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
Posted by Christine on July 17, 2011 under Uncategorized |
Like most people, I have one eye on the debt ceiling and unemployment debate. Sorting reality from spin and the juvenile drama reminds me of decades ago university student government meetings. It’s also reminiscent of some management team meetings where one spends enormous energy sorting the facts from all the hooey.
What strikes me as troublesome is the colossal disconnect between the perspectives of government, companies and the general public. Their focus is telling of the disconnect: The next election cycle, next financial earnings report, and when the next set of bills are due. The lack of common ground or shared goals between these three perspectives is undermining our future.
Admittedly I’m not an economist, and am wise enough to not play one on TV, but nowhere in all these discussions is an acknowledgement that the collective “we” are in new territory. Old rules don’t apply – this is not Paul Volker’s 1980s crisis nor is it like post-Great Recession. While the raging debate about Keynes vs. Friedman is always interesting; it doesn’t apply.
Instead of trying to hold on to the ‘normal’ of yesteryear while singing, teary eyed, Barbara Streisand’s ’The Way We Were’, we should let go and embrace what can be. That doesn’t mean I’m advocating not increasing the debt ceiling. The potential I see, and am focused on, is a unique opportunity we have to shape a new global economy that leverages our collective strengths in new ways.
The strengths as I see them are:
- A highly skilled workforce with fresh thinking on how to deliver value. The generation entering the workforce hold radically different ideas on what defines value and the relationship businesses should have with the environment and society. Partner these workers with baby boomers who are not retiring and you have a marriage of fresh thinking with wisdom.
- Entrepreneurial employment models. The model of hiring scores of full-time employees has proven to hamper company agility and growth. The examples are everywhere – Nokia, RIM, HP. It is like putting blinders on a prize race horse that knows how to run one course – a loop. Companies that hire only key employees in strategic core competencies and employ teams of contract, part-time, consultants, contingent workers for other roles and activities find they are better able to be market-responsive, nimble, and stay on top of emerging trends; the blinders come off.
- Building value based on the community level needs. Whether its social entrepreneur-ism, green energy, water management, new models of agribusiness, travel or healthcare there is tremendous opportunity (and profit) in meeting the needs of the global community. Granted these aren’t easy problems to solve but neither was the invention of the light bulb or the telephone; therein lies the opportunity to innovate and invent the next economic cycle.
- Global communities and tribes. We are as intricately interwoven in the economies of other countries as they are interwoven with us. Customers with needs are everywhere and it doesn’t matter whether they are in Brazil, Russia or in Des Moines. Social media has made the world smaller, more intimate, and customers more accessible. Understand the global customer and deliver meaningful value by serving them with the best resources, regardless of where they are located. There is a lot of opportunity for growth in markets around the world, if we just look at them through different lens.
- Renaissance of leadership and self actualization. The Dark Ages of leadership has led to a Renaissance of the Aware Leader. The rise in coaching – both leadership and life – points to the realization that emotional intelligence and compassionate leadership results in stronger, more profitable companies. Employees, be they permanent and contingent, who are following their bliss are more productive, innovative and efficient. And a new level of leadership is a core requirement to creatively building companies that leverage new business models rooted in new forms of value delivery.
The opportunity I see to drive economic growth is tremendous. Granted it’s scary but the alternative is even more frightful. As my dad used to say, “time to pull up your socks and get moving.”
Tags: CEO, CMO, Crandell, creative destruction, debt ceiling, economy, employment tenure, global economy, globalization, leadership, marketing, new corporate landscape, new economy, sales, Schumpeter, social media, unemployment
Posted by Christine on July 1, 2011 under Uncategorized |
In this episode of the the B2B Specialists podcast Chris Herbert of Mi6 interviews me. Get yourself a cup of coffee, tea or something stronger and enjoy the interview.
NOTE: There may be a 30-60 second commercial that precedes the interview
00:01 We learn a bit about Christine’s experience, background and her research and successes on sales and marketing alignment. Christine believes that B2B marketing is at a key junction in its evolution within companies.
02:40 Christine identifies key symptoms and causes of misalignment. They include: lack of understanding of how customers buy and want to be marketed to, obsession with internal alignment of functional groups and internal conflict caused by zero sum game budgets.
