Month: October 2022

 

The following was transcribed from a recent interview on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. 

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Today we’re going to talk about the use of 3D in retail and beyond. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Beck Besecker, Co-Founder and CEO of 3D Cloud by Marxent.

[Greg Kihlstrom] Let’s talk about the use of 3D in retail. How would you describe the current state of 3D usage in retail by the average retailer, as opposed to industry leaders?

We’re still in the first inning of 3D within retail. I’d like to answer this question by kind of going to where it will be.

So what’s inevitable is that eventually 3D will become the principal way you see and interact with products online. So imagine every single product page that you’d go to on Amazon or Wayfair or Target.com or Macy’s, that it’s in fact a 3D model that you can interact with and articulate and pinch and zoom and twirl and spin and download. Eventually, 3D will replace all photography on every product page. And that will be everything from furniture to shoes to luxury watches, you know, dog food, bottles. It will be everywhere. But we’re probably 10 years away from that. And the reason is 3D is transformable; it’s reusable. You can take 3D and see it in physical space using AR or other applications. You can use that content for advertising. You can use that content for visual merchandising. It’s just a very, very malleable asset that people will just come to expect in time. 

Today, the cost of 3D modeling is still quite high. I mean, you could be spending $30, $40, $50, $60, $70 on creating a relatively simple product. And the quality, like the visual quality you can create in 3D, a live 3D model, is still not quite, you know, hyper-realistic, right, like a photo would be. So the cost and the technology have a little bit of ways to go, but the categories that are already out in front are the home categories. So furniture is by far the largest use case of 3D, for, you know, furniture, kitchen, bath, decking, places where you need 3D to do some sort of configuration before you buy a product. Those are the leaders in the space right now.

What kinds of things are those leaders doing that are setting them apart?

What’s happening is they use an analogy, like we used to call a professional to book an airline ticket, right? Because they had a desktop tool and they would tick away, you know, while you’re on the phone with them, and get you your ticket, right? Then Expedia and Travelocity and all these sites, you know, Web-ified them and made them easy to use, and point-and-click, drag-and-drop, and all of a sudden we can all book airline tickets by ourselves. The same thing is now happening for the home industry, where it used to be, if you wanted to design a kitchen or a bathroom or lay out furniture in a virtual space, there was a desktop tool; you would download Photoshop or some other professional tool. You had to have a big graphics card and a big processor, and you had to be trained on how to use the software. 

Now, because 3D is now available for browsers, we can take all that software, really make it drag-and-drop, super-simple, put it on the Web, and people can do it themselves. And so, I mean, we’re doing hundreds of thousands of kitchens and decks and bathrooms and consumers are just doing it themselves. And so now it’s becoming like a self-service e-commerce tool to design a kitchen and check out.

Beyond some of the leaders and some of the areas where it’s being used currently, where do you see some other big opportunities in retail, and what kind of benefits do you think it can bring there?

There’s a confluence of variables I have to meet in order for it to work. So, for instance, for something like a kitchen, if we created 3D models of a kitchen catalog, those products, you know, the faucets and the  appliances and the counters and the cabinets themselves, once we create those assets, they’re not going to change very often, right, like once every two or three years, you might update a finish or something. So the cost of creating those assets can be amortized over a long period of time. Then you also look at, well, what’s the use case? It’s like, well, OK, I actually have to configure this in order to buy a kitchen, and it’s a several thousand-dollar purchase. And so the amortization of the content, plus the use case, is creating a value proposition that works.

To move into other categories, to your question, let’s say handbags, as an example. Will people use 3D to sort of visualize and interact with a handbag, if they’re on Gucci or some place like that? Well, if it costs you $1,000 to create that 3D asset and that product’s out of inventory in two months, you’re not going to get a return on investment. Then you have to ask the question, “Well, do people actually really want to be able to hold a 3D Gucci bag in their hand, like does the product market fit there? Now, if the cost of creating that handbag is 25 cents, you know, why not, right? You’re probably going to get some lift out of that experience. And so you’ve got to find the cost and the amortization and the use case, and if they all sort of intersect to actually make an ROI that actually works. So that’s how we go from category to category and start testing that.

