It’s my data. Give it to me. Oh, and help me leverage it, too.
This demand is customary in the business world, but increasingly it comes from the mouths of consumers.
How Did We Get Here?
The consumerization of data analysis is not new. You could put your finger on any point in the timeline of humanity, as far back as the invention of the printing press.
A key inflection point in the 1980’s occurred when the widespread adoption of personal computers made us all publishers. Later we got networked and could share our documents and spreadsheets. It continued in the 90’s with email, and the advent of the Worldwide Web for searching and sifting, managing virtual folders, bookmarking, saving, copying, sharing etc. In recent decade, we built a habit of tapping data stores for making decisions – in online shopping with its price comparison engines. For most of us, a Google search is our first resort.
Today our social media tools help us to sort and manage our relationships, connections, conversations, and the statistics about those sorting processes, into visual and mental maps about our lives. Hmmm….Is your organization generating customer data that’s worth sharing with your customers?
As Clay Shirky remarked in his book “Here Comes Everybody“, the problem is “not information overload, it’s filter failure”. We really can only care about the most meaningful data. Which data is that? How do we decide? What tools are available? I mention a few cool ones below.
The Tyranny of Time
That issue is inflated by the tyranny of time. We each only have so many waking hours in each day. Joke alert: I booked a couple of hours this Saturday afternoon for some spontaneity, but I may have to time shift it to Sunday. Hmm, I’ll just mark it as Tentative on both days. We’ll see.
We depend on data, and love when it is presented visually. If you have used your smartphone to scan the merchandise QR code, or compare prices with a Google search while “showrooming” in a store, you get the value of massive data visualization on a small scale. If you use a free GPS app on your phone to navigate to a new destination, you get it. If you filter your Twitter feeds using Lists, you get it.
Who’s Doing It?
Visualize and zoom in on your LinkedIn connections via InMaps
The new mantra is: Gimme my data, in a way that helps me gain insight to make better decisions faster.
One problem: detecting the useful faint signals in all that data is often a daunting task, but usually yields a few “Aha!” moments if you know how to leverage tools, whether you are a consumer, producer or business. A few people are making progress in this area, like Coloci and LinkedIn Labs’ InMaps (visit http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com ) which gives you a new way to visualize your connections and discover new relationships – an absolute must for any sales prospector. In the enterprise space, new entrants like Qliktech are invigorating the space long dominated by established players like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Microstrategy. In the catalog retailer space, we now have Pluris Marketing. Have you tried them? Have you found others you’d recommend? Are you onto the “Quantified Self” movement? Have you synced your FitBit fitness tracking device today?
What are you doing to give people transparent access to their data? Whatever you decide to to, it just might make you their hero.
The path to sustained sales and marketing alignment can be a simple one – simple to do, simple to repeat, simple to remember. All you need is a map. In that spirit, I attempt here to boil down some alignment opportunities for Sales and Marketing leaders, into a single graphic.
The chart below shows the three main focus areas each for Sales and Marketing which, if approached collaboratively, can improve business results and transform the relationship. Below the chart is a set of definitions, followed by a few examples of how to apply it to your own situation.
Sales and Marketing Alignment topics
3 Sales goals – Value, Volume, Velocity
Value. Since it is almost as costly to close a small sale as it is to close a large sale, Sales professionals would be wise to focus on increasing the potential Value of each sale. In larger organizations, differently skilled teams manage different sized deals.
Volume. The more dealflow you can create, the better your chances of growing your customer base, learning from their needs to improve your offering, and improving the company’s financial ability to innovate and fulfill those evolving customer needs.
Velocity. Increasing the speed of deal flow can also increase your capacity to sell, grow the customer community, and learn from them to help you innovate and improve. It becomes a flywheel.
Content. The more compelling and relevant your content, the more you will attract the audience most likely to benefit from your offerings.
Community. The more your content resonates within and among audiences, the greater your capacity to build a community and engage in dialogue to improve sales, products, services, and support.
Conversion. The more effectively you convert sales, the more you can learn from customer experience about how to improve your engagement, conversion and product improvement processes.
