My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.
I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.
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Today’s customers—both B2B and B2C—are firmly in the driver’s seat of the “Experience Economy,” a once-in-a-generation shift of power from brands to buyers. Customers place more value in the customer experience (CX) than in the goods and services themselves—and they’re adopting new technologies to get exactly what they want, where, when, and how they want it. As such, their customer journey is no longer predictable and linear. The B2C and B2B worlds have morphed into B2Me, where friction can make or break your customer relationships.
With customers driving the evolution of CX at breakneck speeds, how can businesses keep pace, let alone thrive? The answer lies within their customer data—countless data points from many different sources (sales, marketing, service, commerce, point of sale, field service, finance, community, social, etc.). The problem? Harnessing that data into a single, dynamic view of the customer so you can market to a segment of one, on an enterprise scale.
Unpacking Customer Data Platforms
Data is the currency of the Experience Economy. The ability to organize it, gain insights from it, and then use it as fuel to power contextual experiences across the customer journey—whatever path that takes—is critical.
Entering the scene in recent years are customer data platforms (CDPs). CDPs are software solutions designed to create a single, unified, and continuous customer database accessible by other systems throughout the organization. They should allow for a comprehensive view of each customer, yielding the ability to offer personalized content and customized delivery. They should be able to predict a customer’s future actions as well, allowing for more personalized experiences throughout the customer’s journey. CDPs are usually managed by marketers and are structured to support campaign management, marketing analyses, and business intelligence.
But many enterprises are not achieving these results with existing CDP solutions on the market. Most CDPs are offered by startups whose solutions can address only narrow marketing use cases in either B2B or B2C scenarios, but not both. Most fail to create a truly singular view of the customer, as they are able to incorporate only marketing digital interaction data and nothing else. Their models and algorithms aren’t modifiable by the customer, providing a “one size fits all” approach that doesn’t work across industries and business models. More recently, we’ve seen the entry of enterprise content and CRM vendors into the CDP space that promise to deliver true CDP solutions. At Oracle, we think delivering an enterprise-grade CDP—a customer intelligence platform—isn’t about point solutions, content, or CRM—it’s about expertise in managing data at scale.
It is an extremely difficult engineering task to corral demographic data, transactional data, and behavioral data and to integrate it across devices and channels to create a complete, connected, insightful, and actionable customer profile. That’s why thriving in the Experience Economy requires a partner that has data at the core of its business—and its solutions.
More Than a CDP: Oracle CX Unity Customer Intelligence Platform
Oracle CX Unityhelps enterprises thrive in the Experience Economy by weaving their disparate customer data—from marketing, sales, commerce, and service—into strategic intelligence. It merges online, offline, and third-party data to create a single source of real-time customer truth, helping eliminate the “blind spots” that prevent so many enterprises from better understanding their customers and delivering richer interactions.
What’s more, CX Unity goes one step further than the broader CDP market by applying built-in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to prescribe the optimal experience within existing business processes. Here are some real-life scenarios that illustrate the Oracle CX Unity difference:
You’re ready to execute a marketing campaign. Since Oracle CX Unity ingests service records, you might want to suppress customers who are having significant service issues, allowing their sole experience with your brand to be focused on their upcoming solution.
You manage your company’s website and know that 70 percent of your visits are anonymous. Wouldn’t it be great to turn half of that 70 percent into known visitors? Oracle CX Unity can help.
Your customer Rick buys wine from your online retail business. In addition to knowing that Rick enjoys wine, a third-party data source from Oracle CX Unity tells you that he also likes fine foods, hiking, and travel. Now you can build a deeper, richer relationship with Rick by offering content and products that speak to all his preferences.
You’re a sales representative for an insurance company that just released a new product. In Oracle CX Unity, you can see at a glance which existing customers are most engaged and have the greatest propensity for this new product.
Offering a connected customer profile, comprehensive customer intelligence, and personalization across the entire customer experience, Oracle CX Unity allows your brand to drive at the same hypersonic speeds as your customers. Learn more about how Oracle CX Unity can help you create personalized, differentiated customer experiences.