I work a lot with organizations where we’re working on personalization strategies and, wouldn’t it be great if we could, if you have a product, whatever that product is, in the ad, on the website, on the mobile app, wherever you are, could you see the exact product in the exact angle, with true personalization. That becomes really hard when you’re doing product photography. You can’t take a million photos of every single thing. It sounds like it might be early days to really try something like that at scale. But I definitely see some potential for things like that as well.

A really interesting thing that we’re experiencing right now is, let’s say you’re the manufacturer of a product. Let’s just say you’re doing furniture. And I’m the retailer. And the manufacturer, you may, come along with me – so, “I love the couches you manufacturer; I’m going to buy them.” And then I say, “Hey, I need to merchandise those couches on my site. Do you have any photography?” And you say, “Yeah, here’s some product shots I’ve made out of 3D, and here’s some lifestyle images, like in a house and in context, a really nice, glossy photo. But my website – I’m the retailer – uses a different background, right? And I only may sell three of the five products that are in that photo. And so there’s this gap in the market between what the manufacturers provide and what the retailers want, because they’re gonna personalize that content to their site. 

So all of this 3D stuff is actually a great answer to how to solve that, if the manufacturer says, “Well, here are the assets, and if you need to produce custom content for your own merchandising, you know, have at it.” And then what that also does is now, all of a sudden, instead of using these assets for you know, you create photography in September and use them all year ‘round, you can create instant content for holidays, right, and promotions. And so it’s much faster, much more flexible, much less expensive, which is pretty neat.

So there’s a lot of talk about metaverse and all things related to that, for various reasons. You know,  obviously, it uses a lot of 3D. How do you see that changing retail and even what you’re doing?

I’m going to try to be not jaded. Well, it’s funny, so we wrote the very first augmented reality app for the app store in November of ‘11. And so we love to be on the bleeding edge. So we love innovation. It’s why we do what we do. It’s, you know, the best part of the job. I’ve also lived from AR to VR to MR to XR to now, you know, it’s all these different monikers we give the space. Well, here’s where I think there’s an absolute, no question, use case. That’s, if you’re in some kind of game experience like Roblox or Fortnite and you’ve got avatars and you want to somehow wrap your personality and brand in, like, a virtual Nike shoe or a virtual Gucci bag or what have you, that makes a ton of sense to me. I mean, that’s just basic brand advertising and marketing, right? Some of these other cases, like we have a lot of furniture clients who are like, “Hey, what should we do about the metaverse?” I’m like, “Well, man, it’s kind of interesting. All you do is talk about creating high-quality, realistic assets, and now you want to put them in Roblox, that’s basically cartoonish, like there’s a little bit of a logic gap in there somewhere, that needs to be sorted.

So my view, at least I can only really speak to where I’ve had some experience, but I think what’s really interesting about a metaverse type opportunity, for at least the home category, is some day, when you buy your home, the seller will also give you an exact 3D model interactive replica of your home to go along with it, and Zillow will have 3D homes that you can download and interact. And so the idea of going out into something like the metaverse, whether it’s a connected experience or stand-alone, and pulling things out of that world and into your own digital version of your space, I think that’s pretty cool. But, you know, the way I think about the metaverse now is the first thing we do when any technology is new is we copy what we already have in that new medium, right? 

And that’s what we did with websites. They used to, the taxonomy of a catalog looked like a store, right? And then of course that’s all changed. And so, to me, creating a virtual mall – and I’m not trying to downplay the guys that are doing these kinds of things – to create a virtual mall to walk around is like, to me, the equivalent of creating a virtual car lot to walk around to buy a car, like that makes no earthly sense to me. I don’t want to walk around a mall. I want the mall to come to me. But I think that’s how you start, right? The first thing you do is you go, “Oh, hey, let’s emulate the real world, and then we’ll iterate and come up with something cooler.”

Let’s go back to those companies that may not quite be on the cutting edge of using 3D in their retail but, you know, getting started and maybe accelerating their 3D usage. So for those that aren’t quite there yet, what are some things that they should be keeping in mind as they’re trying to get started in this realm?

