Year: 2022

Sales Development Representatives: Sales Role, Skills, and Qualifications

Sales Development Representatives are the team members of the sales team of any company. Their focus is on reaching out to leads and deciding if these leads are qualified or not.

Previously, only some tech companies had a niche role. However, the sales development representative is now an important position in companies across various industrial sectors. If you are planning to be an SDR (sales development representative), this post will help you to decide whether it is the right post for you. When you have a better idea, you will be able to stand out from the rat race in the job world. Also, sales managers must know what they should look for in candidates when hiring sales development representatives.

Sales Development Representatives

Primarily, SDR is a role inside the sales team. SDRs solely focus on outbound prospects with the goal of generating a sales pipeline for the sales team. As the role is considered an entry-level position without years of experience, it can be seen as a good way to start your journey in sales.

In order to achieve this goal, SDRs typically research potential prospects before connecting with them. A particular objective of this role is passing sales leads that match the proper criteria and taking them forward to the account manager or account executive.

This is called outbound sales. In outbound sales, SDRs identify their potential customers and connect with them. After that, they pass the customer details to the other sales team members. Inbound sales are where a prospect or lead contacts you after seeing your marketing campaigns or hearing word of mouth.

In businesses, sales development representatives are still popular as the company can have groups within the sales team. SDRs are one particular team with a specialization in a particular process. With the integration of AI SDR agents, these teams can further enhance their efficiency by automating repetitive tasks like lead qualification and initial outreach. These segmented efforts of the sales teams help the business to divide and conquer many strategies, and challenges and streamline the processes systematically.

Work and Responsibilities Of Sales Development Representatives

The role and meaning of sales development representatives differ. In some companies, the SDRs may deal with inbound prospects who show interest. Sometimes, they may have to search for their outbound leads. Depending on the organization, the sales development representatives may have to do both.

Lead Generation And Lead Qualification

At the beginning, SDRs find out the potential leads. Therefore, potential sales become qualified leads. If you are an SDR, you have to reach out to the prospects and connect with them through inbound and outbound channels.

However, before you contact your prospects, you must conduct some preliminary research. You will find that prospects who have similarities with your existing customers are going to be a good fit.

Things an SDR needs to consider:

  • Does your prospect match the buyer’s persona of the company?
  • Prospects’ top priorities
  • What do the prospects want to achieve?
  • Prospective challenges that are pressing
  • Decision-maker of the prospect’s company
  • What tools do their company use currently for solving a problem? (if there are any tools).

Though we know that SDRs decide the qualified leads, BANT, or (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing), or similar criteria, helps us to determine who may buy the products or services.

Initial Outreach

When you find a quality lead, you can decide which is the best way to reach out. Depending on the leads’ availability or where they spent their time, you can reach out to them via social media, cold calls, and/or cold email.

Each of these channels has a different type of approach:

  • Are you connecting to them over LinkedIn or commenting on a particular Facebook post?
  • Are you going to talk to them by phone or send a voicemail?
  • Will you send a video message or a plain email?

In most cases, you may want to touch multiple touchpoints through multiple channels. You have found out that it’s the best course of action.

Whatever channel you choose, the research work will help you to personalize all the messages. So, you will go beyond the given industry information and do targeted research on specific leads and their companies.

So, you are balancing effort and personalization with time management. As a self-development representative, you have to spread a large net, but don’t forget to notice the details of the leads. You must make your leads feel that they are valuable as your potential

Lead Nurturing

No matter how enthusiastic your inbound leads are, you can’t make them ready to meet after just a single call. On various occasions, the timing can be wrong even though you have a good prospect. As a result, you must nurture those new leads and further educate them on your service or product.

Of course, there is a difference in pitching. If your words appear to be too expensive to sell, the prospect is unlikely to be impressed. But if you can offer the right value and deliberately help them tackle their most pressing challenges, prospects may trust you more. It creates a genuine interest in achieving a positive outcome. Your prospects will reach out to you as they will trust you and that your product or service will serve their needs.

Moving Leads Through The Pipeline

As soon as the leads are qualified, you then pass them to the account executive. For the SDRs, this is the main object. Most organizations have a reward system for SDRs. The reward depends on metrics that reflect the number of meetings booked with sales-qualified leads.

