Highly Competitive - software industry insights

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 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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

I last wrote about content marketing for B2B software vendors in 2010 – since then some enterprises have made good progress with strategic use of content marketing. Unfortunately, many enterprises still don't understand why content marketing has value, and haven't figured out what to do.

The story still is this:

• B2B software Customers are becoming more proactive Buyers and have taken the driver's seat in buying decisions
• These customers want relevant, quality content to learn more about problems that matter to their companies and potential solutions to those problems, which may include the offerings of a particular B2B software company
• And they'd like to learn about vendor solutions through honest, well-written content – instead of brochure-ware filled with "marketing" hype  
• But many B2B software companies are not providing the content that customers want

 A lot of data points show that for all types of companies there is tremendous content marketing activity going on now, as well as strong future growth potential:

• A recent report notes that U.S. content marketing now comprises a $40 billion industry
• About a quarter of worldwide marketing budgets are committed to content marketing efforts
• 60% of companies forecast increases for content marketing budgets by mid-2012
• According to Outsell, companies spend $67 billion annually on their websites, where a lot of B2B content marketing takes place right now
• A HiveFire study found that 82% of B2B companies were using content marketing – and the longer the sales cycle, the more use of content marketing

So why do so many B2B software companies struggle with execution and achieving beneficial results?

 

Symptoms, Root Causes and Steps in the Right Direction

There are many marketing-oriented posts about how B2B vendors are going wrong when it comes to content marketing. Most of what's called out is not surprising: failure to write properly on topics that customers prefer - added to failure to even find out what customers want to read; poor writing quality; non-engaging material; promoting brochure-ware instead of useful, thought-provoking material. There is also failure to understand how to match the right content to the right channel, and lack of knowledge regarding the channels that customer segments prefer for various kinds of content.

But these are mostly symptoms -- not root causes for the disconnect between B2B companies and the execution of a content marketing strategy for successful outcomes. One root cause: many companies have no cohesive long-term strategy for content marketing.

First, let's take a couple of steps back: if there's no strategy for content marketing, then it's likely that marketing is not positioned strategically in the enterprise with upper management backing. So it's not just content marketing that may be lacking executive buy-in at the top, but the overall marketing function. Unfortunately many technology companies continue to treat Marketing as an add-on silo'd function, or worse, as voodoo magic that can miraculously fix whatever is lacking from company offerings or hoodwink potential customers into buying the product, whether it's any good or not. In this ridiculous second situation (it happens more than we'd like to think), Marketing is of course the culprit to be punished if the "voodoo magic" fails to save the day.

Marketers were asked to explain what particular challenges they face within their own organizations. We noticed a number of themes running throughout their comments:

 Getting buy-in: "Management patience - mgt needs to understand that in today's B2B environment it takes time to engage prospects. The prospect has a lot more power than they did in the 90's and 2000's."

Now, a couple more steps back and we're looking at: enterprises that are also lacking in integrated systems and processes for internal and external customer interactions; employees who have not been empowered/enabled to interact with customers; poor understanding of target markets and target customer roles; silo'd business functions; poor use of data assets. So before we can make the journey to a well-crafted content marketing strategy, upper management must make the commitment to the integrated enterprise that is customer-focused, market-driven, and process and data savvy. Overall strategies must reflect these tenets. Marketing must be included as part of overall strategy, and the value of content marketing to reach the customer-as-buyer must be given credence, support and enablement. Now we can set about creating an excellent content marketing strategy.

Bottom line: content marketing is not a short term campaign or project; it is a strategic commitment that impacts most of the enterprise.

 

 Content Marketing: What It Takes to Execute Well

Why does it matter that technology companies implement content marketing? Software vendors should be neck-deep in content marketing if they are willing to take the right steps forward with the right strategic decisions in place. Content marketing (if done well) keeps the company focused on understanding and meeting the needs of customers – something these companies should be doing anyway, in every aspect of business. Align the business with Customer, align content with Customer. Content marketing is a natural progression from the recognition that the customer-as-buyer is more and more driving how and if sales happen; content marketing provides a dynamic way to connect to those customers. At a higher level, strategic content marketing is an affect of the enterprise becoming integrated and agile – hopefully of the enterprise becoming a "social business".