Initially, in this space, a lot of early adopters thought of 3D as like an application, like “I need an augmented reality application,” or “I need a product configure app,” or “I need a room planning app.” And that was perfectly fair, three, four or five years ago. But the truth is there’s lots of use cases for 3D, and while you might pilot or beta something by just buying an individual app, once you, if you’re a big enterprise like a Kohler or a Lowe’s or a Best Buy or whomever, 3D really is like a platform decision. You need to buy a content management system, almost like you’d buy a CRM. You wouldn’t buy nine different CRM systems, right? You’d buy one CRN system and deploy. The same is true with 3D because you want to repurpose the same asset and you want to deploy it to different applications, and you want analytics all in the same place. And so I think, outside of maybe piloting something, the biggest decision that people need to make first is, “OK, what’s going to be my content management system first, and then what are going to be my applications, second?”

You mentioned analytics, so I’ll go there a little bit further. How should those companies be measuring success? What are the metrics that your customers use to measure how well they’re doing?

I mean, there are a ton of parallels to e-commerce, things like dwell time, where we all know, the more time you spend with something, the more likely you are to buy it. Augmented reality absolutely works. There’s no question about it. If AR is available on a product page, you get a two to three times increase in conversion. It’s very consistent. Now, I mean, some of that’s you’re interested in the product anyway, so you probably want to discount it. But even if you get a 100 percent, 20 percent or 30 percent increase in conversion, that’s still pretty good, right? 

So what we have learned, though, is augmented reality does not work equally for all things. It’s primarily used in the home category as a replacement for measuring. So if you look at what gets used in AR, it’s big things like dining room sets and bedroom furniture and sectionals. Those are the most popular categories. People don’t really use AR for, like, lamps and mirrors. So you probably don’t want to spend money there. But it’s all the same kind of metrics. It’s increases in average order value. It’s duration in the application. It’s conversion to leads, if you’re using it as a lead generation tool, like into a design team. It is reduction in returns because people are able to interact and make sure they buy the right thing at the right size. So it’s all the same metrics that we use to measure website performance.

About the Guest

Beck and his brother Barry are early innovators in marketing technology, first pioneering cloud-based targeting marketing at Copient, a firm acquired by NCR. Their latest company, Marxent, is another cloud-based platform for retailers that is pioneering 3D content management and 3D applications including AR, VR, product configurations, and 3D room planners. Clients include Macy’s, Ashley, La-Z-Boy, and many more leading brands.

About the Host, Greg Kihlström

Greg Kihlstrom is a best selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur and host ofThe Agile Brand podcast. He has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations oncustomer experience, employee experience, and digital transformation initiatives, both before and after selling his award-winning digital experience agency, Carousel30, in 2017. Currently, he is Principal and Chief Strategist atGK5A. He has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including AOL, Choice Hotels, Coca-Cola, Dell, FedEx, GEICO, Marriott, MTV, Starbucks, Toyota and VMware. He currently serves on the University of Richmond’s Customer Experience Advisory Board, was the founding Chair of the American Advertising Federation’s National Innovation Committee, and served on the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Marketing Mentorship Advisory Board. Greg is Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certified, and holds a certification in Business Agility from ICP-BAF.

 

The Agile Brand Blog – Greg Kihlström Customer Experience & Digital Transformation  

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The following was transcribed from a recent interview on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. 

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Today’s customer is on multiple devices and channels, and wants a seamless experience as they interact with brands whenever, wherever, and however they want. This can provide challenges for even the most customer-centric brands, which require solutions that allow the planning, creation, delivery, management, and testing of campaigns and content across multiple channels that deliver a great customer experience.

Today we’re going to talk about customer experience without boundaries. I’m here at Optimizely’s Opticon 2022 conference in San Diego, and would like to welcome Justin Anovick, Chief Product Officer at Optimizely, a leading digital experience platform used by top brands that want to manage and deliver better digital experiences for their customers.

We’re in day two of the Opticon conference as of recording this show. So, we’re going to talk through a few of the announcements that were made, some big announcements from Optimizely. First, I’d love for you to introduce yourself. You’re Chief Product Officer at Optimizely. What does that mean at Optimizely? Tell a little bit about your role.