Conversations Worth Starting
Using the 3×3 chart above, look at the 9 intersecting boxes and ask the questions implied by the two nouns whose paths cross in each box.
Example 1: Value + Content. In the upper left intersecting box, where Value and Content intersect, Marketing might ask: How can we improve our Content to increase the Value of each sale? Sales might ask: How can the improved Value of each sale guide us in improving Content? It’s the same question, asked from different perspectives, that aligns your response.
Example 2: Conversion + Velocity. In the bottom right box, where Conversion and Velocity intersect, Marketing might be asking: How can we improve the Conversion process to accelerate the Velocity of Sales? Sales might ask: What sales accelerators (velocity) can we use as input for improving the Conversion process?
See how it works? You may come up with better questions to suit your organization’s culture and challenges. Now, formulate your own questions using the relevant nouns for each intersecting box, turn those questions loose in your organization, and watch what happens.
Measuring results with analytics, sales CRM and marketing automation solutions can help you measure and manage your improvement. If you need assistance here, contact us.
How’s it working for you? What questions would you ask your colleagues to help you get better aligned? Drop us a comment here; we’d love to hear your feedback! Visit our Resources page for more free strategy tool downloads.
The customer is King, but Users are your Universe – your “User-verse”. How do you stay at their center?
According to Forrester Research, by mid-decade over half of all purchasing will be done online. For post-digital people (think: Millenials & their iGen progeny), who represent the incoming wave of buyers, influencers and decision makers, this has already come to pass. Millenials are comfortable with technology; iGens are uncomfortable without it. Today’s post-digital citizens deftly filter and apply information to move smartly through life. Socializing and transacting online is ordinary and commonplace. Today’s cadre of decision makers, too, use mobile and social filters to navigate decisions and find relevance in the bit-torrent of change. Collectively, we are your expanding User-verse. For us, B2C and B2B are becoming less different. Now it’s U2E (Users to Everybody), and therein lies a challenge: filtering and relevance.
The challenge is especially acute for Marketing leaders, who are now being held accountable for ROI while also striving to maintain respect and relevance with audiences. Some organizations do a great job at meeting the needs of our always-on audience. I call them Fan Foundries. We recognize them by their digital presence in our lives: everything real-word is mirrored and ehanced online, where it can be detected and consumed by customers, suppliers, employees etc. In turn, our digital travels are observed by these smart Fan Foundries to determine how best to help us through our decision journey and, where appropriate, engage and buy. You know you’re dealing with a Fan Foundry when your next interaction feels like a continuation or enhancement of the prior one, rather than another blind date.
How are you doing?
How is your organization doing? Are you at the center of your Userverse? You probably know that answer, but try this experiment. Visit Amazon, iTunes, or some other online account you admire. Compare that online experience to that of your own business. If you don’t measure up, be assured somebody is going to steal your business soon. How soon? How about…while you’re reading this? If you’re still doing mainly interruptive, outbound marketing, yet your audience is filtering out your messages (via spamblock, TiVo, Unsubscribe, delete key, etc.), what are you doing to help yourself get found and stay relevant?
Fortunately, you no longer need a massive budget to master your User-verse. What, then, do you need? What does a balanced, humming Fan Foundry look like? Layer by layer, it might resemble this:
click to enlarge
Front end – Web interfaces (desktop, mobile, kiosk, email, social media, etc.). The online experience these days is spotty at best, but many good examples exist and they’re in plain view. Good poets borrow, so why not learn from the best, then adapt and refine it based on what you learn from your User-verse as they navigate your content, make choices, and send you signals about what they buy and why.
Content layer – main website content, product/service literature, user-generated content (reviews, comments, etc.), custom apps, partner portals, blogs, e-newsletters, online forums, social media, customer care & service channels, etc. Rich content, re-formatted for channels and micro-audiences, is a golden opportunity to anticipate and delight users, keep you appropriately centered, and signal you on when and how to engage. Just like your web navigation, your content navigation can be tested and refined based on user behavior.
