Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Customer Journeys: Miles to Go

                   Originally published on CMSWire, May 2013

 

Analyzing customer behaviors and journeys takes a lot of work. Customer interactions are part of a complex of experiences that can occur in many channels and with many functions in the enterprise. Customer experiences are occurring as events, related to cross-functional and cross-channel processes that need to be integrated into a sense of a "single experience" from the customer perspective, as well as integrated in terms of data, process, people, and practices within the enterprise. Further hard work must be done to orchestrate customer touchpoints, which can include multiple teams within the enterprise. Truly putting the best foot forward for customer interactions can be tricky and complicated, even when the best of intentions are in play.

But from the customer's perspective, it's simple: did I get what I wanted or needed -- or not?

And the customer perspective is what counts. What looks complex to vendors probably makes perfect sense to customers – it's their journeys after all. Many organizations are embarking on complicated approaches to working with the customer journey because it has complexity. But I think the real issue is that engaging customers now requires more work from all teams in the enterprise, and many organizations aren't prepared to handle the transition. Dictating step 1, step 2, step 3 with the notion that everyone behaves the same does not work anymore, if it ever did. Social media sites encourage the individual to step out – and companies now have to deal with it.

 

Understanding Your Customers

I've written quite a bit about the "customer as buyer" both here in CMSWire and in my blog. I've talked about connecting the customer journey for B2B software purchases to content marketing and to marketing automation. I've explored the complex interrelationships of three journeys for buying and using enterprise software. Any way you slice it, work has to be done, assessed and fine-tuned to learn more and more about current and potential customers, and how to apply knowledge and insights to developing products that customers will want to buy, and then how to market and sell them.

Part of the hard work depends on robust customer segmentations and predictive analytics. These "tools" require time to set up, refine, and measure against outcomes; then more time to continue improving and changing. Just as the customer journey is frequently ongoing, with no "final destination", the work to engage and support the customer during the buying journey also has no final destination, particularly if companies want the customer to continue to purchase, successfully use and recommend their products.

Analytics can be very important to understanding customers as related to company strategies. But while data and insights help organizations make better decisions, it's the "people" part that often makes or breaks the purchase. Purchase decisions can be based on emotions, hidden agendas, influence from friends, family and colleagues – or even whim.

Customer behaviors constantly change, markets change, business environments change – sometimes for good, sometimes for bad. So efforts for understanding and supporting customer segments and their myriad journeys must be continuously updated. The constants: create products customers want and need; put high quality into all efforts; focus on the customer first, then align company goals to what the company is going to do for customers.

There's no one-size-fits-all. B2B customer journeys are really different from B2C; within those two mega-categories more differences emerge. Multi-channel customer experiences are often fragmented and hard to assemble into a "singular" experience. For one company and its products, there can be multiple customer / buyer journeys. There can be multiple customer categories, and within those categories multiple customer segments. It all depends on the products, how they are sold, who is the target, and how well a company wants to interact with customers.

Customer journeys may mutate, stall, meander – and this simply may be standard operating procedure from the customer perspective. So organizations need to get comfortable with the changeable, quirky nature of buying journeys, and apply "responsive design" to customer service and support, marketing and sales, and corporate goals and strategies. Not only do companies need to deliver what customers want and need over multiple channels and multiple devices, but companies themselves may do well to adopt the persona of a mega-channel with an agile customer focus. Internally a great deal of integration has to happen for teams, functions, processes, and data before an enterprise becomes an interoperating and responsive organization. Successful outcomes can be aligned with customer behaviors and requirements after the organization admits that only the customer owns the experience with the company.

 

 

 

Source: Brian Solis

 

 

Detours Along the Way

Because life is not linear, and neither are most customer journeys, organizations have clear challenges to following and understanding the personalized travels of their buyers. Organizations need to get busy with meeting such challenges to gain real understanding of customer segments and buying proclivities. Organizations create marketing plans to provide support, content, promotions and offers that will stick to the customer wherever the journey is. But these plans often harken back to linear thinking rather than working with the loops and veerings that really happen.

Loops, veers, stalls and detours in buying journeys frequently have nothing to do with the value of products and services or with what other vendors are offering. Customers are people who have work, distractions, other buying journeys (personal and work-related), family matters, and all the other messy stuff of day-to-day life. And surprise! -- most customers simply do not dedicate a full time focus to a particular buying journey. It doesn't matter if it's a B2B or B2C journey.

Detours can include new channels that demand new ways of engaging customers. Mobile devices are increasingly more important to buyers for investigating products and vendors, looking at peer recommendations, asking questions, and in many cases making purchases. Mobile requires new approaches to apps and content – and requires greater agility in organizations to deliver mobile-smart experiences for customers. But many companies lag here and are missing great opportunities. This detour then becomes a dead end for the customer journey.

  

It's Not Your Journey

The customer takes the journey – companies don't lead them or manage them. Companies can provide what is potentially needed at each touchpoint, made more effective when handled using the customer perspective. Companies shouldn't get in the way of the customer taking the journey, but should make it easier for customers to find what they're looking for and to make purchases. Of course "easier" is a relative term. Organizations are striving to provide the right information and support at the right time on the right device and the right channel. Many times this works pretty well or even great; sometimes not. Relevance changes constantly.

Not only do customers have no interest in being "managed" by a company, it's really not possible. But solutions and practices for customer-focused touchpoints such as websites, social media, CRM, CEM, and product fulfillment can and should make it easier for customers to acquire products and services in ways that can also map to company goals. If discarding the notion of customer "command and control" in favor of recognizing that considerable power belongs to the customer proves to be more effective for gaining and retaining customers, then solutions for the different touchpoints should facilitate customer-enabling functions.

The best outcome of any customer interaction or experience should be the value that is derived by the customer – the assessment of that value also belongs to the customer. Organizations don't always know what value was received – or if it was received – even when asking customers directly. It may well be that continuously improved behavioral and predictive analytics processes will reveal far more in this area, far better than a multitude of customer interviews and surveys. Customer actions speak louder than customer words.

  

Related Links

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Three Journeys: Lifecycles of Enterprise Software Buyers & End Users

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the "customer as buyer"

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

B2B Software Strategies: Startups, Starting from Scratch, Re-Inventing

 

I write a lot about different B2B software solutions and try to provide lots to "chew on" about the good and not-so-good aspects of software offerings in different solution spaces. I constantly look at new thinking and work out my own thoughts and recommendations. Beyond the solutions themselves, I also explore other aspects of providing software solutions: new directions, challenges, internal and external factors, and especially a strong focus on the Customer. Making software that benefits the Customer means creating solutions that work the way customers / users work, adopting more effective customer-focused approaches for marketing and selling, and changing from being tech-centric to solving real customer problems. I suppose I want to help software vendors go into "hype rehab", to be able to do things for real, particularly from the customer perspective.

What I write comes from my direct experience working with software vendors, customers and end users. How I gain that experience comes from what I do for a living: consulting with and advising all kinds of B2B software vendors on product strategy, better sales and go-to-market strategies, the right target markets and customer segments. I want to help vendors create software that really benefits customers and end users, and performs well (you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one…).

Over the years I've worked with many different kinds of customers, both for software solutions that I've developed and for packaged solutions from vendors. I respect customers and end users – I also know that customers aren't always right, and don't always have clear motives when it comes to acquiring software. As a solo consultant, I work mostly with startups, and small and mid-sized vendors. I like the mindset of these not-so-large companies and the energy most of them bring to creating software -- but not all of these companies fully understand how to function well as a software vendor that meets customer needs. Just like large software vendors, these companies can get lost in the technology and lose sight of what really matters – if you're in the business of selling software.

    

                                                                                                                         Source: watirmelon.com  

 

 

Software Vendor Strategy

Software technology vendors are challenged more than ever to evolve if they are to survive – this may be even more the case for smaller vendors. Larger traditional software vendors are being challenged by SaaS and cloud offerings, and by customer dissatisfaction with bloated, overpriced monolithic software stacks. Evolutionary pressures are also hitting the software startup world, although many regional start-up communities aren't prepared to recognize such pressures. New ways are emerging for creating new companies that don't adhere to the "old school" startup way of thinking.

Another segment of the software industry that is on the rise relates to companies that re-invent themselves. As companies re-invent themselves, especially smaller vendors, benefits can come from thinking somewhat like a startup, especially when creating a new vision for the company. But these re-inventing companies can also think too much from the startup perspective and forget that they are in a different category with different advantages and challenges.

There are a lot of small software companies that are starting from scratch. But these companies may not exactly fit the "classic" definition of a startup either. Certain "old school" VCs and entrepreneurs only consider a startup to be a company intended for rapid growth through highly disruptive services or solutions intended for a large market, and frequently, to be sold as soon as possible. With today's economic volatility this approach has less effectiveness. The approach is also riddled with subjectivity and ambiguity, and gives rise to endless - and usually pointless - debates about whether certain companies are truly startups.

Whether reinventing or starting from scratch, this question needs to be asked: are your efforts meant to result in flipping the basic company as soon as possible, or do you want to grow into something more? If there are investors, they may push for a quick sale so they can reap their rewards sooner rather than later. So the company should decide early on if the core strategy includes evolution into a mature company. That decision impacts: who should be selected as backers, how to handle employees, who the real target markets and customers are, and many other critical aspects of running a software company.

Focus on Customer for Real Competitive Differentiation

It still eludes many companies (startups, starting from scratch, re-inventing, or well-established) that the "competitive" factors that matter most when it comes to winning and keeping customers center on: solving customer problems; providing ease-of-use for the tasks to be done; creating software that works the way customers work; and ending up with a product that is cost-effective to buy and maintain. A significant competitive edge can come from delivering on the promise: our software will help you and your business in real ways (and won't be a pain to use).

I worked recently with two smaller software vendors: one in the process of re-inventing itself, and one that has been "starting from scratch"…for three years. For this article, it doesn't matter what kind of software solutions they offer, although both are working on SaaS offerings. What matters is how they are going about building their businesses, and whether what they are doing will be effective or not. The two vendors are taking very different approaches to how they are going to market and how they consider the Customer in the equation. It's not a question of which approach is "better" – it's a question of figuring out strategies that will work, and why a lack of strategy usually goes badly.

 

Re-Inventing A Software Company – Lots of Hard Work

My client, the re-inventing vendor, is making a big and very deliberate transition from providing on-premises software to building a fresh SaaS version that truly takes advantage of the SaaS solution delivery model and the notion that software should work the way customers work. A lot of the work that we have done together centers on the fact that going SaaS will transform almost every aspect of the business, from business model to pricing to marketing and sales – and particularly how customers interact with the software and the company.

These following points are at the heart of how my client is going forward:

Necessity: The Mother of Reinvention

A majority of respondents (53 percent) say they have reinvented their business "to stay afloat or competitive." This strategy is reinforced in the current competitive climate that 38 percent of respondents describe as "extremely intense."

