Category: Best Practices

DiscoverOrg: TiLT Sales & Marketing Certification

Conviction is one of the ten "micro-burst" training modules in the Sales Development certification program.
Conviction is one of the ten “micro-burst” training modules in the Sales Development certification program.

Technology Sales Intelligence vendor DiscoverOrg formally launched a sales and marketing training program called TiLT.  The certification program is available at no charge to DiscoverOrg clients.  Three programs are planned for sales development, marketing, and account executives with a ten module sales development program now available.  The marketing program should be available by early Q4.

“DiscoverOrg’s mission is to provide actionable sales and marketing intelligence that enables our customers to open the door to growth like they’ve never experienced, and we are leading by example. Our experience as one of the fastest growing companies in the country over the past decade gives us a unique perspective, and the TiLT training program is grounded in real-life, practical examples of what works and doesn’t work in today’s incredibly tough sales environment,” said Henry Schuck, CEO of DiscoverOrg.

The training sessions are platform and sales methodology agnostic and allow the sales rep to engage in “microburst learning” with a combination of videos and curated content.  Each module includes a recorded challenge with students self-reporting their level of sales-skill confidence along the way.  Course metrics are then available to sales managers for tracking the progress of their staff.  Thus, a new sales development rep might take two sessions per week over the course of five weeks.

DiscoverOrg is looking to improve the success of its sales clients, many of whom have devalued the value of good salesmanship.  “Conversation is a lost art due to the advent of technology,” said DiscoverOrg’s Senior VP of Customer Success David Sill.

Sheri Schiffman, Director of Inside Sales for WatchGuard, commented on a recent new hire TiLT training session for their Inside Sales team, “We were looking for a way to decrease ramp-up time for new sales employees, and give them new techniques for converting leads to sales. The TiLT training was relevant and provided immediately applicable information and sales skills. Their commitment to our success is outstanding, and we are looking forward to running other new employees through the training in the future.”

The ten-part sales development program contains the following modules:

  1. Improvisation
  2. Engagement
  3. Relevance
  4. Trust
  5. Conviction
  6. Authenticity
  7. Persistence
  8. Persuasion
  9. Creativity
  10. Storytelling

When LinkedIn acquired Lynda last year, I expected they would quickly integrate Lynda training tools into Sales Navigator, but they have yet to do so.  The Sales Navigator training and tools section is provided by Cornerstone OnDemand, not Lynda.  When searching on Lynda, there are five Sales Navigator courses, but four were five to seven minutes overviews and one was a seventy-eight minute Sales Navigator Basics class.   Thus, it appears that DiscoverOrg has stolen a march on LinkedIn with respect to professional sales development.

Historically, the sales intelligence vendors have avoided formal training programs.  They usually provide a set of short training webinars, both recorded and live, but these have tended towards tool training.  DiscoverOrg is going beyond mere tool training to certification training in “the art and science of sales and marketing.”

It is Time to Revisit Buyer Personas

Buyer Persona tools are a growing area of focus for sales and marketing teams.  Pragmatic Marketing and other B2B product marketing firms have long promoted the value of personas for product planning and marketing messaging.  They help identify customer needs and features as well as associated positioning.  According to B2B Marketing Strategist Ardath Albee, they help “build relationships based on expertise and authority that helps buyers see your company as a mentor and the best choice to solve their problem or capitalize on an opportunity.”

“Buyer personas are important because they allow us to focus our sales and marketing efforts on people who need our solutions to do their job better, to help their businesses grow, to help their businesses essentially reduce cost, to help the increase efficiencies, to help them realize the goals they are setting out to achieve.  In order for us to do that, we need to understand that buyer intimately,” said Ned Leutz of Zoominfo.  “By doing our homework fully we can better understand these people and then, of course, increase our success rate when we are reaching out to them.”

The problem with personas is that they have historically been high-level tools that quickly fall into caricature and disuse because they are not rigorously defined and maintained.  “Many customer intelligence efforts today are ad hoc, uninformed, and manual projects that are full of assumptions and rarely kept up to date,” says persona vendor Cintell.  “Even if you’ve hired a consultant to develop buyer personas, insights are often trapped in static PDF documents abandoned at the back of a desk drawer leaving critical customer intelligence underutilized.”

