Is B2B Sales Broken?
An emerging category of solutions though, called sales acceleration platforms, can create a digital support structure that combines AI, on-demand content and crowd sourced intelligence to improve each customer interaction. Using a sales acceleration platform ensures new reps onboard quickly, come up to speed and meet performance targets sooner and existing reps increase productivity while reducing the ‘friction’ that is creating the low job satisfaction and turnover.
Top Tech Trends for 2022
The past two years have created a great deal of change in how businesses use technology and elevated the importance of that technology to the overall business strategy as the pandemic forced more and more business online. The impact of the past two years is driving continued change and the economic uncertainty creates the need for businesses to accelerate their transformation efforts. The next two years will see many technology changes and innovations as companies scramble to be more competitive.
The Agile Enterprise: Automation and Workflow
Agility, flexibility and adaptability are all aspirational traits for a "modern" business. They are, in part at least, the intended outcomes from digital transformation. They are however, a very difficult and complex set of capabilities to achieve. Some of that difficulty is cultural of course, in general people resist change. Beyond the cultural though, getting underlying technologies that enable the ability to be agile, flexible and adapt to changing market conditions is a challenge for most businesses (and systems). Many business technology systems in use today are still built in ways that inhibit the ability too rapidly adapt business strategy and operations to changing market conditions. System constraints often create impediments to a successful transformation.
Building the Best Digital Experiences
With the rapid move online for businesses and consumers over the past 18+ months of the pandemic, "digital experience" has surfaced as one of the most critical factors for business success. Digital experience (DX) is a broad term and can apply to many aspects of managing a business' online presence. In the broadest sense DX encompasses employee or workforce experience (EX), customer experience (CX) and depending on the business, partner experience as well as any other stakeholder interactions. You could also package all that up as user experience (UX), which covers all online business interactions. Cloud communications platforms, automation, intelligent virtual assistants, and any systems that deliver end-to-end business processes are all a part of delivering the desired UX.
Why Context Matters in Software Selection
Analyst firms love to produce reports that compare technology solutions, businesses love to use those reports to support software selection and software suppliers in general love to hate them. Well, maybe that's too harsh, suppliers actually hate the process and only love the reports when it makes them look better than competitors. As a solution buyer, what do these comparison reports really tell you?
A Digital First Strategy
The behaviors and expectations of customers changed to meet the changing conditions of the past 18+ months. Those behaviors are, in my opinion, irrevocably different. That means that in this aspect anyway, you have to ensure the new workflows, processes and employee behaviors put in place during the pandemic response continue to be improved and remain in place. Intentional digital transformation projects historically proved themselves as complex, difficult and often did not deliver the intended results. According to a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study from October 2020, 70% of digital transformation projects fall short of their objectives. BCG also found that digital leaders see earnings growth of 1.8 times higher than digital laggards. There are a lot of reasons from a customer and business perspective then, to assess your progress and work to improve all the changes you've already implemented. From a workforce perspective the transformation efforts need to continue as well, no matter what direction your post pandemic remote work policies take.
Digital Experiences: Cloud Communication
Most communication tools and access to channels show up in the business’ existing business applications like customer service, marketing automation, etc. The problem with that though, is that in general the communications are siloed to the specific function of the application and can’t be extended across the business. Silo’ed applications with silo’ed commutation capabilities hinder or prevent consistent messaging, consistent channel availability and internal collaboration around a specific issue. The same is true of single communication channel tools as well. When it comes to communications with customers, silos are inherently “bad”.
AI Enabled Analytics? - Zoho Announces New Version of Its BI Platform
Zoho has provided a self-serve analytics solution since 2009, making incremental improvements and enhancements along the way. Yesterday they announced a new version of the BI platform that adds some significant new and enhanced capabilities. The platform is made up of four elements:
Self-Serve data preparation and management
Augmented analytics
Data stories
Marketplace apps
Digital Experiences: 3D eCommerce
The intersection of two hot technologies is creating an exciting new category of solution and experience for online shoppers (which after nearly 18 months of Covid lockdown is a great percentage of the population, in the developed world anyway). Both trends, 3D modeling and augmented reality (AR) / virtual reality (VR), have been around for some time. 3D modeling is used across product design, architecture, engineering and construction, building management, game design and animation very successfully. AR is seeing a broad range of business applications in warehouse management / logistics and other areas. VR is somewhat less widely used, mostly seen in video gaming, although other applications are starting to emerge as well.
Finding the "Right" Digital Solutions
Last year businesses realized that digital transformation wasn’t just a tech industry buzzword but something necessary for them to rapidly respond to the growing Covid-19 crisis. For companies that could do business with a remote workforce, getting the tools, systems and processes in place to enable work from home, eCommerce and digital customer connections was chaos, at least for those that were not already properly outfitted. Looking back now, it's easy to spot three distinct phases of the transformation. Phase one was basically reactionary, get anything in place that will keep the business operating, particularly focused on the newly remote workforce and in communicating with customers and prospects. Phase two was focused on eCommerce (for businesses that had that opportunity), cleanup of work processes and tools, and a growing concern over digital experiences for customers. Phase three, which seems to have started late last year, is broader, and focused on optimizing tools, processes and experiences. This phase will likely continue for the next 18-24 months as workforce policies and new ways to be competitive are explored and implemented.
Digital Innovation
Digital innovation is the differentiator in the post-pandemic economy. For many years in the tech community we have talked about something called “digital transformation” (DX) or as some call it, the fourth industrial revolution. At its simplest the concept is about shifting your business to use new digital technologies and strategies to modernize business models, business strategies, business operations, customer experience, and workforce experience. On one hand there are disruptive companies that emerged over the past 10+ years as “digital native”, having built their business strategy, model and operations from the ground up on digital platforms. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, Lyft, Stripe, Robinhood and Doordash created a new business opportunity by melding a digital platform with a business platform to solve problems and deliver product/service in a novel way. But the digital natives, as disruptive as they are, are only a tiny part of the business landscape.