Justin Anovick:

I’ve been with Optimizely for a little over six years, really focused in the product area. As Chief Product Officer, I’m responsible for the roadmap of the product, what we’re doing, where we’re going.

We have made decisions over the past couple years. You’re always looking at build, buy, partner, and there’s been a combination of each in order to deliver our capabilities. But my team and I really focus on working with customers and partners to make sure that we’re delivering the right capabilities that they need. But also looking ahead, and people don’t necessarily know what they don’t know, and making sure to stay ahead of the curve and delivering innovative capabilities as well.

Greg Kihlstrom:

Nice, nice. We’re going to talk in specific about one aspect of some of the announcements here. One of the big announcements here was this concept of Boundless Digital Invention, which was designed to help brands solve challenges that I briefly described in the intro. Can you describe a little bit about what does boundless digital invention mean, and what does it include?

Justin Anovick:

Yeah. So we went through the process, we talked to customers, and analysts, and really tried to understand the perception of Optimizely as well as what we want to portray, and Boundless Digital Invention was so obvious because it’s aspirational. Right? You don’t want to be bound to the capabilities and the thoughts and the processes that you have today. And really, invention is more along the lines of being scientifically-oriented. When you think of invention, you really equate to being science-based.

So, being boundless, but also rooted in making sure that you’re using science to deliver the experiences that you want. And what’s a part of that really, in how we talk about our capabilities and what we offer, is: Orchestrate, which I think we’ll talk about; Monetize, which is really about the commerce experience; And then Experiment, which is testing a concept to make sure that you’re driving the most value.

Greg Kihlstrom:

Great. Right, yeah. I love that usage of invention, and I think there was quite a bit of talk about both the art and the science of marketing. Having done this for a few years, I can definitely attest to that. There’s definitely an art to it, but if you don’t have the science behind it as well, you’re definitely missing out. I think the Monetize and the Experiment components, certainly those familiar already with Optimizely are definitely familiar with that.

But I think the Orchestrate component is something where personally I’m feeling this in my consulting work with customers. I’m feeling some of the pains that I think drove the creation of this Orchestrate component. It has to do with creation of content, and particularly how content is created for personalization, which that means multiple iterations and variations and all those things. So, anybody that’s been part of a team that has to do that probably has their own horror stories about what it actually takes to coordinate and do all of this. Can you talk a little bit about the Orchestrate solution, and some of those challenges that I kind of inferred there?

Justin Anovick:

Yes. So, technically from a product perspective, (which becomes important at a certain point, but really should be the last piece,) it’s the combination of content management, content marketing, and digital asset management to help marketers, in this case to deliver the right content. But when we really delve into it, we look at what our customers actually use us for or what we hope they use us for, and we talk about these six key activities that help drive the orchestration of what you do.

We can talk through each one of them if we want, but a couple of them are super important as a part of the Orchestrate. The first thing is you have to just know what’s going on in the organization. You have to understand not only what your intent is, but what are your metrics that you’re trying to drive? What are the outcomes you’re trying to achieve? And you need the data and the analytics to tell you how your business is performing.

Without that piece, what’s the purpose of anything else? That becomes guesswork. That becomes less science, and that becomes all art not grounded in reality. So that understand is just purely understanding: What content gaps do you have? Well, we talk to a lot of our customers and we ask the question, “When you start creating content, why do you do it?” And they say, “Well, because we think we need it.” It’s like, “Okay, that’s a good start. But what if we could show you what you actually need and why?”

If you just launched a new campaign for a new credit card, and you realize that customers are actually looking for more details about the APR, well, how do you know that that’s the case without understanding the performance of what’s happening? So that’s the first and I think most critical part. Once you understand, then we ideate. As a part of ideation, there’s collaboration, planning. This is where now you take what you’ve understood of your content gaps and now pursue what you need to do.

Greg Kihlstrom:

Well, and in a multichannel, omnichannel, cross-channel, whatever word that proceeds “channel” world … There’s channel switching by customers, and the teams that are actually creating all of this content need to understand and manage that as well. So, does this help with that kind of thinking as well?