Unfortunately, there were few tools available for identifying and researching personas.  Instead B2B marketers focused on building segments that approximated their personas for marketing campaigns while product managers posted persona profiles in meeting rooms during road mapping and feature definition exercises but failed to use these tools beyond the early product definition stage.

Recently, three vendors have begun to address the B2B persona problem.  Zoominfo focuses on  amongst a company’s best customers.  These personas capture enough information about the attributes of their best customers to help identify similar prospects at other companies.  Such a tool operates as a next generation customer cloning tool as it looks at both firmographic and functional information around leads.  The tool can also be used to evaluate attendees at conferences or webinars to help tailor discussions.

ZoomInfo Personas provide a multi-dimensional cluster analysis for identifying persona categories and prospecting against them.
ZoomInfo Personas provide a multi-dimensional cluster analysis for identifying persona categories and prospecting against them.

Avention also recently rolled out its OneSource DataVision platform for enrichment, segmentation analysis, and Look-alike prospecting.

Leutz recommends that the firm ask questions such as

  • Who are your top performing customers?
  • Who are your best leads?
  • What were your biggest deals?
  • Which customers close faster?

This information that can be gathered from the CRM, marketing automation platform, webinar attendees, and trade show lists.  It can also be gathered from your sales reps, the CFO, and customer conversations.

While Zoominfo can assist with answering Who, they fail to provide insights into What or Why.  In short, Zoominfo’s personas are basically the next generation of peer listings;  they are a starting point for the persona process, but they do not assist with identifying persona needs; determining whether the cluster contains economic buyers, influencers, or users; or specifying what kind of content would be of interest to them.  They also do not assist product management in determining product roadmaps and future capabilities.

There are also several vendors that recently launched tools for defining and maintaining buyer and user personas.  Cintell and Akoonu offer marketers tools for defining personas in a centralized platform that collects survey data and research alongside the profiles.  Both of these services were launched about a year ago so will be evolving quickly.  The two services are cloud based hubs for collecting persona information and sharing it with both platforms (e.g. Marketing Automation and CRM) and employees.  They are ongoing intelligence gathering services for continuously refining and updating personas and then disseminating this intelligence to marketing, sales, and product management.

Cintell Personas cover professional insights, social insights, content trends (intent data), and personality data.
Cintell personas cover professional insights, social insights, content trends (intent data), and personality data.

They also promise to immediately map leads to personas, helping inform messaging, campaigns, and targeting within the marketing automation platform and segmentation and analytics in the CRM.  When tied to a well-researched persona, sales reps would have a better understanding of the prospect’s role, needs, and informational requirements.  Personas provide sales reps with a summary of buying habits, preferences, and motivations along with market research reports, customer interviews and surveys, and persona specific articles.  As living documents shared across the organization, they would also assist product management in identifying latent needs and customer pain points and marketing communications in tailoring content for the persona.

“Our new empowered B2B consumer seeks relevancy and empathy,” said Cintell Co-Founder Katie Martell.  “And marketers know this: In a recent ITSMA study, technology marketers  predicted that understanding buyers will soon become their #1 responsibility.  But getting to this insight is not easy. Efforts to research and leverage personas today are highly manual, shallow, very static, and fragmented throughout the business. The opportunity here is to empower B2B organizations with a platform to gather primary research, enhance it with external market and buyer insights, and combine it with data from internal business systems. The new competitive advantage for companies is a richer understanding of buyers through meaningful, ongoing customer intelligence.”

I don’t see these persona definition platforms as long-term standalone offerings as their functionality is a tight fit for marketing automation.  They will likely be folded into marketing automation platforms once the technology has matured.  It is also possible that predictive analytics companies fold these tools into their products as persona assignments would inform lead scoring and messaging.  Furthermore, several of the predictive firms aspire to becoming recommendation engines, a feature that persona platforms could easily support.  Conversely, business signals would be valuable in building out a fuller understanding of personas.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

In a research study titled, “2016 B2B Sales & Marketing Collaboration Study,” Samantha Stone and The Marketing Advisory Network found that the misalignment of sales and marketing objectives remains a key problem for B2B companies.  Although this has been a topic of discussion for several years now, misalignment remains a key stumbling block to meeting revenue objectives.  Finger pointing between sales and marketing has long been a blogging meme.

