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RevOps at the core of CX and growth? Becoming more Customer centric to break silos is the way to go

I’ve been experiencing first hand the difficulty B2B companies, from scale ups to established tech vendors I’ve been given to work with, to adapt to the buyer’s journey’s radical transformation. As Alastair Woolcock from Gartner reports:, sellers have limited opportunity to influence customer decisions as B2B buyers would spend only 17% of their purchasing journey time with ALL potential suppliers sales reps!

Pie chart showing distribution of buying groups' time by key buying activities.

If you add to this that 33% of all buyers, climbing to 44% for Millennial, would prefer a “seller free” sales experience, one can easily guess something needs to change in B2B Go-To-Market (GTM) and offered customer experience.

Actually, among many things to embark on, I’d be supporting the advent of Revenue Operations (RevOps) and appointing a true Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) in your organisation. The major benefits to expect would revolve around:

  • Alignment of sales, inside sales, business development, digital, marketing and customer success organisations, putting customers at the center,
  • Creating focus around the growth strategy, never loosing sight of the customer satisfaction,
  • Thus simplifying the cross-departments processes, increasing overall efficiency and improving the customer experience (CX).
  • Buying journeys are becoming more of the phygital kind

RevOps is a foundation to become more adaptable and agile.

CROs should build on RevOps for your business to better cope with the ‘New Normal’, fuelled with uncertainty and accelerated changes, unpredictable customer journeys and a demand for hyper-personalized in context interactions, typically spanning across Marketing, Sales Development, Sales, Phygital Commerce, Customer Success and CX more generally.

This is a journey, climbing the maturity ladder one step at a time but accruing value all along. I’ll be certainly talking about this more in the future.

Have a great week-end and feel free to share your experience in response to this post.

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Happy New Year 2020

« Il n’y a rien de tel qu’un rêve pour créer le futur. »
“There is nothing like a dream to create the future.”
— Victor Hugo

I wish all of you to dream high, dream big, dream loud and to enjoy every single step taking you to your future.

Je vous souhaite de réver haut, grand et fort et de savourer chacune des étapes qui vous menera au plus près de votre futur.

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Work your value proposition like crazy

Happy customer?
Did you really work your value proposition?

I cannot stop expanding the list of products or services introduced by major brands or startups that have miserably failed to meet their audience. Many reasons come to mind but for sure the value proposition is at the core of a good positioning. I just stumbled upon this simple framework that will help you work on you value proposition hopefully before you introduce a new product or service or a new version of it.

I’d encourage you to go through several interviews with prospects and customers to work on it at the expense of focusing to much on your beliefs, hunches and other top executive’s far too remote from them. Reality check: people are trying to obtain gains and alleviate pains they are in day to day, not necessarily the ones you are discussing in your executive meetings.

This video captures it pretty nicely. Feel free to share your experiences about value proposition and positioning in commenting this post.

Have a great week.

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CX Network | Introducing Oracle’s VP of EMEA Marketing

CX Network

I’ve been interviewed by CX Networks recently as a new member of their Network’s Advisory Board. It’s all about hyper-personalised marketing, AI, chatbots and conversational UI like Voice Devices and other cutting edge marketing concepts in today’s customer experience economy. Curious to your approach about taking customer experience to the next level and comments on my views.

Here is an excerpt:

We speak to one of the newest members of CX Network’s Advisory Board – Emmanuel Obadia,VP Marketing, EMEA Applications at Oracle about cutting edge marketing concepts in today’s customer experience economy.

Hyper-personalised marketing is a key trend in the industry, how in your opinion have we seen this develop in 2018?

Emmanuel: “We moved from interruption marketing to permission marketing thanks to Mr Seth Godin; to inbound and content marketing more recently. Now we’re really in the consent marketing era. This is the necessary progression, because the consumers are now in control.

“The industry expectation is to apply real-time, one-to-one, in-context personalisation at scale. In practice, this is difficult  because the buyer’s journey is not linear at all and when your organisation becomes larger you will have different parts of the team working to address the customer experience for the marketing journey. It becomes even more difficult to do that in the context of the entire customer experience that goes across marketing, sales, ecommerce and customer service.

“A lot of companies have embarked on this mission to perform real-time, one-to-one, in-context personalisation at scale. But, according to a recent report I read in the UK, only 16% of organisations are able to adjust to customer experiences in real-time based on customer behaviour. Only 17% are able to adjust to the customer journey in a few hours. 25% say it takes more than a day because they’re going through manual processes.”

Read the entire interview on: CX Network | Introducing Oracle’s VP of EMEA Marketing

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Let’s take it on today: IoT, AI, And Blockchain. Time To Reimagine The Art Of The Possible? — Forbes

Taken together, the transformative effects of IoT, AI, and blockchain become multiplicative. Lots are written about it and it becomes difficult to figure what’s coming up next.

Our minds must stretch when we envision the impact of these three technologies taken together. It’s hard for us to wrap our heads around this new art of the possible. So much is changing in such a short timeframe.

Make no mistakes, this is the advent of digital transformation phase II, whatever our role in the enterprise we should be paying attention and starting to leverage these innovations within our daily jobs/life.

More and some examples in the Forbes article.

Source: OracleVoice: IoT, AI, And Blockchain: Time To Reimagine The Art Of The Possible?

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10 Marketing Trends to act on in 2018 – SmarInsights

In these early Jan days, lots of media are publishing their own take on top marketing trends for 2018. Here are the top 10 from SmartInsights:

  • Trend 1. Integrating Marketing Activities Into the Customer Lifecycle
  • Trend 2. Integrating personalisation into the user journey / customer experience
  • Trend 3. Integrating machine learning into marketing automation
  • Trend 4. Integrating social messaging apps into communications
  • Trend 5. Integrating video into the customer journey
  • Trend 6. Integrating content marketing into the customer journey using a customer engagement strategy
  • Trend 7. Integrating search marketing into your content marketing activities
  • Trend 8. Integrating marketing technology
  • Trend 9. Integrating different data sources
  • Trend 10. Integrating digital marketing insights sources

Read more here: 10 Marketing Trends to act on in 2018

 

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How Digital Marketing Will Change In 2018: 15 Top Trends – Forbes

Taking advantage of the very first days of 2018, let’s anticipate where our focus should be in evolving our marketing. Here is a solid list from Forbes that I subscribe to.

“New trends are entering the marketplace and your company needs to pay attention or you may be forced by the wayside.”

1. Augmented Reality Integrated Through Social Media
2. Collapse Of The Influencer Market
3. True Understanding Of Customer Journey
4. More Targeted Ads With Specific Purpose
5. Professional Live Video
6. Conversational User Interfaces
7. Video Marketing
8. Personalization Along All Stages Of The Sales Funnel
9. Contextual Targeting Strategies
10. Cost Per Experiment As A Leading Metric
11. Native Advertising
12. Digital Integrated Into Offline Experiences
13. Voice Marketing
14. Predictive Algorithms
15. Different Kind Of Content Marketing

Source: How Digital Marketing Will Change In 2018: 15 Top Trends