It strikes me that a strategic commitment to content marketing parallels the kind of strategy required to successfully implement and sustain good community management: dedicated team and participation of other enterprise teams, strategic backing from the top down, long-term commitment to the success of the community, allocation of healthy resources to ensure community success, strong integration with multi-channel customer service, and dynamic business processes. A vibrant community can also be seen as a stellar artifact of healthy content marketing.

An integrated content marketing strategy provides a single home base for all content so that real sense is made of how an enterprise is connecting with prospects and customers. The strategy for content marketing pulls together individual marketing programs and initiatives so there is potentially seamless transition for the customer from channel to channel. Connecting the tactics of marketing to a content strategy also makes it more possible to construct metrics that track the effectiveness of insightful content that can be tied to functions such as lead gen and sales funnel.

Customers know that B2B software vendors are in the business to sell products – customers want resources to figure out if a vendor's offering will answer their needs. And customers want to know if vendors understand their business problems, if vendors are thinking into the future. But the bottom line still is: the software vendor better have products worth buying and using.

 All marketers have the opportunity to increase effectiveness, and they all can learn from the "best in class." Just as was the case last year, effective marketers spend more and are more strategic in their approach:

• They allocate 31% of their budget to content marketing, compared to less effective marketers who invest 18%
• They are 50% more likely to consider the "stage in the buying cycle" when developing content, whereas less effective marketers are less likely to tailor content in any way.
• They benefit from substantially more buy-in from senior members of the organization. Only 8% of effective marketers complain about lack of buy-in from higher-ups, versus 17% of those who rate themselves as less effective (though, on a positive note, this number has declined, dropping down from last year's rate of 24% for less effective marketers).

 

 

                                          Source: Greg De Tisi (with my "strategic" addition)  

 

Content for the Customer-as-Buyer

 è Content Value is strictly from the Customer POV

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. Decisions are then made: who are the key customer roles that are most interested in content at different stages of the buying cycle, what topics matter to them, what kind of content, where do they prefer to consume it.

 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. A matrix is now coming together for understanding and managing optimal communication with different customer roles. 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.

 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.

 Strategy and planning to execute, and 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.

 

Content for the Customer Journey

The customer journey consists of multiple touchpoints, which are all 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, including content marketing, which has the challenge of nurturing and sustaining a unified customer experience across all channels, during the customer journey.

The hard work is taking what frequently is a collective of separate touchpoints and harmonizing the collective to enable excellent customer experiences. Orchestration and integration are key aspects of approaching a seamless experience across touchpoints – again this only works if the customer truly perceives such a unified experience.

The buying process for B2B software can be complex and involves 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 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.

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. 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.

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: Content Marketing Institute

 

  

Delivering 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.

Content marketing cannot survive as a strategy in a vacuum. Nor can it have any impact if it is treated as a short-term project or campaign. Strategic content marketing is long-term, with continual development and evolution that parallels the changes that occur for the company, its target markets and customers, and other factors that impact software vendors. Orchestration and implementation of content marketing impact many groups in the enterprise, not just Marketing. The strategies for content marketing should be part of overall corporate and marketing strategies. Similarly metrics for content marketing should fold back into hierarchies of metrics for marketing and overall corporate measurements for achieving goals.

  

Related Links:

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

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid -- Hybrid Roles for Business Technology

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

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 consulting, sales and marketing. 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

 

 

 

 

Internal Disruption – No Longer Business As Usual

Tapping into periodic business model renovation to refresh competitiveness

 

Not too long ago, a tweet from Hutch Carpenter @bhc3 caught my eye:

First step in disrupting an industry: identify the "business clichés"

The tweet linked to an article by Luke Williams, known for his work on ‘disruptive thinking’ for transforming businesses through seeking the unexpected and through adopting proactive disruptive behavior and strategies. The article elaborates on what is meant by business clichés:

In other words, what are the clichés - the widespread, hackneyed beliefs that govern the way people think about and do business in a particular space… inverting or denying industry clichés can often lead to significant business breakthroughs

Williams’ notions of ‘business clichés led to a couple of tweets from me that boil down to:

…apply internally to tech co’s biz model > question assumptions, status quo, disrupt business as usual…to move to new possibilities, competitiveness, new solutions & markets

As with the Social Business, starting internally with change frequently is a better route for companies when faced with the need to disrupt current business models for survival and success purposes. Software companies are especially prone to stand on old business models well past the expiration date. And many software companies are surprised when strong competitors emerge, based on fresh business models.