Skills to Be a Sales Development Representative

In order to excel in a sales development representative role, a candidate needs to have the following key skills:

  • An unfaltering mindset
  • Excellent communication abilities
  • A resilient attitude
  • Boundless curiosity and creativity
  • Active listening skills
  • Multitasking ability
  • Self-awareness and empathy

The traits of an SDR and a good salesperson are almost similar. That’s why it is a wonderful position to step forward to higher-level sales positions.

According to some, there are three key areas in which any SDR must develop in order to be successful in the role:

  • When SDRs have a gritty mindset, buyers’ personal knowledge, and added sales skills, they move above the competition. Having the right mindset for the role is critical, along with having a resilient attitude to get things done. Also, having curiosity and creativity makes the outcomes better. With their impeccable sales skills, they will be capable of handling conversations and increasing the sales rate. Besides these skills, buyers’ personal knowledge means they know the customer’s problems, their pain points. It helps the SDRs articulate the prospects and how they can be of help.

Being an SDR means you have to have quality research skills. This skill will enable you to discover all the information you need. Of course, you can get help from many tools available for finding demographic details. However, if you put some extra effort into research, you will reveal the psychographics of the customers.

For a budding sales development representative, communication is the number one skill to master. It is not similar to having an email template or a good script that contains powerful words of persuasion. Here, SDRs have to listen to the prospects instead of thinking about what they are going to say to them. If you have good communication skills, you will be able to help them better.

Though SDRs look after one part of the sales process, one still has to take care of lots of tasks. And it is a time-sensitive task. But as the market takes a turn, SDRs also have to juggle research work, outreach, and follow-up. If you are not aware of the difficulty of the role, you may feel overwhelmed by it. Therefore, having time management and organization skills is vital for all SDRs. So, if you embrace your curious nature, you will stay motivated as you try to learn more about the industry, products and services, customers, and their pain points.

Qualifications To Be Hired As Sales Development Representative

The sales manager must conduct extensive research when hiring SDRs for your company. After all, it is unlikely to have lots of candidates with experience being sales development representatives. Therefore, the sales manager must focus on the transferable skills of the candidates, like:

  • How much does each of these candidates interact with people, if they work in retail or other places like bartending? They don’t have to have any prior roles in the sales department to show their people skills. But people skills are one of the key qualifiers for the role of sales development representative.
  • Do the resumes of the candidates show adaptability in their previous roles? It will indicate that they can look beyond the popular templates and stand out from a creative point of view.

Sales interviews require qualified candidates because sales teams are a key part of any industry. It is advisable for sales managers that they do not sugarcoat all the challenges the SDR role presents. SDR is a hard-working position. Unless candidates are prepared for the hard work, they can’t last long.

Sales interview shows how the candidates will talk with any prospect. Besides paying attention to what these candidates say, sales managers must take notes on what they are saying. Are these candidates skilled communicators? Do they listen intently? Do they ask the right questions? A candidate with good communication skills can engage easily with your potential customers.

6 Boss Ways To Identify And Create New Sales Opportunities

Sales opportunities are everywhere—whether from satisfied customers, surprise phone calls, or impromptu meetings. Yet, a staggering 79% of leads fail to convert due to poor follow-up by sales teams. Often, sales reps miss these golden chances because they’re bogged down with processes or back-to-back meetings. To stay ahead of the competition, your sales team must actively identify and seize opportunities as they arise. Wondering how? Here are six proven strategies to uncover new prospects that work seamlessly for both B2C and B2B sales. Don’t let the next big opportunity slip by!

Great Ways To Spot The New Sales Opportunities

Let’s not wait to dive into the six best ways of identifying sales opportunities for your B2B or B2C small business.

