Syncplicity, SlideShark Integrate to Provide Real Time, Mobile Power Point Presentations

In highly competitive markets, presentation counts and Sales Reps want every tool and ever bit of information available at their fingertips to help them win business.

iPads and content-rich PowerPoints are points of entry; high fidelity animations, fonts, graphics and colors come next. But customers care about one other thing as well, accurate data. And these days, data that’s a day old just doesn’t cut it. Nor does a group of sales reps sharing different figures with different people at the same company. Organizations and sales teams need to be in sync.  

While smart enterprises may have the diligent staff to keep PowerPoint files up-to-date and available for download, what if a sales rep wants to change the order of his deck, a color, client name or accentuate a feature? It can lead to confusion. And even if everything on the backend is done perfectly, downloading at the client site can be a problem. Whom among us hasn’t been at a presentation where the speaker couldn’t download his files?

Keeping Teams Up to Date

The innovators at Syncplicity, EMC’s cloud-based Sync &Share company, and SlideShark, an award winning app for presenting and sharing PowerPoints on the iPad and iPhone, have integrated to enable mobile teams to have access to all of their presentations in the cloud, to keep them in sync, and to be able to present them professionally, reliably and in full fidelity from iOS devices.

“It (the integrated solution) keeps everyone singing off of the same page,” says Leonard Chung, Syncplicity’s Chief Product Strategist.

The integrated solution works by storing all the presentations in Syncplicity from which users can access their own PowerPoints and those, inside and outside of the firewall, to which they have authorized access. This is done Cloud-to-Cloud, there is no downloading required. Syncplicity eliminates version control challenges, ensuring that users have access to the latest version of presentations on all of their iOS mobile devices.

The SlideShark app is then used to access the presentations and to provide a unified view across all devices in high fidelity complete with animations, vibrant colors, graphics and fonts. Users can control and navigate content, as well as connect to TVs and projectors to deliver truly powerful presentations.

Add to that that SlideShark has a built-in ability to track engagement on copies of presentations distributed to prospective clients. Not only can it tell when and for how long each presentation is being re-reviewed, but also how much time is being spent on any particular slide, giving sales reps behind the scenes insights that they have rarely had before.

Keeping Teams Compliant 

Companies in highly regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, life sciences, financial services, energy and utilities where presentations require extensive approval processes and audit trails can be assured that changes are not being made on-the-fly in the field via use of the recently released Syncplicity Connector for Documentum.

SlideShark/Syncplicity users can also leverage Syncplicity’s “remote wipe” capabilities which come in handy when devices are lost or employees part ways with their employers. It should be noted that wiping is done on an individual file basis and does not impact other SlideShark presentations.

What all of this means to Sales Reps and Sales teams everywhere is that you now have the tools to show-up with top notch, up-to-date, compliant presentations without needing to download a thing. A far cry from struggling to make PowerPoints from your PC look good on an iPad and from being anxious while you wait for downloads at client sites hoping that you grabbed the right file.

And, as an added plus, you have the analytics you need to gain insights into your customer by knowing when your PowerPoint is being viewed, by whom and how much time is being spent on each slide.

It’s an easy to gain strategic advantage that wasn’t at your fingertips this time last year.
 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

This Week: Creating Loyal Customers + The Latest Mobile Stats

Customer Loyalty
Did you know that engaged employees create loyal customers? Or that in addition to your sales people, brand advocates also drive sales?

It's also important that marketing and sales work together to ensure the best customer management strategy is in place.

It's a Mobile World
Studies show that 50% of US adults own a smartphone or tablet, and that Generation C is best reached via mobile. This is all good news for mobile advertisers (and explains all those smartphone sales).

Social CRM Tweet Jam
We're in CXMChat Tweet Jam mode. Mark the date: November 28th at 10am PT, 1pm ET. The panelists are lining up at the door, but it's the Tweet Jam questions we want to show you now.

2012 Gartner Web CMS Magic Quadrant Report
Gartner identifies three trends that have altered the web content management market since 2011.
> Download Now

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• Nov 14 — Forrester's Customer Experience Forum West Los Angeles
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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Five Tips for Successful Multi-Channel Conversion

With smartphone use growing and tablet sales set to hit 126 million this year, it’s all too easy for marketers to become overwhelmed by the challenges of multi-channel retailing and e-Commerce. But multi-channel commerce need not need be complex if we remind ourselves that it’s for people that interact with brands, not algorithms or stats on a dashboard.

These five tips, gleaned from our work with leading multi-channel brands, will help make the challenges of multi-channel retail surmountable, by bringing users into focus.

1. Act on Insight and Data, not Hype

It’s all too easy to get carried along by technical hype. Although this can be exciting and enjoyable, it’s fraught with danger if you don’t measure impact and base your business decisions on data, rather than what’s cool.

In a recent Forrester study this conclusion rings very true: “that in spite of technology advances and more sophisticated marketing techniques — nothing has really changed when it comes to what drives people to buy online.”

2. Do as Little as You Can for Tablets

You probably need to do very little to optimize the user experience for tablets. Just identify the big usability problems and fix them — such as removing Flash and adjusting presentational elements that may prove fiddly. And don’t yawn next time your tech team reminds you of the importance of standards compliance.

3. Focus Smartphones on Existing Usage Patterns

Smartphones need more attention. Let your existing data guide how you tailor for this touch point: are users primarily searching on smartphones and purchasing (later) on another device (e.g. tablet or pc/Mac)? We’ve observed this pattern in the fashion sector in particular.

The good news is you can already compare usage patterns between smartphones and fixed web using your web stats package by filtering by device type.

4. Think About Donald Rumsfeld when Choosing Your Data Analysis Tool

As touch-points multiply it’s tempting to seek out an analysis tool that can help make sense of this multitude of unstructured data by applying some form of sentiment analysis. But, as exciting as many of these tools are, they tend to only reveal “known-knowns.” We’ve never heard of a single client reveal a single “unknown-unknown.”

You’re probably better off talking to your call center staff for an hour each week — since they, as humans, can interpret other people’s sentiment better than machines.