Information management layer – CRM, marketing automation, analytics, modeling, planning, supply chain, financial datastores, etc. Here, with an array of connected technologies, you can dashboard, orchestrate and analyze the flow of people, information and material to discover competitive advantage and facilitate progress. Don’t let the geek factor frighten you from implementing some basic, essential tools. Dig in and ask for help. Or not. And be toast. (Suggestion: call us)
Records/data layer – In an age where more and more data is publicly available and public-generated, your ability to harness data to learn and adapt more quickly could spell success or failure. Master this layer, and you can spend more time selling, transacting business and nurturing future customers while cutting out time-wasters. By cultivating your own data sources and applying your own relevance filters you can speed learning and adaptation, and improve your ability to reliably forecast a profitable future.
What stands in the way of progress? The usual responses are resources, people, skills, time, money, and appetite for change. Okay, but wouldn’t you like to delight customers and win new ones? Wouldn’t you like to substantially and sustainably grow revenue? Wouldn’t you like to still be in business and growing – or, if losing, at least know why you’re losing so you can adapt and improve?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, and you just need resources and expertise to make it happen, contact us.
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Get started today! Visit our Resources page to download free planning tools.
Having worked with Nexaweb Technologies , who modernize legacy b2b enterprise apps for secure Web access and live transaction enablement, and with QVew on b2c mobile/social campaigns for tourism,travel,entertainment and event marketing, we’ve learned some lessons that will keep you out of the weeds. As usual, we’ve added some bonus links at the end of this article. ~Ed
More smart phones with full web browsing capability are sold than TVs, PCs and laptops in the US. Ninety percent of us keep the cell phone within reach 24/7. If you are contemplating ways to reach your mobile audience via mobile and web apps, what criteria would you use to decide? The following chart shows general considerations for investing in mobile apps and mobile websites.
Factors affecting mobile and web app investment decisions
Here is an expanded discussion on technical considerations for investing in mobile apps vs. mobile website solutions. For a discussion on audience, fanbase, user experience and other marketing considerations, contact us.
Technical Factors
1. Audience
Ask yourself: Who is my audience? Do they use mobile devices? Do they prefer native apps or mobile websites? Native App audiences are generally more affluent, and the most affluent are the most active app users. If that info alone sufficiently defines your target audience, then, Bingo! A native app strategy would suit you. Be mindful that most native apps are device-specific i.e. what works on an iPhone usually won’t work on an Android or a Blackberry. If your audience cannot be defined by a single platform (iPhone, Blackberry etc.), then expect to build and maintain several versions of your app – one for each device type.
If you find that an immersive brand experience is essential, to serve existing customers and tailor the experience to their needs, interests and account-based behavior, then the tighter integration offered by native apps for each device’s native features seems the best solution.
Web apps, on the other hand, are far easier to distribute. Unlike native apps, which require you to market and distribute therm, Web apps work on any device with a browser and require no download, thus their distribution is more easily supported by the Web’s linking technology. So, if your audience is broad and cannot be defined by socio-economic factors or a specific platform, a web app may be your best bet. Another perk: HTML 5 has arrived just in time. HTML5 enables app-like performance such as embedded video, so it won’t matter whether your device uses Flash Player, QuickTime, or some other installed video player; HTML 5 doesn’t need those plugins to run video. As for cost: Web development talent is not as rare and costly as native app development talent, further cementing the budget-friendly appeal of Web apps.
Distribution of Web based apps is much easier, because anyone can do a web search on any device, or click on a link, to immediately use your app. Native apps, by contrast, have to be downloaded, and you will need to spend some effort and resources to promote each native app and spur people to download your app. This is not a huge obstacle, especially with existing customers, but it’s a necessary one that doesn’t apply to mobile websites. This difference is becoming less of a technical issue and more of a pure marketing /distribution issue, as technical advances have made the app download/install/update process more smooth.
2. Function and Purpose
Ask: What will my App actually do? If you expect your app to make use of device features like GPS, account info, etc., then a native app is the way to go. Also, if you intend to engage your audience via games that work offline and only occasionally connect online, again a native app is the better choice.
