The Value of an Integrated Marketing Platform
Moving from a complex mix of marketing tools to a single platform solution can provide a great deal of benefit to the whole marketing team. In addition the value of a unified customer data model has a big impact across the whole company. This doesn’t mean that there might be some unique use cases that require a specialized solution, but in the aggregate unifying the team with a robust marketing platform can solve many problems and streamline operations.
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.
Low Code Collaborative Solution Development; Zoho Releases an Updated Creator Platform
Over the past couple of years low code / no code cloud platforms have become much more available and capable. These platforms can increase the productivity of IT teams and democratize the capability to build some types of applications across the business user community. Empowering end users to customize and build simple applications easily reduces the overall demand on your actual development team, freeing them up to focus on higher value, more complex tasks. User satisfaction, assuming the platform meets expectations, is improved across both teams and end users can quickly solve many business challenges themselves.
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.
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.
Delivering a "Good" Subscriber Experience
I've written quite a bit about subscriber experience already, so I won't go back through the definition. If you want to read more background you can check out this post I wrote for subscription management supplier Zuora. I will focus more on the why and how in this post. It may seem obvious, but providing a good subscriber experience has many benefits to your company. What does providing a good subscriber experience do for your business?
Walmart Chases Amazon...again
The retail business, especially in the world of massive eCommerce and brick and mortar giants, is hard. Margins are thin and competing on price, in addition to selection and convenience, makes growing those margins a challenge. In fact, it's not really any easier for the giants to grow margins either. Amazon's most profitable business isn't retail, it's technology. Building the world's largest eCommerce site required cloud based commerce and supply chain services that did not exist at the time Amazon was scaling, so they built them.
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.