6:45 We turn the conversation to the role CEOs have to play to ensure sales and marketing alignment can be achieved. It’s a combination of past experience, culture and accountability. (For a post on this topic see below)
10:45 Christine describes the three stages companies go through in the journey to marketing and sales alignment. Knowing what stage a company is in helps determine what they need to do in order to move the needle to alignment. She uses “all hands meetings” as an example activity and when it’s best used in the alignment process. (For a post on this topic see below)
16:46 We move the conversation metrics. This was very interesting because Christine talks about what an aligned organization should be measuring. She talks about measuring end-to-end conversions, revenue diversity and outcome profitability (versus product profitability). Marketing needs to promote, communicate and position brands and solutions to specific outcomes. I’d like to explore this with Christine in another podcast because it’s very interesting. Marketing is at an important crossroad in today’s B2B organizations.
22:25 We talk about what Christine has planned next for her sales and marketing alignment research and how’s she is helping companies achieve alignment.
Related Posts:
Why CEOs Can’t Blame Marketing or Sales for Lack of Alignment
The 3 steps to marketing and sales alignment
Three Metrics to Measure Sales and Marketing Alignment
Marketing, Lead Generation and Selling to CIOs
Inside the Mind of the B2B Tech Buyer
Chris Herbert is the founder of Mi6. Mi6 is a B2B (Business to Business) marketing and business development agency dedicated to helping companies build their brands and develop commercial relationships. He is the founder of ProductCamp Toronto and the Hi-tech community Silicon Halton. He tweets under the handle @B2Bspecialist.
Tags: alignment, article, B2B marketing, B2B specialist, Chris Herbert, CMO, Crandell, customer experience, expert, interview, marketing, marketing operations, marketing rules, marketing strategies, podcast, revenue, sales, sales & marketing alignment, strategy, webinar
Posted by Christine on June 19, 2011 under Uncategorized |
Fournaise, a marketing consulting firm, recently completed a study that found that marketers and CEOs have a big disconnect. I don’t disagree there is a disconnect but it is disconcerting that a study of 600 companies finds marketing has such a widespread lack of credibility.
I could dissect the study’s approach and find flaws with the methodology or with how the results were interpreted. Or point out that the study headlines have been sensationalized and are rather self-serving given what Fournaise does.
But attacking the credibility of the study does not remove the gnawing feeling that there is truth in the headline. The short tenure of CMOs, the persistent lack of sales and marketing alignment, widespread disappointment in marketing’s poor revenue productivity, and the ubiquitous head scratching about what exactly is marketing’s role supports the claim that there is a disconnect between the CEO and marketing. What I don’t buy is that this is all marketing’s fault.
Marketing, as a discipline, is at a tipping point; it will either redefine its value within the corporation and the market or marketers will find themselves relegated to a tactical role in sales. There are three driving forces behind this: An economic rebound that is growth-challenged, the rise of transparent markets where the buyer (B2B as well as B2C) sets all the rules, and a forced fundamental transformation of marketing.
In a market flooded with new information channels that are not well defined and customers making purchase decisions based on their expectation of lifetime experience, marketing is focused on understanding how to navigate this new landscape while redefining how it mediates the company’s value promise with the buyer’s desired outcome. Marketing, as a discipline, is evolving from being sales’ advocate to enabling and empowering buyers.
Not many CEOs understand that.
To CEOs who lament about marketing’s lack of “speaking the P&L language”, I say start by first reaching a common understanding with your CMO of what marketing means to your company. I can assure you that your definition of marketing is very different from your CMO’s definition; and just because you’re the CEO doesn’t make your definition the right one. Second, develop some empathy and try to understand the transformation that is happening. You need to understand this because it’ll help you make better investment decisions that drive revenue. Then, together, set some meaningful goals and KPIs for marketing.
To CMOs who complain about being misunderstood, under appreciated or Sales’ punching bag, I say step up to the challenge. This is a critical time for marketing. You need to lead the company through this transformation with an inspired vision, gutsy and decisive leadership, fact-based decision making and a laser focus on how to drive constant revenue growth in a world where unpredictability is the constant. Your KPIs need to reflect marketing’s new scope and measure what matters – revenue growth, quality of customer experiences, reputation and effectiveness of strategy. The real opportunity is to transform marketing into the company’s guiding light for continuously creating meaningful value; however the market defines ‘value’.
If you’re interested in the Fournaise study, here is the link http://www.cmo.com/leadership/73-ceos-say-marketers-lack-credibility
Posted by Christine on June 4, 2011 under Uncategorized |
The economy is working on rebounding and companies are gearing up. Pipelines and revenues are heading north and hiring along with it. But something in this rebound is different.
