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.
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.
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?
Why I Broke Up with Evernote After 13 Years
As subscription business models continue to expand I believe it’s time to pay more attention to the subscriber’s experience. Buyer behavior has changed and continues to evolve, but one of the consistent areas that buyers look for is advice on purchase decisions from peers. Since you as a subscription business don’t control that peer channel at all, you have to think through how you can try to leverage that influence channel. A successful subscription business survives long term on renewals, not just new business. Create experiences that encourage customers to advocate for you, or at least have a positive opinion of your brand. Or, said another way, the way you treat your subscribers has a direct impact on your business, positive or negative.
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.