Programing Interface) and what why it is important?

    Of course, you don’t have to know how to code web pages in HTML 5, but you must have a sound, high-level understanding of the Internet-native technology backbone that should be driving your customer-driven business and enabling a differentiated  brand experience.

    It is no longer good enough to effectively abdicate technology decisions to your CIO and the IT department, whilst complaining at the same time about the absence of value.

    In fact, why does your company still have a CIO?

    Over the next five years, the executive role of the CIO will be diminished. The position will be eliminated at many companies, as BT-literate CFOs, COOs and CMOs asert their ascendancy by taking the lead in driving technology change that improves both the customer experience and profitability.

    Forrester Research’s founder George Colony sums up the direction in this quote:

    “Old IT was about uptime (and risk management). BT is about: agility, speed, speed, being bullet-proof, customer-centricity, and business-centricity.”

    Forrester no longer has a CIO. Today they have a Chief Business Technology Officer (CBTO).

    George says that while the actual title change is a small one, the symbolism is significant.

    He has compelling views on the topic, which he articulates here and here.

    As do other good thinkers such as Scott Brinker with his marketing technology blog and Advertising Age article.

  • CMOs will drive technology spend not CIOs

    “CMOs Will Spend More on IT Than CIOs”

    When Gartner analyst Laura McLennan made this bold statement in a Gartner report late last year, it attracted plenty of skeptical comment.

    Increasingly, however, more and more people are lining up to endorse Laura’s view.

    Marketing is now a major technology driver, as it becomes clear that marketing needs a marketing technology backbone in order to get anything constructive done.

    CMOs and CIOs must accept the new reality that they need each other to deliver the cross-functional integration their customers and ultimately their shareholders demand today.

    Tech Republic’s Steve Ranger sums up the challenges in this good blog post.

    Steve quotes a recent Forrester Research report _ Business execs increase direct IT spend to support systems of engagement _ which claims that if IT doesn’t step up and engage, it will be relegated to “overseeing legacy systems”.

    According to the report only 39 per cent of execs thought IT consistently delivered projects on time and on budget, something Forrester described as “the basic building block of IT’s credibility”.