Be Bold and Innovate Your Sales Enablement

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When it comes to the impact of COVID-19 on sales channels, we’ve seen startling data on the short-term shift in channel usage by both sellers and buyers. Traditional FTF and inside sales channels have taken steep hits in usage — dropping by over 30 percentage points in some instances — which has affected direct and indirect sellers alike. For Sales Enablement teams, this presents an immediate challenge and frankly a mad scramble to upskill 1,000s of sellers on digital selling capabilities…

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The COVID-19 Catalyst: Brick-and-Mortar Retail’s Future 

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(Part II of the Hammer and the Dance Series)   I started writing this post as a sequel to the “Hammer and the Dance” post about health care. This one is focused on retail. As soon as I started writing it, the scope expanded significantly. I’ve been doing a lot of work on retail strategy for the past […]

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Partners in Peril: 5 Strategies for Channel Adaptation

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In 2019, Forrester stated that the indirect channel was transformed more in the previous 18 months than the almost 40 years preceding – combined.  And according to a recent Accenture survey of channel professionals, 76% think the channel will be unrecognizable in the next 5 years. We have identified 5 key actions channel leaders must consider now to ensure the health and success of their partner ecosystems in the coming years…

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Are Geographic Sales Territories Dying?

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As the COVID impact increases remote working, virtual conference calls, and online purchasing, sales leaders need to be asking a simple question: Should we actually eliminate geographic territories? The simple answer is “No, but…..”.  We all must recognize that for >100 years the entire DNA of the sales profession has been based on geography.  Whether business-to-business selling, wholesale distribution…

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Executing Customer Retention in Times of Disruption

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We are living through an era of ‘what’s old is new’ as it relates to retention. While executives have always understood the value of keeping loyal customers, massive market transformations have raised the stakes and forced what often was a behind the scenes ‘autopilot’ type of effort to a critical front and center strategy. Retention efforts without customer data and insights fly blind, and the best data and insights are useless if not linked to prescriptive retention execution plays…

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How to Navigate Sharp Changes in Consumer Behavior Using Data – Big and Small

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The essential ways we live and work have changed virtually overnight. As a result, companies are monitoring and assessing what consumers are doing at heightened new levels. Here is how integrating big data and small data insights lead to top-line growth…

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The Cookie-pocalypse: Understanding the Implications for Digital Marketing and Customer Experience

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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

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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 and capabilities that leadership teams should address before the economy rebounds under a new set of buying behavior rules.

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Establishing a Customer Success Function Primed for Value Creation: Three Go-dos to Avoid Common Pitfalls in Tech

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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 specific fail points when this occurs…

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Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA) Beyond Digital Channels

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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 proportion of sales at retail, but no one knew how much. To solve this problem, statisticians used the tools of econometrics to build regressions…

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