Having data is just the start. What you do with it is what counts. Find more by looking at “Modern Marketers Using Data-Driven Strategies.”
Neen James is the author of Folding Time™ and her most recent book, Attention Pays™. She is frequently named one of the top 30 Leadership Speakers by Global Guru because of her work with companies like Viacom, Comcast, Cisco, Virgin, Pfizer, BMW, and the FBI, among others. Neen is a leadership expert who delivers high-energy keynotes that challenge audiences to leverage their focus and pay attention to what matters most at work and in life. She’s also originally from Australia but now lives in Florida. Neen and I are both members of a secret or not so secret society of speakers and although we have never met until today, the energy she shares through her digital communications makes me feel like we’ve known each other for years. On Wednesday October 16th, Neen will be giving an opening keynote, Attention Pays™: How to Drive Profitability, Productivity, and Accountability at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Washington D.C.. Neen was generous to spend some time with me to talk about the importance of attention in business, for marketing and marketing leaders. Enjoy the full video interview below: Neen James on the Value of Personal Branding in B2B Marketing: I think it's vital because when you think about this whole idea, if you really want to get attention, you have to give attention. And as marketers we have to give attention to the brand that people are buying from. We are the product. I grew up in corporate business, Lee. I worked in retail banking, telecommunications, and the oil industry. And what I realized, Lee, is I had to be able to stand out.
The people that we are working with want to know that they can trust us. They want to know that we're going to get them the results that they need. @neenjames
Just like you would do a SWOT analysis on a potential product for a client in a strategic plan, we're going to do the same thing with ourselves because the people that we are working with, Lee, they want to know that they can trust us. They want to know that we're going to get them the results that they need. So a personal brand in B2B is vital and it's also about making sure that the brand has longevity and consistency. Neen James on Systems of Attention: Systems create freedom, right? We all have systems in place, whether we are marketers within organizations or an entrepreneur that is running your own marketing for your company. I believe that we need systems of attention. There are systems of attention to be able to get and give the kind of attention that you want, whether it is in the work place or outside. We all know that with the projects that we're all juggling, the clientele that we're all managing, and the team that we're leading, that we need some systems in place. Neen James on the Cost of Distractions from Multitasking: The costs are insane. Whether they're personal or professional. There was some research done by the Information Overload Group, which is a hilarious name for a company, that found in the US $588 billion dollars is lost every year because there's loss of productivity through distraction and multitasking.
In the US $588 billion dollars is lost every year because there's loss of productivity through distraction and multitasking. @neenjames
From a professional point of view, there's obviously results like reduced productivity and reduced internal customer satisfaction. Are distracted employees really delivering on the results you said you would provide to the clientele that you serve inside or outside your organization? There are many costs including team engagement, productivity, customer satisfaction. There are professional costs, but personally the most disturbing thing I found when I was researching my book, Attention Pays, was that on average nine people die every day because of distracted driving. I mean, we've made it more important to update our Facebook status than to actually pay attention to the road. Neen James on Prioritizing your Priorities: A strategic appointment with yourself is just 15 minutes. Here's what's so fascinating. People tell me all the time, "Oh, there's never enough time." Or, "I've run out of time, we're going to kill time." Well, poor time. Time never did anything to you.
You can't manage time because you and I get the same 1440 minutes in a day. Time doesn't care. It's going to happen anyway. You can't manage time, but you can manage your attention. @neenjames
See, I don't believe in time management, right? You can't manage time because you and I get the same 1440 minutes in a day. Time doesn't care. It's going to happen anyway. You can't manage time, but you can manage your attention. By simply investing in a strategic appointment with yourself for 15 minutes every day you're going to identify what strategic nonnegotiable goals will get you closer to the bigger picture, to the things you're responsible for. Thanks Neen! BONUS: You can download a FREE copy of Neen's book, Folding Time, here (pdf) Bound for B2B Forum: For more information about imagining what’s possible in B2B including Neen James' keynote, check out the MarketingProfs B2B Forum conference including agenda, list of speakers (including Ashley Zeckman and myself) and many other fun facts on the B2B Form website here. Also, get $100 off by using this mpb2b discount code: B2BFriends You can find more information about Neen on her website and follow her on Twitter here: @neenjames Be sure to watch the other videos in the MPB2B series featuring: Ann Handley - Are You a B2B Marketing Badaxe? Jay Baer - Are You Down with EGC? Tyrona Heath - Can ABM & Social Selling Unite?
