The Cookie-pocalypse: Understanding the Implications for Digital Marketing and Customer Experience
Buyer Journeys, Market Insights
How is your company preparing for the coming cookie-pocalypse? The end of third-party cookies will fundamentally change digital marketing strategies across industries and have major implications for delivering a great customer experience…
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Post-Disruption Go-to-Market Strategy
Uncategorized
This pandemic will be over soon. While the costs will be high, scientific innovation and “social distancing” will eventually eliminate this catastrophic disease transmission. To help revenue leaders operationalize strategic change, we have put together a basic three-step process and a sample “checklist” of strategies …
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Establishing a Customer Success Function Primed for Value Creation: Three Go-dos to Avoid Common Pitfalls in Tech
Customer Experience
The biggest issue we see technology companies making today is using the investments in the CS role to define their CX strategy as opposed to defining their CX strategy and using the CS role as a critical enabler to that strategy. There are three very …
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Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) Beyond Digital Channels
Marketing ROI
Multi-touch attribution is critical for marketers who want to truly understand ROI of their various channels. While the term “MTA” is en vogue right now, this has been a problem for marketers for a long time. In the 1960s, television advertising might be driving some …
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Go-to-Market 2025 Forecast: Two Disciplines to Separate Winners from Also-Rans in Next 5 Years
Uncategorized
Driven by digital transformation, the 2020s will be known for massive behavioral change in both buyers and sellers. This is already apparent across every industry where venture-backed digital disruptors are growing rapidly – they are driving go-to-market and customer behavior change. Yet, many disruptors have …
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AEP Digital Listening Bulletin #3
Uncategorized
With only one day to go before AEP closes, consumer fatigue with MA advertising appears to have set in. Despite significant advertising and marketing investment, KFF just released a study that shows how few people actually voluntarily switch plans during AEP. Consumers get smarter about …
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Open Enrollment Digital Listening Bulletin #3
Uncategorized
The last few weeks we have picked up a lot more discussion around emerging categories of enhanced benefits as new products are “digested” by the market throughout this open enrollment; a continued focus on cost control and driving employee engagement; and ultimately, discussions about the …
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AEP Digital Listening Bulletin #2
Uncategorized
Not surprisingly, the rhetoric has heated up as consumers began to react to the multiple messages and plan options being received around Medicare Advantage across nearly all media channels as AEP shifts to full speed. The “improved” CMS Star Rating system results were released on …
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Open Enrollment Digital Listening Bulletin #2
Uncategorized
Welcome to week two of our Fall 2019 Group Benefits Open Enrollment Digital Listening Bulletin. Even more of the benefits conversation turned to the rising costs of the healthcare portion of group benefits over the last two weeks as the reality of 2020 plan options …
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Think Small to Win Big: How Carriers Should Approach Small Business Buyers at an Individual Level
Market Insights
To meet the needs of small businesses, it is important to remember that inside that account there are individuals making the decisions. And just like consumers, small business buyers have distinct communication preferences, servicing needs, and day–to-day pain points. For example, in our survey of …
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AEP Digital Listening Bulletin #1
Uncategorized
Welcome to week one of our Fall 2019 AEP Digital Listening Bulletin. In this bi-weekly e-mail, we’ll take a look at the trends, conversations, and themes that we are seeing dominate the Annual Enrollment Period discussion as carriers, brokers, agents and enrollees go through this …
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Customer-Centricity: Definition, Challenges, and Solutions
Customer Experience
In this article, I’ll walk through the history of customer-centricity, and how digital technology has ushered in a new era of customer-first marketing and support—at least potentially. I’ll then walk through some of the technological and people-related challenges companies typically face as they attempt to …
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Open Enrollment Digital Listening Bulletin #1
Uncategorized
Welcome to week one of our Fall 2019 Group Benefits Open Enrollment Digital Listening Bulletin. In this bi-weekly newsletter, we’ll take a look at the trends, conversations, and themes that we are seeing dominate the group benefits discussion as many carriers, brokers, heads of HR, …
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What Exactly is Digital Sales Transformation?