When asked about whether marketing co-workers were doing a “superb job of supporting sales efforts,” sixty percent of marketers agreed while only twenty percent of sales executives agreed.

Other signs of disconnection between the two parties:

  • Only twenty percent of marketers believe that there is a 95% follow up on marketing generated leads while only half of sales executives believe a 95% follow up rate is maintained within their department.  Overall, 57% of respondents believe that no more than 85% of marketing leads are acted upon by sales.
  • Marketers have little confidence that sales reps are using the tools they develop for sales.  While only 15% of marketers believe their tools are broadly adopted (“virtually 100%”), over half of sales reps believe the tools are being fully deployed.
  • While fewer than twenty percent of marketers believe that sales is rewarded for supporting marketing objectives, 55% of sales teams believe their rewards are aligned with marketing.
  • Firms that did not share key performance indicators between sales and marketing were half as likely to exceed revenue targets.
  • Marketing ownership of pipeline acceleration is critical to meeting revenue targets.  “Organizations that exceeded revenue goals in the last 12 months are 3X as likely as those that miss revenue goals for marketing to “own” pipeline acceleration (not just lead generation),” said Stone.

“It’s common sense that organizations that rally together around shared goals will drive more efficiency than those where different functions are at odds with each other. Yet, most sales and marketing teams struggle with achieving this ideal.  That’s almost terrifying given we know fully integrated companies are more profitable, drive faster growth and make happier customers,” said Stone.  “Sales and marketing leaders are smart, yet almost every organization I walk into has some level of unhealthy tension between the two groups. It doesn’t seem to matter the size of the company, the industry they serve or how fast they are growing. In fact, it’s so common we accept it as inevitable.”

Sales and Marketing SLAs (Source: Marketing Advisory Network)
Sales and Marketing SLAs (Source: Marketing Advisory Network)

The study also found that setting Service Level Agreements (SLAs) between sales and marketing are highly correlated with revenue performance.  Firms that took simple steps such as defining lead scoring criteria and lead follow up timeframes were much more likely to exceed goals than fail to do so.  Of the six SLA goal categories defined by Stone, five were associated with “exceeded revenue goals” more commonly than missing revenue goals by more than ten percent.

The one goal that was not associated with outperformance, agreeing on the “number of new contacts added to the database by sales,” doesn’t address the mix of marketing and sales generated leads.  If we assume that there is an optimal percentage of sales generated leads, then agreeing on a percentage that is significantly above or below the target would be sub-optimal.  Absent a way to determine this optimal mix, setting an SLA on sales generated contacts could easily result in too much or too little time spent on contact identification.  If the number is too high, then reps are likely to add contacts of little value to the CRM so as to reach numeric targets.  A smart SLA would be based upon an analysis of the cost of generating sales contact records against the benefit of adding additional contacts.  As such, setting an analytics-free numeric target is no better than having no SLA at all and allowing each rep to determine their optimal contact discovery level.

Teams that perform best, document more service level agreements between sales and marketing than those teams that simply meet or miss revenue goals,” said Stone.  “Those that exceed revenue goals even collect data points such as win/loss data in a formalized manner.  Perhaps the most simple practice they follow is not only agreeing on lead scoring critical for sales follow up, but on time from lead assignment to follow up. It’s this closed loop accountability that clearly makes a difference.”

Finally, one simple step for improving revenue is for marketing to attend sales meetings.  The study found that B2B organizations which outperform on revenue are twice as likely to have marketers attend customer and prospect meetings than firms that fail to meet revenue targets.  Furthermore, marketing departments should be surveying the sales team on tools.  Stone found that firms “that exceed revenue goals are 3.1X as likely as those that just meet revenue goals to survey buyers when evaluating sales tools and 14X as likely as those that miss revenue goals.”

