Christine Crandell

Lithium Takes a Stand on Customer Experience Hype

Christine — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:46:09 +0000

The echo chamber on customer experience is so loud it almost drowns out any creative thought you might have floating in your head. It’s coming from all corners with everyone jumping on the bandwagon. As companies grapple with what it means, if it’s relevant for them and how the heck to get started, B2B technology vendors are circling like beasts eyeing a herd on the savannah…..

Read the full article on Forbes.

The post Lithium Takes a Stand on Customer Experience Hype appeared first on Christine Crandell.

Sales and Marketing Alignment Begins With Your Customer

Christine — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 00:27:36 +0000

50 percent of B2B sales staff keep missing their quotas. It’s a problem as old as business itself. The culprit, according to sales, is the quality and volume of leads from marketing. The marketing department may be quick to snap back that sales is ignoring their leads or not trying hard enough to close them. When the squabbling causes the revenue pipeline to become even more unpredictable, that gets the CEO’s attention…..

Read the full article on Forbes.

The post Sales and Marketing Alignment Begins With Your Customer appeared first on Christine Crandell.

Is Your Org Chart Driving Customers Away?

Christine — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 13:24:39 +0000

Companies today accept an abhorrent level of dysfunction as the status quo. Studies show that knowledge-workers spend half their day in meetings and employee engagement is at an all-time low. More people than ever hate their jobs and many feel they are drowning in bureaucracy and politics. It affects everything: the top-line, the bottom-line and employee esteem….

Read the full article on Forbes.

The post Is Your Org Chart Driving Customers Away? appeared first on Christine Crandell.

Should Sales Own Customer Experience?

Christine — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 15:18:34 +0000

Closing deals and driving revenue has been at the top of the agenda since the dawn of commerce. However, the sense of urgency and bewilderment about how to grow a company is at an all time high. As I recently blogged,experiments with Chief Revenue Officers have largely failed with the burden for revenue falling, historically, most heavily on sales, even if sometimes unfairly……

Read the full article on Forbes.

The post Should Sales Own Customer Experience? appeared first on Christine Crandell.

Why Mergers Kill Customer Value

Christine — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 17:29:22 +0000

The M&A season is underway. Dell is looking at a $24 billion private equity deal that will privatize the company. Berkshire Hathaway is looking to buy H. J. Heinz, the ketchup brand, for $23 billion. Liberty Global wants to buy Virgin Media, a British cable provider, for $16 billion. US Airways and American Airlines are merging to form the world’s largest airline…..

Read the full article on Forbes.

The post Why Mergers Kill Customer Value appeared first on Christine Crandell.

Become Customer-Centric in 4 Steps

Christine — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 04:12:15 +0000

There’s a lot of discussion in marketing communities about how important the customer is and the role of customer experience programs, but few offer a prescriptive pathway to improving customer centricity; Probably because the exact steps that need to be taken are not as obvious as it is in other aspects of business. The CEO may know that their corporate culture needs to be adjusted to focus more on the customer, instead of internal politics, but not what steps to take to achieve a cultural transition.

One of the ways New Business Strategies differs from other customer experience and business strategy consultancies is our concrete methodology for consistently aligning organizations with their buyers with pre-built programs we have implemented before. Everything about our methodology is based on our Sellers’ Compass, which provides a framework to map the journey buyers go through in their lifecycle as a prospect and customer. Clients that understand what influences a buyer’s decision to buy, renew and evangelize their products develop a North star that guides their path to aligning with the customer’s decisions that contribute to revenue.

I’m happy to announce today that we have finally committed our methodology to paper in a new whitepaper that serves as the industry’s first actionable, how-to for building a customer-centric organization.

Read the whitepaper at: http://www.newbizs.com/resource-library/papers-stories-webinars/experience-to-revenue-white-paper/

The post Become Customer-Centric in 4 Steps appeared first on Christine Crandell.

Don’t Waste Innovation on Products

Christine — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:15:43 +0000

Innovation will never die, but we need to take a broader view of it; a view where the product and technology is just one component of innovating a remarkable, meaningful and valued customer experience. Innovation can take place in business models, culture, delivery methods or support. Innovation is not about invention – not in the way we think of invention anyway…..

Read the full article on Forbes.

The post Don’t Waste Innovation on Products appeared first on Christine Crandell.

Customer Experience: Is It the Chicken or Egg?

Christine — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 18:50:57 +0000

Companies are starting to see the light. They are embracing the principles that Apple, Google, and Philips Electronics have been advocating for a long time – differentiate yourself based on the experience you deliver to customers; not on the products you sell. According to a CEI Survey, 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience. But only 1% of customers feel that vendors consistently meet their expectations. These statistics highlight the magnitude of the growth opportunity before us. What if you just increased the percentage of consistently happy customers by 5%?….

Read the full article on Forbes.

The post Customer Experience: Is It the Chicken or Egg? appeared first on Christine Crandell.

Customer-Centric Messaging JIT for Sales Kick-Off

Christine — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 21:54:28 +0000

It’s three weeks before annual Sales Kick Off event and there’s grumbling in the hallways about marketing’s messaging. It just doesn’t seem to work and wouldn’t it be nice if more effective messaging could be shared with the sales team at Kick Off. It doesn’t really matter if the conclusion that the current messaging is wrong was reached by sales, marketing or management. L ikewise, arguing that the messaging is correct is both fruitless and a political blunder…

Read the full article on Forbes.

The post Customer-Centric Messaging JIT for Sales Kick-Off appeared first on Christine Crandell.

Why Customer Loyalty Is Hard

Christine — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 13:25:45 +0000

Wrapping your business around the customer has been a core business principle since before Adam Smith wrote the “Wealth of Nations” in 1776. Yet every year, there are new technologies, theories, and business models that promise to get a company closer to its customer, as if customer alignment had just been discovered for the first time. Do we really need new-fangled ways of solving the problem, when many companies have performed well at customer alignment for centuries?…

Read the full article on Forbes.

The post Why Customer Loyalty Is Hard appeared first on Christine Crandell.