April, 2013

  • April 17, 2013
  • Ok, you know all those studies that you like?  The ones that tell you that this percent of customers act a certain way and all that? Well, the way we get those numbers is by talking people like you into answering a few questions.  It’s time to answer a few questions if you don’t mind or I’ll have nothing to write about someday (ha!).  But seriously, you’ll be aiding humankind in many mysterious ways if you can take just a few moments to participate in these research studies — but only if you think you fit the need.

    Gamification

    https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NPHVNRX

    Marketing Performance Management

    https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BeagleMPM

    Thanks for your attention! You are a good person!

     

    Published: 11 years ago


    Rodin_TheThinkerAbout ten years ago, I wrote a paper that predicted that analytics and social media would converge in CRM.  I believed this for two reasons.  First, I believed social media was inevitable though I had no idea what form it would take.  Facebook was not on my radar and might not have been invented yet, MySpace was something for kids, and Twitter had definitely not been invented yet.  But Plaxo and LinkedIn offered tantalizing glimpses of what was possible in business with social networking and I believed something of that ilk would eventually drive CRM.

    My second insight was that those social media applications would, of necessity, churn up a lot of data that would be useless unless we pushed it through an analyzer.  But if we did the pushing, like making sausage, out the other end would come valuable stuff.  What amazed me then and continues to amaze me is the rate at which knowledge is doubling thanks to all the data being churned up by social media.

    In 1982 Buckminster Fuller, the futurist, architect and some would say crank, published “Critical Path” a book in which he estimated knowledge doubling like this: Take all human knowledge up to the beginning of the Christian Era and call it one unit.  It took 1500 years for that knowledge to double.  Knowledge doubled again by 1750, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and again by 1900.

    Today, knowledge is doubling at a rate of between one and two years and IBM predicts doubling time will be down to 11 hours by 2014.

    All this doubling has many practical impacts the most important from my perspective is that those who don’t learn how to manage Big Data and the big information it generates in our own businesses will be toast.  Another of those impacts is that our ability to generate new knowledge is so prodigious that it will become increasingly difficult to generate knowledge that is unique to any person or business.

    We generate so much data today that it is possible by induction and other processes to infer knowledge that others might have and might think is proprietary.  On the other hand, though, failing at analysis will leave much information hidden in a morass of data.

    This all points to the need and even urgency attached to developing strategies for dealing with Big Data.  Last week at SugarCon 2013 in New York, I gave a talk on the subscription economy, one of my favorite topics.  In it I quoted some research from Gartner — by 2015 35% of the Fortune 2000 would derive some of their revenue from subscriptions.  And this from Aberdeen — only about twenty percent of companies studied had subscription businesses that appeared viable in that they had high customer satisfaction and renewals and their new contract value (NCV) was a positive number.

    So while Gartner might be right in its prognostication, it leaves much unsaid because revenue is not profit — even a bad subscription company can generate revenue while it’s going out of existence because it loses money on every transaction.

    So, how does a company become part of that top quintile?  Simple.  They develop metrics that they derive from customer data about use, payments and sentiment and relentlessly pursue them tying to optimize customer experience and involvement.  Needless to say, metrics are made possible by analytics — both the reporting kind and the predictive data modeling kind.

    There’s a boom happening in the analytics business these days with companies like GoodData, Totango and Gainsight among many others and I think smart companies — subscription or otherwise — ought to pay attention.

    That was my simple message at SugarCon but the not so simple reality is that most companies are not on the bandwagon yet.  They still don’t know what to do about Big Data and they aren’t exhibiting the needed curiosity to figure out that it’s time to get on track with subscriptions and analytics.

    Another finding that comes to me from long practical experience is that while knowledge might be doubling very quickly, our ability to apply it lags and I wonder and expect that a metric of new knowledge vs. applied knowledge would show a widening gap between what we know and what we do with it.

    Very shortly I’ll publish an ebook of interviews with five CMO’s of some fast growing companies.  What’s interesting about each of them is how these marketers have embraced Big Data and come up with strategies and metrics that better enable them to understand their businesses.  They know that the knowledge doubling that we are all caught up in isn’t some abstract concept, it affects them and it represents one of the great opportunities of this new century.

