Posted by Christine on August 30, 2011 under Uncategorized | 
Arriving at DreamForce the check-in was smooth either because most of the 42,000 attendees hadn’t arrived yet or were off doing something cool. Based on the Twitter feed for #DF11, my guess is that the sessions are excellent. I grabbed my badge and the obligatory logoed backpack (which actually is pretty cool) before racing off to meet Mark Taber, CEO of Active Endpoints.
Mark and I spent a lot of time talking about the Buyers Journey. His experience in aligning to the Buyer proved that the methodology not only demonstrable accelerates revenue cycles but also reduces Cost of Sales. But that is a topic for a different post. What initially interested me in talking with Mark was their new Cloud Extend product.
Mark positioned it as a product that is “the best use case for Active Endpoints’ technology”. In Mark’s words, Cloud Extend solves two problems: Enabling Sales to effectively help prospects through the Buyers Journey, and help keep all that data in any Salesforce instance current and complete. That is probably very true but I saw a very innovative solution to a pesky old problem.
Every had the challenge of getting your sales teams to actually use Salesforce.com or keep all their data current? Or hear the complaint that they won’t use different systems to do a variety of tasks such as contract management or check on a trouble ticket? Onboarding new sales reps and getting them to be revenue productive in a short amount of time is another real challenge for most companies, especially those selling complex products. These are some of the problems that Active Endpoints addresses with Cloud Extend.
Cloud Extend is a Salesforce.com application that enables users to create role-based, workflow driven Guides that are embedded in Salesforce.com. What is interesting is that the Guides are easy to setup, use, requires no training and has applications across the company from Sales to Human Resources. The Guides prompt users through their tasks with questions along with offering best practices and helpful tips. Answers to the questions automatically populate Salesforce.com.
There are countless ways to use Cloud Extend to streamline operations and to align organizations. One application is to take your sales methodology and sales tools and embed them into Guides. Another is to embed outbound or inbound call scripts in Guides. Users follow the work flow driven questions, automatically populate Salesforce with data, and learn best practices along the way. Cloud Extend has one capability that I think is pretty cool, it auto populates a new Salesforce contact with any public data that is available from LinkedIn, Facebook, Jigsaw, etc. including pictures.
The uses of Cloud Extend Guides are limited only by your imagination and number of documented business processes. Cloud Extend (www.cloudextend.com) is priced at $50/user/month and is marketed to Sales Operations, Product Marketing, Marketing, Inside Sales and Sales Management.
If you’re at DreamForce, Active Endpoints is booth 8; well worth checking out.
Tags: Active Endpoints, ActiveVOS, alignment, business process automation, buyers journey, CMO, customer experience, DF11, Dreamforce, Mark Taber, marketing, marketing operations, revenue, sale automation, sales, sales & marketing alignment, sales enablement, sales methodology, sales operations, Salesforce, Software
Posted by Christine on August 28, 2011 under Uncategorized |
Salesforce’s DreamForce event is being held in San Francisco this week and I’m going. Equipped with a much sought after Press Pass, I’m attending, for the first time, as a blogger for Forbes. I’m on a Quest.
The Quest is to understand how IT vendors help companies discover and align to their Buyers Journey. Do vendors understand this transformation and what products support sales and marketing in understanding their target markets’ Buyers Journeys?
How B2B buyers buy today mirrors B2C; the buying process is self-directed, social, transparent and trust based. This change in the B2B Buyers Journey has resulted in a crisis for many companies. With 75% of the buy cycle completed before the buyer ‘raises their hand’, vendors no longer wield the influence they once had. Marketing’s role has changed from Sales’ advocate to Buyer enabler; a role it does not fully understand. The result is revenue cycles are challenged and customer churn is on the rise as buyer expectations frequently differ from their actual experience.
To prepare for this massive show, I researched every exhibitor (desperately) wishing there was an automated way of doing this. There are hundreds of exhibitors spanning everything from security vendors to marketing automation, presentation tools, API connectors, to integration consulting firms, contract management, and sourcing/procurement vendors. DreamForce has morphed from a vendor conference into a something akin to Comdex, in its hay day.
The result is that out of hundreds of exhibitors I identified 34 vendors I wanted to talk to, each either addressed some part of or espoused the principles of the Buyers Journey. Out of the 34, I booked interviews with 17 vendors:
Marketo is not on the list because I’m already talking to them.
Interestingly, I booked these interviews not through Salesforce’s DreamForce Chatter tool but either through Twitter or LinkedIn. I found that most exhibitors and company representatives are not logged on to Chatter which is too bad as they missed an real opportunity to engage with attendees and people looking to network.
The result of my Quest for the Buyers Journey will be posts here and at Forbes. I’m hoping to find vendors that understand how B2B buying has changed and have real solutions focused on engaging, influencing and enabling buyers throughout the Journey.
Armed with comfortable shoes, my digital recorder, and Evernote on my iPad I’m ready to face 42,000 attendees.