5. Observe Your Customers

There’s no substitute to observing behavior: be that in-store, on-line or on a mobile. Whether it’s in a usability lab or conducted remotely getting into the heads of real users completing tasks (using whatever touch point they’d like), this will be a great source of qualitative data to see how to optimize each of your channels.

Image courtesy of CLIPAREA/ Custom Media (Shutterstock)

Editor's Note: Interested in reading more on multi-channel marketing? Check out these tips from @kevinc2003: Multichannel Marketing in 2012: 3 Key Insights
 

About the Author

I founded WhatUsersDo so that organizations can base digital design decisions on UX insight (and not hunches).

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Apple Selling A Million New iPads Per Day

 Continuing to dominate the tablet market, Apple has announced sales of three million new iPads over the three days launch. That's double the sales of the previous iPad launch, but with two models to choose from, which was more popular? 

They Fly Off Shelves, But Which Flies Further?

Apple has made its usual post-launch sales announcement, with the news that it sold three million fourth-generation and mini iPads over the launch weekend. Apple provided no breakdown of the sales, which hit 34 countries on Friday, and with the launch of the cellular models still to come, there could be a lot of market confusion as the tablet sales shake out into the holiday season.

Were the same 1.5 million buyers who turned up for the iPad 3 launch buying one of each model to round out their collection? Apple's brief release fails to enlighten us, probably as it won't want rivals to know which of its products is delivering the best sales.

Given the appalling east coast weather during the launch, Apple would likely have sold more, even though trade was reported as brisk at its New York outlets. There is also no word on Mac or iPod sales, which were also refreshed at Apple's October event.  

Tablet Market Warfare

After the immense battery of launches and sales in October, Apple now faces major competition in the tablet market. To highlight that point, IDC's latest stats show Apple's tablet market share down to just over 50%, down from 60% this time last year. No matter, how good the reviews, sheer choice will dilute Apple's sales. 

Chart: Worldwide Tablet Vendors Market Share, 2012Q3 Description: Worldwide Quarterly Tablet TrackerIDC's Worldwide Quarterly Tracker provides total market size and vendor share for both the Tablet and eReader markets in 46 countries. Detailed segmentation is provided by CPU, operating system, connectivity type, screen size and resolution, storage, distribution channel, and customer segment. Measurement for this tracker is in units, value, and end-user price. For more information, or to subscribe to the research, please contact Kathy Nagamine at 1-650-350-6423 or knagamine@idc.com. Further detail about this tracker can be found at:http://www.idc.com/tracker/showproductinfo.jsp?prod_id=81 Tags: Samsung, Apple, Amazon, Asus, Lenovo, Tablet, IDC, tracker, Q3 2012, 3Q 2012, market share, galaxy, iPad, Kindle, Transformer, ideapad, 2012Q3 Author: IDC charts powered by iCharts

While second place Samsung can only manage 5%, expect Microsoft and partners to make a sizeable entrance in the next set of figures. On a positive note for the major players, shipments are up across the board, and Apple's new numbers might shift the balance back up. 

Meanwhile Apple is still rolling on, with moves toward a 6.10 release of iOS via a new beta, and the release of the cellular-equipped tablets. It will soon however be having to defend its tax position with stories around the world about its paltry (but completely legal) contributions in some countries. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

This Week: The ROI on Collaboration + Social Media for Customer Support

Selling & Supporting Via Social Media
Social Media can be used by more than the marketing team. Social is a key avenue for customer service and it is an important tool for sales representatives.

Incorporating built-in customer support in your mobile apps can turn negative reviews and comments into positive ones, leading to happier customers and broader adoption.

Patterns for Successful Collaboration
Check out these 12 strategies for successful collaboration and dive into how to best determine ROI on your collaborative technologies.

Strategic SharePoint
In preparation for the SharePoint 2012 Conference this month, we bring you Work, Play, Tablet, PC: Welcome to the New Microsoft and SharePoint Deployments Increase Despite Rising Costs, Staff Shortages. Watch for our special coverage of the event.

Analyst Report: Why Customer Experience is the New Marketing
Understand the present imperatives of Customer Experience Management and the new role of Web Content Management.
> Download the Report Here

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Customer Experience: Following the Crowd #rdm12

From an early age, most of us are taught not to “follow the crowd,” but instead to chart our own path. However, when it comes to sales and marketing, following the crowd can produce impressive results

Clinton Bonner, Director of Marketing and Social Content for crowdsourcing provider TopCoder, explained during a session at the Revenue Driven Marketing Leadership Summit hosted by Aberdeen Group in Boston, MA that when his company adopted crowdsourcing techniques for its own sales and marketing efforts, lead generation and development of “quality conversations” improved significantly.

Getting to the New Clients

Bonner began by describing the difficult lead generation process undertaken by TopCoder, a crowdsourcing “open innovation” community of digital content creators. Unlike some crowdsourcing providers, TopCoder does not allow the “one off” sourcing of projects but requires the purchase of a full pipeline of services. As a result, the typical sales cycle lasts six to nine months.

“It takes 120 to 150 hot leads to produce 20 to 22 marketing qualified leads (MQLs), which produces four sales qualified leads (SQLs) that produce one new client,” said Bonner. “We were producing five MQLs a month, which was enough to keep us treading water but not swimming quickly.”

Eating the ‘Dog Food’

Working with a team of four business development specialists, Bonner decided to find a way to make them as productive as a team of 40 specialists. Although TechCoder builds all of its IT applications through its own platform, Bonner said he realized the company was not “eating its own dog food” when it came to sales and marketing.

“We decided to generate new content, like webinars, white papers and social media postings,” he said. “It did help generate more conversations and more clients, but it turned out that the content really helped convert people who had already started talking to us. The content was sort of like an app store that provided what prospects needed to keep the conversation going.”

With the content having less impact than hoped for on prospective clients who had not yet engaged with TopCoder, Bonner decided to pilot a crowdsourced lead generation platform called ConnectAndSell, which linked to TopCoder’s Salesforce CRM solution and specialized in getting qualified leads on the phone.