"Small-business owners are especially adept at reinvention – whether because of obstacles or new visions for growth," Veltre said. "Change is never easy, but neither is starting and running a business. We see our small-business clients embracing change and reinventing themselves to secure a rewarding future."

As part of the reinvention process, small-business owners say they focused on overhauling the products or services they offered (47 percent).

If small-business owners aren't reinventing their business, they stay sharp and evolve to keep up with the competition. The following steps were cited as ways they kept business thriving:  

88 percent kept updated and knowledgeable about their field

70 percent increased face time with customers

 

It has been exciting to see a company that really understands its original software business now embrace the SaaS platform and build an offering that takes advantage of what works best for customer-focused SaaS, particularly around clean design and usability from the end user perspective. It's also real work to alter management mindsets and help the company realize that it is leaping into a whole new world. The change to SaaS will likely lead this company to increased innovation in what it does for customers.

There seem to be a lot of articles about how traditional vendors often fail at creating SaaS offerings but these articles are generally talking about large companies who obviously come with a lot baggage. Smaller vendors are usually more agile and open to new thinking. They are much more in touch with their customers, and have the real-world experience to avoid certain pitfalls and to hard-earned credibility to a new SaaS solutions platform

To a certain extent, having a startup mindset is useful, especially when taking on a new solution delivery model. The mindset is necessary to be strongly open to change and some very new concepts of doing business. But the re-inventing company must keep in mind that it is not starting over. The company needs to see that many years of experience, lessons learned and a diverse customer base are invaluable, and catapults the re-inventing well beyond a "startup".

This re-inventing company is hungry for real intelligence and insight to be able to formulate good strategies, to understand the new SaaS paradigm, to know how to market to customers, and who those new customers may be. Getting a good feel for the vendor landscape is also essential. For SaaS, web presence and pull marketing escalate in importance; well-informed and well-crafted strategies and tactical implementations for marketing and sales must be based on the right intelligence.

Brand identity is a focus for the re-inventing company, not for competing against larger vendors, but to make clear to customers what the company does, that it does it well and can be counted on as a partner. This company is crafting core concepts around the customer and end user. As to lessons learned that are being applied to the SaaS offering: which current solutions have done well; what customers have indicated they liked and didn't like; unexpected use cases from customer implementations that open doors to niche solutions.

This company has a real commitment to customers and solving problems. This company is learning how to see from the customer perspective. As a step in that direction, they are revamping the current website not only to accommodate a SaaS offering, but to make sure that the website responds to the way customers want to navigate it.

 

"Starting From Scratch" Gets Off on the Wrong Foot – and Stays There

Unfortunately the client that started from scratch is not an inspirational story, but more a cautionary tale. Both from my brief advisory tenure and what I continue to know about the company, this is a company with no focus and no strategy, and apparently no concern that these two essential ingredients are missing from the plan (if there is a plan). "Starting from scratch" is entering its fourth year of existence.

What's the problem? "Starting from scratch" seems to be a vanity creation of the founder, with decisions running on his ego. The founder had previous experience with starting and growing a couple of other small software companies, and has elevated himself to "I can do no wrong". Generally rude and self-involved whether dealing with employees or outside consultants, this founder is a control freak. The final fatal flaws: changing direction constantly, no cohesive vision, and no ability to stick with a solution direction long enough to develop it. These are not pivots – there's simply not enough structure in place to pivot from. More like meanderings.

On face value there is a good idea for the SaaS offering. But it has never been given enough time for definitive development and execution. In fact, very little has been built. A rather large list of vaporware inhabits the corporate website, with a hidden "we will build it if they come" agenda. The company basically waits for a single customer request something that will then be developed as the next app. The flaw of this approach - creating an app for a market of one - should be obvious. Beyond that, the "model" doesn't scale. All the company has is a series of one-off custom apps, just like a developer for hire would do. Brief flights responding to "whim" do not add up to a long term strategy.

Remember, this is a SaaS offering. But there is very little available for subscription. Kind of defeats the purpose. There is no process of testing apps with potential customers for feedback, since there are no apps to test. There is little research on target markets, customer roles and problems to be solved – simply because the founder already "knows" what should be done. Yep.

Marketing efforts are of course scattershot, following the lead of the founder. For example, efforts related to social media are not part of an overall marketing strategy, but are random self-promoting blasts that totally miss the opportunity for interaction on social media. There's no on-going plan, no engagement with potential customers, little creation of useful or high quality content. Just a lot of disjointed activity with no overriding purpose.

With no brand identity or real goals for the development of the offering, this company is playing at business. The founder has failed to define a real solution space, target markets/customers, go-to-market strategy, a business model – and then stick to them long enough to get anything done. For "starting from scratch", a real customer focus is non-existent as far as defining target markets and problems to solve, and then providing a well-developed SaaS offering to do it. Surprisingly this company has VC backers. These backers are in the game because of the founder's previous companies.

There wasn't much that I could do for this company simply because they don't understand what a mess they are in. They had no interest in comprehensive market and customer intelligence, so I simply completed the requested tactical project for them – the end.

 

Devil's Advocate and Tough Love

While my consulting practice officially involves terms like market intelligence, future trends and customer strategy, I frequently think the better phrase is "Devil's Advocate". Most companies, whether re-invented, starting from scratch or a "classic" startup, need a devil's advocate. Partly to counteract all that kool aid drinking so many software companies tend to do. The devil's advocate is needed to dish out a certain amount of 'tough love' to help companies find and navigate a good path for growth and success.

Unfortunately many new companies, or re-inventing ones, rarely budget for in-depth assessments for determining the right strategies for products, go-to-market, customers, and vendor landscapes. These companies need outside perspectives to determine if the company is truly solving customer problems, providing a product that customers want to use, or even for understanding whether the software has value for any customers.

A devil's advocate asks all of the "so what" questions: does the solution matter, is the offering really a solution, who would buy it and why. The devil's advocate helps companies keep an eye on the future, understand the present, and keep looking in the rear view mirror to catch a glimpse of which unexpected vendor may be their next main competitor. B2B software vendors have specialized risks and competitive factors. All too often these vendors are too rooted in the day-to-day to look in any other direction, no matter what stage of development the company is in. Keeping pace with change is critical; change will be constant and sometimes brutal.

Those companies who ignore the coaching of the Devil's Advocate, or don't think they need one, many times achieve these negative distinctions:

• Lack of real innovation – more "me too" masquerading as "new tech"
• Short-sighted approach for employees – now and for future direction
• Too enamored of the tech itself – no sense of why a customer would use it
• No real markets or customers
• Failure to continuously monitor solution space, markets, customers, other vendors
• Failure to constantly test strategies for change, good and bad, and then figure out what actions to take

To prevent bad outcomes, software vendors of any size need real intelligence, real analysis and realistic strategies.

 

 

Related Links

Three Journeys: Lifecycles of Enterprise Software Buyers & End Users

The Irrelevance of Porter's Five Forces for the B2B Software Industry

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

Customer-focused Marketing Automation: ‘Automation’ is the Easy Part

                    Cross-posted on CMSWire

 

Marketing automation (MA) is a hot topic right now – it's also in the early stages of potentially becoming an integral component of engendering positive customer interactions. Quite a bit has been written about what comprises current marketing automation capabilities. Most use cases center on email drip marketing and lead management / nurturing – done well, they can make a big difference for many companies. Enterprises are beginning to understand how to use MA for more on-target 'shepherding' of prospects during the buying cycle. And for enterprises with sophisticated buyer needs, marketing automation tools can provide a good means for building sustainable processes for continuous high quality leads and revenue growth.

There are stumbling blocks for marketing automation:

• Multi-channel customer experiences are fragmented and don't always map well into MA
• Marketing automation is doomed if it retracts into a robotic email-blasting machine
• A customer focus aligned with marketing automation requires several interconnected strategies for customer, marketing, content, lead gen - plus sales and marketing collaboration

A further complication is this advice from Forrester: frequently the customer has completed 75% of the buyer journey before engaging with sales. Of course, not all buyer journeys are the same -- often marketing automation is the most useful for complex journeys. But there's still a lot to do to be successful with marketing automation.

 

The Customer Perspective Always Matters

From the company perspective, enabling excellent (or even good) customer experiences can seem complicated, even ephemeral. Some marketing programs are trying to make the "customer experience" quite intricate, perhaps overly convoluted. Software solutions are being developed around marketing processes for "customer experience management", where too much emphasis may be on the "management" part, and too little on what constitute positive or desirable experiences from the customer perspective.

The customer perspective should also drive the use of marketing automation. There's a lot of activity for the development and adoption of MA technologies – there's also a lot of room for improvement regarding processes, practices and objectives. All of this should swirl around what the customer needs and wants from the enterprise's products and services. And that will take deep intelligence, constant measurement and improvement, and continuous analysis to achieve tangible results that benefit the customer and the enterprise.

 

A Forrester report from 2011 conveys some of what it takes for success with marketing automation:

 

 

        

 

'Customer' and the Buyer Journey

To achieve more valuable use of marketing automation, you have to start with thoroughly understanding customers, buyer journeys, trigger events and key touchpoints. This means a lot of research, analysis and segmentation at sophisticated levels – all of which will have to be constantly refreshed. Behavioral and predictive analytics can provide useful insights, but these types of analytical modeling are not simple tasks. Collaboration with domain experts must be included to validate research, analysis and recommended steps to take.

Buyer journey mapping is a significant undertaking for engendering better customer buying experiences and for adding intelligence to marketing automation plans. Customer segmentation may yield multiple buyer journeys and maps, and possibly different customer experiences – this will serve to take marketing automation further away from an undesirable one-size-fits-all. Buyer journey mapping helps better decision-making for aligning the interconnected strategies and processes needed to constantly refresh relevance for customers, particularly when marketing automation is in play.

    
 

Source: Forrester

 

 

Buyer journeys are not always linear progressions. Instead steps or phases in the journey can circle back on themselves. Different phases may be revisited until the buyer is ready to move to subsequent phases. Circle-back cycles can occur multiple times. All of which adds complexity to constructing effective marketing automation processes.

 

 

Forrester's customer experience touchpoints flow captures the iterative nature of many buyer journeys:

 
                                          Forrester: Emergence of Customer Experience Management Solutions

 

 

 

Customer Intelligence: Data, Integration, Analytics

For almost all aspects of Marketing, data really matters for achieving sustained effectiveness. Data is needed from many different internal systems and also must be collected from external venues such as social sites. Data sources and business processes must be integrated to manage the constant need for up-to-date information on customers. Useful customer segmentation can only be achieved through such integration efforts.