Do you remember the excitement you had when you were young and finally had a piggy bank full of coins? It was time to exchange the coins for paper money so you happily hummed a tune as you began separating the coins out to their denominations, counting them and stacking in piles across the floor, then finally stuffing the coins into the paper rolls. You admired your work and knew it was all worth it because now you could buy that first gift. But as time went on, the process of separating, counting, stacking and rolling became too repetitive and tedious. It took too much time to get to the real prize.
Today, businesses are still “counting, stacking, and rolling” their processes and it takes far too long for customers and employees to get what they need, the real prize of insights that help the business move forward. On that point of taking far too long, Bain & Co. and the Economist Intelligence Unit collaborated on research and they “found that the average company loses 21% of its productive power to time-wasting interactions.” For companies, every interaction people have with their work should feel efficient yet human. No one should feel like they need to roll coins and stack rolls in order to get the answer they need or to work with you. The experience should be rewarding, like having a piggy bank full of money, without the hassle. That aforementioned research also concluded that the best companies are typically able to reduce that 21% loss by nearly 50% compared to their peers.
We were intrigued then by a recent article published in SiliconAngle. It coincided with announcements Oracle made at its annual Oracle OpenWorld user conference and it provides insights into how productivity can be vastly improved through the use of AI and digital assistants. The trend of forward-leaning businesses now is to find and implement tools that will create more time for strategic analysis and execution and reduce the amount of time spent on repetitive, low value tasks. Think about that for a second. Creating time. If you want more of the world’s most valuable resource, an important metric to track is the ratio of time your organization spends gathering and cleansing the data versus analyzing the data. Companies should pour more energy into finding ways to have their high-priced talent working on things that add real measurable dollar-generating value. Value like the kind that’s produced by giving your marketing team the tools they can use to infuse their campaigns with the ability to engage with more relevance and precision micro-target audiences in order to accelerate sales. Or tools that allow them to connect in a more conversational manner with those target audiences.
In this new frontier where AI and machine learning streamline the interaction between businesses and customers, neither party should have to waste time getting lost or experiencing delays to access what they need. The adaptable technology of AI changes with its environment and responds quickly to any requests, improving itself over time. Equivalent to a GPS turn-by-turn navigation, AI guides the customer smoothly throughout their journey with the company.
The use of chatbots for ERP and EPM Cloud has quickly become an important channel for businesses. They enable companies to interact with everyone in their world, from employees to customers to prospects, quickly enabling those people to get answers as soon as they type the question. And with the use of Oracle’s new “predictive planning” feature, companies now have the ability to help people identify and leverage trends and patterns in financial and operational data. Such automatic predictions improve the quality and timeliness of planning decisions by enabling customers to access predictions at data load time, see prediction and forecast variances, identify variance patterns and make revisions seamlessly with a touch.
Generally speaking, with the deployment of digital assistants across Oracle Cloud Applications, organizations now have the opportunity to more directly engage with their customers and their employees in a proactive and personalized way, across all web, mobile, and messaging platforms. Customers no longer have to waste time searching for bread crumbs of important data, in getting lost in a company’s catacomb of information sites, no matter the method they choose when interacting with the company and its offerings.
Finally, and perhaps the aspect of this technology advancement that promises the most significant long-term business impact, these new technologies offer real productivity boosts that help connect employees to their best self. By reducing the frustration of delays experienced while gathering information and resources that they need in order to excel at their job, AI opens up the possibility for more fulfilling engagement of an individual with their work and a stronger connection and understanding of its relevance to the larger corporate mission and associated goals. Employee success, anyone?