Tags: 360vantage, 7degrees, angel, automated lead management, branchit, CMO, demand generation, DF11, Dreamforce, Eloqua, etrigue, genius, hubspot, lattice engines, manticore technolgy, marketing, marketing automation, marketing operations, marketing strategies, marketo, merced Systems, optify, Pardo, reachable, revenue, revenue management, revenue performance management, sales & marketing alignment, sales force, sales support, Salesforce, seesmic, sliverpop, teamsupport, tradeshow
Posted by Christine on August 15, 2011 under Uncategorized |
BrightTalk has invited me to shared best practices, real life case examples and a road map for how to align Sales and Marketing. This free webinar will be held on October 19th at 10:00am pacific time.
From the prospect to up-sell stages, organizations have a great opportunity to accelerate their revenue cycles by enabling marketing and sales to function as a unified team. Aligned Sales and Marketing teams are more efficient, close more sales and have happier customers. Attend this webinar to find out the seven steps you can take to accomplish this, complete with supporting case studies.
Topics Covered:
· Understanding why aligning to the Buyers Journey drives faster revenue
· Determining the stage of Alignment your company is in
. Deriving best practices from case study examples
. Starting the Alignment discussion with Sales and Marketing
This is a free webinar – I hope you and your colleagues will participate. To register just click on the BrightTalk link below.
Tags: alignment, best practices, BrightTalk, buyers journey, CEO, CMO, collaboration, Crandell, customer experience, demand generation, education, expert, free webinar, marketing, marketing operations, marketing strategies, revenue, sales, sales & marketing alignment, strategy, training, webinar
Posted by Christine on August 10, 2011 under Uncategorized |
Tipping Point
The market’s response to the S&P downgrade of American debt was panic. The ‘Great American Downgrade’ is what I’m hearing it being referred to. While the pundits argue over whether it was a ‘crash’ or a ‘correction’, the Senate, ironically, debates opening an investigation into S&P’s “irresponsible” act. The looming question of whether this will trigger a double dip recession depends on how we look at the future.
A glass can be either half full or half empty; it all depends on your perspective. In the frenetic world of 7×24 news, social media, always-connected jobs and maxi-multi-tasking lives we often lose perspective. It is as if we’re racing through a forest as fast as we can, seeing only the blur of the trees and believing we’re on the right trail.
Our economic situation is a sum total of all the activities and perspectives of businesses, citizens, investors, and governments. What plagues our economy is the same thing that hampers growth in our companies – doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results. Marshal Goldsmith said it well in his quote “What got you to here won’t get you there” and it is rather appropriate for our current situation. It would do us, and the economy, well if we gained some perspective for we are at a tipping point.
The USA economy can tip into a pattern that resembles Japanese style stagnation or it can redefine and reinvent itself. The same goes for businesses; they can hunker down and experience limited growth in their traditional markets with current products or they can re-evaluate and redefine their value in light of global trends and offshore markets that are growing. We all need to look at growth from a different perspective; one that is rooted in thinking outside the box about how to deliver meaningful value.
For most companies that means tackling the lack of confidence in their Sales and Marketing organizations. We all know Sales and Marketing are broken and it’s time to publicly admit it. The ‘broken-ness’ is evidenced by B2B Marketing struggling to demonstrate its value in terms it has historically never had to. B2B Sales is increasingly becoming marginalized and struggling to meet revenue targets in a world where no one “really” wants to talk to them. One reason we’re in the current situation is because companies (and governments) have been inwardly focused for too long. The quest for great efficiency, effectiveness and productivity has been sought within and between departments; not at the organization’s boundaries between it and its markets and constituents. Protracted inward alignment results in myopia and the general drinking of one’s own whiskey.
Fixing Sales and Marketing begins with dropping the classic definitions of what Sales and Marketing are suppose to do along with the internal tug-of-war associated the zero-sum game mentality. Replace that with a culture and roles obsessed with aligning to the expectations of your prospects, lost accounts, current customers, and target markets. In other words, align to your Buyer.
Begin the alignment process by intimately understanding where Buyers go and what they do on their purchase journey. It takes some elbow grease and tenacity but every company can achieve understand the Journey by interviewing the economic buyer, influencers, evaluators and users of every won and lost account to understand the ‘who, what, where, how and why’ of their Buyers Journey. While the B2B Buyers Journey has three overall stages comprised of ten steps, each role (or persona) follows a slightly different journey path. To align to your Buyer, organizations need to know all the various paths and the destinations along the way, in detail. A high level or generic view of the Buyer’s Journey obscures the actionable information; the data that enables you to deliver a valuable experience made up of meaningful content presented to the right persona at key junctures on their buying paths.
Next align organizational roles to enable, engage and deliver value to the Buyer. The experience a Buyer wants as a customer is often more important in the purchase decision than the actual product they are buying. Structure your organization’s roles into value chains (instead of departments and organization charts) from initial market sensing, Buyer experience crafting, and product development/manufacturing through to market listening, Customer/Buyer success and service. Measure how the Buyer rates their experience along the Journey and set role-based metrics.
The key to growth is two-fold: Accelerate revenue cycles by delivering the experience buyers value and have a company culture focused on continually earn your customers’ business every single day. The bottom-line is we need a fresh perspective on how to do business differently if our economy is to ‘tip’ in the right direction.
Tags: alignment, B2B buying, buyers journey, CEO, CMO, collaboration, Crandell, Debit Ceiling, demand generation, demand management, economy, marketing, marketing strategies, new economy, purchase cycle, purchasing, Recession, revenue, revenue cycle performance, sales, sales & marketing alignment, social media, strategy, tipping point