“We had to get serious about our data,” said Bonner. “We weren’t syncing it properly and not tying our content together smartly. Qualified conversations are difficult for us to obtain because of resistance to change. We need pure volume.”

For example, Bonner said TopCoder hosted regional “roadshows” and used ConnectAndSell to identify people with “.gov” emails in the Washington, DC area and then find relevant associated data such as articles they had published. Thus initial contact was much more targeted and relevant. “Our qualified conversations went up by a factor of eight to 10 times,” he said.

The ‘Three Ps’ of Crowdsourcing

Bonner said crowdsourcing is not “throwing things over the fence and hoping the crowd works magic,” but a competition-driven model that obtains the best work from highly trained specialists. He said crowdsourcing represents the future of work and is based on ‘three Ps” — platforms, parallelization and productivity. He expounded a bit on the meaning of the second P.

“As an executive you should be an orchestrator and not get involved in the muckety muck. Watch things happen. You have to let go of things you’re not used to letting go of and accept that a piece of the chain of work will be done in a non-traditional way.”

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

E-Commerce Tracking Tips for Google Analytics Users

Do you have an e-Commerce website? If you do, you're most likely using a web analytics tool to gather actionable insight from your current customers. Beyond straight sales numbers, I use the various e-Commerce reports within the Google Analytics interface to determine where our customers are coming from and what marketing campaigns are paying off. I'm going to go through a method I use to help track these items.

But, first, if you are brand new to the idea of tracking Ecommerce on your website, I highly recommend using Google Analytics. It's free and pretty easy to navigate. The setup can be a little confusing, but Google provides a great help article with all of your instructions.

Campaign Tracking

The first step in successful tracking of what marketing campaigns are driving the most sales is setting up a custom campaign. Basically, you want to tag your links so that we can see which campaigns are bringing your site visitors, and in turn, sales. Google has developed their URL builder, which makes this pretty easy. For example, here is what a URL might look like for a newsletter we're sending out: http://www.webucator.com/go/course-of-the-month/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=webuNewsOct12

Of important note, look at the campaign variable, webuNewsOct12. Now, we can track how many sales were a result of this campaign.

e-Commerce Overview Report

Once logged into your Google Analytics account, you can navigate over to Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview > Source/Medium. As seen on the attached screenshot, you can see that our newsletter campaigns were our fifth biggest source of sales in the given time period. (Please note that most of the information is blurred out for privacy reasons, but you can still see the main point.)

This general report will give you that high-level perspective of which sources/mediums are helping your business grow. And again, tied back to the campaign variables you determined in the step above. Maybe you also see a source/medium you didn't know about? :) 

e-Commerce Product Performance

After viewing the Overview report, you might want to tie specific product sales to specific campaigns you are running. Right underneath that Overview report, you'll see the Product Performance report. Now this report will be tied to how you setup your initial e-Commerce tracking code on your site, and will show specific products that were purchased.

To add in a level of campaigns, head over to the specific category group you're interested in, and then click on the Secondary dimension tab. Under the Advertising group, you'll see your Campaign option. Take a look at the screenshot below:

I sorted the campaigns in alphabetical order and now I can see exactly what products visitors purchased from exactly which campaigns I started. This is a great avenue to see if there are any ways to either optimize current campaigns or start focusing your product messaging on different campaigns!

Campaign Tracking

Lastly, one very quick note on campaigns. If you are ever curious to which campaigns are simply bringing you the most traffic (after you've tagged your links), navigate over to Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns. This will give you a combined report of any AdWords campaigns you might be running coupled with any manual campaigns you setup with the URL builder.

And that's a wrap for this article! I hope you learned a few, new actionable steps for your Google Analytics account. If you have any questions on these steps, please leave them in the comments below and I'll get to them. And stay tuned for another Google Analytics blog coming up next month! Happy Analytics!

Editor's Note: Bob provides a great foundation for getting started with Google Analytics in his Google Analytics series.
 

About the Author

Bob Clary has over eight years of marketing experience. He is currently the Marketing Manager and Google Analytics Trainer at Webucator and is a Google Analytics Qualified Individual. Bob has also created Webucator's online Google Analytics courses.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Jive's New iPad 'Present' App Keeps Sales Professionals Up to Date

Enterprise social software provider Jive Software is introducing Jive Present, a tablet application designed to assist sales presentation and training efforts. The company is also releasing new enhancements to its core platform.

There's reason we constantly see Jive in the leader position of reports like Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social CRM and for Social Software. It's because the social business software provider is constantly updating their platform to include features necessary for a social enterprise.

Making Tablets More Social

Jive Present extends the Jive social business platform to sales professionals who use iPads and gives corporate managers the ability to monitor how end-users consume data, comply with best practices and regulations and follow educational programs.

Jive Present

The app can:

• Distribute data including rich multimedia, audio and visual content
• Centrally manage the distribution of customized data to individual end users
• Mark up and distribute specific sales content to customers and prospects in the field in real time
• Enable real-time mobile collaboration among end users 

Essentially this iPad application gives sales professionals who are on the go, direct access to the most recent content they need for sales presentations. There are automatic notifications of updates and the app is integrated with the Jive network so you can share and get information from other team members or departments quickly.

Jive Present Notifications

Jive Beefs Up Platform

Jive is also making what it says are “hundreds” of enhancements to its core platform (including updates to many apps we talked about back in May). Some of the more noteworthy upgrades include Jive Anywhere, which provides platform access from any website or app, Jive App Experience, a feature that enables app integration into Jive with one keystroke, the Jive Edge social intelligence engine, which offers customizable “attention streams” that allow focus on specific processes and people within activity streams, the Jive for Teams group collaboration solution and a redesigned user experience. 