  • Work With Sales-qualified Leads – In sales, lots of sequential steps take place, leading to the ultimate event, the sales transaction. Sales-qualified leads are mostly leads that have an interest in buying the product or service from you. Mostly, these prospects can afford it at the moment and are ready to make the purchase.Sales-qualified leads or SQLs are mostly generated from efforts of sales prospecting like salesperson-to-salesperson communication, cold calling, or marketing sales campaigns. However, lead generation is a lengthy process and can be expensive for SQLs. The reason is that SQLs require a great deal of sales resources. So, sales experts have to ensure spending the sales resources on only sales-qualified leads with the most potential of converting to sales.But what are the ways? You can just ask leads a few questions regarding their budget. For example: “What’s your ideal budget for the complete purchase?” “Can you share the highest amount you have spent on a similar object”? It will not only help you to save an ample amount of time but also prevent you from following up on any unqualified leads.There are some other ways you can qualify your leads for sales offers, like sales forecasts. It will depend on sales history, financials, or competition analysis. Also, you can qualify for a few sales leads scrutinizing the sales cycles of other companies. Check the leads who have bought similar products from the companies, the length of the buying process, etc.From the buying patterns of these leads, you will understand whether they will be interested in your product or not. Sometimes, the prospects already know their limitations and share clear information with you about their problem and want them solved. Then it will depend on your solution and what you are offering for them to buy it.
  • Create Buyer Personas – Sales-qualified leads go through the filtering process, but they come out on the other side as ready to buy. However, not all of those leads come from one place. Most times, the SQLs come from all sides of the world and of different age groups and different genders. Besides that, income levels can vary due to different occupations.Not all of the leads have the same needs to be catered. When it comes to SQLs, you won’t be able to apply the same blanket sales tactic. Therefore, the marketer must know that not every message is for every lead. The messages have to cater to a particular category of potential customers.As it is not possible to connect with all the leads one-to-one, there has to be some alternative. So, the sales team and marketing team must create buyer personas. The buyer personas give a general portrait of the audience of your business. It’s almost a fictional profile.The function of the buyer personas is to group your audience into one bracket with similar individuals. Buyer personas create avatars for each type of strong personality that we come across. There can be a fast, active person who needs to do a quick reading before their purchase. As there are lots of personas, the buyer personas must accommodate them all.There’s a way to choose criteria for each avatar. During sales, you may have to organize the prospects based on buyer readiness. You can also segment the SQLs based on pain points, location, income, or occupation. When a SQL lead matches a particular buyer persona, it creates a quick sales opportunity.
  • Use Customer Referrals – Let’s be honest; sales opportunities don’t have to come out and be presented in front of you. Why not create opportunities? But how can you do it? You will need customer referrals.This is the time to turn your focus from sales-qualified leads; you can tap into the existing customers of your brand. Of course, you have to do the segmenting, like which customer is loyal and who buys most often from you. Also, do not forget to connect with those customers who have been with you for a long time.Then, you can reach out to existing customers via email or a phone call. You have to inform them that you are starting a referral program. Do ask them to refer your service, product, or brand to anyone of their knowing. When word of mouth about your company reaches people via your satisfied customers, it impacts sales positively.But why would your customers participate in the referrals? To make the referral program a huge success, you have to give incentives to the participating customers. Freebies or discounts are some ways to incentivize. There can be some big discounts or rewards for the most active participants in these referral programs.Never neglect the importance and strength of “word of mouth”. When the lead hears a recommendation from your existing customers– family members, coworkers, friends, etc.-there would be a higher chance of your offer to work.
  • Establish Affiliate Programs or Third Party Referrals – Affiliate programs or third-party referrals can drive the sales of your company higher. As you know about it, you won’t be able to wait to milk the opportunities coming your way from everywhere. So, we will suggest you build a third-party referral relationship.There are billions of companies striving to boost their sales besides your company. All are attracting their own leads, qualified or less qualified. What if you connect with another company or influencer’s new qualified audience?When you have a third-party referral program or affiliate program, you will have it. It boosts sales opportunities just like the customer referral program. Your affiliates also earn revenue from you when someone buys from the affiliate links of your services or products. In such cases, you should offer them money instead of freebies or discounts.In today’s time, it is one of the best ways to get the word out about a product, service, or brand name. It pays off heavily. When you leverage social media to initiate affiliate marketing, it generates optimal results. As consumers see referrals via social media, they are more likely to buy. Affiliate marketing leads to higher sales.
  • Go To Events, Expos, And Conventions – There are no better ways to get leads than going out of your office and visiting events, expos, and conventions. Of course, don’t want to visit the places randomly. You should visit the places with the right strategy. Before you get any event ticket, create a list of the potential customers that are at a convention or expo. But do make it intentional to visit such events where you will find your target audience.However, do not talk to potential customers forcefully. It’s best to keep your conversation friendly and casual while discussing your company and its services or products. Business cards are the best tools to hand out. You should end the conversation on a decent note before you move on to the next person.When you evaluate the contacts thoroughly, they can get in touch with you. Keep all the contact info in one place through some CRM software. It will help you to follow up with sales calls and close some deals.
  • Use CRM Software – Software CRM nowadays manages customer relationship management or CRM. Here, you can manage all the contacts in one place, segment them, nurture them, contact them, and send automated responses. Also, the software lets you send newsletters and SMS broadcasts to your customers.Sometimes, fewer sales opportunities can be an issue. But, most times, sales representatives feel overwhelmed by the amount of obtainable sales opportunities. Even though they have a good amount of opportunities, they have to find affordable yet high-potential openings.If you use CRM software, then sales reps can organize the sales pipeline, track real-time sales progress, and identify the key factors related to individual sales opportunities. As the lead enters the sales funnel and moves through it, all the interactions get logged into the software.You can review customer communications through the software and track when the lead is ready for sales. Also, the software can identify the best leads with high scores for you. It can also change the customer score automatically depending on their behavior. With CRM, you can reach out to less potent leads later on.