Uncategorized
As of 2020, “digital transformation” is a hot topic in corporate America. But “digital transformation” of a salesforce – actual people – is almost an oxymoron. Yes, we can provide sales reps with more software tools but essentially, they are still managing human-to-human interactions to …
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3 Strategies to Win with Customer Experience in the Platform-as-a-Channel Ecosystem
Customer Experience
In a previous article, we discussed the rise of ‘platforms-as-a-channel’ and the implications for companies across all industries. While there is a multitude of factors driving the rise of platform marketplaces, the underlying driver that makes it a sticky trend lies with the customer. Customers are looking …
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Beyond Benefits: Enabling Brokers To Unlock Their Full Potential
Sales Enablement
Brokers are successfully building relationships with small businesses, but they shouldn’t get too comfortable… For individuals buying and managing employer-sponsored benefits at small businesses, the support a broker provides is vital. In most cases, it is even more important than the carrier providing benefits …
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If Customer Centricity Is So Important, Why Do So Many Businesses Struggle to Get It Right?
Customer Experience, Sales Coverage
Customer centricity has never been more important to the success of both B2B and B2C companies. In just a few clicks, today’s customers have the power to shop around for the best price, compare features and even consult customer and influencer testimonials. The shift in …
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Leveraging Channel Partners as Your Frontline to Sales Agility
Channel Partner Enablement, Sales Enablement
As the technology industry landscape continues to shift towards XaaS recurring revenue models, the role of the channel is changing dramatically and forcing a new model for the vendor-partner relationship. While there are clear financial benefits of the recurring revenue transition, the underlying driver is …
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The Changing Face of Distribution Marketing to Seniors
Digital Sales, Lead Generation and Nurturing
When it comes to e-commerce, “rising seniors” have had 20 years to get used to secure e-commerce pages—specifically the little lock that appears on secure sites. The idea that seniors will hesitate to conduct business online is at this point probably more of a stereotype …
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Platform-as-a-Channel: A New Model Disrupting the Channel Partner Ecosystem
Channel Partner Enablement, Digital Sales
The partner channel model hadn’t changed much until a few years ago. Most groceries and consumer goods traveled through supermarkets; most cars were sold through dealers, and most manufacturing items were sold through distributors. These traditional channel models have some combination of nine traits in …
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Why the Ancillary Insurance Market is About to Boom, and Only Some Will Have Competitive Advantage
Market Insights
Offering a health plan is no longer enough. Today’s employers are adding dental, life, long-term disability and other innovative ancillary benefits in order to attract and retain the best talent in the tightest labor market in years. This means brokers and carriers need to follow …
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6 Step Approach to Reinvigorating Your Competitive Positioning – Part 1
Sales Enablement
As tech competition heats up, those that innovate and work faster, better or cheaper, may win, yet while they focus on reinventing or optimizing what they bring to market, businesses that focus on how to position their solutions might be more successful in attracting buyers. …
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9 Requirements for Effective Cross-Selling in High Tech
Buyer Journeys, Cross-Selling, Marketing Analytics
The impact of digital transformation on the Technology sector is staggering. Billion-dollar technology incumbents, hyper-growth emerging stars, and new start-ups alike are not only developing and supplying the catalysts of digital transformation to their customers across all industries, but they also face the need to …
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How Simply “Watching Your Buyers” Can Increase Retention Rates
Market Insights
One of our clients recently came to us with an issue that we immediately diagnosed as a friction problem. A product had been conceived and built which should have been selling well, but uptake was slow. There was nothing functionally wrong with the product; it …
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9 Requirements for Effective Cross-Selling in Financial Services
Cross-Selling, Marketing Analytics, Sales Enablement
Our nine requirement guide for financial services companies to build effective and scalable cross-selling programs.
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