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 […]
One of the primary goals of the “Connected Company” framework is customer engagement. The terms customer engagement and customer experience take on a new meaning in the connected context. In Connected!, I bring out the need to focus on Ecosystem based CX instead of company specific CX. Traditionally, we’ve relied on industry based customer personas and use cases. And we’ve measured our effectiveness through […]
In Connected!, one of the 5 strategies I outlined towards being a connected company was about creating 3-tier loyalty models. It means that we start thinking about extending our loyalty programs. Every industry can do it – banking, retail, CPG, travel etc. All we need to do is to think of what our customers want beyond the products we are selling. […]
Products can be physical like shoes, apparel or computers, or they can be software platforms. As you move from year to year, a physical product line needs significant investments in manufacturing to refresh. And the process of determining what bets should be made to maximize that investment is critical. Software products need refreshes too, and although they seem pretty malleable, […]
It was a privilege to speak at the BAI Beacon conference in Orlando a few weeks ago. The topic of the day was digital (of course) and what banks should be doing to improve customer experience and make operations more efficient. My session was on “creating connected customer journeys of the future” – based on my book Connected! I felt that even as we […]
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 […]
An interesting study by Retail Leader(1) points out that consumers are buying more fresh grocery. The top reasons are more locations and choices. For the market overall, and for our health too, this is great! That got me thinking. More often than not (overwhelmingly), our offers and promotions are refused! So in an era of more choice, as a retailer, how […]