    Published: 11 years ago


    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

     

    Beagle Research Group Announces 2013 WizKids Award

    Emerging software companies with remarkable approaches to business top the list.

     

    April 17, 2013 — Stoughton, MA Denis Pombriant, founder and managing principal of Beagle Research Group, LLC, today announced the winners of the company’s 2013 WizKids Award which is given to outstanding emerging companies in the front office and CRM market.  Award winners include Apttus, Badgeville, HubSpot, NextPrinciples, Skyword and Totango.

    “This year’s winners span multiple front office categories from social media to analytics and from gamification to adding new twists to old processes like CPQ (configure, price, quote),” Pombriant said.  Each year the analyst firm reviews hundreds of companies and profiles outstanding firms whose offerings are disruptive and provide significant improvement over conventional business processes as well as some that introduce completely new ideas.  It then collects its profiles in a report and announces these awards.

    “We were impressed with the variety represented by this year’s winners,” Pombriant said.  “With all the attention given to social media in the front office, it has been gratifying to see so many companies innovating in other equally important areas,” he concluded.

    The full report is available as a free download at BeagleResearch.com and it contains Website addresses and contact information for all winners.

    ###

    Published: 11 years ago


    Many thanks to all of you who called, emailed, tweeted or otherwise lobbed a quick inquiry — “You Ok?” they asked in unison.

    Yes, I am Ok, though the city I most closely associate my life with is not.

    Many Americans have an association with Boston, which makes yesterday’s tragedy so tough.  It’s like something bad happened in your other hometown.  Many people went to school here, interned or just took a long weekend to tour the cemeteries and battlegrounds of the Revolution.  Maybe you ran the marathon once or twice or recall when John Williams conducted the Pops and wowed Hollywood with his film scores.

    Other things need only a word, a name or just a year to conjure complete memories shared by many people who don’t live here.  Lexington-Concord, Paul Revere, Hawthorn, Thoreau, Emerson, Heartbreak Hill, JFK, 1967, 2004.  And forever, with new meaning after yesterday, The Boston Marathon.  It’s what makes yesterday so tough.

    Boston has been a marathon Mecca since 1897 but it was given a boost in the 1970’s after the American Frank Shorter won the 1972 Olympic race and author Jim Fixx published “The Complete Book of Running”.  Fixx mythologized the marathon and Boston’s long tradition born from its late nineteenth century Classical Revival in which it celebrated Pheidippides’ long run from the battlefield at Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over the Persians in 490 BC.

    After a long day of running all over the battlefield as a messenger, Pheidippides set off, running, for Athens to bring news of the victory.  On reaching Athens it is said that Pheidippides uttered only one word, nikomen (“We have won”), and then expired.  With Fixx’s help, race participation mushroomed to the point that you now have to qualify by running another marathon just to register for Boston.

    If you ever ran Boston, or any other marathon, you probably know of Fixx’s prescription for finishing.  It takes sixteen weeks of daily training to finish Boston, assuming the weather gods are with you and you don’t cramp a calf muscle on Heartbreak Hill.  If you do the math, running Boston is not something you take lightly, it’s a New Year’s resolution that you commit to usually by running in the cold, dark and slush.

    I can’t help thinking that whoever did this unspeakable thing yesterday made a similar resolution.  But I won’t dwell on it.  I know the authorities will find those responsible for this atrocity and bring them to justice.  Meanwhile, today I am thinking about something Ted Kennedy wrote in his memoir a few years ago.  You can’t change yesterday so there isn’t a lot of good that comes out of worrying about it.  Today is something we can affect and mold, and tomorrow is something we can transform.  The governor said today wouldn’t be business as usual exactly but the city is persevering and in the face of this tragedy I think that’s what’s important.

     

    Published: 11 years ago


    I am happy to be working with Ginger Conlon Editor-in-Chief at Direct Marketing News (DMN) again.   You can see my latest post on gamification and behavior management here and take a new survey on the subject here.  Many thanks!

    Published: 11 years ago