Jive Drives Engagement

Jive’s new tablet app and platform features, such as Jive App Experience, are part of what appears to be a larger strategy of driving higher engagement with the Jive platform. Earlier this week, we learned about partnership between Jive and gamification software maker Badgeville. The new Badgeville for Jive integrates game mechanics into the Jive Software social collaboration platform as a method to increase engagement and encourage adoption for those using the system on a daily basis.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Optimizing Organizational Effectiveness Through Social Business

Many organizations today are seeking opportunities to be more responsive and effective. Typical goals are to improve sales efficiency, accelerate innovation and increase responsiveness to customers. As companies have leveraged the benefits of external communication using social networking, leading organizations have recognized the potential for similar impact through full transformation into a social business.

Collaboration in Demand 

IBM's 2012 CEO Study identified that collaboration is the number-one trait CEOs are seeking in their employees, with 75 percent of CEOs calling it critical. A new, unprecedented era of internal knowledge sharing, catalyzed by “digital natives” entering the workforce, brings expectations of connectedness and contributing to the overall organization. Becoming a social business drives both the cultural change as well as technology adoption required to meet the expectations of employees as well as customers, partners, and suppliers.

The largest potential for improved collaboration is insertion of social into business processes. Inside the organization, this can lead to measurable improvements in the responsiveness and close rate of salespeople, faster delivery of new products and shorter cycle time in providing customer service. There are efficiency benefits as well, as organizations turn from sending information in private channels such as email to sharing information through social file repositories, wikis, blogs or profiles.

Putting Social to Work at IBM

At IBM, we have proven the value of social business tools in several ways. Here are a few examples:

• Our inside sales organization has increased its successful conversion rate for leads and opportunities, based on utilization of internal social tools. Salespeople now have direct access to product expertise and information, which they can then utilize to address customer requirements and objections more quickly. We have measured a several percentage point improvement in results which can be directly correlated to the use of internal social networking.
• Project teams at IBM increasingly are comprised of talent clouds, where the best subject-matter experts and skilled leaders are assembled for a particular activity. To help identify and leverage expertise, employees create and maintain their own organizational profiles, including much richer data than the typical corporate directory. IBMers document their technical skills, spoken languages, customer affiliations, interests and previous employers, all of which feeds into an expertise location system.
• Unstructured activity tracking has replaced formal project management for group-oriented task management. The activity-centric model provides significant improvements versus email oriented approaches, which tend to focus on individual to-dos and keep most of the knowledge hidden in individual user mailboxes. 
  Shared activities store everything from meeting minutes to presentation material to document templates, all in a outline-oriented shared repository. Activity contributors typically can be added by anyone already involved, ensuring that new contributors are enabled organically.

In my own experience, the motivations for participating in internal collaboration through social business tools are clear. My daily email volume has decreased over the last three years, despite greater responsibilities. The constant inbox assault of requests for current presentations, attempts to locate me or determine the status of current projects or activities has all disappeared.

By providing all of that information through our use of social business tools, those IBMers who I normally interact with or influence can find useful information on their own, by utilizing tags, search tools or notifications. This has resulted in a transformation of email into a social mail experience, where only relevant content arrives in my inbox with a faster path to action.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

How Support.com Turns Data into Actions -- and Results

A customer represents two things: an immediate dollars-and-cents sales opportunity, and a store of valuable data, including buying habits, behaviors and opinions. Technical support company Support.com has some ideas on how to use this data to improve the way your employees influence customer experience.

When a Stranger Calls, Data Answers

We thought it was fitting to take a closer look to see how a tech support company uses data to improve the way their personal technology experts turn data into actions and the impact these actions have on customer experience and satisfaction. We spoke with Paul Vaillancourt, senior vice president of Contact Center Operations at Support.com to learn more.

Support.com provides remote technology services to consumers and small businesses directly via an online portal and channel partners (which include retailers and anti-virus companies). Personal Technology Experts must pass rigorous testing and training before helping customers.

Unlike other companies, everything at Support.com is analyzed. From the moment a call is answered to the moment the case is resolved, calls are recorded, scrutinized and archived on-site. Additionally, because one single system is used, data is instantly available, eliminating time it may take to transfer data from one CRM into another.

Influencing the Behaviors of Others

How tech experts are trained can determine whether companies meet their overall goals and whether customers’ problems get solved. As a result, when Support.com noticed a higher than normal attrition rate, they focused their attention on the training process to better understand how they can improve the effectiveness of tech experts.

First, they listened. Before tech experts get to answer actual customer calls, they undergo rigorous training and then a nesting period, during which they role-play. They listened to what those who decided to leave said in their exit interviews, as well as to feedback they received from others. They learned that experts were overwhelmed by the complexity of their tool set. As a result, Support.com changed how they introduced experts to calls, having them listen more to actual customer calls before they role-played (which they did more of as well).

Then they created a goal. Goals were actual behaviors, rather than a metric. Instead of saying that they wanted to decrease the length of the call by two minutes, they said: we want experts to solve problems quicker. In order to solve problems quicker, it was important to understand how experts could glean better information from callers. They determined that not enough probing questions were being asked. Sure, experts were active listeners, but they weren’t necessarily asking questions that could uncover useful information in a timely matter. Once experts were properly trained to listen for keywords and specific prompts, call times were shortened.

Finally, they give constant feedback. PTE’s are given score cards which contain six weeks' worth of data, including average call length, call disposition, contacts per hour, attendance and a quality score. The score card also compares an expert’s results to other experts as well as company goals, so individuals can see how their behaviors impact overall goals.

Creating a Culture of Intentional Actions (and Outcomes)

What Support.com’s process for listening, analyzing and producing actionable insights really highlights is the impact that a company culture built around data can have on customer experience. Every company says that they are dedicated to ROI — but not every company invests in the actions of their employees to really understand how behaviors translates into outcomes.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Samsung Starts at Home with Galaxy Note II Launch

 Samsung is expecting monster sales of its new supersize smartphone which launches in South Korea today, a territory that Apple has not yet launched the iPhone 5 in. 

Samsung's Triple Threat

Celebrating the launch of the Samsung Galaxy Note II in its home country, the company's head of mobile has predicted sales some three times that of its predecessor. The original Note sold over 10 million units according to Samsung, which will make this device, that straddles the smartphone and tablet markets, a major force with its own niche. 