To learn more about how modern technologies can help drive measurable improvement in the way your business operates and how it engages with customers and employees, see how Oracle’s Customer Success – Business Advisory Services can help.
Interested in finding out what tools make marketers’ live easier? Find out more about working what better targeting, segmentation, digital analytics, and automation with Oracle Marketing Cloud.
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It’s time for another episode ofThe Self-Reliant Entrepreneur. Once a week, I’m coming to you with a reading from my new book, due out in October 2019. The book is structured around 366 daily readings from some of the great works of the mid-19th Century, and then I share my thoughts on how that quote relates to the modern entrepreneurial journey.
Today’s Reading: Done Growing
“Lord, when shall we be done growing? As long as we have anything more to do, we have done nothing…Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it’s a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold.”
Herman Melville Letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne – published in Memories of Hawthorne by Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1897)
Here’s another question to ponder, when shall we start growing? Melville admitted in an earlier letter to Hawthorne, “Until I was twenty-five I had no growth at all. From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.”
Growth requires change, change is hard, so growth is hard.
Stop growing and life stagnates, but as Melville seems to express, it’s exhausting at times. Mainly because growth doesn’t happen by hoping or even setting audacious goals. It happens when you admit where you are now and accept all the chapters in your past without regret.
From this lucid place you can chart your growth.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if we got a cake and celebrated each step in our personal growth, you know instead of simply acknowledging we lived another year.
Admit we don’t know it all—cake, realize we don’t have to react—cake, decide to leave a toxic job—cake, hug more, forgive sooner—cake, learn how to listen to and support team members—cake, admit, without blame, that our parent’s shortcomings don’t define us—cake.
Maybe those are our real “birth” days?
Final Thoughts
There’s a lot to unpack there! One of the things that became clear to me as I was doing research for this is how much the writers of that time knew each other and spent time with each other. A lot of the writings that I came across were letters back and forth amongst these famous authors, and it’s interesting to get that private perspective on these very public people.
But now to focus on the content of the reading itself. Wouldn’t it be amazing if, instead of getting a birthday cake just because we’d aged another year, we instead celebrated moments of growth? Maybe some years we’d get seven or eight cakes on our birthday, if we had a particularly growth-filled year. It’s worth paying attention to the fact that we are never going to be done growing. While change and growth can be scary, they become less scary when you consider the alternative.
And now for today’s challenge question:Do you tend to focus on the positive or negative traits of others? Why?
Want to learn more aboutThe Self-Reliant Entrepreneur?Click here.
This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by SEMrush.
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Here’s what marketers look like wheneverythingis a priority:via GIPHYAnd here’s what marketers look like when everything getsprioritized:via GIPHYI think you can all guess which scenario is more efficient, effective, and less stressful. Throughout my marketing career, I've taken on roles that have challenged me to be a jack of all trades as well as a specialist—yet every role has required the ability to identify, assess, and tackle the tasks at hand in a way that makes sense for my clients, organization, team, and myself. Simply put, every marketing practitioner and leaderneeds to be able to prioritizeanddeprioritize work to be lean, mean marketing machine that drives results.To help you or your marketing team actually get work done (and do it well), here are a few tips for prioritizing to optimize your marketing workflow.
5 Tips to Get Your Marketing Priorities Straight
Tip #1 - Address the elephant in the room.
No one wants to admit it, but not all work is urgent and not all work is “important.” If you or your team’s workload is over capacity, you need to address this elephant in the room: some of the work has to wait. The hard part is actually taking the time to determine which tasks and pieces of work are urgent, important, both, or neither. Here’s how we often look at it:
Urgent tasksare time sensitive. They might be needed to fix a mistake or identify the cause of an issue. They could be the catalyst for launching on time. With urgent tasks, time is of the essence and getting work done quickly is critical.
Important tasksare effort sensitive. They take up a lot of resources. They’re the big rock everyone is waiting on. It’s fully expected that important tasks may take a little bit of extra time as they’re something you need to nail right out the gate to impress a client, influencer, or partner.