Justin Anovick:

Yeah. It’s funny that you said whatever word precedes “channel,” because I was talking to somebody else, and we’ve been talking about it for 20 years. Omnichannel, cross-channel, all of that, and it’s not just about the digital channel. I think one of the trends that we’re seeing more and more of is some people come to us and say, “I want a CMS,” and they’ve already determined the problem statements that have helped them arrive at why you’d want a CMS. But in reality, they want an improved experience, they want to drive more leads, they want to decrease customer acquisition costs or whatever.

In reality, though, they really need to develop content that’s a part of a campaign. So if you’re launching a new credit card, like we said, it’s not just about what goes on the website. Well, you need banners, you might need copy for emails, you might need copy for social, and that’s all about launching that new credit card, and it’s not just about the content for the web. And what we’re seeing in the trends is that there’s a single team that owns all of that. There might be specialists that create it for the end property, but in reality you’re creating that entire campaign and web is just one element of it.

So when you go through the ideation process, it shouldn’t be in isolation of all the other activities that occur, and that’s a massive trend that we’re seeing. It’s no longer just about any one channel. Because it is funny, when you see and hear “omnichannel”, organizations normally were never organized that way. They were never omnichannel. Their customers were, but they were never organized that way. The trend is now that the organizations are becoming more omnichannel themselves.

Greg Kihlstrom:

So a lot of organizations right now, like Fortune 100 companies that I work with, are organizing these things in Excel sheets, and a myriad of Jira and Asana, and name your project platform of choice. How does this help with that? So you’re organizing cross-channels from the customer perspective as well, but how does this help in just putting stuff in one place?

Justin Anovick:

If you saw the skit that we did at the keynote yesterday, well, the conclusion was: #Don’tBeKevin. But how we got there was … It is insane that if you are creating content, regardless of how you’re using it, you might be in Word, and then you’re collaborating in Word and commenting in Word. Well, that’s in isolation of a broader workflow. And then you have to go and manage that campaign or that content in an Excel, and then you have to post in Jira and Slack and Teams and all these different places.

And as we’re going through and developing the before skit to articulate the problem that exists, we ourselves just had massive laughter because that’s where we were a few years ago, and we know that organizations are like that. So the complexity and the chaos of having to use all those different applications … I used to be in a contact center space, and one of the first things that you would do is you’d go in to look at the customer service rep’s desktop, and they would have 15 tabs open that they would open in succession in the right order because they knew what it was like.

Well, that’s marketers’ lives these days, is that there’s literally 15 different applications in order to process one piece of content. It is ridiculously chaotic. So yeah, our skit was done by Kevin, who, that’s why we say: #Don’tBeKevin.

Greg Kihlstrom:

Nice, nice. So, you touched on this a little bit earlier, but how does this help with personalizing messaging to customers? So you’ve got to create all those different variations in order to personalize, you need to have the content to support personalization. How does this approach with Orchestrate help with that?

Justin Anovick:

It becomes a little bit more complicated, because over the years … The answer becomes more complicated, but the actual solution is probably easier. But over the years, and we’ve talked about it, everybody out there wants to personalize. You want to personalize: What product are you putting in front of people? What content are you putting out there? Oh, you need to create atomic content, because then you just change out the paragraph.

All of that is critically important, but the whole missing component was the data that drives that decision and how you segment. So if I have three kids, there’s a newlywed, there’s somebody that has three dogs, how do you make sure to know what you’re delivering to? And historically that was a missing component.

So you could personalize the content because you’ve created atomic content, you’ve created a bunch of different options. But what was missing was it was all based off of the behavior of what they were doing in that experience, and then people like them that took that same path. But it wasn’t able to use external data about the individual, and it could be even anonymized. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about what you know about them, but you start to take that and that data then drives the right content.

So the creation of the content, having multiple blurbs and making sure to deliver, that in essence was the easy part. The harder part was really about aggregating the data to be able to use and deliver that personalization. And frankly, in the industry that’s probably what was missing up until two, three years ago.

Greg Kihlstrom:

And that drives things like next-best action and other things like that as well, right?