Constant interaction between marketing automation and CRM systems is another must-have. Beyond these two systems, the understanding of customer needs and desires also requires data from customer experience systems, social media owned by the enterprise, and campaign management. For marketing automation to support engaging and personalized customer interactions, detailed analysis of communications over time can reveal what buyers are likely interested in now and for the near future.

Marketing automation processes don't have to end with converted leads. Significant opportunities remain for targeted customer communications to nurture a more developed long term customer relationship, to open the door for new interactions, and eventually grow new purchases and customer brand advocacy. Effective personalized interactions that evolve with the customer relationship can derive from the use of analytics. Customers can change very quickly – marketing automation has to keep up.

The data and intelligence attained in support of MA objectives must be shared with many other systems to enrich the continuous improvement of enterprise-wide customer focus and service. Not only are integrated systems and processes needed to accomplish this, but healthy cross-team collaboration, as well as the right strategies from top to bottom.

 

Marketing Automation + Customer Intelligence = Lots of Quality Content

A key aspect of marketing automation is matching the right content or message to the right customer at the right phase of the buying journey. In some ways, this is easier said than done, keeping in mind what it takes to really understand the customer. A great deal of very creative content will need to be developed along with savvy rules and decision processes. This is Personalization on Steroids.

Web content / experience management platforms and practices have a complementary relationship with marketing automation, and a critical need for interoperability to benefit each of them. Marketing automation is first focused on prospects who are purposefully interacting with enterprise web assets. WEM and content marketing are often attuned to engaging prospects who are less familiar with the brand and what it has to offer. Integration of MA and WEM for comprehensive interactions with prospects and customers has great potential:

HubSpot conducted a study last year on website redesign. What we found was that marketers redesign their websites with a surprising frequency. 68% of marketers underwent a website redesign in the last 12 months….Most marketers who redesigned their website did so for branding reasons or because "the previous website was old," and the company "just needed to modernize." When you think about it, none of these reasons are particularly focused on the customer.

After hearing from marketers, the survey also asked website visitors what they thought. The results were significant. 76% of respondents said the most important factor in the design of a website is that it "makes it easy for me to find what I want." So why are so many homepages driven by company-needs rather than those of prospective-customers?

The short answer is data. Emails sent through marketing automation are triggered by lead intelligence data. But most marketing automation systems are set up separately from a website's content tools so the same data can't trigger website content in a similar way.

 

For marketing automation content to provide superior customer engagement it must follow the same 'rules' that exist for effective content marketing: it's no longer about the vendor and product features, it's about content that helps prospects and customers solve their problems and improve the performance of their enterprises. Content marketing strategies map content to buyer journeys – since the same applies to marketing automation, integration opportunities should be explored.

 

  

Silos or Ecosystem?

The more strategic aspects of marketing automation are in their infancy and are going to take time and a lot of hard work to deliver useful results. Customer-responsive email marketing and better management of lead generation are important steps in the right direction. But marketing automation has to go beyond email programs and lead nurturing to bring more value to improved customer interactions not only for buyer journey phases, but for ongoing relationships with customers.

Marketing automation can take on greater significance particularly when integrated with WEM and content marketing processes for intelligent content delivery that reflects real understanding of each customer segment. Anytime we are talking about content, we're talking Customer – so the needs and desires of customers must be at the strategic heart of integrated processes for MA, WEM and the other components of an integrated digital marketing ecosystem.

Marketing automation has the potential to evolve into a key piece for building dynamic intelligence that feeds many digital marketing processes. But marketing automation will not meet that potential if it focuses only on responses to the actions taken by buyers in one-off interactions.

 

 

Related Links

The New Data-Savvy Adaptive Marketing

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

Three Journeys: Lifecycles of Enterprise Software Buyers & End Users

 

There have been increased efforts to improve the usability and the user experience for enterprise software solutions. The user experience is much more than utilizing software – it's all the interactions that occur during the life cycle of the software for a particular set of end users and customers. This is why the term user journey may be the best for describing the ongoing "relationship" between users and vendors and the software they provide. To engender better post-sale end user experiences, software vendors must integrate that journey with two other journeys: the software design phase user journey and the buyer journey for purchasing software. Although different roles may inhabit these three journeys, this is an opportunity for convergence in terms of how to go about creating software that people want to buy, use, keep and recommend.

Enterprise software often provides a less satisfying experience for the end user journey. Enterprise software vendors really need to do a better job of focusing on the end user perspective, particularly to improve software structure and usability as much as possible. Perhaps larger vendors should take a lesson from smaller vendors: adopt a core focus with the end user at top of mind, and simply break down what is essential to achieve what users really need and want – no more, no less.

There are opinions that choosing SaaS / Cloud offerings is the no-brainer solution to poorly designed enterprise software -- but it's not that simple. In particular, larger enterprises have complex problems that usually require sophisticated software solutions that provide a lot of capabilities. Vendors should pay attention to the key word sophisticated: create clean, smooth-performing software through thoughtful design to enable great user experiences. Many enterprise customers / users' would like easy-to-consume little packages of software to handle needs but not all problems can be solved that way.

 

The Chicken and the Egg

The three journeys. Logically the order would be: 'software design phase' user journey; 'purchase of software' buyer journey; and post-sale end user journey. But I don't think that things really work that way when creating and selling software. Let's forget about the first release of a software offering and instead concentrate on the journeys that kick in thereafter. After all, when software is first designed it isn't about the user or customer as much as it is about the "vision" of the founders, or worst case, "cool technology".

The sequence I see: buyer journey, design phase user journey, and post-sale end user journey.

Each of these three journeys is distinct, and each journey serves up roles that comprise the Customer. Nice and confusing – and I believe that the lack of integration for how these journeys are handled by traditional software vendors has contributed greatly to the existence of far too many software offerings that do not achieve the work that "customers" need to be successful in their own enterprises.

In the sales process for traditional enterprise software, the customer-as-buyer often is a composite of roles: mid-level managers who choose the software, VPs who approve purchases, CEOs and CFOs who influence or dictate purchase decisions, and even staff in accounts payable who enact purchase transactions. Defining and engendering excellent experiences for a customer or buyer journey comprised of all of these roles will require a lot of work. But this is work that should be done for vendors to understand their "customers".

Things get messier when the "customer experience" extends to the two end user journeys – the composite "customer" has become more complex, requiring even more work to reconcile what it takes to deliver software that enterprises will want to buy, that users get value from for their work, and that will earn customer loyalty. And since, like so many aspects of enterprises, the three journeys usually persist in silos with little movement towards convergence, improving the customer experience will require vendors to understand a lot more about how these journeys should integrate and interoperate.

 

Why So Much Bloatware?

Bloatware has become the not-so-great hallmark of enterprise software. Many software companies fail to assess whether they have achieved a good core competency before branching off into other areas. If the knee-jerk reaction is to start adding bloatware, then it's time to re-examine the direction of the company, how it views the solution space, and the current business model. What gets lost in the arms race to add more features is the user experience. A degraded user experience leads to lack of adoption, continuous dissatisfaction with the software offering, and potential defection to another vendor. The inability of software vendors to see the three journeys in an integrated "big picture" may be one of the chief culprits for enterprise software bloat.

But there are other culprits. Buyers frequently focus on business goals and more strategic outlooks, so their requirements often do not always match what end users need. But business goals are also enacted by the day-to-day work of the end users who depend on software to get the job done well. The creators of software should keep both of these camps in mind.

End users are also guilty in the bloatware escalation. The users of software can make requests for features and functions that may only matter for current work needs. If the "customer" (composite of all the different roles) insists that these changes must be made to keep the account, vendors often cave and add more and more features over time. Many of these features may not even matter to the bulk of current and future end users.

 

 

                                                                                        Source: Creating Passionate Users

 

        

First Journey: The Buyer Journey for Purchasing

For enterprise software, it is the buyers of the software that many vendors see as the "customer". On the buyer journey, customers go through various stages to reach a decision about purchase. The buying process for enterprise software can be complex and involve multiple steps. Adding to complexity, the buyer is that schizophrenic composite of multiple roles in the enterprise. Since the buyer frequently is not the end user, the buyer's organization already has a serious disconnect between the decision makers and the employees who have to make use of the software in support of work to be done.

Most enterprise vendors want their sales teams to close deals quickly as possible. So vendors don't want sales teams veering off into extensive discussions of end user needs and requirements. These sales people are dealing with the composite buyer of the software and are more focused on the process to gain approval from all buyer roles.

The harmful disconnect between the enterprise software buyer journey and the end user experience is articulated by Michael Krigsman:

Economics and strategy lie at the heart of why traditional enterprise software is so unloved. For the most part, vendors sell these products to budget holders, who are primarily managers and executives, making end-user satisfaction a secondary consideration. When large companies buy software, selection committees focus on many factors, starting with the product's ability to address "organizational needs." This common approach incentivizes vendors to prioritize management goals over creating delight for end users.

Fellow member, Basab Pradhan, who is Senior Vice President and Head of Global Sales and Marketing at huge Indian consulting company Infosys, offers a pointed view:  

Enterprise software still doesn't care about users. Its focus continues to be serving executives, rather than employees, because executives make buying decisions. Therefore, we see all the song and dance about BI and in-memory computing, while employees continue to suffer with terrible UIs and no options.

 

                                                                      Source: AgileProductDesign.com

 

We are at a point where not only software vendors must better understand end users, but the buyers of software need the same education. If a company is buying software technology to improve performance and competitiveness, then the company had better focus on key contributors to success: empowered end users - their own employees - who deserve to have highly usable and reliable tools to carry out the work of the company without wasting a lot of time each day on software that is difficult to use and doesn't meet requirements.

 

Second Journey: Software Design and the User Experience

In software design and development phases, the user experience and user journey should be important aspects. The software companies that are improving the usability of their offerings realize that they have to understand how the software is used in the 'real world'. There can be multiple user roles that have different routines and reasons for interacting with the offering. It's likely that the growth of SaaS and mobile apps has been a significant factor in pushing more traditional enterprise vendors to take usability seriously, as expectations for what technology should deliver evolve.

Doing a good job with usability and the user experience is much more difficult for traditional enterprise software, which is often complex, with a lot of steps to complete tasks. Consumer apps and SaaS offerings have an easier time with usability due to much smaller scope for what the technology accomplishes. For designers and developers of enterprise software, a constant awareness of the various end users throughout all phases of software design and development is essential.