Tibor Shanto, Principal of Renbor Sales Solutions, calls for improved cooperation between sales and marketing under the leadership of a Chief Revenue Officer:

I have always seen sales and marketing as being on a shared mission and fighting the same battle. Like the military, to succeed, marketing has to provide air cover for the ground troops, namely sales, and this requires complete coordination, planning, execution, and review. This needs to extend from lead generation through all stages of the sale. At each stage, marketing offers up different coverage based on the feedback from sales. And sales needs to be sure to provide that feedback every step of the way or the air cover may miss the mark. While each branch of the military has their command, the overall effort is led by the commander. That’s why I am a fan of companies having a Chief Revenue Officer, rather than a distinct VP Marketing and VP Sales.

It is through a recognition of shared goals subject to shared metrics and feedback loops that firms can obtain improved performance from the two departments that own revenue generation.

The research was sponsored by QuotaFactory.

Account Based Marketing Blog Series

 

Lead Quality Stratification Chart from "I Don’t Want More Leads (and Neither Do You)"
Lead quality stratification chart from “I Don’t Want More Leads (and Neither Do You)”

I was recently commissioned to write a blog series on the subject of Account Based Marketing (ABM) for sales intelligence vendor Avention.  ABM is one of the hottest trends in sales and marketing as firms have realized that blanketing the market with non-personalized messaging is both inefficient and becoming less effective.  ABM provides a structured approach to sales and marketing whereby firms define their best customers and prospects and then focus their energy on these best candidates.  Due to improvements in datasets and technology, firms can now target and personalize their messaging much more effectively.

Here are my recent articles and opening paragraphs:

  • Data Quality Remains Boring, but Ever More Important: Three years ago, I wrote a blog titled, “Data Quality is Boring”.  To be honest, it still is.  Few marketing executives will walk into the job and set data hygiene as their first priority.  But is it more critical than ever due to the increased scope of SalesTech and Martech and the advancement of Account Based Marketing (ABM) and predictive analytics.  None of these tools will achieve their promise without a rigorous process for embedding high quality data into your leads, contacts, and accounts.  Marketers need to build data quality into the front-end of their data acquisition process and then maintain data quality over time.  Likewise, data quality needs to be maintained within CRMs due to the rapid rate of contact decay.
  • Demand Gen is to Fishing With Nets as ABM is to _____: Account Based Marketing (ABM) is quickly moving up the hype cycle and becoming a best practice at many B2B organizations.  While ABM has been around for decades, it is only in the past two years that the wisdom of B2B targeting combined with focused sales and marketing activities around ideal customers has been revisited.
  • Digital Transformation of Sales & Marketing: In my last blog, I discussed Forrester’s model of Digital Predators, Digital Transformers, and Digital Dinosaurs.  Forrester argues that businesses must quickly become digital with products and services which are either sold or delivered digitally.  According to Forrester, about five percent of business revenue is being converted from traditional to digital each year with nearly half of all revenue being digitally mediated by 2020.  At that point, ninety percent of digital predator revenue will be digitally mediated, and nearly seventy percent of digital transformer revenue will be digital, but only one-third of digital dinosaur revenue will be digital.  Thus, over the next four years, the transformers will quadruple their digital revenue mix while the dinosaurs will merely double it
  • Account Based Marketing & Cloning Best Customers: As sales and marketing teams embrace Account Based Marketing (ABM), they have come to realize that ABM requires that the two departments agree on what constitutes a best customer as well as how to identify them.  Account Based Marketing is a balancing act between extending your target market and retaining strategic focus.  Firms need to direct their energy and investments into a universe of best prospects and customers.  Once this ABM target list is defined, sales and marketing must maintain a laser-like focus on these candidates.
  • Account Based Marketing & Expanding Your Footprint: When assessing vendors for Account Based Marketing (ABM), the initial focus may be on building the ABM target list, but equally important is the ability to sell more broadly across an organization.  Thus, deep contacts and linkage are critical for upselling, cross-selling, and accessing new pockets of potential buyers within firms.  After all, it is easier to sell deeper into your best fit accounts than it is to establish that initial beachhead.  Furthermore, a broader footprint generates both greater income and greater account security.
  • Account Based Marketing & Company Research: Account Based Marketing (ABM) has been re-embraced as a strategy by sales and marketing teams as they have realized that traditional outreach methods (e.g. banner advertising, phone, and email) need to be better targeted towards a set of Ideal Customers.  Simply taking a “spray and pray” approach to marketing is becoming less effective as prospects become less willing to answer calls or read poorly targeted emails.  If the voicemail is generic or the email appears to be generated from a marketing automation platform, it is unlikely that the prospect will do anything beyond hit the delete button.
  • Meet ABM’s Kid Brother: ABSD: In my last few blogs, I’ve discussed Account Based Marketing (ABM) as a targeted approach to strategic B2B marketing, but have yet to broach the subject of how ABM affects sales reps.  Since ABM began at the very top of the funnel as programmatic marketing to anonymous targets at named accounts, it had little process impact further down the funnel; but now that ABM has become a broader marketing strategy for named accounts, the question is much more relevant.
  • MQL and SQL — Why Can’t We Just Agree on Lead Qualification: For too long, sales and marketing have been at loggerheads over what constitutes a qualified lead.  This disagreement on what is an actionable opportunity has been one of the sources of ongoing conflict between sales and marketing.  How many times has marketing crowed about all the leads they generate for the sales team only to be dismissed by sales reps and their managers?
  • I Don’t Want More Leads (and Neither Do You): The headline to my email read, “I don’t need more leads.  Said no marketer ever.”  I guess I’ll be the first to disagree with that statement – as would the marketer who wrote the headline.  You only need to read her subsequent copy which states “When fully integrated into your demand generation efforts, predictive marketing enables B2B marketers to drive deeper buyer engagement and increase revenue opportunities from target accounts.”