Samsung announced the Note II at an event back in August, The specs include a slightly larger 5.5″ HD Super AMOLED screen running at 1280×720. Inside is a 1.6GHz quad-core CPU with 2GB of RAM (with 16, 32, and 64 GB options and a microSD slot) plus dual cameras.

A chunky 3,100mAh battery and LTE and HSPA+ offer fast communications and a long uptime. It is available in white or grey with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The device is out now in Asia, with a European roll out in early October and American markets near the end of that month. This device, with the Galaxy SIII and full Tablet Note models, give Samsung a growing edge on its rivals. 

Fighting in Many Markets

That launch is unlikely to be threatened by the on-going litigation between Samsung and Apple (currently under appeal), as this is one device that Apple can't claim the company has copied. With the Note II to launch in over 128 territories, it is a major part of Samsung's thrust to promote itself as the No. 1 Android device maker, even as it prepares to support the Windows Phone 8 launch. 

In what will be a critical time for all players, Samsung will be looking for the Note II to give it an edge against the likes of Nokia, HTC, Apple and others. One year on from the launch of the original, will the follow-up see the success of the first model, or are Note users a happy bunch with the 'tweener device?

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Meet the C-Suite: The Chief Marketing Officer Must Focus on the Customer

The onslaught of new technologies, media and marketing channels introduced within the past decade have definitely changed how the C-Suite approaches sales and marketing. Not only is the role of marketing included within a company’s key leadership positions, the responsibilities of the Chief Marketing Officer include more than just advertising and lead generation. In fact, it’s more common to have an executive who’s more content strategist than sales guru.

CMO: Marketing & Technology

The Chief Marketing Officer works closest with the Chief Technology Officer. At some companies, there’s been an emergence of a Chief Marketing Technology Officer, in which the executive must combine technology and analytical expertise to make sense of and leverage the vast amounts of customer and market data.

However, it’s still more common to see separate CMO and CTOs roaming the C-Suite. As a result, sometimes your digital marketing strategy is only as good as your technical infrastructure. However, like the CEO and CIO, who must focus on empowering employees through more efficient workflows, the CMO must empower customers to engage with a company across social networks and online communities.

More Challenges Than Success

In their 2011 CMO study, IBM uncovered a few common themes among CMOs, namely a need for better collaboration with CIOs, a more comprehensive focus on the customer and subsequent responsive communication, as well as a system of engagement that maximizes value with each interaction.

As a result, the study found that many CMOs are struggling to manage the impact of key changes in marketing. A successful CMO isn’t just a social networker, she needs to be a data scientist, adept at gleaning information from customer analytics and evolving key marketing messages accordingly.

It’s no surprise then that turnover among CMOs is quite high. According to a study by SpencerStuart, the average tenure for chief marketing officers of leading U.S. consumer brands is 42 months, which is higher than it was a few years ago, but half of what it is for a traditional CEO.

Customer Marketing Officer?

According to the following IBM CMO study infographic, the biggest problem CMOs have is adapting to the customer-centric social landscape. It’s not about market trends — it’s about the customer. Additionally, it’s not about the data, it’s about how data can help build relationships.

 

What Does the Future of the CMO Hold?

When the economy is good, great marketing is just icing on the cake. When times are tough, marketing is often the first to blame for bleak sales. While the CMO must focus on both data and customer relations, at the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line.

However, a company must invest in the cultural, organizational and technological infrastructure so that a CMO can spend more time fine-tuning key messages for the appropriate audience, rather than building the foundation upon which great content can be delivered. You can't have one without the other, and a CMO is hard pressed to do it all, making it essential that the C-Suite works together to support one another.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Dreamforce Takeaway? Salesforce Gears-up to Takeover the Enterprise

And you say you want a revolution, we all want to change the world….

Once upon a time Salesforce.com was a startup that provided hosted Sales Automation solutions. Co- founded by former Oracle executive and Larry Ellison protégé, Marc Benioff, the company’s explicitly stated mission was “the End of Software.”

Today Benioff is credited by many, including Wikipedia, for “turning the software industry on its head” for using the Internet to “revamp the way software programs are designed and distributed.” Salesforce’s annual user conference, Dreamforce, which ends today, welcomed more than 90,000 registered participants (I suspect some of them virtual), displacing Oracle OpenWorld as the largest Enterprise software conference in the world.

Fait accompli Mr. Benioff?

Apparently not. A guy like Benioff, who walks over hot coals and jumps off tall bridges in the dark of the night, isn’t the type who rests on his laurels.

Last Tuesday, using a Show ‘N Tell keynote as his medium, Benioff declared revolution again.

If the Salesforce CEO has his way, a few years from now, information workers all over the planet will be working from his company’s “social stream”, Chatter, and their desktops might look like Enterprise versions of Facebook.

Altimeter Group founder and author of best-selling Groundswell, Charlene Li, summarized Benioff’s keynote in a tweet:

And if you look at everything that Salesforce has acquired of late and with how the purchases are integrated into Salesforce’s various clouds, it’s hard to argue Li.

Consider that since 2010 Salesforce has purchased:

• Sitemasher, now known as site.com
• Activa Live Chat, now known as Salesforce Live Agent
• Heroku, a Cloud Application Platform to deploy and scale powerful apps
• Etacts, a technology that connects with your Gmail account (using oAuth), and integrates with your inbox to build out your list of contacts. The service also allows you to connect your mobile phone and will track who you talk to frequently over the phone or SMS
• Dimdim which provides for real time, rich-media collaboration and meetings
• Manymoon (Fe) — now known as Do.com
• Radian6 which helps companies listen to what people are saying about them online and engage in those conversations across the social web
• Assistly, now known as Desk.com — Model Metrics which delivers applications and services as part of the Software-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service
• Rypple (now Work.com) an application for Social Employee Performance Management
• Stypi, a collaborative real-time text editor
• Buddy Media, the social enterprise software of choice for eight of the world’s top ten global advertisers
• ChoicePass, a customized corporate perks and employee rewards technology company
• Thinkfuse, an enterprise SaaS provider that integrates closely with email to streamline scheduled communications
• GoInstant, a co-browsing solution that allows two or more people to browse the web together in a real-time interactive session.