It doesn’t matter the method you use to define your organization’s priority levels; whether it’s the ABCDE Method, Eisenhower Decision Matrix, Eat the Frog Method, or your custom method-of-choice. What’s important is that you define the levels, they have clear differences, and have the stamp of approval from the whole team. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself in the same situation of “everything is important” and “everything is urgent,” which is no good for anyone.via GIPHY
Tip #2 - Define responsibilities.
Any marketing endeavor is marked by dozens of smaller tasks that feed the engine, many of them dependent on the timely execution of what comes before it. Within our agency for example, we need to receive influencer contributions before we can finalize our copy for a large asset. We need the copy client-approved and quality-checked before we can finish the design and promotional assets.Recently, I've taken on some of the day-to-day management of project workflow, giving me a bird's eye view to potential bottlenecks, obstacles, and snags. But not everyone has the luxury of having that insight across the organization.Because a large majority of tasks (and projects) are dependent on other work getting finished, you need to define responsibilities and accountabilities for each team member—and hold them to it:
Let them know who is accountable for each step in the process.
Set expectations for when the step needs to be completed.
Show them how it impacts others when those expectations are missed.
Tip #3 - Assess your task list and prioritize daily.
When I get into work every morning, I list out priorities. Priorities for myself, that day and that week. Priorities for any projects I’m helping support from a resourcing or prioritization standpoint. I can tell you from experience that these lists changes each day—no matter what.Whether you’re managing your individual priorities or priorities for a whole team, work is in constant flux. One team member could have a heavy meeting day on Monday, leaving them with only four hours of working time. You could be out of the office a whole workday for additional training. Or, someone agreed to get all of their priorities done (wanting to appear efficient) only to have some of their tasks slide to the next day. Considering all of the unexpected things that can happen in a work day, it’s important that you assess tasks and re-prioritize on a daily basis. It’s something I’ve had to learn to do, too. This not only allows our team to better stay on-track, but it also gives us five opportunities throughout the week to assess whether or not we’ll actually finish each and every priority.
Tip #4 - Establish communication mediums and expectations.
Easily one of the most importantproject management tipsis to keep communication open, honest, and frequent. And it applies to prioritization as well. Priorities shift. Sometimes, daily. It’s one of the harsh realities of marketing as we strive to reach the right audienceat the right time. Changing priorities allows us to reach our audience with timely, relevant messaging. Or, delight a client with a quick turnaround. Whatever the reason, it’s essential that the change is communicated to the necessary parties early and clearly. It doesn’t matter if your team prefers communicating those changes via email, in a daily standup, or overSlack, as long as you have a documented process, format, and frequency set for communications, your team will be better prepared to switch gears at the drop of a hat.
Tip #5 - Always have a Plan B.
Plans don’t always work. Someone gets sick, an influencer has to back out of a campaign, your client or an internal stakeholder gives you a last-minute, unplanned round of edits, or a new opportunity has presented itself and you need to capitalize. When one timeline moves, so does another. You need a back-up plan to keep your priorities on-time.It seems like an obvious suggestion to have a back-up plan, but it doesn’t always get done. Even though you’re confident in your team and their ability to deliver quality work, you need to be prepared for the worst case scenarios. Otherwise, panic ensues because you have all your balls in the air and no one to catch them.The back-up plan could be leaving a buffer to all of your timelines, assigning extra resources to projects, building in additional editing time even if you don’t think it’ll be needed. Expect (and plan) for the worst, hope for the best.
Let the WorkFlow
At TopRank Marketing, we get a lot of work done. We have several internal teams often working on multiple campaigns at a time. And it’s impossible to do it all at once. Prioritizing our work helps us optimize our marketing workflow for both efficiencyandquality. Without clear, defined priorities we’d just be really bad jugglers. Instead, we’re pretty darn good at it. via GIPHYWant more ways to get things done? Check out thesemarketing productivity hacksfrom Workfront’s Director of Digital Marketing Mike Riding.