 

Principles of inclusive concept generation  

• Repeat to refine. Successive cycles of exploration, creation and evaluation should generate a clearer understanding of the needs, better solutions to meet these needs, and stronger evidence that the needs are met.
• Test early and test often. Perform quick tests with rough prototypes, early enough in the process that meaningful change is still possible.
• Strive for simplicity. Simplicity is powerful but elusive, it requires a clear and succinct vision of what the product is about. Ask "can you do it with less?".
• It's normal to be different. In addition, it's normal to want different things and do things in different ways. Understand diversity amongst your customers. Understanding disability is only one part of understanding diversity.
• Consider the whole user journey. Satisfying user goals involves designing for end-to-end journeys that takes place in real-world contexts.
• Detail matters. Dig deeper to uncover and address the things that people really do, really want, and really need.
• More than just users. Consider the needs of stakeholders such as regulators, shareholders, manufacturers, retailers, purchasers, installers, supporters, and maintainers.
• Challenge assumptions. It's easy to get stuck in thinking that the way things have been done is the only way they could be done. List your assumptions and ask "why?".
• Let ideas breathe. Give wacky ideas the chance to become great ideas.
• Prove it. Complement opinions with evidence.
• Wear different hats. Be creative, be critical and know when to switch.

 

In the article Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed, Helge Freheim discusses Hassenzahl's "Model of User Experience":  

Several models of UX have been suggested, some of which are based on Hassenzahl's model. This model assumes that each user assigns some attributes to a product or service when using it. As we will see, these attributes are different for each individual user. UX is the consequences of these attributes plus the situation in which the product is used.  

The attributes can all be grouped into four main categories: manipulation, identification, stimulation and evocation. These categories can, on a higher level, be grouped into pragmatic and hedonic attributes. Whereas the pragmatic attributes relate to the practical usage and functions of the product, the hedonic attributes relate to the user's psychological well-being. Understanding the divide can help us to understand how to design products with respect to UX, and the split also clarifies why UX itself cannot be designed.

 

Hassenzahl's "Model of User Experience"

 
  

Source: smashingmagazine.com

 

 

Often software vendors push their teams to complete new development as quickly as possible, imposing impossible schedules on work-constrained teams. With this approach, design and development teams are not given adequate time or even resources to properly pursue user experience improvements. Some teams may not even be interacting directly with product management or architecture teams – instead they are handed tasks to complete without benefit of the big picture or concern for the end user journey.

Design and development teams can be in silos cut off from other teams, and cut off from the 'customer enterprise' and its end users. Software design often calls out the importance of "stakeholders" -- often the reality is a rocky course through a poorly coordinated "ecosystem" of disparate non-unified groups with conflicting agendas. Often the stakeholder with the least power is the end user of the software.

 

Third Journey: The User Experience After The Sale

Often we think of the post-sale experience as the traditional customer lifecycle that focuses on all interactions between software vendor and the customer after the sale. However, the customer life cycle is usually concerned with the business aspects between the customer and the software company and not on how the customer continues to use and interact with the software itself. The "customer" in the customer life cycle may not even be any of the end users.

End users do have ongoing relationships with the software and the vendor as each user role utilizes the software solution in support of work to be done. Each end user experience is colored by the sum total over time of usability, performance, meeting needs, reliability, training, customer support, and so on.

End user adoption and success with the software should not be the responsibility of the buying company – it is the responsibility of the software vendor, if that vendor wants renewals, customer referrals, fewer unhappy customers, protection against competitors. Many software companies have developed genuine interest in helping end users achieve successful experiences and strive to create software offerings with the end user in mind. Vendors of complex software solutions often implement user enablement programs as guidance for accomplishing different projects and tasks, to help users get up and running more quickly.

Another approach to aiding and improving software user experiences is through monitoring technology. Monitoring technology measures, and at times manages, how end users work with enterprise software. The purpose is to help improve user experiences, to improve the adoption rates of software by enhancing the successful use of the software. Interactions can be analyzed on a user by user basis. However, most of these offerings are "application performance management" solutions where most of the focus is on the performance of the application in a given IT infrastructure, and not really on the people and their experiences.

One of the most empowering ways end users let vendors know about their experiences with software is through independent well-organized user groups, such as Americas' SAP User Group (ASUG). As with any community, end user groups provide a stronger voice for expressing the good, the bad and the ugly about the software in different ways: directly to the vendor, in discussion forums and other social media, in publications, at user group events.

One of the barriers for software vendors understanding end users comes from the customer enterprise itself, which is usually comprised of silos with poor cross-team collaboration and communication. There may be no concerted effort by the customer enterprise to find out what software end users want and need, and what they don't want. Successful user-focused software design requires constant and deep communication with end users. Vibrant interactions lead to better designs and better usability. Often thedesign team is not allowed direct access to end users – by the customer enterprise.

 

                                                         Source: Creating Passionate Users

 

 

Where Do These Journeys Lead?

It can be confusing when considering these three essential journeys that greatly impact the success of software offerings, both for vendors and customers. Terminology is confusing at times, with references to customers, buyers and users. All the more reason to understand what these journeys are about. Software vendors could greatly improve the usability and desirability of software offerings if they would understand and support interoperability between these customer/user journeys and experiences.

Many traditional software vendors lag in adopting an outside-in approach to creating, selling and supporting applications. Often the focus is not on the buyer or user, but on internal goals that can conflict with the needs of customers. Vendors follow paths to success that frequently are disconnected from customer success and end user experience excellence.

For many software vendors and their customer enterprises, the three journeys exist in silos, with disconnects between the teams that are involved in supporting and enhancing each journey. Integration and interoperability between the journeys must take place on both the vendor and the customer sides. And the vendor should see every aspect of the three journeys as an opportunity to demonstrate brand quality and reliability.

The software user experience, just like the customer experience, only belongs to the user. You can design software in support of the user experience, design for enhancing and improving the experience the user can potentially have, but you can never design the experience itself.

 

  

Related Links:

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

Content Marketing Strategy for B2B Software Vendors: Starring the 'New' White Paper

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the "customer as buyer"

 

  

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

The Adaptive Enterprise: New Directions for MDM?

Originally published in Hub Designs Magazine, November 2012

 

As market forces continue to fluctuate, business leaders are searching for the best ways to work with uncertainty and still deliver improved performance. As a result, organizations are transforming into adaptive enterprises.

Performance for the adaptive enterprise means agile, dynamic, and responsive to continuous change. But this kind of performance requires enterprise data that is reliable, usable and timely, so that analytics and decision-making processes are quickly on target with relevant recommendations.

Information management has an important new challenge for provisioning right-time data to emerging adaptive enterprises. MDM is a reflection of how an enterprise uses data and information for business purposes. The creation and management of master data touches more than the information itself. By creating data repositories and processes that reflect business functions, enterprises should now have access to the information that is so vital to effectively and agilely adapting to constant change.

 

 

Agile Processes, Agile Data

In 2011, Gartner surveyed 300 user organizations: 49 percent said process improvements are the key business priority driving interest in MDM. Gartner's Andrew White commented:

"MDM treats information as assets that indirectly contribute to enterprise performance by improving process execution via data consistency," White wrote in his presentation slides. "BPM is a management discipline that treats processes as assets that directly contribute to enterprise performance."

MDM has a clear role in improving business processes; both MDM and optimized processes contribute to better performance management. The increasing focus on master data in relation to business processes extends usage across the enterprise to more business roles and functions. For many enterprises, data governance policies are the means for the orchestration of master data management, practices, processes, and people, so that compliance with data governance policies assures that master data is available as a trusted and vital asset for the enterprise. A new direction and challenge for data governance will be creating policies that reflect the continuously changing needs of the adaptive enterprise.

 

Dynamic Business Processes: Adaptive Case Management

Adaptive case management is an interesting example of adaptive and responsive processes that depend on reliable data. Forrester Research defines adaptive case management (ACM) this way (Forrester calls it dynamic case management):

A highly structured but also collaborative, dynamic and information-intensive process that is driven by outside events and requires incremental and progressive responses from the business domain handling the case. Examples of a case folder include a patient record, a lawsuit, an insurance claim, or a contract, and a case folder would include all of the documents, data, collaboration artifacts, policies, rules analytics, and other information needed to process and manage the case.

Immediate access to the right information is essential to ACM due to the unpredictable nature of case management knowledge work. 'Unpredictable' is also a driving force of the adaptive enterprise, where there is increasing need for organizations to adapt to the volatile nature of business as it happens. ACM may evolve beyond its 'roots' in business process management to become a much-needed internal platform of process orchestration, practices and technology to more relevantly and quickly surface the most-needed information, content, and data, wherever they exist in the enterprise -- all in the context of situational business processes related to a particular employee's responsibilities.

Frequent mandates for ACM include managing risks and compliance, containing costs, applying a systems approach to non-conforming processes, and the ability to respond well to the unexpected. MDM parallels these mandates with a number of its value areas for enterprises:

• Compliance and risk management
• Revenue growth
• Customer interactions
• Cost and performance efficiency
• Business agility

Both MDM and ACM can contribute positively to customer-focused activities, along the lines of real-time analytics, decision-making, dynamic process, and timely responsiveness.

 

Performance, Outcomes, Metrics

Obviously, ineffective business processes and data bottlenecks are obstacles to the adaptive enterprise that needs to nimbly change in response to events and new insight, and to rapidly make decisions to make the most of new opportunities and challenges. Achieving performance improvements starts with identifying how data-fueled processes can be optimized, and how MDM and BPM can work together to do so. Well-functioning business processes, whether explicitly defined or adaptive (as in case management), are an essential contributor to agile business performance.

A classic example of setting an improvement objective aligned with MDM is the reconciliation of customer identity across systems of record and systems of engagement, since both domains must be integrated to support and capture customer interactions. Many business functions - and strategies - greatly benefit from a unified view of the customer. The organization can quickly and accurately interact with customers. Now metrics can be applied to measure outcomes and performance relative to customers, based on the organization's KPI preferences, and tied to corporate and line-of-business objectives.

Processes and performance improvement initiatives can be decomposed into master data elements that can be sorted and aggregated properly for metrics to quantify value. Focus is put on the data assets that are the most essential for overall business improvement. MDM makes such a focus repeatable across the enterprise to integrate business processes and metrics around the same master data elements

 

The Successful Adaptive Enterprise

Success factors for enterprises almost always include effective leaders, the right strategies, and high quality products and services that meet customer needs. But more and more demands are pushing enterprises to constantly monitor and respond to changes in markets, customers and competitors. These changes will then alter other success factors: strategies now have a shorter shelf life. Enterprises are challenged to:

• Transform to an organization comfortable with continuous adaptive behavior while relying on business processes and data systems to increase flexibility at tactical and strategic levels
• Make better use of data, processes, analytics to improve decisions, to predict future trends and markets, and to proactively manage change
• Develop responsive risk management and compliance processes that are ready for the uncertainties of business, both good and bad

Data analytics are seeing wider adoption as important tools throughout the enterprise, reflecting the convergence of BI, BPM and MDM. Analytics are also being used to evaluate enterprise data to improve both information management and business processes, more frequently in real time. Analytics-fueled data management capabilities bring improvements and evolution to data integration and data quality approaches. More enterprises are looking for analytics embedded in a wide variety of systems, including operational systems that now make use of real-time analytics and decision-making technology.