Justin Anovick:

Yeah, absolutely. So, a lot of folks want to design the ideal experience of the right step to do next, the right content, but in reality it has to be much smarter than that. The next-best action could be a multitude of things based on what they just did. You really can’t design the ideal flow because there’s massive permutations to it. You really have to have the logic to say, “These are how these two components or this atomic content is connected,” in order to drive the next-best action.

Greg Kihlstrom:

So, last thing on this topic. Another time-saver and kind of an efficiency gain is the ability to repurpose content. So you create something, it works well, you test that it works well, but you want to use it in a slightly different way or for a different purpose. So, how does this Orchestrate help with repurposing or creating new content based on existing or previous …

Justin Anovick:

The thought is, again, you understand what’s happening, you ideate, you’re creating that content. You create a brief that basically says: What are you intending to use this for? And then the offshoot of that would allow you to use the micro-components, the atomic content for the right area. So the title might be something that you would use in an email, as well as something that’s on the webpage. But the body may be different, because the body on the site is way longer than what you can send out in an email or in social. So you create variations of those. It’s all based on the same overall, overarching title or structure where you’re creating those multiple components to be able to use in the right channels.

We have some capabilities to allow the system to automatically create content. You type in basically what you want, how you want to say it, and then it’ll create those variations for you. I think that is a little bit further away from people to be able to use that mindlessly. You still need to check what you use, but there’s capabilities that the application and the smarts, that it can create it for you. So you create the content for the website and it can recommend, “This is what you should say for mobile.” But it’s the reusability of that based on the overarching content piece, in essence.

Greg Kihlstrom:

Nice. So for someone that’s considering taking this approach, using a tool like Orchestrate, what’s a way that they could start? What mindset should they have, or how do they get started?

Justin Anovick:

There’s a few options. One is to just Venmo me. Two, more likely the first thing is you shouldn’t start off by saying, “I need Orchestrate.” You need to start off by saying, “What are the problems? What are we trying to address? What are the outcomes that we’re looking to achieve? Poor lead conversion? Customer acquisition costs? Stock?” or whatever. That’s where you start. Really define it.

Now, that sounds super logical. But when you go into a lot of opportunities or customers and they haven’t defined that one piece, they just know that they need a CMS or they know they need a combination of these capabilities. That’s like the last step, right? So, obviously understand what’s going on out there and the different capabilities, but really refine what you’re looking for as to the problems that you’re trying to solve. Again, it seems so obvious, but it seems like people start with wanting a CMS and then back their way into their problems that they’re solving. It should be the other way around.

Greg Kihlstrom:

I totally agree. Asking, “What’s the problem we’re trying to solve?” is always a good approach. So, I totally agree. Well, one last question before we wrap up here. We’re at Opticon here in San Diego. What’s been your favorite part so far?

Justin Anovick:

This is the first time seeing colleagues and customers in a while. The last time we got together was really three years ago, and I’ve given more hugs to people this week than I have probably my entire life. Because it’s like, “Oh my gosh, I actually missed that person,” and the 4-D experience is actually much better than the 2-D experience. But it’s been connecting with people and all of that.

In addition, on the selfish, product side, I had a meeting with my product team the other day and said, “Hey, assume that our customers don’t know what we’ve done in the past few years. They probably don’t know what we’ve acquired. Start off from baseline.” And really enlightening people on what they can do with their current investment today, it’s pretty cool to unlock that and uncover it. So the combination of people, and then enlightening customers as to what they actually own and how they can actually get more out of it. So, yes.

About the Guest

Currently the Chief Product Officer at Optimizely, Justin is responsible for product strategy, product management and technology partners. Justin has a 20+ year career with experience in sales, pre sales and professional services and experience with mid-size ($100+M) organizations as well as M&A. He tends to be more business oriented than technical and has spent a lot of time helping to determine the best go to market strategies based on data, past experience, and what the field is seeing.

Justin joined Optimizely over three years ago after leading product strategy at Verint. He is known as a creative thinker who knows how to present a compelling story and provides great leadership for his team. As part of the fun he has at Optimizely, he also co-hosts their internal variety show “Episodes”.

Justin lives with his wife and kids outside of Charlotte, North Carolina.