  

What is a Business Model?

Business models focus software companies on target markets, customers, the solution space and, somewhat indirectly, the competitive landscape, the same matrix that underpins market intelligence. When companies seriously embrace the selection of a business model, the process introduces good and rigorous strategic thinking into decisions about company direction, as well as definition of company scope. Through the business model, the focus is holistic and interactive in terms of how the company will proceed to achieve success.

Of course there are many definitions and concepts about what comprises a business model. A lot of MBA school, entrepreneurial, and VC hours have been spent on not only deciding what is the optimal business model for a particular undertaking but on the strategies to carry out its intentions.

  

The shortest definition that I’ve come across is in a post by Tim Berry: A business model is a description of how your business intends to operate and make money. Berry then goes to the next level:   

But innovative business models go beyond this simple formula to create customer loyalty, make value in unusual ways, and define new products or services that people didn’t know they needed.  

This dovetails somewhat with a business model definition put together by IBM:

• What value is delivered to customers: Customer segments, the value proposition, the specific “job to be done,” what is sold and how it is sold

• How revenue is generated: the pricing model and forms of monetization

• How the company positions itself in the industry: the company’s role and relationships across the value chain

• How the value is delivered: Key internal resources and processes as well as external partnerships.

There is lots of disagreement, lots of vague notions regarding whether business models matter or not.  Some consider the business model almost a sacred object, carved in stone. More and more, many see each iteration of the business model as disposable. A new class of thinking sees the business model not as an end but an ever-evolving means to success as a company.

 

Articulating New Direction - Most Companies Not Very Good At Doing This

Intriguing idea: the disposable business model. But how many companies pull off such an approach?

From my experience in the software industry, not many. Particularly bad at changing direction are mid-sized software vendors that are publicly traded. While being a smaller company would suggest agility for change, often these companies are ham-strung by boards of directors who seem to want growth without risk. There is no growth without risk for most companies. One piece of advice to mid-sized software vendors is to never go public and thus retain a healthy ability to reinvent the company without the inertia of boards of directors and Wall Street expectations. Another piece of advice: learn to embrace risk: that is, the good kind that can lead to growth and new success.

But no matter the size of the company, many software vendors usually wait too long before assessing the health of the current business model and even then, are slow to articulate change, even slower to act effectively. As a result, core markets increasingly stagnate, management still tries to work with the old way of doing things, and fails to work genuinely on a new business model, or as Williams advises, to identify and then deny the business clichés that are dragging down the company.

In 2008 Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, and Henning Kagermann published the article “Reinventing Your Business Model” in the Harvard Business Review, an article that went on to receive second-place honors for the 2008 McKinsey Award. The article culminates research into the difficulties many companies have with pulling off success through business model innovation. The authors contend that these companies have such poor understanding of the current business model (really disturbing! but explains a lot…) that they can’t relate the current model to new opportunities, nor can they be confident about ejecting the current model for something new.

(Clay Christensen) also underscores the fatal flaw that managers make when trying to reinvent their business in the face of a disruptive competitor. Their solution is often to leverage what the company already has in place at marginal cost rather build an entirely new business model with heavy investment.

If you are trying to create a new business model because the world is changing, then you don’t want to leverage what is already in place. An entrant doesn’t have anything to leverage, so just creates what needs to be created.

 

When It’s Time For Reinvention

A 2005 survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit reported that over 50% of executives believe business model innovation will become even more important for success than product or service innovation. A 2008 IBM survey of corporate CEOs echoed these results. Nearly all of the CEOs polled reported the need to adapt their business models; more than two-thirds said that extensive changes were required. And in these tough economic times, some CEOs are already looking to business model innovation to address permanent shifts in their market landscapes.

 

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results 

-- Albert Einstein

  

Of course, there’s no point to changing the business model if the company isn’t innovating its software offerings, which must come about by “disrupting business as usual” internal to the company. Not all product innovation demands a reinvention of the business model. Perhaps the salient question is: how does this new innovation impact the proposition articulated for customer value? Companies that find success with business model reinvention also possess clear understanding of their customers and the value to those customers that comes from innovations.