MDM initiatives have the right capabilities and strategic purpose to underpin business agility and the adaptive enterprise. Master data can be extended to provide improved use of information systems and repositories throughout the enterprise. MDM can stretch its data muscles to take on new business requirements and objectives where data and process are key components, and now venture into new categories that need MDM to better serve the enterprise. To achieve agile business actions takes highly disciplined approaches to MDM and data governance; and it takes flexibility bred into information management DNA to be able to quickly but reliably handle change.

 

Related Links

Business Priorities Point the Way for MDM

Connecting Data Governance to Business Outcomes That Matter

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

'Big Data', Intelligence and Multi-faceted Innovation

Data Management: Reaching into the Cloud

Information, Intelligence and Process: Combining Forces to Better Answer Business Needs

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

"Lean Is Not a Destination, It's a Journey": Lessons in Quality, Reliability, and Risk for MDM

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

  

The Irrelevance of Porter’s Five Forces for the B2B Software Industry

 

For the software industry the use of strategic market and competitive intelligence has not been particularly well executed by many vendors. MI and CI for software vendors differs greatly from the more established practices for CPG, Pharma or manufacturing – often what works well for these other industries has little relevance for software vendors. The main difference: the intensely fast pace of constant change for most of the software industry. "Time" is measured in nanoseconds. As such the software industry requires a greater focus on MI and CI, but often actual practice does not include the most beneficial aspects.

Market Intelligence is essential for creating strong product strategy and for fine-tuning that strategy as industries, markets, customers, the product space, and competitors evolve over time – again usually very small windows of time. Core decisions for businesses must be based on reasonable understanding of significant and likely future events – what the potential impact could be, good and bad. Market intelligence is the dynamic means for uncovering the right future-pointing intelligence as early as possible, averting "nasty surprises" and discovering new opportunities.

Strategic market Intelligence differs from business research (and traditional business intelligence) through context -- a certain mindset held while the research and analysis phases are done. The market intelligence professional always has in mind the organization, its business and product space, the industry, customers and target markets, and the drivers behind the need for intelligence. It's an ongoing sense of the impact of what could be uncovered -- the ramifications of what seemingly unconnected items of intelligence could mean for the company. It ensures that business decisions and product direction are customer-focused, market-driven, and reality-based.

Where software companies go wrong with MI and CI efforts is limiting activities to directly supporting sales in tactical ways, focusing only on pointless programs for "killing the competition", and endless feature/function battles that are meaningless in today's commoditized markets for software solutions. Another wrong turn has been the adherence to Porter's Five Forces as a model for product strategy and for market and competitive intelligence, undoubtedly influenced by MBA school curricula in the eighties and nineties, much of which has now proven useless to many enterprises.

 

 

                                                PORTER'S FIVE FORCES 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Porter's Five Forces: The Magic Model that Doesn't Work

I recently read Steve Denning's article on the demise of Michael Porter's Monitor Group consulting firm. Porter invented a model for corporate "strategy" based on 'Five Forces' that has been treated almost as a reverential artifact for many years. Denning's article brought me back to my own thinking years ago on why Porter doesn't work for software companies. I never have really used Porter for strategic market intelligence for the software industry – instead I developed a matrix that holds more relevance to the needs of software companies.

I refer to Porter's model as an "artifact" because it is no longer relevant to today's markets, if it ever really was. It's linked to a business context set in the Eighties, when corporate strategy focused on inside-out objectives such as beating competitors and sustaining profitability with no connection to value delivered to customers – chest-thumping instead of serving customers. There was a great deal more market predictability and regularity. Today's markets obviously have become volatile and not so predictable; businesses are now challenged to create new business models multiple times during the life of the enterprise to survive and thrive.

 

Five Forces Model Fails the Software Industry

Because Porter's Five Forces model is based on non-changing market conditions, it is limited or even harmful for dealing with dynamic, ever-changing industries and markets. Well, the software industry never sits still, and this has intensified in recent years. And the customers of software vendors are also facing uncertain and fluctuating markets, which adds further complexity when seeking insight for future trends regarding customer needs and wants.

Professionally, Porter was not experienced in any industry, in any hands on sense, when he created the Five Forces model, so he didn't have practical experience to fully explore or prove out his model. If you don't understand the software industry, how people interact with software and rely on software to improve their own enterprises, then any indirect models will likely have little relevance.

Under Porter, competitive intelligence is not about going to market competitively to meet customer needs and desires - it's about "beating" everyone including the customer. The customer is not a partner but a conquered spoil of war. Not exactly the best path to engendering customer experience excellence – perhaps Porter's model is one of the reasons that many enterprises have done such a bad job of focusing on the customer. MI and CI better serve a software company when its purpose is to understand the competitive landscape well enough to seek out paths that diverge from the "herd" so that the company carves out underserved markets and better understands customer needs. Porter's aggressive modeling around "competition" has misguided organizations into becoming obsessed with destroying the competition.

Other areas where Porter's model comes up short:

• The value of partner ecosystems including supply chain
• Predicting future trends
• Identifying new customer segments
• Understanding that software solution spaces are commoditized
• When it's time to sunset solutions and markets

These are all essential to growth and evolution for sustaining success.

 

Defining and Sizing Markets – Another Porter Failure

For software offerings, market sizing used to be a fairly straightforward task, when technology problems and solutions were seemingly distinct and silo'd from other technology areas. Market sizing is important but many software vendors don't consider all of the parameters that actually define the markets and the customers that are the best fit for software offerings.

An example of market sizing that has become more complex – and that certainly would be poorly served by using Porter's model – is the software market for what used to be called Web Content Management and is now frequently called Web Experience Management. The use of websites and web presence by organizations to promote and sell their products has evolved to sophisticated levels where multi-channel customer experiences have greater importance and often involve Internet venues that are not controlled by the organization.

WEM is actually a composite of a solution ecosystem – understanding this leads to a better calculation of the overall market size. Although some market forecasts from analyst firms are stretching to include more of this ecosystem, often multiple market forecasts must be considered and added into the final market potential for WEM solutions. The overall solution ecosystem becomes compellingly relevant when taking the customer's point-of-view for the desired end-to-end solution.

Porter's model is ill-equipped to handle such converging markets or ecosystems. Often Porter's model is used in business school in simplistic calculations of market size where the 'profit potential' is the real goal, unfortunately without considering the many variables that go into real market potential. And of course such simplistic calculations also lead to the allocation of 'market share' – once again focusing on competitors rather than customers.

The complex variables for real market potential primarily center on the customer: meeting customer needs and desires, improving customer experiences with the organization, understanding who the customer is through useful segmentations mapped to solution scenarios, addressing usability and problem-solving effectiveness for the software offering, from the customer perspective. But these are harder variables to try to quantify and often are left out of the 'equation'.

Another aspect of WEM markets is the fact that there are two sets of customers to be considered: the customer who buys the WEM software, and the target customer for the web properties that will be built with the WEM software. Since WEM solutions impact two levels of buyers, the technology exists as a means to an end – it is the "end" that really matters and must be foremost in the minds of vendors and solution buyers. Porter's model has little to account for the complexities of 'customer' in this scenario.

 

So Why Am I Concerned about Porter

As many have pointed out, Porter's Five Forces seemingly didn't save Michael Porter's own high-dollar consultancy, so how can it have relevance to the needs of other organizations. Even Porter's consultancy wasn't part of the simple market construct that is the best fit for gaining benefit from the Five Forces model.

Steve Denning asks in his article:  

Had Monitor tried to implement Porter’s strategy and executed it poorly? Or had Monitor implemented Porter’s strategy well but the strategy didn’t work? If not, why not?

Denning further explains what was greatly lacking from Porter's model:   

There was just one snag. What was the intellectual basis of this now vast enterprise of locating sustainable competitive advantage? As Stewart notes, it was “lacking any foundation in fact or logic.” Except where generated by government regulation, sustainable competitive advantage simply doesn’t exist.

What’s gone wrong here was Porter’s initial thought. The purpose of strategy—or business or business education—is not about coping with competition–i.e. a contest in which a winner is selected from among rivals. The purpose of business is to add value for customers and ultimately society. There is a straight line from this conceptual error at the outset of Porter’s writing to the debacle of Monitor’s bankruptcy. Monitor failed to add value to customers.

 

For strategic purposes alone, a lot of time has been wasted on trying to align an organization's management with Porter's model when it just plain wasn't useful for most software companies. Many industries have spent way too much time and resources on building complicated and non-scaling frameworks that never really help the organization with strategic decision-making and don't provide real-time responsiveness to market changes. And if the model is applied only to particular segments of a complex corporation, important aspects will be missed by working without the context of interrelations across product groups and segments, as well as across organizational functions.

 

                                                                                                        Source: Julie Hunt Consulting

 

 

Customer-Focused Strategic Market & Competitive Intelligence

Many software companies continue to think of market and competitive intelligence as tactical methods to attack competitors, to convince a customer not to buy from a competitor, instead of: developing their own strategic solution offerings, building strategic relationships with customers, and understanding how to help customers really solve their problems and support their business initiatives with reliable solutions.

Focusing on Customers should be the starting point for MI and CI initiatives for software vendors. It is essential for software vendors to attract customers, and eventually sales, through true ROI and through differentiation other than feature/function minutiae. Market Intelligence programs, in collaboration with product marketing, are important sources of comprehensive research, analysis and recommendations for providing the elements of a software solution that can set it apart, from the customer perspective.

Strategic MI makes a significant difference for the competitiveness of software companies:  

• New opportunities – identify new trends that will matter to target markets and customers; how to get there before the competition (whenever possible)
• Enhanced customer interaction – understand customer POV, goals, needs, strategic direction
• Stronger target market selection & positioning – research, validate go-to-market and positioning; locate under-served markets for target customers and solution space; guide how to articulate positioning well for customers, analysts, industry
• Strategic view of competitive landscape – figure out true differentiation, figure out where competitors are not operating; understand the issues that matter to customers and the solutions they seek from competitors
• Early warning of industry and/or competitor changes – take advantage of opportunities and leverage/deal with threats and risk

 

Related links:

Software companies still fail to tap into top benefits from market and competitive intelligence programs

Market Intelligence – Making Better Business Decisions at the Core of the Company

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

Provocation-based Market Intelligence in a Market-Driven world

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

Social Re-Connects Enterprise Search

                                                            Originally published in CMSWire October 23, 2012

 

Enterprise Search continues to go through transformations to improve its usefulness for all employees, since information is common currency for practically everyone in every organization. To be able to agilely collect and reconcile information across disparate repositories and formats, unified search platforms will have to combine multiple search capabilities from enterprise and internet search technologies, as well as BI search and other kinds of analytics. And for it to work well, people need to be able to make use of these layers of disparate search technologies through a single point of access.