About the Host, Greg Kihlström

Greg Kihlstrom is a best selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur and host ofThe Agile Brand podcast. He has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations oncustomer experience, employee experience, and digital transformation initiatives, both before and after selling his award-winning digital experience agency, Carousel30, in 2017. Currently, he is Principal and Chief Strategist atGK5A. He has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including AOL, Choice Hotels, Coca-Cola, Dell, FedEx, GEICO, Marriott, MTV, Starbucks, Toyota and VMware. He currently serves on the University of Richmond’s Customer Experience Advisory Board, was the founding Chair of the American Advertising Federation’s National Innovation Committee, and served on the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Marketing Mentorship Advisory Board. Greg is Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certified, and holds a certification in Business Agility from ICP-BAF.

 

 

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This article was originally published on CMSWire.com – Read the full article here.

When it comes to martech, organizations that don’t have a strong philosophy find it hard to make strategic decisions.

The marketing technology landscape is not getting any smaller, or more narrowly defined, with this number increasing from about 1,867 in 2015 to nearly 10,000 as of mid-2022. With so much choice, it can become nearly impossible to make good decisions, or to even know where to start narrowing your choices.

One incredibly helpful thing to define before embarking on an effort to define your technology infrastructure is to define what I call a marketing technology philosophy. This will consist of your guiding principles that point you in the right direction as you make fundamental choices about the types of platforms you incorporate or reject as part of your marketing technology stack.

Organizations that don’t have a strong philosophy are at a disadvantage because it becomes harder to make strategic decisions. With so many platforms available with similar features, integrations, and promises made, not having a clear direction to go in makes the choice of investments even more difficult. What’s more, not having a strong philosophy also means that a course correction may be required in order to deprecate a system that significant time and resources have been invested in if it fails to fit in a longer term plan.

In this article, I’m going to discuss a few ways to define your marketing technology philosophy and why they may — or may not — be a good fit for your organization.

This article was originally published on CMSWire.com – Read the full article here.

 

The Agile Brand Blog – Greg Kihlström Customer Experience & Digital Transformation  

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As much as 30% of adults experience problems connecting to the internet at home, with 15% of U.S. adults only relying on “smartphone-only” internet. This technological disparity has led to the rise of a digital divide, with less fortunate communities often being left behind.

Written by Trix David for The Agile Brand Blog

Digital access has been more available than ever. A report by the Pew Research Center on mobile tech and home broadband notes that U.S. smartphone ownership and home broadband subscriptions have increased from 2019 to 85% and 77% respectively. However, despite a vast majority having access to these technologies, some people still face access difficulties. As much as 30% of adults experience problems connecting to the internet at home, with 15% of U.S. adults only relying on “smartphone-only” internet. This technological disparity has led to the rise of a digital divide, with less fortunate communities often being left behind.

What is the digital divide?

The digital divide refers to unequal access to technology. Maryville University’s insights on the digital divide in the U.S. note three types of the digital divide: the gender divide, the social divide, and the universal access divide. These disconnects often arise from less privileged groups, such as women, people who aren’t able to afford access to broadband or the internet in general, as well as those with physical disabilities or digital illiteracy. However, there could also be a digital divide in terms of capabilities. A gap in technology-related skills or education may grow more evident as younger, more tech-savvy employees enter the workforce — potentially leaving older workers behind.

How can employers address the digital divide?

Given these technological challenges, many people struggle with not only limited access to different resources but also struggle to stay relevant at work. The digital divide can negatively affect their happiness and work performance, especially in recent years when workers were forced to follow a remote setup. As covered in our post called “Healthy Organizational Cultures”, it’s the responsibility of employers to bridge this gap and focus on improving the employee experience, before their customers’ experience. By being inclusive in their approach to their workforce, companies can help employees address issues related to technology and develop positive business outcomes. Here are some ways employers can start overcoming the digital divide:

Make equipment and tools accessible

Having limited access to technological equipment such as a laptop shouldn’t be the basis for not keeping a great employee. The difficulty often lies in not being able to afford these tools, so to remedy this, businesses should at least lend workers digital equipment and tools that enhance their work. In addition, companies also need to consider their employees’ internet speed and provide an allowance based on their workload. By improving accessibility, businesses can achieve better remote worker productivity and job satisfaction.