Conclusion

There are various ways you can improve the sales strategies after you identify the sales opportunities. Therefore, you have to identify the right sales opportunities, like qualified leads and overall leads. CRM software can help you with the myriad details of the sales process with convenience.

The B4B Mindset

If your company sells to other businesses, you probably refer to your company as ‘B2B’ or ‘Business-to-Business’. But it has been found that reframing the business as ‘B4B’ or ‘Business-FOR-Business’ can increase revenues, customer retention, and employee morale.

Why would such a small change drive these results?

Because thinking of your business as B4B forces a shift in mindset.

Identifying as Business-FOR-Business provides an organization with a sense of purpose.

And that drives innovation and creativity.

When a business identifies itself as a business that sells to other businesses, it leads to a competitive mindset.

Pushing commodity products becomes the sales strategy.

Success is measured in volume.

Price becomes the primary criteria for offering value.

Volume discounts become the name of the game.

Which makes the business vulnerable to bigger manufacturers offering lower prices.

B4B thinking forces a complete mindset reboot.

It forces businesses to switch from a competitive mindset to a collaborative mindset.

When an organization thinks of itself as a business that works for other businesses, it deepens the relationship they have with their customers.

Its primary measure of success becomes how it helped its customers grow.

The business aligns its own success with the success of its customers.

Even if that means investing in customer training.

And providing value-added services.

At no cost or minimal cost for some time.

Why does this make business sense?

Because revenue growth of a business depends on two main factors:

  1. The volume of the cash flow – how much cash is flowing in during a given period
  2. The longevity of the cash flow – for how long that cash flow will continue

Companies with a ‘Business-for-Business’ mindset that organizes their activities around the success of their customers generate a long and dependable cash flow that helps them grow sustainably.

If you would like to know more about how ConvergeHub can help you switch to a B4B mindset by helping you stay in close touch with your customers, talk to us.

Or, if you would like to check it out yourself, go ahead and create a free ConvergeHub account here.

9 Powerful Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Business Faster

Needless to mention that transforming a business idea into a long-lasting business that constantly churns revenue, is no easy job. First, you need to discover a profitable idea for the business, more precisely a niche that will click. The next thing you will be doing is to identify and target a demographic and your unique selling point or simply a product that you are going to sell. Once your idea is ready to hit the market, the most essential thing that you need is a strong marketing strategy that will give your business enough exposure and boost to start selling. A good marketing strategy will also ensure continuous growth for your business.

There can be several elements responsible for a business to become successful. However, nothing can replace some well-crafted marketing strategies. A customer lifecycle management software can help you achieve your marketing goals through its organized data and insights into customer behavior.