Much of the Dreamforce Conference was spent explaining how all of these acquisitions will be/have been integrated into Salesforce to transform the workplaces of today into the socially connected Enterprises of tomorrow.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Moxie Software Adds VirtuOz Virtual Agents to Chat Spaces

VirtuOz, Inc., a provider of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for online marketing, sales and support, is rolling out a packaged integration with Moxie Software’s Chat Spaces for sales and services. The integrated solution is designed to provide online consumers with seamless transition from virtual to live support.

Integration Offers Online Customer Service Personalization, Convenience

Specific features of the VirtuOz integration are intended to provide greater personalization, convenience and information to the customer. These include:

• Queue Traffic Controller: Directs customers to a live chat queue based on their individual sales or support needs. Configurable settings also allow the virtual agent to help direct customers to queues with the shortest wait time.
• Queue Countdown: Displays the wait time to the customer.
• Customer Conversation Knowledge Transfer: Automatically transfers the virtual agent-customer conversation to the live chat agent.
• Best Practice Channeling UX:  Allows the user to stay in the same interface regardless of channel.
• Voice of the Customer: Analyzes both IVA and live chat conversations to suggest continuous improvements to the virtual agent.

Integrations Help Moxie Extend Spaces Value

Integrations such as the new partnership with VirtuOz help Moxie extend the value of its Spaces social collaboration suite. In April, Moxie integrated Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud into Spaces Connect, giving customers more complete access to the answers they need and making it easier for workers to help those customers because there will be more ways for them to work together, including email and chat.

A Good Chat Helps Everyone

Moxie is also working internally to bolster the capabilities of its Spaces Chat tool. In May of this year, Moxie added a new feature in Chat Spaces that allows customer service agents engaging customers in chat sessions to seek assistance from internal experts, whom normally would be excluded from the interaction.

The new chat features also allow a customer service agent to simultaneously engage multiple experts. For example, a customer service agent for a bank could seek help in resolving a customer’s issues involving both a checking account and a mortgage loan. Communication with experts is conducted internally via Moxie’s social media mechanisms, so the customer does not directly communicate with internal employees.

VirtuOz May Prove Good IVA Partner

VirtuOz may prove a good choice as a partner to deliver IVA functionality to Moxie Chat users. According to a recent post on the Customers.com Technologies blog, VirtuOz virtual agents’ best capability is their “range of virtual agent interaction styles.” VirtuOz virtual agents can “converse” with customers and use their answers to automatically direct them to the best source of information, as well as perform tasks with case management and CRM systems on customers’ behalves, acting as customer proxies.

This type of advanced virtual customer service/support functionality sounds like a promising means of transitioning online customers to the live agent who is ready to provide the correct information and services.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Marketing Automation Provider Pardot Upgrades Platform for Personalized Web Experience

B2B marketing automation provider Pardot has upgraded its platform with features that it said makes sales initiatives easier. 

Zach Bailey, Pardot vice president of products, said in a statement that sales and marketing executives, in order to hit their numbers, “need enriched campaigns, tools that simplify campaign creation, and even more automated processes.” The platform, he said, has been updated “with these concepts in mind,” allowing users to spend more time being creative with their campaigns and “less time fussing with their marketing automation system.”

Enhanced Dynamic Content Builder

One of the updates is an enhanced and simplified dynamic content builder, whose revisions are intended to improve ease of use in the creation of personalized web experiences for buyers. New functionality includes the ability to customize blocks of content on a website based on known data about the sales prospect, such as job title, previous downloads or industry.

This enhanced functionality for dynamic content, the company said, could be used to promote calls-to-action that are based on a prospect’s interests, or to display images that relate to a prospect’s past purchases.

The Pardot landing page now has a brand-new interface, designed to enable the building of professional-grade landing pages within minutes. Users employ pre-defined templates, populated by their content via a drag-and-drop builder. The content can reside within Pardot, so no app-switching is needed, and advanced users can choose to hand-code the HTML.

Eventbrite Connector

A connector has also been added to Eventbrite, the cloud registration management service. This integration makes Eventbrite information about events available inside Pardot, so that digital marketers can plan accordingly.

The updates also include enhanced control of CRM data syncing, a more flexible conversion reporting, click-to-open rates and bounce reasons added to email reporting, and the ability to view historical import data.

Pardot’s B2B cloud marketing automation platform, targeted at small- and mid-sized businesses, includes CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring and ROI reporting. The new enhancements follow the release during this quarter of more than a dozen additional features for the platform.
 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Three P's of Avoiding Social CRM Failure

With the social era in full swing, we hear on a near daily basis about all the benefits a social media and social CRM strategy can bring. Tactically, they can help sales with potential leads, give service a new window into building customer satisfaction and provide marketing with fresh opportunities to engage and entice new customers. Strategically, they can help you avoid becoming obsolete and irrelevant as customers increasingly go social.

So the benefits are many, varied and exciting. As was said in many a B-grade film, “what could possibly go wrong?”

A bunch of stuff.

Working on a white paper about SCRM failures with Brent Leary, a SCRM guru and small business expert, has made one thing painfully clear: while SCRM rewards the creative and the clever, it also savagely punishes the thoughtless, the cavalier and the clueless.

Some of these failures are extremely public — the landmark “United Breaks Guitars” example being the most well known. They befall all kinds of organizations, spanning the gamut from McDonalds to FedEx  to Qantas Airways to even the American Red Cross. But they also plague smaller organizations: CEO blogs may hit the wrong note, details captured from social media by a business may strike customers as creepy, or the timing of a social media campaign may be perceived as insensitive.

Their failures all have something in common: they all indicate points where someone stopped thinking about the customer and the context.

How do you avoid SCRM faux pas? I call it the three P’s:

1. Policy

Generally speaking, your employees, and especially those employees tasked with running a successful SCRM effort, want to succeed. In order to do that, it’s important to develop a set of policies to manage the ways you interact with customers in social media and how the information that you collect is then handled. This need not be a complex document, but it should take into context the nature of your organization and your employees.