Identify When A New Model May Be Needed:

An opportunity to...           

• Address needs of large groups who find existing solutions too expensive or complicated
• Capitalize on new technology, or leverage existing technologies in new markets
• Bring a job-to-be-done focus where it doesn’t exist

 A need to . . .

• Fend off low-end disruptors.
• Respond to shifts in competition

 

To determine whether a firm should seek to reinvent its business model, Johnson, Christensen and Kagermann advise these steps:

• Articulate what makes your existing model successful. For example, what customer problem does it solve? How does it make money for your firm?
• Watch for signals that your model needs changing, such as tough new competitors on the horizon.
• Decide whether reinventing your model is worth the effort. The answer is yes only if the new model changes the industry or market. 

So the new proposition for staying competitive may be that many companies will need to adopt the strategy of continuous business model reinvention. But to do this, tremendous internal change will have to happen, particularly around the management of the company. Reinvention, new directions, continuous competitiveness -- all are only possible in companies that embrace change and innovation in the corporate cultural DNA.

 

             
                              Source: IBM CEO study – Capitalizing on Complexity

 

Comprehensive Market Intelligence is Key to Business Model Disruption

A lot of what can make a software company more competitive – and can contribute to innovation of business models, markets and products – comes from well-executed Market Intelligence activities and processes. Excellent Market Intelligence is essential if business model reinvention will be an on-going initiative. Understanding customers, markets, channels and competitors is based on better information to create advantage in new and unique ways:

• New opportunities – identify new trends that will matter to target markets and customers; how to get there before the competition (whenever possible)
• Early warning of industry, market and/or competitor changes – take advantage of opportunities and leverage/deal with threats and risk, and always look over your shoulder…
• 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

 

 

Reinvention: Brand Equity / Brand Perception

I want to open up the question of how business model reinvention impacts Brand, both in terms of brand equity (value and general recognition built from the former business model) and brand perception (how current and potential customers – plus media, competitors, analysts, etc. – view the company). In the not-so-distant past, it had been considered near suicide to make business model changes that could negatively impact Brand. But in the digital age, when information is quickly disseminated through endless media, most people are easily educated about changes in a company. The Internet itself is all about constant change, and many have grown up in that environment.

I’m not going to explore the Brand aspect in this article but it is an issue that must be considered when reinventing business models and enacting innovation that impacts customer perception and receptivity to the company’s offerings.

  

Smaller Companies With Disruptive Genes – Better At Business Model Reinvention?

>> JackBe – Customer-Driven Disruption

JackBe started off as an Ajax tools vendor in 2001. After a while the company began targeting enterprises with a mashup platform that connects to all sorts of data sources. Responding to what JackBe customers wanted, the next development was to provide capabilities for ad hoc data integration mashups by end users.

Recently JackBe has been calling itself ‘the Real-Time Intelligence Company’, specializing in situational awareness, and is promoting the idea that the company may have a new way to provide business intelligence for enterprise end users. Real-Time intelligence for JackBe first of all means self-service BI, extrapolating its mashup services for end users. Real-Time also means fast, easy access to existing data sources, without concern about the freshness of the data. Essentially, the JackBe approach supports instant decision-making in certain scenarios.

A significant challenge entails the validation of data sources and value of the resulting mash-ups: do the end users understand what they are doing and are they intelligently combining the appropriate data? Is the intelligence that is pulled together relevant and accurate, and how do end users know or test the intelligence to provide validation?

By stepping into the larger arena of BI, JackBe now has invited in scrutiny from a well-established solution space. However, traditional BI is not without its problems and has suffered low adoption and success rates over time. It may be that JackBe is pioneering a new approach that could make a significant change to how BI is practiced or even what constitutes “business intelligence”.

JackBe has found itself moving into a new business model, seemingly a case where business model reinvention continues to be customer-driven, and where a company listens well to its customers and acts on their needs and wishes, to achieve competitive positioning and success. But with the new business model comes new challenges to ensure the validity and accuracy of its product directions.

  

>> NewsGator – One Business Model Dies Out, Another Adopted to Thrive

Starting in 2003, Newsgator focused on developing RSS usage for information and content consumption.  A business model shift occurred when NewsGator changed from a consumer focus to targeting enterprises. Even though NewsGator still provides RSS, access is now free.