In this article, we will be discussing different marketing strategies that will help your business grow stronger and faster. But before that let us understand in brief what marketing strategies are.

What are marketing strategies?

A marketing strategy is a company’s blueprint for connecting with potential customers and turning them into clients. It encompasses the organization’s value proposition, key brand messaging, customer demographics and psychographics, and other high-level details. By assessing what your company excels at and identifying areas for improvement, this strategy enhances your chances of achieving your goals.

At its core, a marketing strategy addresses the essentials of a business, i.e. the four basic marketing strategies, also known as the “four Ps”: product, price, place, and promotion. So, if your four Ps are sorted out, you may expect your business to skyrocket in no time. Let us get into some essential marketing strategies you need to adopt to start your marketing from scratch.

9 Powerful Marketing Strategies To Boost Your Business

Here is a list of some powerful tactics that can lay a strong ground for a high-performing marketing strategy.

1. Conduct a Thorough Research

Detailed research work is critical to any marketing approach. You can confirm more informed decisions by strategically conducting research, whether the study is on the market or the brand. These studies will help you gain an understanding of your marketing objectives and the grounds to measure your marketing efforts.

Moreover, a detailed study of customer data through a customer lifecycle management solution allows you to know your customers better and thus enables your resources to cater to their needs better and push business. Also, it is the market research that will let you have clear insights into the areas of your business that are performing higher than the others. This in turn helps you develop a better know-how on what to sell.

Evidently, it can be said that organizations that indulge in systematic research work on their customers and market base are more likely to grow in terms of revenue.

2. Adopt a Niche-driven Strategy

Target a specific industry and grow your niche on the same. By carefully targeting a specific niche you can establish your expertise on it. Niche targeting and establishing specialization is a very powerful marketing strategy that can boost a business to a huge extent. Almost all fastest-growing companies have labeled themselves as specialists.

Specialization is the primary factor that distinguishes your business from your competitors. It simply is a strong differentiator and simplifies your marketing efforts by clearly defining your area and the work you do. So, if you want to maintain your business at the top, you must target one particular niche that you understand in-depth and label yourself as the leader in it.

3. Maintain A High Performing Website

A website is an asset and the face of your business in today’s marketplace. It is no longer considered simply as the digital medium of advertising company services. Nowadays, it is treated more like an organization’s online presence. A place where prospects get their first impression of the business and know more about the services. It is where they may even get a free trial of the product.

If your potential buyers are there looking for a credible business on search engines, then it is the responsibility of the website to build online visibility and attract buyers to the company’s services. A website is a critical factor in the present competitive market waiting to be discovered in the search results. So, it is essential that your website displays the right expertise and message of your firm. You must also ensure that the messaging on the website is good enough to convince your customers of your firm’s credibility and the ability to address their problems.

A website containing robust content, whether it is textual or design elements, that educates users properly along with some targeted offers that attract leads, is considered a high-performing one. Again, don’t forget the usability aspect of the website.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You need your website to be discovered among oceans of other websites, right? So, how do you ensure that? SEO, of course! Search engine optimization or SEO is a prominent way to make your site discoverable to your prospects making it one of the most marketing strategies. Ask the best-performing businesses and undoubtedly they will mark SEO as a critical marketing technique on digital platforms.

SEO is the path to enhancing your website’s search engine rankings and gaining better online visibility for it. This increases the possibility of better organic traffic to your site and thus better chances of lead generation. So, optimize your website content by using relevant keywords and phrases, and by improving your website’s loading speed and mobile-friendliness.

5. Content Marketing

In this strategy, the focal point is informational content. The content serves as the medium for reaching, engaging, and attracting customers. The content may be in the form of texts, videos, infographics, and others. The content must simply provide some answers to user challenges.

The primary goal of content marketing is to increase organic traffic and help in conversions. Further, content marketing targets to optimize your content for search engines and increase your site visibility. The best part of this marketing strategy is that, unlike paid marketing, it can be done absolutely free of any charge.

6. Social Media Marketing

It is true that 90% of your customers are on social media. So, we can say that social media marketing is an essential component of today’s business strategies. By leveraging various social media platforms as part of your digital marketing strategy, you can connect with your target audience, build brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales. All you have to do is, do market research on your customers, select the right social media platform, create high-quality content, optimize your social media profiles, engage with your audience, and run targeted ads. Finally, track the key metrics and conversions to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns.

