Disrupting The Game

Category: Change

  • Reprioritise Point of Sale and focus on Point of Value

    Reprioritise Point of Sale and focus on Point of Value

    How many of our customer realise genuine value when they engage with the people, products, services, and experiences which constitute a brand?

    Too few, according to CX guru and the Head of the Qualtrics XM Institute Bruce Temkin.

    Bruce has recently revisited the case he originally made back in 2010 for organisations to focus on the value customers derive. He argues for a concept called Point of Value to be recognised as the next logical step after the traditional Point of Sale or transaction stage.

    According to Bruce sales without customer value are like a Ponzi scheme. They feel good in the moment, but the long-term outcome is likely to be negative.

    “Too many organizations overly focus on selling their products and services, keeping a tight eye on short term metrics like sales targets,” Bruce writes, “but sales are not necessarily an indication of long-term success. What’s missing from the picture? Value!”

    “If customers don’t get value from their purchases, then they are likely to return them, stop using them, not renew them, and tell others to stay away. Does that sound like a sustainable blueprint?!? Of course not. However, most organizations have a hard time breaking their addiction to sales numbers.”

    Bruce challenges companies to compare and contrast their focus on sales targets versus the usually secondary effort they devote to delivering value.

    “It’s time for organizations to shift their focus from sales to value! If we see an economic downturn, then the focus on value will become even more critical as companies are pushed to target their limited resources at retaining customers.

    According to Bruce a POV mindset would mean the following:

    • A clear measure of customer value that’s used as a critical KPI for the entire business, driving everything from sales commissions to bonuses for the product development teams.
    • Support for customers to help them envision and articulate their POV and match their purchases accordingly.
    • Cross-functional journey teams with responsibility for driving success during the engagement phase for key customer segments, and continuously monitoring any changes in how customers perceive the POV.
    • Product organizations adopting a focus on “designing for value” by prioritizing features and enablement that streamlines the path to POV over new capabilities. Rather than considering feature adoption as a customer success function, product teams are responsible for ensuring that it is as easy as possible for customers to reach the POV.
  • The decisive new NPS metric: earned growth rate

    The decisive new NPS metric: earned growth rate

    Is “earned growth rate” the complementary metric which will transform the Net Promoter System (NPS) from being not only the most popular customer experience metric but also the most gamed and abused?

    Bain’s Fred Reichheld has returned to the Harvard Business Review, where he first introduced the NPS model in 2003, advocating for the new metric.

    To calculate their earned growth rates, firms must have systems, process and people that will gather data on the costs and revenues for each customer over time and must ask all new customers why did they buy?

    If the reason is a referral or recommendation, a customer is “earned”; if it’s advertising, a promotional deal, or a persuasive salesperson, the customer is “bought”.

    Reichheld says “we realized that the only way to make the system work better was to develop a complementary metric that drew on accounting results”.

    However, firms will not be able to credible calculate their earned growth rate unless they have their technology, people and process act together and most do not.

    Reichheld acknowledges this issue, but states “it’s time to get serious about measuring (and reporting) the progress … and to recognize that improving the lives of the people we serve is the only way to win”.

  • SOS: high impact predictive tool or overrated and over hyped?

    SOS: high impact predictive tool or overrated and over hyped?

    Is the number of times that a brand is typed into Google the new high-impact, predictive business metric?

    Marketing science gurus, Tasman Murray and Ken Roberts, debate Share of Search’s merit, whilst I moderate, in this compelling webinar from the Growth Colony: Australia’s B2B Community.

    Be prepared to resort to Google Translate for the Latin that Tas and Ken inject into their exchanges! #shareofsearch.

    https://youtu.be/PVuaqS0dP5s

  • Slow progress is not good enough

    Slow progress is not good enough

    Now into its second decade, the survey by leading Australian B2B marketing agency Green Hat shows that marketers are achieving only slow progress in digitising and driving commercial outcomes.

    Unfortunately, just 28% of respondents reported having achieved their objectives in the current survey. That’s not good enough. The case for incremental improvement has never been weaker than it is today with the pandemic disrupting our business world forever. Those that not only survive but thrive will be orchestrating leaps forward in the coming months and years, with marketing in the lead.

    Thanks to the pandemic we are all moving rapidly to a digital world, where business, especially business-to-business activity, happens wherever people are.

    Businesses who did not have their digital platform acts together were especially vulnerable during the pandemic-stricken 2020. They struggled to facilitate online commerce efficiently and with the ease. Their vision,  leadership, data, people, process and system silos and deficiencies were exposed by the transparent front door that is their web presence.

    Critically, today’s B2B customers know what good looks like thanks to their own personal commerce experiences with the leading B2C brands. In 2021 all B2B players, must fast forward their digitisation ambitions with their marketers playing decisive roles. 

    Today, no matter what industry you are in, it’s not enough to simply promote your brand and make, market and sell a product or service. You need a digital community marketplace. An integrated, self-service, collaboration environment (web + commerce + marketing automation + CRM + analytics and ERP) where you customers interact, buy (ideally, subscribe), share, engage and learn from one another. 