Note: I am a former Avention employee (2001 – 20010)

HBR: Digital Exhaust for Sales

Mark Kovac of Bain and Company wrote an interesting piece on the topic of digital exhaust in Harvard Business Review.  The short piece, titled “Using Digital Exhaust to Improve Sales,” provides three examples of how software vendors are combining big data and analytics to provide new tools to sales management.

Kovac defines digital exhaust as “the data generated from the regular activities of a sales force or their customers, to change the behavior of frontline sales representatives in ways that dramatically improve sales productivity and effectiveness” and provides examples from three firms including Lattice Engines.

The first firm, Volometrix, was acquired by Microsoft last year.  Volometrix performs resource analyses to determine where sales reps are spending their time and which behaviors are positively correlated with sales performance.  Unfortunately, the use case Kovac provides is about a firm that realigned company priorities providing more time for selling and therefore “too much sales capacity.”  While efficiency is desirable, if software solutions result in efficiency improvements without much improvement in efficacy (ability to sell), then they will be resisted.  This isn’t too say that Volometrix doesn’t provide efficacy gains (I only know them from the story), but case studies which focus on cost savings (efficiency) over revenue gains (effectiveness) may create situations where sales reps refuse to cooperate.

The second vendor discussed is GoToMeeting which is performing voice-to-text semantic analysis and discerning which phrases and approaches are more effective.  The data gathered is anonymous (though I still see issues with recording calls, particularly in certain jurisdictions) and provides insights in how to more effectively sell.  The software sounds a bit like SalesforceIQ but instead of focusing on email analysis, GoToMeeting is using conversations.

Lattice Engines stratifies leads by probability of closing with the highest probability leads immediately sent to sales and the remainder held for nurturing.
Lattice Engines stratifies leads by probability of closing with the highest probability leads immediately sent to sales and the remainder held for nurturing.

The final case study was predictive analytics company Lattice Engines which helps firms improve “call response rates, close rates and average order value.”  Predictive analytics for sales and marketing is a growing class of recommendation software with a broad set of competitors including Leadspace, Infer, 6Sense, and Mintigo.  Lattice Engines combines first-party and third-party data sets to score leads and recommend sales approaches.  Unfortunately, Kovac focuses on the matched third-party data instead of the digital exhaust captured by the firm (he does mention loyalty scores and product purchase history).