7. Marketing Automation, CRM, and Lead Nurturing

These are three interconnected strategies when used together can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts by creating a powerful system of lead conversions. The benefits of this system can be various. It saves time and resources by automating tasks, enables personalized marketing campaigns, accommodates scalability for large customer bases, and supports effective lead nurturing by automating follow-up interactions. By combining marketing automation, enterprise CRM, and lead nurturing, you can gain valuable insights into customer behavior, enhance customer satisfaction, improve lead conversions, and finally increase revenue.

8. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

A paid form of advertising, PPC is popular in search engines like Google and Bing and among other social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. In this digital marketing model, you need to pay a fee each time your user clicks on one of your ads.

Here you are bidding on keywords that your ads will show up on. The ads are triggered whenever a user searches for those particular keywords. The various types of PPC ads include search ads, video ads, display ads, social media ads, remarketing ads, and shopping ads.

9. Referral Marketing

This is a highly effective strategy since to date people tend to rely more on word-of-mouth recommendations compared to any other marketing techniques. In this strategy, you incentivize your existing customers every time they refer your business to new customers. Referral marketing has multi-faceted advantages such as gaining better quality leads, strengthening relationships with existing customers by offering rewards or incentives, being less expensive compared to traditional advertising, and improving brand image. A well-designed referral program will help you gain from the power of word-of-mouth recommendations and ensure significant growth for your business.

Conclusion

Wrapping it up, you must remember that marketing strategies are not only meant to attract and win customers, retaining customers is also a significant part of these strategies. Since more than 67% of global businesses rely on their existing customer base for a steady revenue stream, most of these brands prefer marketing strategies that are customer-focused and designed to keep the existing customer base happy.

Hence, a well-crafted marketing strategy is designed with CRMs such as ConvergeHub that work on real-time data and will help you achieve your business goals. Further, you can check the analytics to understand which strategy is working and which is not. That way you can redo your marketing efforts accordingly and expect better results.

Designing Customer Experience

What would you say is the most important factor to transform the customer experience in your organization?

If you were asked to redesign the customer experience in your company, where would you start?

I think the most important factor is the ability to see the business from a customer’s perspective … viewing the business from outside, looking inwards … seeing what the customer sees … feeling what the customer feels.

That would be the first step to creating a compelling customer experience.

More and more, customer experience is becoming the ultimate battleground for companies and their competitors.

And this is a trend that will continue into the future.

Digital transformation wars will be won or lost on this battleground.

There is a good reason for this.

Compelling customer experiences are very hard to design.

And even harder to deliver.

Because it requires empathy before technology.

It requires a willingness to understand human behaviors.

To carefully observe the customer journey.

To really listen.

And only then use technology to digitally reengineer customer experiences.

To create an uninterrupted experience through each step in the customer journey by integrating the front end customer facing technologies with back-end processes.

If you would like to know more about how ConvergeHub can help you reengineer the customer experience in your company by helping you stay in close touch with your customers, talk to us.

Or, if you like to check it out yourself, go ahead and create a free ConvergeHub account here.

An offbeat way to grow sales

When your rep calls a customer to ask for more business, how much does he know about that customer?

Would he know that this is an unhappy customer with multiple unresolved support tickets?
Would he know that this customer has threatened to move to a competitor?
How about the fact this customer has been with your organization for 10+ years and expects special treatment?
Or that they have specific needs and have purchased custom products or services in the past?

You see, the level of information that the rep has access to will determine how that call will go.

According to a recent study, 62% of customers said that a representative’s knowledge or resourcefulness was key to their positive service experiences.

Regardless of how you put it, even in this age of bots and artificial intelligence, there is no substitute for knowledgeable human service.

And study after study show that customers overwhelmingly show appreciation for great service with their wallets.

Not just their own wallets, but also that of their family and friends, in the form of referrals.

So, one of the most important ways to grow sales, even if it does seem a little unexpected, is to empower your reps with knowledge. The more they know about a customer, the more repeat business they will be able to close.