If, on the other hand, you plan to simply host an information-gathering user experience online, and require users to access data sources controlled by you via a Web server, then a web based app seems a better choice. A nice advantage of a Web based app is that you can completely and whimsically make daily changes to the user interface and content, and even dynamically serve targeted content, and immediately those changes become available to your Web app visitor.
3. Time
If you want to get instant updates and enhancements in the hands of all users, and you contemplate frequent time-sensitive updates, then unquestionably a mobile website or web based app is for you. If, on the other hand, you contemplate a relatively stable app experience that deeply engages customers, and you have secure account information or a few data sets you need to deploy, and you also require tight integration with device features, then a native app solution seems more fitting. It’s also feasible to place some Web-like (HTML) components in a native app when Web performance is needed, resulting in a sort of hybrid app – part native app, part Website.
Another consideration is turnaround time for launches and changes. With native apps, that timeline is longer and rather more unpredictable than with web apps, since native apps are usually hosted by an online app store whose approval process can be lengthy and opaque – and the rejection process is often equally mysterious. You can get around the app store mystery, though, if your typical user audience is well-defined and securely controlled, such as employees, customers or organization members rather than the general public, and you contemplate launching multiple apps that each perform different sets of functions. If such is the case, consider launching your own app store and hosting your apps yourself.
4. Budget and Talent
Chalk up another win for Web apps here. With a Web app, you only need one or two versions. A .mobi version may be necessary unless your main website is architected using, say, CSS, to re-format on-the-fly and fit any size screen. Web development talent is less scarce and expensive than native app development talent. By contrast, if you go the Native App route and need to create multiple device versions to reach various user audiences, expect a compounded cost of development, maintenance and upgrade, not to mention the coordination and management of uniform performance across all versions in your app portfolio. Only the most disciplined development teams can pull this off.
Conclusion
Along the continuum of user experience, native apps are killer – for now. They can make use of a device’s native resources (hence their name) like geolocation, phone, camera, address book, secure wallet, etc. And they don’t require an online connection unless you want to offer some sort of group play or data interchange. The trade-off is that building a mobile app will cost you in terms of talent, lack of control over approval process and launch/update timelines in the app stores, costs and time involved in marketing and distribution, and the effort and tooling needed to maintain multiple versions for various devices.
Web apps, by contrast, are relatively less costly to build and maintain because the talent is less scarce, giving you flexibility to respond to customer requirements with changes and enhancements – an attractive consideration. The emergence of HTML5 is further impetus to consider Web app versions, since HTML 5 solves performance issues, enabling web developers to create many app-like performance experiences in an ordinary Web browser.
Epilogue: Customers Have the Last Word
According to a 2011 study by Modapt and Morrisey & Company, the three top dissatisfactions among mobile users are:
Navigation difficulties
Slow download speed
Difficulty reading and finding information
With this information in mind, think about what it would take to plan and execute a mobile experience that “wows” your audience. If you plan to create an experience that is on par with everything that exists out there today, think again. Mobile users are frustrated. This is your opportunity to outshine.
What has your experience been? Still have questions? Ask away!
Related articles
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Gamification is not just playing games online. It involves an understanding how the science of game mechanics can motivate us to achieve our goals.
Being a Fan Foundry involves applying principles of human motivation. Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Need” suggests that once our basic food, clothing and shelter needs are met, we are free to satisfy higher level needs like belonging, learning and self-actualization. We humans are a constantly striving bunch.
Sales and Marketing professionals have long studied Maslow, B. F. Skinner and others to learn how to recognize and interpret “buy” signals, improve the buyer experience, increase qualified leads and convert more sales. Whether you are in retail, e-commerce, enterprise sales, education, politics, contract negotiation or consulting, a review of some basic principles might help you discover ways to improve your results.
In this upcoming series of “Why We Buy” articles, we examine the science and review real world examples of their application, so you can consider how they may fit your own business challenges.
Use the “Keep in Touch” button (right sidebar, top) to receive monthly notices of upcoming installments in this series.
“Why We Buy” Topics (click live titles to visit articles; more to come)
