Today, I'm at the Frost & Sullivan Sales & Marketing Executive MindXchange in Anaheim. A little smaller than expected, there are only about 50 people here. Nonetheless, it's a nice interactive format where sessions are discussions, rather than monologues. For me, nice to be able to open my mouth and hear my own thoughts and questions during a session, rather than being talked at for 8 hours.
So with all the speakers and discussions today, here are the most interesting things I've heard or learned. Some perhaps applicable to my job, others just interesting.
1. The next killer app for mobile devices? Mobility.
WTF was my first thought. Allen Kupetz, who gave us all his book "The Future of Less", proposes that "it is not individually email, or movies, or text messaging, or even voice calls that continue to drive the wireless revolution, but a combination of all of these in a mobile environment. People want to be able to do what they want when and where they want." Hmm... we've been saying that all along, but still wondering what the killer app is. Nice summary Allen.
2. Changing market perception starts with employees.
Both Alicia Dietsch (AT&T) and Sue de Leeuw (Blue Shield of California) focused on how the launch of their new brand in the marketplace, all started with their employees. Focusing on internal communications campaigns to ensure that employees are living the brand, and delivering the brand at all customer touchpoints. Both ladies presented case histories that had incredible content and solid results. They both really showed how brand value is much more than just pretty new logos. I only wish I had the manpower and the budgets to execute on something like this!
3. Big companies do long-term planning well.
Again, in both AT&T and Blue Shield presentations (as well as the value-based selling presentation by BP Products), there were long-term timelines for rolling out various phases of a plan. And I'm not talking Q1, Q2, Q3... I'm talking Year 1, Year 2, Year 3... I'm not sure if it's a sympton of me, or a symptom of my organization, but I don't have good long-term annual planning or outlook. Yes, my industry changes rapidly, having to re-align priorities based on market changes. At the same time, my company is also focused more on short-term quarterly achievements rather than a 3-year horizon on goals. Moreover, my own ADD personality is aligned this way so that I'm too impatient to give a project a 3-year timeline. Heck, I probably wouldn't be around to see something through it if was planned with that long of a horizon. But I do admire companies and people that have the patience and the tenacity to pull off a long-term roll-out like that.
4. Others in my company are inward focused.
Some other management in my company have been there for so long, that their view of the world is too entrenched in our product and our features. They need to get out into the real world more - see our customers, talk to our partners, come to conferences like this and hear about other companies challenges with CRM, sales, and marketing processes. Even our forward-looking plans still focus on features and challenges that are too old, and not progress enough. Even discussions with customers are too focused on challenges with our current product, but we should really be elevating the conversation to discuss the challenges in their business, and how our solution can address those today and in the future. This is how we will build a valuable product that people will pay money for. Now, it's one of my challenges to raise that level of conversation.
5. It's great to get validation.
Sometimes I think I'm smart. Other times, I wonder if my instincts are wrong. Today, it was great to get validation from other companies that they are doing things successfully, in areas where I have only talked about - not executed on. For example, Don Fowler from Siemens Medical talked about their strategic accounts program. Where they are providing on-site "consultation" or "audits" of how their customers are using their products, in order to understand where the gaps in their utilization are, or recommend other products. If that even results in saying that they don't need to order anything right now, than so be it. This is similar to the concept of the CRM Audit that we have discussed, which would be a simple audit, and can even be performed by an account manager (not necessarily a consultant). Sometimes, just hearing that another company is doing something successfully, gives me confidence to push things internally. And I suspect that others (in the management team and others in general) also feel this way, so me providing this third-party validation shoudl provide additional confidence in what we are doing so we can now focus on rolling it out.
So there we have it. My first "Top 5" blog posting.
If anything, at least this forces me to collect my thoughts at the end of the evening and summarize my thoughts so I can rest better at night without thoughts running through my head.
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