If you would like to know more on how ConvergeHub can help empower your sales reps and customer service reps to close more repeat business, sign up for a free trial here.

Or get a free one-on-one consultation with one of our experts.

The Correlation Trap

How much does your organization know about your customers? … and what does your organization do with that information?

Businesses today know more about their customers than they have at any time in history… they know where their customers live, where they work, every last phone number or email address they use, social media handles, birthday, cars they drive, … maybe even their shoe size.

And yet … their innovation process … building products or services that their customers will actually use … remains as uncertain as ever.

Why?

The more you know about your customers, the easier it should be to satisfy them … isn’t it?

So, why isn’t that happening?

Because the data that is being gathered is not necessarily relevant … it does not necessarily cause the behavior/action that we think it does.

Take the case of Marc Jones.

He is 62 years old.

Lives with his wife in the suburbs of California.

He drives a Toyota minivan.

His birthday is 12 October.

His shoe size is 13.

But none of these are the reason why he chose to buy a burger from McDonalds today.

Maybe he was tired of eating healthy all week and wanted a change in taste.

Maybe he was in a hurry and McDonald’s was on the way home.

Maybe he just wanted to chill in front of the TV and he picked the easiest dinner option he could think of.

Point is, companies who collect demographic or psychographic information about him are not going to be able to capture those reasons from the data points they collect.

Knowing more and more about customers … collecting volumes and volumes of data about them … and trying to force a correlation between the collected data points and customer behavior … can take companies in the wrong direction … and can even hamper innovation.

What organizations really need to know when a customer takes a specific action, is what that customer is trying to accomplish in that specific situation.

And that kind of insight can come only when organizations have deep conversations with real customers.

Think about it 😊

If you would like to know more about how ConvergeHub can help you drive Digital Transformation in your company by helping you stay in close touch with your customers, talk to us.

Or, if you like to check it out yourself, go ahead and create a free ConvergeHub account here.

Becoming Unstoppable

This is a story about how a blind man escaped from the World Trade Center during the terrorist attack of Sep 11, 2001.. and what it takes to develop an unstoppable mindset like that. Click here to read it on my LinkedIn post.

On September 11, 2001, a blind man escaped the World Trade Center by walking down 78 flights of stairs with his guide dog Roselle.

That man is Michael Hingson.

Michael Hingson is one of the most inspiring and fascinating persons I had the good fortune to meet.

He is a New York times best selling author and an international hero honored and awarded by top organizations worldwide.

Blind since birth, Michael is inspiring thousands, giving readers a transformative look into the life and boundless capabilities of the blind.

Recently I sat down for a chat with Michael. We spoke about life, technology and what makes a person unstoppable.

Click here to listen: https://lnkd.in/d5S6jbHe

What do you think? I’d love to hear your feedback.. go ahead and leave a comment on the LinkedIn post.

If you would like to know more about how ConvergeHub can help your organization becoming unstoppable by helping you execute better at the speed that is right for your business, talk to us..

Or, if you like to check it out yourself, go ahead and create a free ConvergeHub account here.

The Efficiency Trap

Here’s a trick question for you – if you think about implementing a new tech in your organization or business … like cloud or mobile or IOT … what benefit do you think about achieving?

Let me take a wild guess here … 😊

You thought about achieving EFFICIENCY in your organization or business …

Which is great …

Efficiency is definitely the inherent primary outcome of most digital interventions in a business …

Efficiency is quickly reflected in the profit numbers.

It is a big short-term win.

And that is why most business leaders focus on that.

But there is so much more to it than that …

A new technology in your organization is a complete business transformation resource …

It can optimize your business processes.
It can drive competitive advantage.
It can create new revenue opportunities.
It can skyrocket your customer satisfaction scores.

But when you are only motivated by the efficiency excitement, you miss all of that.

Because your focus narrows down.

And the strategic thinking that would lead to these benefits is lost.

So … what is YOUR motivation for implementing that new shiny tech in your company?

Think about it 😊

If you would like to know more about how ConvergeHub can help you drive Digital Transformation in your company by helping you benefit with CRM technology in all the areas of your business, talk to us.