In 2007, NewsGator reinvented its business model by launching Social Sites, community / collaboration software that also provides tight integration with Microsoft SharePoint. NewsGator was already a SharePoint partner for its RSS capabilities, so its business model shift pivoted on a strategic, and rather significant, partnership already in place. NewsGator acquired Tomoye community software in 2010, mainly to enter new markets. Tomoye also had the SharePoint connection.

The move to a communities / collaboration platform that extends SharePoint has proven to be successful to date. The new business model includes a deep commitment to Microsoft and SharePoint – and active cultivation of an ecosystem of Microsoft partners around “making SharePoint social”. Social Sites is built directly on the SharePoint platform, is SharePoint cloud certified, supports multiple versions of SharePoint, including mobile and Office 365.

NewsGator has selected a niche for its social solutions in that it is dedicated to complementing the SharePoint platform and to making the experience of using Social Sites with SharePoint a seamless and smooth experience for end users. With this business model, NewsGator success is highly dependent on continued SharePoint success. The up side is that Microsoft makes available an extensive ecosystem that can greatly benefit NewsGator.

One aspect of business model reinvention for NewsGator tracks back to the impact of reinvention on Brand. Does the company name still make sense, shifting from RSS/aggregation services to social media platform? Or does the brand recognition of NewsGator’s name trump any confusion about what the company now does? Frankly, considering that a good many software company names are obscure, this really shouldn’t be an obstacle for NewsGator, particularly with such a targeted solution in conjunction with SharePoint.

  

>> Stone Bond – From Services to Software Vendor

There are many cases where professional services providers for IT solutions will either productize services work into a software offering or purposefully create new software solutions that eventually evolve into a packaged software business for the services company. A key change in business model comes when the company must decide if it is to be a dedicated software vendor or a services company – or even, perhaps, the company decides to split into two organizations.

Stone Bond’s consulting services began in 1993, providing IT solutions for the worldwide oil and gas industry. Among the services was data modeling projects, working with oil company engineers as end users. Many in the oil and gas industry have long understood that their data is a very valuable asset.

In 2002 Stone Bond Technologies launched a software solution called Enterprise Enabler for data and business integration projects. Enterprise Enabler presents as a single environment for EAI and ETL capabilities and is somewhat geared towards end users / business users through out-of-the-box “codeless” data integration capabilities. Stone Bond has developed several technologies such as AppComs (for connectivity) to innovate how integration projects are created and executed. BPM and workflow based on SOA utilize end-to-end shared metadata.

While Stone Bond still targets the oil and gas industry, and obviously has a great deal of expertise for that industry, the company has already taken Enterprise Enabler into other markets, such as financial services and government. The solution also straddles target customers by offering a solution that can appeal to business users and/or IT teams. Enterprise Enabler may be blazing a trail for bringing together IT and business to better execute data integration projects as collaborative partners.

The company is now working on showcasing Enterprise Enabler as a software product independent of the original consulting business, with work going into raising brand awareness. Enterprise Enabler already has a solid customer base, but also seems like a “best-kept secret” in the data integration vendor space. In some ways, Stone Bond has an interesting clean slate when it comes to marketing to and educating the world on what this solution has to offer.

 

Related Links

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

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

Provocation-based Market Intelligence in a Market-Driven world

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

B2B WEM / WCM Software Vendors Targeting Mid-Market customers: stay where you are!  

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  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

 

Disclaimer: Julie Hunt is not affiliated with any of the vendors in this article.

 

A Smarter Edgier Collective: Business Technology Professionals on Twitter

 

As a departure from my usual in-depth article I’m sharing my somewhat ‘social-logical’ thoughts on the community of business technology professionals on Twitter.

Twitter has many faces for its users. There is one Twitter where masses of people tweet about pop culture and everyday life. There are also the Twitter worlds of brand promotions and consumers. And then there are Twitter “collectives”, floating through the Twittersphere with distinct flavor and vigor, where certain “birds of a feather” come together.

One particularly strong “collective” swirls around business technology professionals. These tech professionals work with hardware and/or software, as: users, vendors, analysts, consultants, marketers, product managers, practitioners, writers, developers, critics, innovators. And most of these seemingly disparate professionals are continuously and serendipitously crossing paths on Twitter, in a way that was never possible before.