It is critical that all employees have the ability to find and analyze information and data across the enterprise. Search is not a separate technology or program – it must integrate with business processes and corporate initiatives as vital infrastructure. Search for all employees aligns with communication, connectedness and collaboration – bringing us into Social constructs.

 

Social Search Tuning for Enterprise Search

Many attributes of Social Search can help Enterprise Search work better – but Social Search alone isn't enough to replace Enterprise Search. Too many capabilities are needed to deliver what employees need from comprehensive search inside the firewall. But Social can serve to fine-tune or filter search by leveraging additional information about the Searcher, as a valuable enhancement.

Social also aligns well with one of the key success factors for Enterprise Search: Context. Many have advocated role-based context as a particularly powerful filter for effective search results. Contextual factors are usually the over-arching driver for a particular search by a particular person. As such, search needs to engender the right user experience to return the best results.

Enterprise search can tap into employee profiles, internal networks, other work-related interactions, and systems usage to personalize search and extend context in order to return the most relevant results. Beyond the usual 'systems of record', social networks and activities provide a great deal of contextual information, especially in terms of topics. The composite of all of these attributes can indicate each person's professional purview and work focus, which can better connect that person to the right information.

Social helps Enterprise Search through:

• Social Networks – people who know stuff, connections to other people who know stuff
• Social Artifacts – opinions about information, expressed through ratings / rankings, reviews / comments, tagging

 

Social Learning

Concepts from Harold Jarche for Network Learning provide lessons for the social aspects of enterprise search, both through inter-dependent connections and collaboration, and through independent pathways via technology (tools) and the information itself:

One way to look at network learning is as a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing.

• Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard—it not only allows us to "pull" information, but also have it "pushed" to us by trusted sources.
• Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.
• Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas and experiences with our networks and collaborating with our colleagues.

 

Also of importance is the serendipitous or accidental acquisition of information or knowledge, very much an affect of social interactions.

 

Social Networks: Information Acquisition

Software vendor IBM Vivismo (the Velocity Information Optimization Platform) provides an interesting story from 2009 describing how the U.S. Air Force has used social capabilities to improve enterprise search. The USAF information system is called Air Force Knowledge Now (AFKN) and has been around for several years in various iterations.

Organized into thousands of "Communities of Practice", Airmen share their expertise in postings that range from F-16 tactics to procurement regulations.  AFKN was launched in 2002 and now rivals the largest corporate intranets.  Open to anyone with a .mil email address, AFKN has nearly 300,000 registered users who view 10 million pages per month.  AFKN supports about 170,000 searches a month, but Adkins expects that to double with implementation of the new features (based on Vivisimo's platform).

"We want the tags and ratings to make the system smarter as a result of hundreds of thousands of people interacting," says Adkins. "The secret to success is it has to be easy for folks to use, or they won't use it."

AFKN aims to provide quick, easy access to millions of pages of content.  Social search adds two elements that improve relevancy of results.  First, keyword tags, ratings and comments add new navigation aids to AFKN users, speeding access to results they need. Second, social search tools make it easy for users to contribute their insights and experience to AFKN.  When these insights become part of the search index, search relevancy is improved for the next user.

 

Social Networks: Relationships as Search Filters

Sociology in the workplace provides insight into the value of social networks for improving enterprise search. In environments where collaboration is encouraged and communication across the enterprise is effective, the natural way to search is to ask colleagues for ideas on how to find what's needed, to share information, to brainstorm on how to refine search results, and to figure what's missing (leading to more searches). Obviously search relative to social networks is collaborative.

The social network as a construct doesn't engender successful search activities. It's how individuals connect to and work with people in the network for finding information that make social networks useful for search. Gartner's Larry Cannell examines "the synergy between search and enterprise social network sites":

As enterprise social network sites integrate with more business applications, the similarities between enterprise social network sites and search will become evident from two perspectives. First, from the point of view of how workers will expect to interact with business application information via a social network site. Second, there are significant similarities between how business application information is aggregated into a social network site with how the same is done with search-based applications.

In addition, these integrations (business applications and social networks) offer longer-term opportunities to build the enterprise social network into a powerful knowledgebase that consolidates information across business applications; much like the role enterprise search can play today.

 

There are also obstacles to finding the right information through social networks:

As multiple business applications become integrated with a social network site, a significant challenge will be the normalization of business entities across applications. For example, aligning a customer record in a CRM system with the same customer record in a warranty claims system. Without this alignment, cross-business application relationships cannot be captured within the site's social graph and workers participating in the network will see duplicate customer profiles (one from the CRM system, the other from the warranty claims system).

 

Social networks and collaborative processes are growing in many enterprises, as effective conduits for helping employees work better and more efficiently. It's now falling to the enterprise search platform to orchestrate alignment of the knowledge held by social networks with current information repositories. Part of that integration is to incorporate search capabilities already provided by social applications into the enterprise search platform. Since social venues enable real-time collaboration, enterprise search may need to change from displaying results to becoming a sort of a command center that allows actions to take place directly from search results, such as adding a comment to a blog post.

 

Activity Streams: Topics as Filters

Activity streams are another social venue that has been gaining increased enterprise adoption. Streams can be personalized for individual need, subscribing to an array of topics that tie to work activities. These streams are more about real-time information as it is created and shared, but are rapidly becoming large information archives as real-time continuously becomes 'yesterday'. And a new challenge, and opportunity, emerges for enterprise search bolstered by analytics, since most of the information resides in multi-structured content.

While it is not meant to be an enterprise search tool, Tibco's tibbr offers activity stream collaboration driven by a topic-oriented approach that is designed to find the people who need particular information items. The focus on topics is meant to cull out irrelevant information – employees subscribe to the topics that matter to them. Topics can be information, colleagues, software systems, and business processes. The business process is of particular importance, since the tibbr approach, coupled with Tibco technology, ties information acquisition to the work being done by employees.

In activity streams, topics are context and the streams capture continuous collaborative 'conversations'. In the Forrester Wave for Activities Streams, Rob Koplowitz comments:

Social activities streams are a bridge to this enterprise social vision. They connect workers to each other and to information. On its own, the information workplace lacks a mechanism that pulls together events, along with their context, background, and required actors, in a manner that is attractive and easily consumable for knowledge workers.

 

The Evolving Workplace

There is quite a bit of research on the significant value of making the right information available to the right person at the right time – and quite a bit of research shows clearly that Enterprise Search has a direct impact on the success of organizations. So enterprise search platforms must include social capabilities to tap into powerful ways to find the information that employees need more quickly and accurately. This calls for integration into a single platform that continuously evolves as the workplace changes.

 

 

Related Links

Enterprise Search: Un-Cool and Mission Critical

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

The New Data-Savvy Adaptive Marketing

Originally published on CMSWire, September 20, 2012

 

Marketers for many organizations are facing evolutionary pressures to transform marketing practices and processes to the always-on state of Adaptive Marketing, a new iteration of direct marketing that wants to engender a unique brand experience for individual customers. At the heart of Adaptive Marketing is a customer-focused organization that is committed to constantly re-craft product offerings, sales initiatives and marketing tactics to match individual customer needs and wants. Adaptive Marketing is fueled by a matrix of customer intelligence analytics and maps into enabling continuously improved customer experiences.

For Adaptive Marketing to work, organizations have to transform the marketing infrastructure to accommodate the fluid requirements of being always-on. Changes are made to how media is set up and managed, agency relationships take on new purpose. Digital asset management goes to the next level to constantly dish up customer-responsive images, marketing calls-to-action, and other personalized and time-sensitive content. Agile practices have entered the marketing realm – and creativity and science are now partners.

To derive right-time customer intelligence, multiple kinds of data analytics are needed to tackle the many different kinds of customer data, as well as the variety of sources for that data. Right-time analytics are now being tapped for everyday marketing decisions, and to reflect the true nature of social and customer interactions: synchronizing the organization with customers, their interactions and their communications related to the organization and its products. Data analytics and customer intelligence are becoming invaluable to point the way to marketing solutions in real time, constantly reflecting changes in customer behavior and market trends.

  

                    
     

 

Personalized Customer Experiences

It may be through Adaptive Marketing that organizations have a powerful approach to nurturing positive customer experiences. Adaptive Marketing provides personalization at the experience level, based on customer data analysis to understand ever-changing customer needs and interests. Adaptive Marketing may be a more valuable approach for B2C companies, but there are lessons to be learned for B2B enterprises too.

Instead of seeing customers "in bulk", Adaptive Marketing pulls each customer into more individualized 'segmentation' as part of the data analytics behind personalized brand experiences. Product and experience personalization obviously can work well to increase customer satisfaction and the desire to come back again for more. Analytics technology, along with marketing management tools, can help provide quick responses to customer needs.

Marketing performance-related analytics and marketing management platforms are also part of the story for Adaptive Marketing, particularly using analytics to tie outcomes of marketing efforts to enterprise strategic goals and desired business results.

  

 

 

The Challenges of Customer Intelligence

Marketers and enterprises are now challenged to gather customer data from disparate and frequently fragmented sources. Data analysts must resolve customer identity across these diverse sources to aggregate the right data in a usable fashion to feed into analytics processes. Often, marketers are faced with tackling large volumes of data as well as multi-structured content, two forms of Big Data. Then data must be analyzed, insights derived, and decisions made as to actions to take – all of which comprise an iterative, always-on process.

Tibco Spotfire recently shared the results of a study done by the Columbia School of Business, emphasizing the value of sharing customer data across the enterprise, eliminating information silos:

A majority of senior corporate marketing executives (91%) believe that successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions, according to a study from the Columbia School of Business. Yet, 39% say their own companies' data is collected too infrequently or too slowly for them to turn that data into actionable information. The report notes that one of the biggest obstacles to turning data into actionable insight may be a lack of effective data sharing across departments and divisions of the company.  

In order to leverage the opportunities of big data, the report suggests marketers need to better:

• Collect meaningful customer data – including real-time data – from a variety of sources
• Link that data to metrics developed for measuring marketing ROI
• Share data across the organization, linking datasets together at the customer level
• Utilize this shared data to effectively target and personalize marketing efforts to customers

 

Marketers are also faced with deciding how to proceed with utilizing analytics. With so much data to process, at times it may be appropriate to formulate questions to be answered or problems to be solved. Other times, the right path may be to let the data point to previously unknown patterns, as is often done with Big Data analytics.

Marketers now must be dynamically responsive to change and must more quickly decide what to do. So Predictive Analytics are becoming more important to many organizations that want to derive future views that will guide their decisions, particularly those regarding potential customer behaviors and desires. Behavioral models are built based on certain objectives, such as projecting the propensity to buy particular offerings, using different customer attributes (predictors). The results are put to use to do a better a job of finding the right customers and specifically providing what they need.

