- Christine
- August 3rd, 2013
- Forbes Blog
Much of today’s discussion on B2B customer experience focuses on interactions. What is the buyer doing? What content are they interacting with and where? How can sales engage with the buyer earlier? While understanding the specific actions and motivations of buyers is important to delivering a valued lifetime customer experience, it is not everything....
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- Christine
- March 9th, 2013
- Forbes Blog
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......
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- Christine
- January 12th, 2013
- Forbes Blog
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...
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- Christine
- November 30th, 2012
- Forbes Blog
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?...
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- Christine
- October 13th, 2012
- Forbes Blog
The transition to a customer-centric organization will transform many Chief Revenue Officers into Chief Customer Officers. As organizations realize that the customer experience and relationship is the asset that leads to revenues, CROs will shift focus from the revenues themselves, to the customers that deliver it. For CROs making this transition, it may feel like unfamiliar territory.....
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- Christine
- September 9th, 2012
- Forbes Blog
It’s budget season for most companies and a key part of the process is balancing revenue targets with investment levels. We all know how the story plays out; it’s always a fight leaving all involved bruised and sore with a good amount of lost trust. Oddly, people wonder why Sales and Marketing don’t get along? The irony is that both Sales and Marketing are wrong.....
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- Christine
- August 29th, 2012
- Forbes Blog
Most sellers are product-feature obsessed while their Fortune 100 buyers are relationship focused. In a recent study conducted on how companies purchase technology we found that Fortune 100 organizations place more importance on the quality of their vendor relationships than how well the product or service performs. Fortune 100 buyers are frustrated with the state of their vendor relationships .....
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- ccrandell
- February 1st, 2012
- Forbes Blog
Getting one's arm around sales is a persistent challenge that plagues every CEO, CRO and sales leader; the numbers just keep moving around. Tracking a pipeline can be like driving across the Golden Gate Bridge on a foggy morning, which is about every morning. One day the pipeline is strong, the next day panic has set in as it looks like sales will miss its number, followed the next day by claims “it's OK, we're good.” What’s really going on is guesswork. Despite automation like CRM, SFA, and ERP systems, analytics, and Sales Operations teams engaged in sophisticated analysis, it is still guesswork. Sales remain a black box…
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