Or, if you like to check it out yourself, go ahead and create a free ConvergeHub account here.

Waiting and Watching

If you are a business leader or a business owner … and during the early days of the pandemic if you had decided to not move quickly … and instead to wait and watch what your competitors did before taking any action … what would have happened?

Your business would miss out on months and even years of business … and might not have even survived.

You had to take action … and fast.

That’s the next assumption we are going to shatter …

Assumption #3 – Wait and watch what others do

Covid-era has shown us that there are times when we have to move fast, sometimes even to just survive.

And at other times, as I mentioned in my last week’s post, speed can also be a disadvantage.

So … what works??

Should we go fast or slow??

The answer again is … It depends … depends on your situation.

Move at the pace that works for your business and your customers.

Move at the pace that allows you to scale effectively and learn quickly.

Maybe move fast to test innovations.

And once you figure out the right approach, move at your own pace to adopt those innovations in the different areas of the business.

Bottomline ..

There is no easy answer.

No one size that fits all ..

But then again … isn’t that how life works? 😊

If you would like to know more about how ConvergeHub can help you drive Digital Transformation in your company by helping you execute better at the speed that is right for your business, talk to us.

Or, if you like to check it out yourself, go ahead and create a free ConvergeHub account here.

The first mover disadvantage

Continuing our discussion on shattering assumptions … let’s pick another assumption to shatter – the first mover advantage …

Before there was Google there was Yahoo and AOL … and we all know who won the search-engine war and who lost half a trillion dollars of valuation …

Here’s the next assumption about digital transformation that we will shatter today …

Assumption #2 – First Mover Always Wins

Does digital transformation need to happen faster?
ABSOLUTELY.
But does it have to be the FASTEST for it to work?
Is it a winner take all scenario all of the time?
NO.
NOT AT ALL.

True, speed can be an advantage.

But there are many risks and missteps associated with being the first mover …

You could misread pain points and solve the wrong problem.
You could rush the design and testing and build an inferior solution.
You could spend too much on educating the users on a new platform.
You could help competitors learn from your mistakes and build a better product or solution.

Digital Transformation is NOT a winner take all scenario.
The key is not being fastest but rather innovating at the right speed.
And leverage all the assets that gives the business its competitive advantage.

Ever heard of Book Stacks Unlimited? It was an online bookstore founded in 1992, 3 years before Amazon.
Amazon did not have first mover advantage. But it moved fast and scaled quickly. It’s doing pretty well I would say 😊
Walmart moved slower, leveraging its assets. And yet it built a sizeable online business.
So did Best Buy and Home Depot.

So, the key question to ask is NOT ‘Are we the first mover?’ … and then give up when the answer is no.
The key question is – How do we innovate faster and execute better and move at the right speed that works best for our business and our customers?
Yes, it’s always more complicated than you think 😊

If you would like to know more about how ConvergeHub can help you drive Digital Transformation in your company by helping you execute better at the speed that is right for your business, talk to us.

Or, if you like to check it out yourself, go ahead and create a free ConvergeHub account here.

NOT a Technical Challenge

In my last week’s post I talked about some of the assumptions that businesses had to rethink during Covid times … and while that hurt in the short term, we are now beginning to see that a lot of good did come out of those painful decisions.

So, let’s dive deeper and examine a few of the assumptions that had to be shattered … especially those related to Digital Transformation.

Assumption #1 – Digital Transformation is a Technical Challenge

This assumption feels true, right?

If the transformation is ‘digital’ then why is it not ‘technical’??

Because Technology, in and of itself, does not really do much for a business.

The Business itself needs to change using the Technology as a tool or a medium for change.

And that is very very hard.

Implementing a Technology is the easy part.

Using that Technology to change specific areas of business – operations, customer experience, business models, employee engagement, or anything else – is as challenging as it gets.

But that is what drives the business results.

Technology just enables the options.

It is up to the company’s leadership to actually execute on those options and drive meaningful business results.

If you would like to know more about how ConvergeHub can help you drive Digital Transformation in your company by improving customer experience, communication, and visibility, talk to us.

Or, if you like to check it out yourself, go ahead and create a free ConvergeHub account here.