For example, at a technology company it’s fairly likely that a good number of your engineers have blogs and discuss their work. Have you reminded them of the potential price of divulging product news before the company’s ready to share it with the world?

Another policy: remind employees that they need to be professional when representing the company — or else.

Have you standardized hashtags for your business or are employees making up new ones as they go?

These are all simple things, but they can help you keep everyone on the same page. They’re not useful only for casual social media users, they’re helpful for the internal media team to maintain consistency and clarity while doing its work.

2. People

The folks you pick for a social media team (or for the social media role in general) need an ability to grasp certain things: chief among them, the ability to imagine how the customer will see their efforts, and they should comprehend the final goals behind their social efforts.

An ability to appreciate how customers will react to social media messages is vital to writing good messages in the first place — but it’s also vital if you want to avoid a misfire. Employees with inappropriate senses of humor and a lack of impulse control should not be in charge of the corporate Twitter feed, for example. But, more subtly, the ability to choose the right words in social media is crucial. Especially in customer service, a degree of diplomacy is a must.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

InsideSales.com Raises $4M to Hone Predictive Analytics for Sales Force Automation

InsideSales.com, a provider of a Saas-based sales force automation platform, has completed a round of funding totaling US$ 4 million. The company says it will put the money toward accelerating growth into enterprise markets and developing predictive analytics capabilities.

The InsideSales.com platform takes what the company calls the “high velocity sales model,” which it says is a data-driven approach to sales. Using cloud-based technology, InsideSales.com seeks to improve productivity, visibility and analytics with a metrics-based “preferred inside sales model.”

This sales model leverages rapid lead response qualification and cold-calling teams paired with experienced closers who conduct sales using the phone and Internet, as opposed to the traditional face-to-face outside sales model that InsideSales.com says is more expensive and less efficient.

Engaging Modern Consumers

InsideSales.com is attempting to tackle what is becoming a widely-recognized challenge for today’s sales professionals — engaging a much savvier and more connected consumer. Dan Schleifer, EVP of sales enablement for enterprise sales collaboration software provider SAVO Group, recently explained in an interview with CMSWire how he sees Web-based communication technology as holding the potential to revolutionize sales in today’s environment.

Schleifer said by automatically collecting data in real time while a sales rep is making a presentation or pitch, via mobile device, sales enablement tools can eliminate organizational silos and fill the gaps in B2B sales data quickly enough for sales strategies to be altered as soon as problems can be identified. “The clinical moment of truth in any sales process is when the rep is sitting with the customer. Sales enablement allows you to understand that moment of truth.”

While InsideSales.com is geared more toward identifying leads for real-time sales calls than for increasing the personalization of site visits, the underlying strategy of automating a process and improving its effectiveness with real-time data and predictive analytics is the same. InsideSales.com generates and stores quantitative call data linked directly with qualitative lead process and flow information.

Some Days are Better than Others

As an example of how InsideSales.com’ technology can be applied, LeadResponseManagement.org used data from the InsideSales.com system to conduct a study into telephone sales issues such as what day of the week is best to call back a web-generated lead for optimal contact and qualification rates. The study determined Wednesdays and Thursdays are the best days to call for making contact with and qualifying leads (with Tuesdays the worst day for making contact and Fridays the worst day for qualifying).

This type of feedback can be invaluable for companies trying to successfully reach prospective customers who have become adept at both filtering out information and conducting extensive research on products, brands and services.

Hummer Winblad Venture Partners led the funding round, with co-investors including Josh James, founder and CEO of Domo and cofounder and former CEO of Omniture.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Stop Before You Overhaul: 5 Ways Testing Can Maximize Impact with Minimal Changes

An overarching site overhaul is often a marketer's go-to solution when online sales and conversion rates are sinking. After all, if bounce rates are high, average order values aren’t up to snuff, and one-time-buyers are the norm, it must be the website's fault … right? 

Right, but … when solving issues that are isolated to specific points of interaction or achieving certain tangible outcomes, it's usually not the whole website that needs attention. More often than not, all that’s needed is some strategic testing and targeting, followed by a few powerful modifications based on the results.

If you’re seriously considering making global site changes in the name of improving sales and conversions — or already took the plunge and need to regain lost ground — consider the following minimal changes to make a big impact on key website pages:

1. Homepage: First Impressions Count

The homepage is usually the first page visitors see and the first one marketers want to modify. Before making big changes, consider the top objectives of an e-commerce homepage: to display products/services, to encourage navigation to other parts of the site, and to allow visitors to search directly and easily for what they’re looking for.

Testing results of hundreds of retail sites consistently reveal that keeping the visual display clean and compelling attracts more engagement. A cluttered, busy collage of products, on the other hand, is likely to overwhelm visitors and drive them away.

Is your navigation bar also clear and intuitive? Make sure that category and product navigation options are especially prominent, well positioned and easy to identify. Lowes.com does a good job of using icons with rollover text to engage visitors and direct them to the desired product or category.

Finally, if you’re trying to attract attention to a new product, consider using a contrasting color for the section of the navigation bar that links to that product, so that it stands out from the other categories.

2. Category Pages: Sorting Things Out

Because category pages revolve around visitors’ need to search for and sort through products or service types, any updates to this section should enhance the visitor’s ability to filter and find. It’s easy to fall into the trap of ignoring category pages or writing them off as a vehicle that simply exists to transport visitors to the pages that really count, but testing shows otherwise.

For instance, multivariate testing results for Harry and David revealed that simply increasing the number of products displayed from 3 to 4 in a row of category results, and adding an “Add to Cart” button underneath each of those products resulted in dramatic lifts in conversion and overall revenue generation.

Clear calls-to-action for featured or sales items also assist in transforming browsers into buyers. And quick view functionality allows for visual inspection and comparison with other products, without forcing a visitor to commit to a click-through before they’re ready. Finally, allowing customers to save searches for later provides visitors convenience and therefore creates loyalty.

