E2.0

  • June 27, 2012

    • I spent most of last week in Boston at the Enterprise 2.0 conference where I was honored to be the sales and marketing track chairman.  Next year it will be called E2 Social and will bookend the other conference that has been held in Santa Clara and will become known as E2 Innovate.  There’s good symmetry here.  I can’t think of another purely social show or one focused on innovation.  Most shows today are vendor sponsored which is good but different.

    Our track had some cool presentations on social marketing from IDC mavens Gerry Murray and Joe Farentino, revenue performance management from Phil Fernandez, CEO of Marketo, and an intriguing discussion from Pam Kostka, a fellow Crusader and CMO of VirtuOz, a company that makes virtual agents.

    If you are wondering, a virtual agent is a software robot that you can talk to regarding sales, marketing or service issues just like a person.  These agents are a happening thing and promise to do away with wait times and improve service.

    There were also two panels, one on M&A activity that we put together last minute with the able assistance of Sameer Patel, Josh Greenbaum and Louis Columbus.  As is so often the case with these things, serendipity played a role and caused more than a few people to walk away with the idea that this kind of thing ought to happen again.  Thanks guys, the panel was outstanding and a good example of the talent pool that lurks in the Enterprise Irregulars a group with a low profile (that ought to be greater) and an inversely proportional IQ factor.

    The other panel, which I want to focus on, was illuminating to me for an unexpected reason.  I invited some of my brain trust including Thor Johnson, Cary Fulbright, Derek Peplau, Columbus and Murray mentioned above.  Toward the end we had a discussion of big data and someone mentioned a large company that had converted from one CRM system to another and had deleted many years of sales data in the process rather than bring it along and try to figure it out.

    Initially I thought throwing away all that data was folly but I came to see it as smart but for reasons that I think are different from the consensus of the panel and audience.  One audience member got the analysis right, in my opinion, when he said simply, “There’s nothing in it,” by which he meant there was a great deal of data but that it was devoid of information content.  How could this be?

    Very simply, most CRM systems either have fields or enable you to create them to capture important data like product interest, deal size, projected close date and much more.  All of this is valuable but CRM’s point of failure is that these fields can be overwritten and there is no provision for storing historical information.

    Now, you’ve heard my sermon on historical data before most likely.  But at E2.0 I had an insight about the difference between sales and marketing that reflects the difference in the data we collect and analyze in each space.

    In marketing we collect data once from a large sample.  If you run a program against a list you collect data from a large number of people one time.  You analyze the data and perhaps discover people who are interested in a product now or in the future and you process accordingly.

    Sales is different.  The universe of data sources is smaller but the sources give off data constantly through a sales cycle.  Sales reports — pipelines and forecasts — show a single cross section of the data and they are equivalent to the individual frames of a movie.  Most of the time it’s hard to say much about how a film ends by examining a random frame.  Sometimes you get lucky and the random frame shows the butler with a knife in the in the library etc. and you can make a deduction.  But most of the time you aren’t that lucky.

    Unlike the movie, which is a succession of stills projected in rapid succession to give the illusion of movement, the sales forecast is a one and done thing.  Worse, making the report necessarily destroys the old frames.  So, getting back to the company that threw away old data, I would throw it away too.  The old data was simply the last frame depicting the end state of a deal and usually the end state is a loss.

    There’s almost nothing you can discover from the end state but if you have all the frames that led to the end then you can apply analytics to it and find out things you didn’t know.  Analytics lets you play the movie back and forth to find the aha! moment.  But you need to keep all the frames.  The point is that in marketing you can apply analytics to a single state of the market but if you try to do the same with sales you’re toast.  Sales data is different from marketing data and so are the ways we analyze it.

    In the panel I moderated last week that idea was not in evidence and it shows how we need to re-think and maybe find new people who think differently about selling and sales data.  Without new thinking we’re liable to not be able to figure out the importance of social tools and selling will continue to be a hard nut to crack because it remains more art than science.  It doesn’t have to be that way.

    Published: 12 years ago


    I was surprised and delighted to be invited to chair the Sales and Marketing track at the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, at the Hynes Convention Center, June 18 to 21.  I will be working with a great bunch of people and look forward to putting together some top notch thought leadership for the track.  Please check out the website and plan to attend some of the sessions.  They’ll be worth your time and I’ll plan some nice weather for you.

    Published: 12 years ago


    Enterprise 2.0 came to Boston this week and it provided an interesting snapshot of an emerging market.  At the same time Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) released a study that calls for a more robust IPO market.  I see connections.