Of course, this tech professionals’ collective on Twitter is not formally organized nor does it need to be to result in effective communication and interaction. I like to think that the some of the propensity for technology folks to interact on Twitter has origins in software / hardware in “old school” developer communities, BBSs, and forums. “Special interest groups” within the tech professionals collective exist on Twitter (frequently marked by hashtags) – but mixing and interaction amongst all such groups are continuous and fruitful.

In mixing it up, software analysts are talking to social media agencies and practitioners, marketers to systems analysts and developers, big fish talking with not-so-big fish. Silos are being evaporated, as individuals are walking a bit in another professional’s shoes and seeing from another’s perspective. Twitter has been an extended and natural collaboration experience with open communicators, willing listeners, change agents and change acceptors. For these tech professionals, is Twitter becoming “collaboration as business process” that is essential to their professional endeavors?

As a collective, technology professionals take advantage of many activities, both organized and impromptu, that are possible on Twitter. Many lead and/or participate in chats or tweetjams via organized events, or jump in on lively exchanges that start with a couple of people. Connections and brainstorms spring up where impromptu conversations are usually open to all, with an almost stream-of-consciousness flow. Unexpected new relationships develop. When disparate worlds willingly collide, it can enable the emergence of new ideas, perspectives, unexpected slants on topics and problems.

 

Interactive Social Caretakers

On Twitter, each tech professional might be considered individual social caretakers or personal “community managers”. David Armano articulates how effectively trained community managers should posses the following seven qualities:

Articulate: Able to communicate effectively in a variety of media

Social: Engages in authentic conversations and interactions

Professional: Acts as a responsible ambassador of brand/org

Adaptable: Can make decisions quickly, handle crisis situations

Enthusiastic: Energetic, passionate and engaged in relevant topics

Connected: Has ties to the right people within the community

Organized: Can keep track of data, relationships, content calendars, and a variety of assets essential to maintaining community  

I find that this list captures the traits embodied by many of the tech professionals interacting on Twitter. The “communities” they manage permeate the collective.

 

Twitter as Social Intranet for Tech Professionals?

Looking at this loosely-organized Twitter collaboration phenomenon for tech professionals, is it reasonable to think of Twitter as an über Social Intranet for such professionals?  This would be a very public intranet but this Twitter intranet has much in common with the current fledgling social intranets behind the firewall.

Toby Ward describes a social intranet as:

An intranet that features multiple social media tools for most or all employees to use as collaboration vehicles for sharing knowledge with other employees. A social intranet may feature blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, or a combination of these or any other Web 2.0 (intranet 2.0) tool with at least some or limited exposure (optional) from the main intranet or portal home page.

Intranets are places where an organization goes to find knowledge, experts, documents, discussions. If we consider the intermingled tweetstreams of the tech professionals collective as the “home page” or the gateway to the treasures of this “social intranet”, then a smörgåsbord of blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networks, and so on are available to all of the collective. Indeed Twitter itself may be the ultimate open forum. The Twitter “social intranet” also reflects continuous change: unpredictable, dynamic, significant, evolving – allowing exchanges of unexpected information and opinion.

In his presentation on Social Intranets, Oscar Berg sees a shift to Value Creation, emphasizing Collaboration – Learning – Innovation – Relationships. Twitter interaction experiences encompass the tenets of Berg’s Value Creation as well as these points called out by Berg regarding the greater expectations people have for organizations:

• Fast response
• Accessibility
• Simplicity
• Freedom of choice
• Transparency & influence
• Need-driven

 

Holism through social networks and cultural change

If each tech professional on Twitter is their own community manager (and brand manager), and is participating in a social intranet super-structure, what sort of “social organization” describes the overall collective?

In the work that Jeremiah Owyang is doing on social businesses, he maintains that companies organize social in 5 ways: Centralized, Distributed, Coordinated, Multiple Hub-and-Spoke, and finally Holistic. Holistic is the least frequent in organizations where everyone uses social media equally and consistently across all organizations, somewhat as “social masters”, with the essential qualities of community managers.