For new sales hires, the expectation is that they join with a solid book of business and a pipeline already in hand; even for companies where the ramp time for sales people to achieve repeatable revenue productivity is six to nine months. Same goes for marketers. Regardless of the market’s or company’s maturity or readiness the expectation of newly hired marketing leaders is that they produce a significant uptick in pipelines in 60 to 90 days, regardless of the capabilities or competence of marketing or sales. For many new hires, these are unrealistic and unachievable expectations. Nevertheless, the message is loud and clear – growth comes only from net new customer acquisition.
Have CEOs finally ‘had enough’ of sales and marketing mis-alignment? Or has the uncertainty of the rebound resulted in a laser focus on priorities? What’s really happening is that customer acquisition is dead. The irony is that customer acquisition always was a myth.
Companies do not acquire customers; it’s actually the other way around. But for decades companies, and their marketers, held a myth that they controlled how and when customers purchased their products. With better marketing, snappier messaging, the right sales approach, better sales people, and more features the customer will “have” to buy the product if they want to successfully address their challenges.
By the end of the Great Recession, the buyer took control and began to mandate how companies will sell to them. If companies want a sale, they need to follow the buyer’s rules which can be somewhat unforgiving. And these rules are not obvious since buyers never told vendors what the new rules were. Except that the buying process is now social.
The statistics point to the sea change that has happened and the ensuing chaos within the vendor community. Only 3% of all sales interactions are considered worthwhile by prospects. On average only 50% of sales people make quota. A buyer spends 2.7 seconds reading an email before deciding to delete it. A voicemail is only slightly better at 5 seconds before the buyer hits the delete button. Ask for more than 5 pieces of information on a web form and conversion statistics plummet. And don’t even think of asking for a phone number.
The myth of customer acquisition is dead.
The new rules are for vendors to invest in a deep, intimate understanding of the buyer – their business, challenges, desired outcomes, definitions of value, and how they go about solving problems. Only by understanding the buyer’s journey and how value is defined can companies begin to compete and win new business.
Counter to marketing’s traditional integrated marketing approach (a.k.a., cover all the mediums in case buyers show up at one of them), marketers need to first invest in understanding the buyer’s journey. How do the various buyer roles acknowledge they have problem, commit the organization to solving the problem, understand the root causes of the problem, investigate best practices and alternatives to solving the problem, explore available solutions, develop a criteria to screen potential solutions, and validate shortlisted solutions?
Marketing needs to accept that much of the journey happens without their knowledge. For companies the first inkling of a buy cycle is when buyers download multiple pieces of information from corporate websites or click thru on adwords. At that stage the buyer is already 50% into the buy cycle with well formed impressions of what constitutes a successful solution (and vendor). Marketing and sales is too late to dramatically influence the buyer’s process or their definition of an optimal solution.
The new rules require that marketing map the buyer’s journey by stage and document where they go (medium), what they look for (content), and the actions taken. To win, marketing needs to be where the buyer goes at each stage of the journey. If the buyer turns to industry analysts to ‘understand causes of the problem’ make sure the analysts are well briefed on the vendor’s capabilities and their reports mention the buyer. If the buyer looks to social communities for suggestions on available solutions, make sure vendor evangelists and customers are regular, credible contributors. If buyers explore and evaluate potential solutions by downloading or accessing free versions, offer freemium versions. Then engage them through ‘tips, tricks, and best practices’ drip campaigns integrated into the product.
The key is to first understand the buyer’s journey and secondly, to purposely participate in the journey by offering the sought content in the right mediums for each stage of the journey. Done right the buyer will engage with the company early on and subsequent conversations will be more meaningful for both parties.
Think of it as sales enablement for the buyer.
Tags: alignment, automated lead management, buyer journey, CMO, creative destruction, demand generation, integrated marketing, marketing campaign, marketing rules, marketing strategies, marketo, new economy, revenue, sales, sales & marketing alignment, sales cycle, sales enablement, social media, strategy
Posted by Christine on April 24, 2011 under Uncategorized |
There is a great new conference, DemandCon, coming to town that is dedicated to best practices for managing the end-t0-end revenue cycle. May 18-20th at the Hilton, downtown San Francisco, the conference is geared for sales and marketing folks. (BTW, the hotel is almost sold out) The conference organizers have one rule for the speakers – give the audience actionable advice they can implement the next day.
I’m honored to keynote Day 2 (May 19th) at the early hour of 8:00am. Am secretly hoping that all the city bars close early the night before. The keynote is about the people side of alignment and how to deal with it; euphemistically called the Clash of the Titans.
The six archetypes of sales and marketing folks will be discussed along with how to handle them as well as the natural pairing of archetypes. A Thinker goes well with a Strategist. A Tactican and Junkie fit naturally well. And a Blamer as well as an Egoist are misfits. But I want to go further than that and talk about the role of the CEO in alignment. Because in the end if the company leader doesn’t ‘get it’, then the road to alignment looks very different based on what archetypes are roaming the halls.