 

New Work and New Roles To Do It

Adaptive Marketing holds great promise for improving understanding of customers and for enabling high quality and individualized customer experiences. But the 'guts' of Adaptive Marketing, including highly sophisticated and complex analytics processes, are placing serious demands on marketing functions. Just by itself, the work to be done to constantly collect, aggregate and reconcile customer data from so many disparate sources can be quite overwhelming and fraught with problems.

Adding in new processes, practices and management for the complete Adaptive Marketing function, quite a bit of new expertise has to be put in place. Not only are sources of customer data distributed and varied, the media landscape itself is fragmented. Tremendous efforts to orchestrate all of these aspects of Adaptive Marketing are required to make all the pieces work together and to be able to monitor and manage effectively, as well as continuously open the way for unique customer experiences.

For the analytics area, data and business analysts who are also experienced marketers are important to success with Adaptive Marketing. These roles must be adept at interpreting analytics results for things like customer behavior, and equally adept at communicating the implications to marketing and management teams. New Marketing and IT partnerships are essential to ensure that business and technology work well together.

Alignment with enterprise strategies need to take place at the C-Level for Adaptive Marketing to be successful and effective. Scott Brinker introduced the new role of the Chief Marketing Technologist in 2008; marketing organizations are slowly embracing this role as a partner to both the CMO and the CIO for creating and enacting the right marketing strategies with the right marketing technologies. Brinker sees the Chief Marketing Technologist as "an equal blend of a marketing-savvy technologist and a technology-savvy marketer".

Brinker also details some of the attributes of the 'rank-and-file' marketing technologist role:  

They cover a wide swath of technical skills, from wrangling data and analytics, authoring lightweight web features, synchronizing disparate marketing software platforms, SEO, web APIs. They're a cross between an entrepreneurial marketer and an enterprise IT manager — and with pretty good web coding chops. Think of a great technical Web 2.0 entrepreneur, and you've got a pretty good estimate of a marketing technologist.

 

From Insight to Action

The increasing importance and use of data analytics for Adaptive Marketing and customer experience improvement does not reduce marketing functions to quantitative endeavors. Data and analytics are stepping stones to more precise intelligence so that better decisions and actions can be determined more quickly and accurately, in ways that benefit both the customer and the enterprise. Improved customer 'intimacy' is likely to result. Getting closer to customers is somewhat the 'holy grail' of most marketing endeavors.

In the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, 88 percent of CEOs said "getting closer to customers" was the top priority for their businesses over the next five years. Many company leaders see opportunities through the right analytics to understand customer needs, desires and behaviors, to improve customer attraction and retention, and to ultimately drive revenue and growth. The analytics performed by marketing from program start to post-mortem also provide the means to tie marketing activities to tangible outcomes like successful products and revenue growth.

Marketers now have to understand the interrelationships between many kinds of data, evaluate the aggregated meaning, and then determine how to take insight to action. Marketers have to be self-optimized to derive continuous insight, rapidly make effective decisions and take actions that will improve the customer experience on a daily basis. There's a lot of work to do to enact Adaptive Marketing and all the pieces that make it work, but it's time to move beyond traditional marketing approaches and basing digital marketing plans on 'gut' notions.

   

The Evolution of Digital Intelligence

                                              Source: Forrester Research, Welcome to the Era of Digital Intelligence

 

 

Related Links:

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

Enterprise Search: Un-Cool and Mission Critical

  

Here we go again: another significant enterprise problem that isn't being solved, a problem that has been around for most of the digital era. Is it because the problem isn't cool enough to capture the attention of upper management? -- so it's seen as 'somebody' else's problem, instead of recognizing that real costs, productivity and value are being squandered because this problem isn't being solved

There are good technologies that could help with the problem now. But strategies are missing regarding how these technologies should be used. Newer technologies are coming along that will make the job easier, but there are no strategies for adopting them either.

 The problem? Enterprise Search and Findability

Obviously an enormous amount of digital items are created every day – but inexplicably there is an equally enormous vacuum for how to find the right stuff. There is a debilitating disconnect between the proliferation of electronic information and the constant need to quickly and accurately find all of the information and expertise that is essential for work every day. From top to bottom, enterprises have failed to take seriously the high cost of being grossly inadequate at finding information, data, documents, experts. Instead they have settled for low performance, low-return techniques to… sort of handle Search.

  

Surprise! Lack of Strategies

There is quite a bit of research on the significant value of making the right information available to the right person at the right time – and quite a bit of research shows clearly that enterprise search and findability have direct impact on the success of organizations:

The growth of information and data makes findability increasingly more critical in order to get the right information to the right person at the right time.

Gartner states that "by 2015 organizations integrating high-value, diverse, new information types and sources into a coherent information management infrastructure will outperform their industry peers financially by more than 20%".¹

(But) solving the problem of finding the right information is not a priority according to this survey (The Enterprise Search and Findability Report 2012):

Most organisations do not have a strategy for search, neither a budget, nor any resources.

 ¹ A Framework for Creating Value From Information Assets: The Key to Information Management Success", Gartner Symposium Nov 2011, Ted Friedman and Regina Casonato

 

But enterprise search continues to elude C-level managers as a strategic imperative for building a "culture of success" within the enterprise. The multitude of studies that have been done to show the high cost of manual processes for locating the right information seems to have made no impact on upper management when it comes to creating a strategic approach and implementing right-fit search technologies and practices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: IDC report – Information Access in Tomorrow's Enterprise - 2009

 

Undoubtedly upper management at most companies view enterprise search as an IT project, as a nice-to-have, as something so unglamorous that it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the competitive DNA of the company, let alone innovation and responsive change. Upper management is failing to lead the enterprise into the 21^st century by building strategies, engendering culture and selecting technologies to energize how information can be continuously found by everyone in the enterprise.

Here's the flaw that plague most organizations when introducing enterprise search: a search technology is established within a silo – a business unit, group or function – without a strategic plan in place, without a view to fanning out the particular search technology for the entire enterprise. Meanwhile, other business units may bring in silo'd search functions. A loosely stitched patchwork emerges. No focus, no big picture, no notion of a search platform that governs one or more approaches to search, as needed by the enterprise. Instead search is implemented as too tactical, too dependent on IT as the driving force.

For search to be strategic, the push must come from upper management with purposeful collaboration with end users (who understand the business needs). Search must be tied to real outcomes and impact on the business, to help the enterprise leverage insight to best advantage.

 

Hierarchy of strategies

Too often organizations don't understand that centralized functions that impact most of the enterprise can only succeed based on a hierarchy of strategies. There has to be than an over-arching C-Level strategy, not just a silo'd "strategy" that only benefits a small group. Strategies for Search have to include more than "information and knowledge management pros". Collaboration with all users must occur – strategy cannot be something dictated without understanding how people in the enterprise work (this parallels the failures when IT only decides on the selection of software systems – of course, with the approval of upper management).

A hierarchy of strategies means that lower level strategy has to meet the needs at the business unit or group level -- but also align with desired business outcomes. Lower levels map back into the over-arching corporate strategy that is tied to high level goals and objectives. The result is an approach to search and findability that makes sense, can be measured and is an essential platform that is greater than the sum of the parts.

As with many other strategic initiatives, those enterprises that purposefully dedicate time, money and people to supporting enterprise search find the best results and real impact on the business:

Thus addressing those deficiencies in how an organisation manages search can deliver great returns for a relatively small investment, preferably in personnel. The survey reveals that:

Amongst the organisations that are very satisfied with their search, they have a (larger) budget, more resources and systematically work with analysing search.  

Search is not a separate technology or program – it must integrate with business processes and corporate initiatives as vital infrastructure. Search for all employees aligns with communication, connectedness and collaboration

 

Quantitative and Qualitative Value Metrics

For Search technology and processes, qualitative value is as equally important as looking for quantifiable returns. Each enterprise will need to select the attributes to be measured, hard and soft, and how they will be measured. For each enterprise, the "right" metrics are the ones that measure the actions and outcomes that relate to key business context and goals. Once a matrix of metrics has been selected, it's likely that each organization will need to constantly assess that set of metrics for validity and effectiveness.  

A leading Canadian IT consulting firm, NLC, recently tackled the (metrics) question head on in their 'Building the Business Case for Enterprise Search' whitepaper last week. While maintaining that a formal analysis 'misses' the real value of Enterprise Search, the paper does go on to provide a formal approach based on the IDC report, The Hidden Costs of Information Work (May 2009).  

The proposed formula boils down to measuring:

Search Cost Today = # of knowledge workers X avg. salary (incl. benefits) X % of time spent searching

Potential Annual Benefit = Search Cost Today X The Search Lift Ratio (%)  

Once deployed, estimates around 'The Search Lift Ratio' can easily be quantified through a combination of A/B testing…'accurate' time-on-page measurements and traditional survey/feedback polls.

 

For many enterprises the qualitative value of search may be the more significant set of metrics for determining what has been gained:

With enterprise search capabilities expanding and more companies looking to how search can help their business, the question now is what the true benefits of enterprise search are. According to Glotzbach, the biggest opportunity offered by a good enterprise search tool is a phrase he calls "information velocity", which basically refers to the notion of businesses trying to move faster and more efficiently. It means different things to different businesses. For a business with a large customer support team, being able to find the right answer for a customer faster would translate to hard-dollar benefits around operational efficiency, shorter call times, etc., and then soft-dollar benefits around improved customer experience. For a technology or engineering-driven company, it means being able to quickly assemble a team's collective wisdom for improved decision-making.

Another overarching benefit of enterprise search that applies to all companies is improved collaboration. “We see search as a key component of collaboration, especially in today’s global economy,” Glotzbach says. “It’s not uncommon for even midsize companies to have offices located throughout the world. Unfortunately, with that geographic dispersion, the left hand doesn’t necessarily know what the right hand is doing.” Search can thus become the glue that helps to connect teams with all the same information, so everyone is working on the same page and sharing the same insights.

 

Qualitative benefits of enterprise search and findability can contribute a significant financial punch:

• Continuity – knowledge available after employees leave
• Productivity – working smarter, more efficiently, less "reinventing of the wheel"
• Consistency – similar practices and processes to make sure all employees benefit from optimal search guidelines for faster and more successful results
• Reducing Risk – this has big impact: ensuring that the right information is being used for all sorts of work needs, including decision-making, innovation, customer service, risk management

 

Obstacles to Finding the Right Information

In too many enterprises, people at all levels spend too much time in manual processes and poor search techniques to acquire information, usually stored in multiple repositories and in disparate formats.