There is a growing set of SalesTech vendors that are applying digital analysis to previously inaccessible datasets.  While sales remains an art, these solutions are shifting the sales profession from a craft to a science.  If vendors are to be successful, they need to focus more on efficacy versus efficiency.  While sales could certainly become more efficient by reducing non-productive administrative activities (and reps are always happy to reduce dead weight time spent tracking problems, navigating contract signatures, and entering data), the focus should be on top-line growth and exceeding quota, not cost reduction.  Otherwise, sales reps will resist their adoption.

ABM: How Many Accounts?

ABM Target

The question of how many accounts to include in an Account Based Marketing (ABM) program was addressed by Jon Miller, CEO of Engagio in a recent blog.  (Engagio uses the term “Account Based Everything,” but it still applies).  Miller proposed a straightforward capacity analysis based upon the hourly requirements to properly manage various categories of accounts.

He also identified variables to include in your estimation:

  • Your expected deal sizes
  • The length of the sales cycle
  • Your available sales resources
  • Your current level of engagement 
with major prospects
  • The intensiveness of your account-based strategy

If your ABM targeting is defined as “we target the Fortune 1000 vendors in the following sectors…”, then you may be missing many opportunities.  Likewise, if it is too broadly defined then you may lack the resources to properly manage a land and expand strategy at each of the targets.  A capacity analysis lets you work backwards based upon the number of global enterprise reps, named accounts (large, medium, and small), and SDRs.  Miller proposes sample capacity numbers for each of these sales rep categories.

“The challenge is to scale your ABM program so that you can address internal requests from the sales team, but at the same time not lose the unique approach of ABM and revert back to the traditional kinds of marketing,” says Jeff Sands of ITSMA, “Salespeople are highly competitive, and when they start to see their peers succeed in implementing a strategy like ABM, they want to jump on that bandwagon really fast. You have to make sure you scale appropriately.”

Your ABM strategy should begin with an understanding of your capacity and then progress into an analysis of revenue goals (revenue maximization, profitability maximization, new market entry, market share growth, etc.).  Only then should you begin identifying your ABM targets.

Data.com and Pardot: Synch but No Prospecting

Pardot stare and compareWhile other sales and marketing intelligence vendors provide integrated prospecting within marketing automation platforms, Salesforce has not implemented Data.com prospecting for the Pardot B2B marketing automation platform.  Pardot is strictly a permission-based marketing platform so sales reps need to work the prospects to obtain marketing permission before the record can be sent from Salesforce to Pardot.

“It’s a bad idea to purchase email lists and immediately send email to those purchased prospects, and no reputable email service provider will allow you to immediately send email to a purchased list. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from this treasure trove of information, as long as permission is explicitly obtained first,” said Skyler Holobach, Pardot’s Email Compliance Manager.

Instead, Holobach recommends using Data.com Clean to enrich basic contact information obtained from web forms or tradeshows.  If the user is synching with Data.com Clean, then company and contact data is enriched.  Otherwise, users can synch against Data.com Connect for contact enrichment.  Updating takes the user through a “stare and compare” process.

When users have Data.com Prospector lists, they are required to call into accounts to obtain opt-in permission.

“The incorrect way would be to use Data.com as a cold lead generator for email purposes. Given the terms stated in the Permission-Based Marketing Policy, customers can not pull in prospects through Data.com and immediately add them to Pardot lists for emails and/or nurturing without first obtaining their permission. By not following best practices, you’re also running a significant risk for getting your IP address blacklisted, which can lead to significant email reputation damage,” said Holobach.  “Instead, you should follow the best practices outlined above, to first obtain permission prior to sending email. By obtaining explicit permission prior to sending email, you can reap the benefits of the Data.com database while staying in compliance with Pardot’s Permission-Based Marketing Policy and keeping your email reputation high.”

Lightning Strikes SFDC Again

SalesforceIQ Inbox_Hero
The SalesforceIQ Inbox provides a set of desktop and mobile productivity apps for which bring Salesforce intelligence to the email Inbox.

Salesforce.com had another beat and raise quarter where they beat expectations and raised their revenue guidance.  When you are growing at 27% year over year (28% once currency headwinds are factored in), it is easy to have a succession of beat and raise quarters — All you have to do is figure out how to add two billion dollars in revenue this year and then continue to do so geometrically every year forward.