Not sure if I’ll do slides as I have a particular aversion to death by PowerPoint. But I discovered this nifty little tool I want to try – AutoTweet – which lets you send out pre-defined tweets, automatically, from your slide deck. Either way at 8am the talk needs to be memorable and actionable.
If you’re attending and there is topic or idea you want to throw into my speech-ideation process – drop me a note or reply to this post. Because at the end of the day, this speech is for you.
Posted by Christine on April 9, 2011 under Uncategorized |
It could be a modern Cinderella story. As chief executives struggle with harnessing product innovation to their corporate carriages so as to propel sustainable growth, one of their most promising assets could actually be hiding in plain sight. It’s their company’s under-appreciated IT department.
It’s not that IT work goes unnoticed; it’s just that it’s more often seen as a housekeeping function than a strategic source. Indeed, a 2010 survey conducted by Harris Interactive revealed that CEOs consistently rank IT as the most innovative of their companies’ functional organizations.
In fact, in business after business, IT has long been tasked with improving company service levels, integrating new technology, and supporting a growing array of applications – all while keeping costs under control. The best companies have even turned this capacity for doing more with less into a competitive advantage. Even so, chief executives and directors rarely invite IT to the innovation strategy table.
So just how can companies leverage their IT’s enterprise innovation skills to increase product success rates and exploit new market opportunities? Take a closer look at the problem: why companies need to improve their product innovation management in the first place.
Following the near-death experience of the Great Recession, companies now face a global business environment marked by accelerated speeds and regionalized economic cycles. Nimble competitors, seemingly coming from nowhere, quickly stake claim to new market opportunities. Product lifecycles contract. And emerging markets no longer settle for glocalized products.
In response, executives are clearly seeing the need to get the right products into their customers’ hands as quickly as possible. In fact, according to a Boston Consulting Group survey, more than 70 percent of senior executives said that innovation is one of their top strategic priorities. But to get there, they need to build a different kind of operational model. Specifically, a model that can:
- Match their innovation initiatives to strategic business objectives
- Reprioritize initiatives and product portfolios in response to changing market conditions
- Balance investment in sustaining current products versus disruptive initiatives
- Infuse customer responsiveness into everyone, regardless of their job
- Uncover new market opportunities and respond with the right products
Making that kind of operational model work requires an agile approach to innovation management. It also requires continuous alignment between executive and development organizations. We call that model strategic agility. Through it, executive strategy stays in tune with market conditions. Functional organizations react in unison to changes in that strategy. And a set of operational practices and supporting technologies is then defined to keep all eyes focused and all hands synchronized.
However achieving that organizational alignment is easier said than done. A 2009 global executive survey on managing innovation by PTRM Consultants confirmed that more than 60 percent were concerned about their ability to link strategy with execution, and that 50 percent of their R&D investments never saw a return.
Enter IT
More than any other enterprise entity, IT comprehends the data, process and automation needs of each departmental function. Innovation management in general, and strategic agility in particular, requires technology to make data instantly and globally accessible with support services that span the enterprise. So here are just a few of the areas where IT can assume a leading role in implementing strategic agility.
- Define the requirements and access policies for a global repository to house market and economic data, resource capacity, market assumptions, business plans, product requirements, and schedules.
- Define standards, methods and interfaces for acquiring real-time market data, communicating with external stakeholders, and capturing data stored behind firewalls in repositories and static formats such as notebooks, spreadsheets, presentations.
- Define traceability and auditing policies to ensure that changes in data, strategy, priorities and resources remain consistent throughout the enterprise.
- Work with IT software vendors to ensure that available technology supports the company’s needs for strategic agility.
Finally, IT’s role in servicing a broad customer base presents an opportunity for companies looking to improve product idea management. IT can use this expertise to create processes for analyzing, selecting and prioritizing ideas gathered from internal and external sources.
Companies that adopt strategic agility can markedly improve their performance. Measures of success can include deeper market penetration, higher ROI, lower R&D costs, higher percentages of revenue from new products, stronger margins, and consistent growth patterns. According to Gartner, companies employing data-driven, predictive decision-making outperform their peers by as much as 25 percent across many of these metrics.
The opportunity is tremendous. The rewards are clear. But strategic agility requires executives to embrace change. And a happily ever after ending is available to those who succeed. But midnight is approaching for many, and getting home can only be done by shining the spotlight on IT.