Organizations encounter the same issues over and over for enterprise search:

• Trying to find all of the right information quickly
• Implementing meaning-based search: Ensuring relevance and context as essential attributes of the right information
• Requirements for tagging and taxonomy in traditional document and content management systems are unrealistic for most enterprises – these processes are hard to implement and are usually abandoned – most employees don't have the mindset, nor the time, for this type of classification
• Extensive variety of information and content types, extensive array of locations >> need for multiple search approaches – how to manage this and make it easy for most people in the enterprise

Further hampering enterprise search strategies is the employee desire for the experience to be just like using Google. But there are vast differences between Internet search and internal enterprise search – this 'conflict of interest' must be reconciled to choose the right search / findability technologies, and for how employees view search itself.

Google-type search requires knowledge of keywords for the topic in question. The searches cover web content that has been optimized to be found. Google results are ranked by popularity and somewhat by relevancy to keywords and to who you are as a searcher. Now false expectations have been created that the 'Google way' applied to the internal enterprise will yield everything that is needed.

Enterprise search is more complex and subtle. It requires multiple distinct search technologies to cover all use cases. Within the enterprise, different groups and software systems are creating digital items within silos that are frequently searched solely with proprietary technologies. Enterprise Search needs to take place across multiple disparate repositories, navigating security and permissions – where none of the content has been optimized to be found, except in instances where taxonomies have been created (which is often not done). Often the goal for enterprise search is to uncover an array of data and information that then has to be read and analyzed to determine relevancy to projects and decision making. So "popularity" of content is rarely the right attribute for determining meaningful information for enterprise tasks.

 

                 

  Source: The Future of Enterprise Search and Information Access

 

Determining the Platform Mix

It is critical that enterprise staff have the ability to find and analyze information and data across the enterprise. At this point for any enterprise, search and findability should be considered mission critical, especially with the continuous creation of digital items, now at critical mass.

A well-structured approach to determining the right search platform should include:

• Thorough analysis and understanding of all search requirements and needs, from simple to complex – aligned with enterprise groups and business activities  
• Segmentation of information, data and content types
• Segmented user roles - analyze the kind of user experience expected by different enterprise roles – impacts the kind of UI needed to improve search productivity  
• Mapping search requirements to different kinds of search capabilities and solutions: full-text, structured data, e-discovery and so on  
• Setting right expectations for employees to understand why enterprise search is different – why this is better for what employees need (not popular pages à la Google, but the right information contextual to the needs and objectives of the organization…)

Include processes to evaluate and analyze the effectiveness of different search solutions – then act on results to continuously improve, plus recommend changes for how information is stored, what business needs are not being met, and so on.

To be able to agilely collect and reconcile information across disparate repositories and formats, unified search platforms will have to combine multiple search capabilities from enterprise and internet search technologies, as well as BI search and several kinds of analytics. Analytics right now can be limited by 'artificial' filters that may lead to failures to include or even recognize the right data. A lot of enterprise information is in content / document form, but content, text and semantic analytics are still not where they should be and can be quite pricey. Parallel efforts in BI search may end up the Next Gen findability intelligence tool that enterprises need.

 

One More Processing Tool

Too often upper management fails to understand that the means to competitiveness, innovation, and agile change exists within the organization with the right processes and technologies – and enterprise search can be one such means. The right search platform can be fully available to the enterprise, if upper management understands the strategic importance of connecting everyone in the enterprise to the information that is so important to key decision-making, project work, customer support, and for moving the organization forward.

Enterprise search is more than search or findability – it is a conduit for bringing together seemingly disparate items of information and knowledge to be analyzed by one of the best tools people have – the human brain. Frequently the human brain can identify salient points in unlikely places, consider and weigh the importance or non-usefulness of all kinds of information, intuitively discerning significant patterns that may not be entirely logical but nonetheless important for arriving at insight and intelligence.

 

Related Links

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

 

   

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

The Customer Journey: Content Marketing for B2B Software Buyers

     Originally published in CMSWire July 2, 2012

 

The customer journey consists of multiple touchpoints, which are the interactions with any and all enterprise functions, employees, and marketing / digital channels. They all matter – they are the milestones of the customer journey. Touchpoints are also components of multi-channel marketing, which has the challenge of nurturing and sustaining a unified customer experience across all channels, and for the customer journey.

The buying process or customer decision journey – where customers go through various stages to reach a decision about purchase – is a significant piece of the B2B customer journey. Content marketing can bring value to all aspects of the customer journey – all customer engagement opportunities. But particular attention to the buying process is an essential aspect of successful content marketing strategies.

  

Content and the Customer Journey

The buying process for B2B software can be complex and involve multiple steps for the customer, both for arriving at a decision and for making the purchase itself. The "customer" frequently consists of multiple roles: techies (IT), line-of-business decision-makers, financial and budget managers, executives, and sometimes the actual users of the technology. (One of the flaws on the buyer side of the equation is too often the "end" user of the software solution is left out of the decision-making process.) Content marketing has a fantastic opportunity to help potential buyer roles with the decision steps and foster positive experiences as part of the customer journey.

  

"What do Suspects want? What you Know, not what you Sell"

 

                                 Source: Eloqua

 

 Eloqua's Joe Chernov has produced a lot of solid work advising B2B companies on how best to implement content marketing. Chernov and Elle Woulfe recently released a slide deck on Mapping Content to the Buyer's Journey:

 Key takeaways:

• Content has minimal value in absolute, but tremendous value when mapped to the right stage in the funnel
• When it comes to distribution, think of suspect-stage content as "many to many," prospect-stage as "one to many," lead-stage as "one to few," and opportunity-stage as "one to one"
• When it comes to prospects, content that assuages professional fears tends to be most effective
• Mismatching content to stage can backfire … mitigate by asking yourself, "Is this piece of content, delivered at this time, advancing the buyer's journey?"

  

Customer Segmentation for the Journey

Work done for target customer segmentation and for mapping the customer journey is very useful for organizing types of content, and how and when content is made available to various customer roles and needs. Some content will be tagged to certain steps in the buying process: key customer roles for each step, what topics matter to them, what kind of content, where do they prefer to consume it. Some content will help existing customers use technology solutions for greater benefit and find out more that the vendor can do to help with business success. Some content is meant to pique interest for anyone unfamiliar with the vendor.

  

                             Source: Inflexion Point

  

The key milestones in the B2B buying decision process happen when:

• Something changes, and your prospect recognises they have a potential need
• They conclude that solutions are available, and that there is an economic case for change
• They define their requirements and decision criteria
• They identify and shortlist technically and financially feasible options
• They identify a single preferred solution
• That solution successfully navigates the investment approval process

 

Many resources are available for understanding how to match content to steps or phases in the customer journey, including Spark Inbound Marketing's B2B Buying Cycle and Eloqua's Content Grid:

 

  Eloqua's Content Grid v2 (excerpt)  

 

  

Content for the Customer-as-Buyer

è Content Value is Strictly from the Customer Point-of-View

Just as the customer alone owns the customer experience, the perceived value of content solely rests with the customer. Learning customer desires for content is where a lot of time should be spent. Just like software solutions must be right-fit for customers needs, the same goes for content. Just as vendors should be segmenting target markets and target customer roles for being able to connect their solutions to customer needs, the same segmentation should be used for content.

è Insights, Critical Thinking and Expert Knowledge-sharing

Software vendors need to provide content about current problems and future directions for topics that matter to customers. With so much content available on the internet, writing about yesterday's issues is not engaging to most customers, unless yesterday's issues address problems still plaguing customers. Then the content should look at what might be done to solve those problems. Customers realize that technology is in constant flux, in good and bad ways. Helping customers to see into future trends that could benefit their businesses, and the potential gotchas of new technology, is likely to provide valuable content from the customer POV.

è Diversity of Content

Content can be expressed in many forms, multiplied by many channels – which means companies really must understand for each target customer role what are the preferred content types and preferred channel for each content type. Mobile platforms present good but difficult channels that must be understood and handled well. Opportunities are increasing for more interactive components related to content. Creative, sophisticated approaches to most content should be considered – simplicity and clarity are other constructs to consider. Developing several related pieces of content for a particular topic can enrich how content marketing aligns with the customer journey. People come back for the next installments, and the vendor can develop more in-depth coverage via different media and different channels.

   

 Source: InboundWriter

   

è Quality over Quantity – and reliable continuity of quality content is vital

Customers and prospects don't want to waste their time on junk content or thinly disguised brochure-ware. Imperatives for effective content marketing artifacts are quality, creativity, hot topics, deep insights – essentially respecting the target audience by producing excellent work. Constant and reliable content creation is important, but what this means will vary by content type and channel.

 

There are a lot of reasons why content marketing doesn't work for some companies…But the biggest culprit (and it's not even close) is a lack of consistency, and, in some cases, a content stoppage. Research from IBM in 2010 stated that about 80 percent of corporate blogs never post more than five entries (hat tip to Rebecca Lieb). That is a truly unbelievable stat…

 

è People, Money, Time

Content marketing is sustained only by realistic allocations of resources: people, money and time in particular. B2B software companies should be tapping internal subject matter experts (SMEs), as well as external ones, to deliver the kind of content that customers want. Internal tech experts are also needed as reviewers and editors to ensure that content is accurate. Strategic-thinking enterprises cannot expect their employees to participate in content marketing on their own time or to work it into already busy work schedules, as a "sideline". Upper management has to make sure that content marketing participation for an employee is a recognized part of regular compensated responsibilities.

The responsibilities of creating relevant content must come from company staff:

Content marketing is brand marketing, cubed, and as such requires the full attention and supervision of your team. Prospects and customers now expect to engage with you— and by engage with you we mean get to know your brand—through your content. Creating content assets to support content marketing is a centralized strategy that relies on a consistent brand voice and vision to work. It's a bad habit left over from legacy thinking to allow your marketing organization to create content as one-off campaign or program assets without thinking of the broader implications.

 

Strategies to Deliver What Customers Need

The work to be done to understand how to deliver the right content to customers and prospects is the same work that B2B software vendors should be doing to deliver the products and services that customers and prospects want and need. The work being done to identify optimal target markets and customer roles for products should be extended to segmentation for content marketing purposes. In all of these cases the ultimate "product" for the customer should be high quality, reliable, useful, easy to put to work.

There are a lot of great ideas for the tactics of content marketing, but it's not likely that sustained success will result without multiple strategy levels in a given enterprise. Even if Marketing and other teams develop a good content marketing strategy, it cannot be effective if Marketing does not have a strategic position in the overall enterprise, backed by upper management. And before we can make the journey to a well-crafted content marketing strategy, upper management must make the commitment to be an inter-operative enterprise that is customer-focused, market-driven, and process and data savvy. Enterprises must ensure the creation of integrated systems and processes for internal and external customer interactions. Content marketing is not a short term campaign or project; it is a strategic commitment that impacts most of the enterprise – for the entire customer lifecycle.

 

  

Related Links

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors  

Content Marketing Strategy for B2B Software Vendors: Starring the 'New' White Paper

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the "customer as buyer"

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side, to customer-centric work in solutions strategy, competitive selling and go-to-market strategies. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services