Zappos.com’s “Save This Search” function allows visitors to save a particular category search with a relevant name, so they can return at a later time, choose their products and complete the purchase. After all, you can’t always control whether a customer leaves, but you can certainly make it easier for them to find their way back.

3. Product Pages: The Big Display

Since product pages are all about encouraging visitors to make the purchase, a retailer’s job here is to inform, make customers comfortable with the product and simplify buying.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

iPad Mini to Trigger Content Battle Among Small Tablets

 Google's Nexus 7 is a powerful, well-priced tablet winning great sales and reviews. Amazon is preparing a new Kindle Fire, while Barnes and Noble has just trimmed the price of the Nook. So, how will the Mini iPad fare when Apple isn't first to market and what can Apple do to sweeten the deal?

Not Just a Mini

The iPad Mini could still be a collective hallucination experienced by the tech world. While we've seen enough parts of an iPhone 5 that you can practically build your own (if you have the right contacts in enough Asian factories) the diet iPad remains a ghostly enigma. Sure, case makers are selling protective add-ons based on the likely size, but that didn't stop them being wrong about last year's abortive iPhone 5 launch.

Even so, working on the assumption that Apple does launch a Mini iPad in September or October, it will place the company in an interesting position, where it won't be the first to market in the category. Also, going on the fairly firm rumor of a 7.85-inch, non-Retina display, at around $200, its rivals will be well entrenched and Apple will lack a killer hardware feature. 

Playing the Software/Content Game

Magic is all about misdirection, as any good Magic's Secrets Revealed viewer knows. Despite their best efforts, we see Apple building desirable hardware with one hand, but we rarely hear about the software and services being sneakily dealt with by the other, until the official news and there is plenty Apple could add to iOS 6.

Having concluded that it is in the software arena that the Mini iPad will need to stand out, and after years of rumors, how likely is it that Apple will either finally buy Spotify, or launch a comparable service across all media? That could provide a monstrous amount of content for users and put it on a par with Amazon's hit services. 

Or, it could work along the lines of Sony's PlayStation Plus service, offering a number of the better quality iOS games, some films and the latest music, all for a monthly subscription. These offerings are key in a market now dominated by content and not technology, and is an area where Apple is lagging behind.

Finally, there's the ever nagging feeling that Apple has a big gaming play up its sleeve, and with Amazon now entering the games developer arena, could Apple follow in some capacity? An iPad Mini would make the ideal unobtrusive console, connected to a big screen via HDMI and played through wireless controllers. 

Pre-Game Hype

While there are some flamebait headlines doing the rounds based on a recent consumer survey, the iPad Mini will likely do a roaring trade on launch, as the Google Nexus 7 did. But as the Kindle Fire has proved, good content makes the tablet experience, and that's more important to end users than it is to the critics.

If Apple delivers some new compelling opportunity for those who found the full-size iPad too expensive, it could carve out huge amounts of revenue on a monthly basis from those users. Without it, Apple could find the new iPad looking decidedly plain in the view of price-concious consumers. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Sales Enablement - Unleash the Potential of Your Sales Team

Sales enablement is a hot topic lately, with an increasing number of CRM and sales/marketing automation vendors providing sales enablement solutions. However, according to Dan Schleifer, EVP of sales enablement for enterprise sales collaboration software provider SAVO Group, the full potential of sales enablement lies in revealing what happens in the middle of the sales process.

Sales Enablement in the Middle

“CRM is the accounting system of record for sales at the tail end of the process,” Schleifer said during an exclusive interview with CMSWire. “Email and social tools are at the top. But in the middle of the process, assuming sales reps don’t do decent jobs entering sales contacts into the CRM system, and they invariably don’t; you don’t get visibility into what is happening in the field when the sales rep’s lips are flapping.”

Thus, Schleifer said there is no single tool that provides sales visibility all the way down the sales pipeline, from initial prospecting to closing (or not closing) a deal. He continued,

Marketing automation is important but doesn’t close the deal. CRM backs in from the closed deal further into the selling process. But nobody is collecting data such as what PowerPoint slide the sales rep used at what stage of the sales presentation. We don’t know what objections were handled or what team members were pulled in.”

For example, Schleifer said that a project manager may have been called in to all the successful sales presentations for a specific service or product, but this data is not captured in the traditional marketing automation/CRM information-gathering process. “It’s the essence of what makes B2B sales tick,” he said.

From the Field to the Home Office

Therefore, Schleifer said the full potential of sales enablement technology lies in its ability to uncover what is really happening in the field, identify success factors, and then communicate those factors throughout the enterprise. In addition, he said properly applied sales enablement tools can provide “short cycle feedback” allowing adjustments to sales strategies as they are being enacted.

“As a sales executive I don’t want to wait for the CRM system to tell me that a new product release is not resulting in closed sales,” he stated. “The clinical moment of truth in any sales process is when the rep is sitting with the customer. Sales enablement allows you to understand that moment of truth.”

By automatically collecting data in real time while a sales rep is making a presentation or pitch, via mobile device, sales enablement tools can eliminate organizational silos and fill the gaps in B2B sales data quickly enough for sales strategies to be altered as soon as problems can be identified. They also allow senior management to quickly understand what makes top performers stand out compared to their peers.

“Any VP of sales can tell you who their top performers are,” said Schleifer. “But they can’t tell you why. Sales enablement technology allows them to collect and process data on their top performers and determine patterns of success that then be pushed to all sales reps through the right coaching. It changes the sales process.”

Ultimately, Schleifer said a sales enablement tool should work the way an assistant aiding a surgeon works. “The assistant hands the surgeon every tool they need,” he said. “That person knows everything — the surgeon doesn’t have to write it down.”

In the next few years, Schleifer sees sales enablement technology developing to the point it can provide senior management with real-time actionable feedback from the field, rather than short-cycle feedback. “Executives will get a real-time field view and be able to take immediate action,” he predicted. "It’s really just Big Data and analytics wrapped around the right data. Within days or even hours of a new product release, you’ll know if it’s working.”

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com