On Wednesday’s earnings call, CEO Marc Benioff claimed that SFDC continues to invest heavily in its sales cloud platform while competitors have invested elsewhere.  Remarking on SFDC’s continued leadership position in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, he stated that

Everyone else kind of abandoned their technology in this area and they are trying to give it a lot of lip service, but the reality is there is just no comparison between what we have and what the other vendors have at this point.  It’s incredible and it comes through in our demos, it comes through in our wins, and it comes through in the core customer success.”

The Sales Cloud, their oldest and largest cloud, saw an acceleration in its growth rate due to its Salesforce1 “rebooting” combined with the new Lightning user experience which was designed as mobile first.  Other growth drivers were Pardot, their B2B marketing automation platform, and the recently acquired SteelBrick CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) service.

Lightning also supports the Force platform.  It’s mobile development capabilities help developers “rapidly build and expand and create these applications using Lightning and deploy them on all these different devices,” said Benioff.  “Lightning is so unique and so special in the industry.  It lets our customers build these applications quickly at a very low cost and deploy them across so many different platforms that we’re going to see a continued growth in core clouds.”

The Next Growth Driver: Artificial Intelligence

Benioff also discussed past and future growth drivers for Salesforce and the tech industry.  Past drivers include cloud computing and social with mobile as a key current driver.  Moving forward, growth will come from the integration of artificial intelligence across SFDC to improve customer experience and workflows.  Benioff provided the new SalesforceIQ Inbox service as an example:

[The] Salesforce Inbox is very exciting because it uses artificial intelligence and machine intelligence to work with our users, to work with our emails, to work with their calendars, and work with their CRM data to give them perspective ideas on exactly how do be more efficient in the sales, service, and marketing processes of their companies…

This is another major growth factor because it will appear in sales, it will appear in service, it will appear in marketing.

For the past few years, Benioff has been discussing the importance of being a customer company that interacts with customers across a broad set of platforms and departmental touch points with “systems of intelligence.”  It is along this front that SFDC has staked out its most recent competitive differentiation:

We’re in the midst of a massive generational shift; a new generation of customers and consumers is clearly emerging. We have been calling them here at Salesforce C generation customers. Customer generation, consumer generation that these are people who want it now, they want it fast, they want it easy, and they’re mobile, they’re social, they’re always on, and our customers are working to connect with the C generation in new ways, very exciting. I mean this is really part of a huge shift that’s happening in computing. We’ve gone from the first generation of computing which was very much about systems of record to the second generation which was systems of engagement we talked about that on these calls many times over the last 10 years. And we are clearly moving into this incredible world that the system of intelligence that’s all yielding these incredible systems of customers or C generation customers that are — that our customers are connecting to. And that’s we’re so excited about.

Focusing on the customer, delivering systems of intelligence, developing a mobile-first platform, betting on the cloud when the tech market is collapsing, and embracing social.  These decisions all seem obvious in retrospect, but in the fog of corporate battle, the trick is to identify and implement the next wave early and better than anybody else.  When you think about it, that’s easy — sort of like growing revenue by two billion dollars this year.

Dun & Bradstreet Human Trafficking Risk Index

HTRI

This is a bit off the beaten path for my usual discussions, but it is always welcome when a company is able to create new products which take their core capabilities and direct them towards a global (or local) problem.  In this case, Dun & Bradstreet has developed a Human Trafficking Risk Index which helps firms avoid dodgy suppliers that may be using slave labor.   What’s more, this appears to be the first in a series of “Responsible Business Analytics” products they are planning to launch.

Their new Human Trafficking Risk Index helps procurement departments identify potential vendors that utilize trafficked labor (21 million people globally).  This shadow economy has been sized at $150 billion in annual illegal profits by the International Labor Organization.  Dun & Bradstreet is combining data from the US Departments of State and Labor with their global linkage information to help their customers “address supply chain risk while also helping them to be responsible corporate citizens.”

In “Trafficking in Persons Report” (July 2015), Secretary of State John Kerry said “This year’s Report places a special emphasis on human trafficking in the global marketplace. It highlights the hidden risks that workers may encounter when seeking employment and the steps that governments and businesses can take to prevent trafficking, including a demand for transparency in global supply chains.”