    In this transformational climate, now, more than ever, we marketers must step up and lead. Marketers have to exercise genuine customer-focused influence and advocacy both horizontally and vertically across their organisations.

    It means, for example, embracing service, supply chain and transaction management as the new marketing. There is little value in assembling and advertising blue sky brand promises if your supply chain is not close to best in class, if your customer service team is an island and your ERP landscape is a patchwork of dinosaur legacy systems with 20th century DNA. 

    The Green Hat report highlights, the despite progress on many fronts, marketing must speed up.

  • Disconnect and run

    Disconnect and run

    Disconnect and run: Netflix’s Social Dilemma. Conscientious defectors explain that addiction and privacy breaches are features not bugs in this compelling documentary. Vladimir Putin did not have to hack Facebook to intervene in the Brexit vote and the 2016 US election, he simply had to use it. And Netflix itself operates a supremely optimised algorithmic business model. Solutions anyone?

  • Marketing must earn its Board Room credibility

    Marketing must earn its Board Room credibility

  • Missing in action: dynamic and transparent dashboards?

    Missing in action: dynamic and transparent dashboards?

    Where are our governments’ COVID-19 dashboards?

    As most professionals know, dashboards are visualization tools used to communicate actionable information. Governments do appear to have them, in various iterations, but are they being effectively utilized, dynamically reflecting real-time data and transparently available to their citizens?

    Seeing our leaders, from the Victorian State Premier, Daniel Andrews, here in Australia, to the UK’s Boris Johnson and the United States’ Donald Trump, repeatedly stand at their podiums with their paper notes, and little else, I cannot help but wonder are these guys analogue leaders adrift in our digital age?

    #dashboards

  • Tesla’s “blitzscaling” wins

    Tesla’s “blitzscaling” wins

    Tesla, the company accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy, has recorded its fourth profitable quarter in succession.

    It’s $US 104 million Q2 2020 result again exceeded expectations and confirmed that Tesla continues to stake out its own territory as the world’s most dynamic brand with “blitzscaling” growth fueled by commanding leads in battery technology, vehicle software, solar energy, autonomous driving, data-driven insurance, collaborative social marketing and its “alien dreadnought” gigafactories.

    As leading analyst Dan Ives says, it is “Tesla’s world now and everyone else is paying rent”.

    Tesla’s former Quality VP Philippe Chain recently shared a great culture insight.

    Chain, who has also worked at Renault and Audi, wrote: “what took a single meeting and five days at Tesla would have required a six-month-long process at Renault or Audi. It would have started with a thorough investigation going back to the source of the error, looking for the person to blame internally, investigating a possible blunder of the supplier, etc. Then, a politically delicate sequence would have unfolded to set up a series of meetings and workshops. Multiple hierarchical strata would have been involved, going up probably to the very top of the organization.

    “That is the key to the Tesla Way: expedited, value-driven procedures, implemented with a maximum delegation, and a fast decision-making process in a flat structure.”

  • Survey better not less

    Survey better not less

    Make your customer sentiment surveys better, don’t scale them back; and ask “is there anything we could have done to make your experience more exceptional?” Great insight from Net Promoter System (NPS) creator Fred Reichheld.

    Fred also argues that our 2020 COVID-19 pandemic is a time for companies to pause and reflect on the future, “what will they stop doing? Were their old goals and aspirations enough?”

    “The Net Promoter Score® helps companies improve their human footprint by clarifying how they affect the lives they touch, of both customers and employees,” Fred says.

    At least two thirds of the Fortune 500 employ a Net Promoter Score program. It is, by far, the most popular sentiment measuring tool.

    Fred says companies use NPS to try to establish how well they are treating their customers and employees.

    “This moment presents an opportunity for all of us and all companies to reconsider our primary purpose, to get back to core principles. The pollution of ‘habit’ and the apparently ‘urgent’ has been cleared aside.”

  • The platform is now the Salesforce story

    The platform is now the Salesforce story

    Salesforce’s “platform and other” business unit jumped ahead of the core CRM sales and service automation clouds during their FY21 Q1, highlighting how companies are finally getting their digital platform acts together.

    The pandemic is no doubt an accelerator, but the essential truth is that we must all be platform companies today.

    During the his Q1 earnings call, CEO Mark Benioff cited the platform play that new mega customer AT&T is embracing: “every customer touch point: the AT&T truck pulls up to my office or my home, that’s going to be Salesforce; I walk into the AT&T store and that’s going to be Salesforce. I’m getting an email from AT&T and that’s going to be Salesforce; and I’m on the phone with the AT&T call center and that’s going to be Salesforce. We’re going to make sure that they have that Customer 360-enhanced data, and when we’re integrating all that data MuleSoft is going to connect AT&T’s different back-end systems, Tableau is giving them the ability to understand customer preferences and Einstein is going to help them serve more intelligent recommendations and route service cases”.

    AI is a big part of the Salesforce platform story. This good blog post explains how to make AI business use case.