The central notion of holism is that the whole ends up greater than the sum of the parts, meaning that something organically greater emerges. The tech professionals’ collective derives its organic strength from such parts as mutual respect, active listening, cross-culture, cross-geo, cross-functional to achieve a collaboration that is alive and kicking.

 

 

Related Links

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

 The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

 Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  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

 

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

 

For the past few years, companies have been exploring initiatives internally and externally that dance around the notion of “social” methods for engaging all of the people in an enterprise ecosystem - to bring about better results for these companies. These social methods have been described with terminology such as “enterprise 2.0”, “social computing”, “web 2.0”, “social media”, and so on. The evolution of these social methods has led now to another term: the Social Business.

I find the term “Social Business” a necessary one:  to remind companies that people are very important to their success: customers, employees, partners, suppliers, and so on. I see the term “Social Business” encompassing what companies might become to engage people - inside and out – to achieve business goals, and frankly, to stay in business. Again looking at terms in common usage: Enterprise 2.0 has been concerned with the “inside” (I call it social collaboration) and social media / web 2.0 have been concerned with the “outside” (external-facing customer engagement). A blurring between Social Inside and Social Outside has begun, partly driven by the adoption of customer-facing social media tools by internal collaboration programs.   

A lot of the conversation for the ins and outs of social these days has focused on technology and practices - and even on “naming conventions” - but People as the focus is what really makes a difference for a business to achieve success. People participating in the “Social Business” are cross-generational: there are lots of people of all ages who are savvy about collaboration, communication, social media, respecting colleagues and customers – none of these activities are the sole turf of any generation. And I’ll repeat: the focus on the value of People and trust in what they can accomplish (not just on tech and practices or processes) is at the heart of healthy companies.

Why does a renewed - and authentic - interest in People matter to a business? From the customer perspective, much has been written about customers now driving relationships with businesses where businesses listen to what customers want, like and don’t like. From the perspective of employees and partners, a great deal of what companies need comes from people:  innovation, creativity, ideas for new directions, passion, enthusiasm, customer relationships, knowledge, experience, judicious consideration, and so on. 

The Human factor always has to be distinctly considered in anything called “social” -- otherwise it’s just a buzzword shell game. First there must be authentic respect for all the people in the enterprise ecosystem; then enterprises can work on building out social practices that consider the human element – afterwards, apply technology and processes where they make sense.

  

Value of Social Business - Inside

In enterprise activities such as collaboration, knowledge management, business intelligence, business process management, adaptive case management, there is a significant role to be played by social capabilities to improve how these activities perform and provide relevance and results. Social business on the inside is also rightfully tied to enterprise collaboration and intranets that are taking on more social media type capabilities. Many software solutions are including social capabilities as methods to improve solution usage and value, as well as do a better job of incorporating the importance of the human element.

For example, Business Process Management (BPM) solutions encompass practices and tools that are evolving and including more people-oriented methods in terms of social collaboration capabilities. Forrester’s Clay Richardson comments:

Enterprise social – and social BPM by extension – is seeing healthy adoption in industries and organizations that have open cultures and have a need to innovate and share ideas quickly. Although it might seem counterintuitive, we’re seeing the greatest adoption of social BPM patterns in the healthcare and public sector – specifically in defense.

Sandy Kemsley, independent analyst and systems architect for enterprise infrastructure, also understands well the people side of business:

Tom Davenport recently wrote about the need to add structure to social in order to bring enterprise value: Transaction systems like ERP and CRM, tools for workflow and document management, and project management systems all made it more clear to people what they need to do next in their jobs. That capability has undoubtedly led to productivity gains.

But work effectiveness also demands that people share their knowledge and expertise with each other. That’s where social media comes in. It makes it easy to reach out to others for help in making a decision or taking an action. And the transfer of knowledge through social media doesn’t require a lot of difficult knowledge management work in advance.

Business Intelligence is another software solution space that is looking at building in collaborative layers throughout the BI lifecycle. The possibilities for new applications of analytics increase with collaboration. Inviting in many-to-many interactions also opens up processes to new ideas from participants. Gartner found that social venues and collaboration help to track and capture outcomes of the decisions made based on BI / analytics:

Gartner's user surveys show that improved decision making is the key driver of BI purchases. However, most BI deployments emphasize information delivery and analysis to support fact-based decision making, but fail to link BI content with the decision itself, the decision outcome, or with the related collaboration and other decision inputs. This makes it impossible to capture decision-making best practices. Solutions are emerging that tie BI with social software and collaborative tools for higher-quality, more transparent decisions that will increase the value derived from BI applications.