When people are asked about Dun & Bradstreet, they usually think of business credit reports, but the credit products are part of a broader Risk Management Solutions division that covers both business credit and supplier risk.  Along with credit scores, they have one of the world’s leading company databases, the 250 million company WorldBase file, which covers both active and inactive companies with deep company linkage.  It is this linkage intelligence that helps firms see through shells and holding companies to connect known bad actors with the rest of the organization.

Companies are already looking for the risk management companies to assist with KYC (Know Your Client), AML (anti-money laundering), and PEP (Politically Exposed Persons) to root out corruption.  Responsible Business Analytics is simply the next set of tools for helping companies act responsibly, maintain compliance, and avoid reputational black eyes.

What was impressed me was that on their Q1 earnings call, CEO Bob Carrigan spent a few minutes of his prepared remarks discussing their new index.  His focus wasn’t on profitability or future revenue streams, but about helping to reduce a global problem.  Carrigan argued that the role of the Chief Procurement Officer has expanded from optimizing the supplier base to managing supply risk including reputational risk.  Thus, the CPO needs tools that assist with regulatory compliance and brand risk management.  According to Carrigan,

Our supply risk solutions help customers manage this full spectrum of risks.  Today, CPOs have a fast growing need in what we call “Responsible Business Analytics” to help them guard against regulatory and reputational risks.  We help them as they comply with Government diversity requirements and monitor global banned entity lists, as well as meeting their social responsibility commitments like funding suppliers with sustainable business practices and meeting best in class ethics standards.

Is this a product category that will be a big money maker for Dun & Bradstreet?  I doubt it.  But at the margins, it provides a differentiator between Dun & Bradstreet and other supply risk vendors.  As such, it could tip a few deals their way while helping to reduce the profits of human traffickers.

 

Sales Lessons from My Mother

The Thonet Bentwood Rocking Chair has been in production for 150 years. It is a design classic.
The Thonet Bentwood Rocking Chair has been in production for 150 years. It is a design classic.

My mom had a varied business career from which her sons took lessons about hard work, business ethics, and perseverance.  After earning a Master’s in Design, she worked for the state of Connecticut designing educational facilities for the severely mentally challenged (at the time, mentally retarded was the proper term before the R word became an epithet).  After a few years, she entered capital equipment sales, first for Thonet, a famous furniture manufacturer, and later for Amedco, a hospital equipment company.  She was proud of the companies she worked for and it was pretty cool that we owned a Thonet bentwood rocker, a 19th century design classic.  She later managed sales, marketing, and HR at my parent’s clinical research company.  At all three companies, she excelled.

My mother was working her sales territory in the early seventies when companies were reluctant to hire saleswomen.  She was equally comfortable working with purchasing departments, nurses, doctors and engineers.  She would be out on the loading dock when the truck arrived with the equipment, toolbox in hand, assisting with the delivery.

She also went to every bid opening, using it as another opportunity to meet with government purchasing departments and research competitive bidding.  One time, her analysis of a low bid led her to realize the firm was passing off reconditioned equipment as new.  While she initially lost that bid, she protested that the competitor did not conform to the requirements of the RFP and wrestled the contract away from them.  That is perseverance and a judicious use of competitive intelligence.

She also made sure that my brothers and I had a chance to assist with her nursing home deliveries.  She’d hire us to help unload the equipment and push it on dollies to each of the rooms of a new nursing home.  It was good, honest work and gave us an opportunity to witness her sales victories.  We earned $10 an hour, and she expected us to work just as hard as the rest of the crew during the installation.

My mom also had a strong ethical perspective.  For her, sales was about developing relationships, meeting your promises, and never bad mouthing your competitors. When she began selling hospital beds, her territory was poorly developed.  It was basically controlled by the #1 company in the space and it took her years to build up her pipeline and develop the relationships to wrest away sales from the incumbent.  This meant she often delivered samples or sold a few birthing beds (a specialty product) years before the next capital investment cycle.  Birthing beds were her Trojan Horse.

Happy Mother’s Day