In this blog, I’ll discuss what is design thinking, is it still relevant, and how to apply it in a practical way to a real growth problem. We’ll use channel partnerships as our example today. Why design thinking? Consider these statistics: Only 9.1% of sales think that leads generated by marketing are high quality 85% of all channel partnerships fail […]
Increasing competition and rapid innovation in enterprise business-technology makes channel sales strategies a must have. According to a recent research, deals close 46% faster when a partner is involved. However, channel sales strategies continue to be challenging. Having been on both sides of the enterprise tech sales equation – SI & ISVs – in this blog, I’ll highlight 3 practical […]
Sales and marketing alignment in the enterprise space – aka complex sales – is tough to achieve. Yet, if you do that, you can achieve a whopping 36% higher retention rate(3), and higher sales win rates of 38%(4) overall. That’s fascinating. Although this study was not entirely focused on complex B2B sales, these are still meaningful numbers. As any practitioner […]
When we think about revenue attribution, one of the most common topics that we think about is “How much revenue did marketing influence?” or “Where did our leads come from?”. That makes sense when business leaders intuitively already have a sense of what is moving their pipeline. It’s also useful when brand awareness and lead generation need primary focus. It […]
What are connected customer experiences? These are customer journeys that run across company boundaries, and are not limited to the traditional way of creating interactions with our own company’s channels. The focus needs to be on customers’ broader aspirations – what “they” want, and what they are NOT getting. So these experiences are developed with an outside-in approach. Here are 5 simple but amazing examples […]
The artificial intelligence strategy buzz is everywhere. But now we need to move beyond rule based personalization and predictive analytics based recommendations. That kind of AI has been going on for 20 years if not more. Calling every analytics based project AI using a lot of jargon is definitely fashionable. But it also adversely affects the maturity of your artificial intelligence […]
There’s a lot of ongoing debate regarding future of payments which includes a discussion on credit cards, wallets, loyalty, banking, among other related topics. Meanwhile, we need to ask if the current financial services players have really made progress preparing themselves for the future of payments (or banking for that matter). I believe we still need to work on “setting the right […]
Implementing AI seems to be simple at first glance: Get a dataset, run a regression or neural network on it, and voila, you have insights Send your prompts to a generative AI API like AWS or Open AI, and receive excellent content (or code) back However, beyond the innovation lab, adopting enterprise AI is complex to say the least. In […]
Creating a customer journey map helps you understand and analyze the experiences and interactions a customer has with your product or service over time. We should capture a journey from the customer’s perspective – highlighting key touchpoints, emotions, and pain points. That’s because our end goal is to provide the appropriate Wow! moments and mitigate any negative experiences. Often these […]
A buyer journey is how your buyers will move towards a purchase – have a problem, evaluate solutions, make a decision. It’s not just for marketing, but also applicable to sales – new client acquisition as well as account growth (or account farming). A buyer’s journey is different from your B2B sales pipeline which is an internal process for sales […]
As AI takes centerstage, data silos are the biggest hurdle that every enterprise architect, CIO, CTO, or business leader wants to solve today. We need access to quality & timely data, which in turn will lead to better analytics and straight through processing of transactions. So far, a solution to solve the problems of data silos has been elusive. In […]
If you are looking to influence revenue from your content marketing, then this blog will be helpful for you. Traditional content audits focus on SEO metrics, traffic, and technical issues. A good guide for this type of audit is here by ahrefs and another good one by SEMRush. For enterprise B2B clients where the sales is complex and transactions are […]
The idea of creating a composable business enterprise stems from a need for better resiliency to change. It also leads to better customer experiences and business agility. Gartner lays out a framework for organizations to follow the four principles: modularity, autonomy, orchestration, and discovery. At its core, this means a decoupled, more agile organization so that business processes can pivot […]
The impact of API economy is across all industries. Because APIs by their very definition are supposed to promote interaction and dialog across multiple companies, often in different industries. In my article on American Banker Don’t Give Away The Store When Enabling APIs, I brought out the focus on ensuring that banks maintain their customer experience front end, while allowing additional channels […]
A recent report on The Disruption of Banking by The Economist highlighted that more than half of the banks are either ignoring the Fintech trend, or talking but not doing anything about it. In 2016, we are now seeing banks finally starting to tackle the emerging trends by partnering on many fronts, utilizing application program interfaces (APIs) and experimenting with […]