    First, E2.0 as it is abbreviated, made its annual visit to Boston.  The show is gaining momentum and with it the paired ideas of the social customer and, I hope, the social enterprise.  E2.0 moved out of a big hotel and fit comfortably into the Hynes Convention Center where there is room to expand over the next several years.  There are also many more places to hold after parties in the new location, something that many vendors and analysts took full advantage of.

    E2.0 is the leading edge, the point of the social spear.  It is the place where people of a certain mindset go to share big ideas about the future of business but it wasn’t that well attended.  I thought more people representing more companies wanting to get on with socializing their businesses would attend but I was wrong.  I chalk it up to social being still in its early days.

    There were not enough customers telling their success stories and too many vendors attempting to be neutral thought leaders, which I don’t think worked.  And ironically for a social show, the big established vendors of everything technology related made their best old school attempts to own the space.

    IBM emitted a press release with this headline: “IBM Named Worldwide Marketshare Leader in Social Software for Business”.  The PR contained this: “IBM social software including IBM Connections provides tools such as communities, forums, wikis and blogs and new capabilities like advanced special analytics, enabling users to expand their network with recommendations of people to connect with based on prior connections and similar interests.”  It was only missing a concluding, “You all can go home now, we’ve got this.”

    But in fact, no one has this and no one probably will for a few years.  The thing I find odd is that there was little discussion of the need for the enterprise to change, to morph from a hierarchy to a community, to become social.  It felt like the only thing the big guys were concerned with was corralling the social customer while leaving the hierarchy intact.  Good luck with that one.

    Conspicuously absent from the festivities was Salesforce.com a company with as much to say about the social enterprise as anyone.  But it seems like Salesforce only goes to its own shows where it can be the star and control the message.  That will work in this market’s earliest days but if Benioff, Inc. wants to capture the vast social enterprise market they’re going to have to start coming to some of these events.

    I think Salesforce has a good message as evidenced by the company’s Cloudforce event last week.  They’re talking about the social enterprise and the social customer in ways that the others are not.  The others, IBM and company, are still proselytizing about their technology while Salesforce is relentlessly pushing a message of empowerment, of how to be better at what you do through the use of social technology.  That’s what I thought was missing from E2.0.  I didn’t get to all the sessions but I spoke with a lot of vendors and some, especially the smaller guys like, Clearvale (BroadVision) and Saba and very small guys like Yammer and DoubleDutch each in their own ways gets it and is pushing the ball toward the goal line.

    Future editions of E2.0 need to sell that new religion and it might be helpful if they reduced the number of shows to one per year rather than the current East and West approach.  I might suggest turning one of those into a virtual event to showcase another part of the social revolution.  The show’s got to start eating its own dog food.

    In a related matter, the NVCA issued a report that takes a polite shot at the financial community by pointing out the obvious.  The financial meltdown of a couple of years ago still emits a kind of financial cosmic background radiation which has made IPO activity difficult and since the IPO is essential to a healthy venture industry, the industry has a bit of a cold.  From the release:

    “Clearly the industry continues to feel the ripple effects of the global economic downturn — most notably in the form of limited exit opportunities,” said Mark Jensen, partner, Deloitte & Touche LLP and national managing partner for venture capital services. “However, with signs of improvement in the economy and easing of the liquidity crisis, the tide may be turning.  Innovation continues to be an important driver in our economic health and a strong exit marketplace is critical to the venture capital ecosystem driving much of that innovation.”

    Low IPO activity means it’s harder to raise funds and for investors to take on risk if there’s limited upside.  That’s too bad because when you think about it, the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been invested in the last thirty-five years have generated many tens of trillions of dollars worth of business activity.  As I wrote in a recent post, building the information economy has driven U.S. GDP from $1.6 trillion in 1975 to over $14 trillion today.  That effect has been mirrored all over the world.  So while it might seem like the venture industry is a remote part of our lives, it’s critical to our well-being.  I take this report very seriously.

    No doubt some new investment is flowing into social technology vendors but the amounts are still small and judging by the number of booths at E2.0 there aren’t enough new companies dipping a toe in the water.  Disclaimer — I am not giving financial advice here.

    Still, what I gave seen in the last couple of weeks with E2.0 and Cloudforce suggests an early stage market with some good ideas that has yet to catch fire.  There’s a core group of vendors and influencers who get it, some of whom might be a bit too enthusiastic but that goes with the times.  To me it’s a no-brainer to keep at it, we’re mostly on the right track but we need to find new ways to attract large companies to this new approach to business.

    Published: 13 years ago