Promoting social on the inside draws on the rich value that lies in the many people who populate the enterprise.

  

Value of Social Business - Outside

Social media and social CRM solutions and practices are gaining interest and usage as means to work with customers throughout the customer lifecycle with the company. Social media and social CRM also play important roles for connecting the Social Business-Inside with the Social Business-Outside.

Social media is not just the latest fad in marketing; and to really work, social media is not “one-size-fits-all”.  Enterprises must understand how a go-to-market strategy that includes social media will help with objectives and obligations; then enterprises must figure out which social media to use and why. Social media commitments require an authentic personal touch, both for how customers are communicating with the enterprise, and how the enterprise responds and sustains customer conversations.

Maria Ogneva comments on the social customer and social CRM:

The ability for everyone to engage and be in alignment: Social media is not a silo, and no one department owns it. There must be a process in place by which each message gets automatically routed to the right person, classifying it by type (question, complaint or compliment), content (what it actually said), sentiment, action needed, and influence. This helps automate the triage process, which until now has been mostly manual.

Jeremiah Owyang’s work with brands employing social media to better connect and support customers is extensive and well-known. In his presentation on “Three Trends Companies Must Invest in for Social Business”, Owyang introduces the notion of Rings of Social Influence which include employees as company ambassadors for communicating with customers, as well as these recommended best practices for such employees:   

• Establish guardrails to protect both employees and the company
• Offer internal training courses, (like Intel’s certification program) and recurring training
• Offer an internal water cooler where they can talk in a safe place and plan: Yammer, Socialcast, Community Platforms

And of course companies must recognize the power of the customer voice and consider Owyang’s recommended best practices for customers active in social media:

• For better or worse, customers are already talking about you – how can you aggregate their voices closer to your brand?
• Develop an advocacy program to recognize and reward your top customers.
• Change your mindset to understanding that critical feedback is an opportunity for product and service improvements – then use to increase loyalty and WOM.

 

Social Business Equation: Inside + Outside = Eliminate silos

Many enterprises are understanding the value of social media to better engage and retain customers, to attract prospects, make sales, help customers solve problems: Social Business - Outside. But it seems to be much harder for enterprises to understand social on the inside and why that matters. Enterprises must come to understand that social on the outside won’t be substantially achieved – let alone sustained - if social on the inside isn’t working.

Social on the inside pertains to all company teams that touch customers, prospects, partners, and suppliers – basically the vast majority of the company.  The commitment, usage and value of social on the inside and the outside must be real – employees, partners, customers will quickly figure out if a company is faking it.  With healthy social practices inside a company, the support and growth of social for any interactions involving the enterprise human ecosystem – inside and out – should then be a natural and vital part of overall company strategy.

Here are the big questions:

1. Can the enterprises that need to, change quickly enough to re-humanize?
2. More importantly, will enterprises even choose to change?

This change – understanding and nurturing the value of all the people in the enterprise ecosystem – impacts how the company operates internally, how it does business externally, how the company effectively engages the human ecosystem that is truly needed for the company to survive as a successful business – inside and out.

From this change comes these rewards:  big impact on continuous innovation / relevant product development, drawing the best out of employees, collaborating with customers and partners on future direction and products, listening to all of the people in the enterprise ecosystem to draw on their experiences and expertise for building and sustaining competitive edge >> all contributing to the success and relevance of company.

The strategic decision to become the social business has to come from upper management and boards of directors – it has to be a key aspect of the enterprise – or it won’t happen in any significant or sustained fashion. When an enterprise chooses to become a “social business”, the divide between social-inside and social-outside should blur as more and more as silos within the enterprise hopefully disappear, and as bi-directional connections to customers and prospects, partners and suppliers become more authentic and more immediate.

 

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Jeremiah Owyang has produced a very good starting point for depicting the Social Business Stack, expressed in terms of technology. I’ve added a “reminder” element to his diagram:

 

 
 
 

 

Related Links

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

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

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid – business technology hybrids bring real value to company competitiveness

  

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  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