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.
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.
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.
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.