Offer training and support programs

To adapt to changing technologies, companies must train and support their employees in learning or re-educating themselves in different processes. This is in line with an article by Business Insider on reskilling, sharing that 79% of CEOs are regularly concerned about their workforce’s existing skills. Businesses must reskill their employees to promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth and support productive employment with fulfilling work. Free training programs can ensure employees have relevant skills and increase business success outcomes.

Stay connected with employees

Aside from addressing their accessibility and technical challenges, employers must stay connected with their employees. Organizations that foster connection and collaboration between their employees can encourage more experienced workers to help out their new co-workers. Aside from being a way to seek mentorship, social interaction can help boost employee morale and motivation to help workers tackle problems in the digital workspace. Employees can increase their knowledge and productivity through a positive work environment, leading to outstanding performance.

  

Read More The Agile Brand Blog – Greg Kihlström Customer Experience & Digital Transformation

The following was transcribed from a recent interview on The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. 

Listen to the Episode

Prefer to listen? Click play below to listen to the episode. 

Today we’re going to talk about unifying sales teams and bringing people, processes, and platforms together to achieve a common goal. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Susan Rothwell, CRO at Vericast.

[Greg Kihlstrom] Last year, you helped lead the company through a reorganization that aligned these businesses under a brand. And with this reorganization came the need to take all the siloed sales teams and unite them as well. So let’s dive into that a little bit more. Why did you make this decision with the teams at Vericast, and what was the impact to those formerly siloed sales teams?

[Susan Rothwell, CRO at Vericast] I think it’s really interesting to go through what I like to call is an evolution or transformation, right? I mean, we’ve felt that, as an organization, having one brand was really going to help us leverage our customer relationships, as well as all of the different solutions that sat in the different siloed parts of the organization. So the first step was making sure that the team, not just my sales organization but also the company, kind of understood what that mission was, why we were doing it and what the benefits to it were, right, to the company and to the organization.

And that’s a really heavy lift, when you try to do that, right, because people are so used to their worlds. But I think, when you then put that strategy and focus out there, I think the key to success, whenever you’re doing any type of realignment or any type of reorganization, is really, to me, two things, right, first of all really making sure you have not just the strategy but the data and the analytics and the trends and things to really understand, based in data, why you’re doing something. And, number two, make sure you’re engaging people to be a part of the journey and helping lead through the journey, right? Because that’s so important, because that allows people to create ownership. It also gives you, from a leadership perspective, an opportunity to really hear a lot of great thoughts and ideas and, I think, give you a much better perspective on how you need to align, how you need to lead through it, and understanding your teams have a lot of great ideas and experience that just make that transition a lot easier.

Can you give an example of how you use data and business intelligence in enabling what you were just describing?

Yeah, I actually just went through an exercise last week. It’s a practice that continues to evolve. One of the things that I let my teams know is that we will constantly be evolving as a sales organization. Businesses change; the way people engage businesses change; people at your accounts change. So you need to be constantly making sure you understand where the industry or the business is and how we should be aligning to that. So, you know, evolution in how we’re organized, as long as I’m leading the team, will always be a best practice. It’s something that we look at all the time, and not something that people should be afraid of but should lean into.

So we were looking at one of the teams last week, and we were using different pieces of data to lead the conversation. And those pieces included internal data. So we were looking at sales performance, right, how much revenue was a seller doing; how many sales calls; were there sales activities; in accounts, at what level were they reaching; were they in the C-suite in the accounts, right, like what was the hierarchy there? So we look, what was the customer buying from us; what different product lines, you know, had their revenue increased or decreased? So we were looking at that internal piece of it. Then what we did was we appended some information about the client. Were they experiencing changes in their business? Were they opening locations? Were they adding new products or services or things like that? Was there changes in leadership? You know, what were some of their strategies they were focused on? And then the final thing was perhaps is there something going on in the industry, right, that could be driving changes into that business?

And we accumulate all this data, and then what we do is we weigh it, right? We give weights to the data. And what ends up happening is, out of this exercise, which was a little bit of a different experience for us in how we used the data, we ended up looking at our top 200 accounts in one of the segments and realized that we have what were called hidden gems, right? They were accounts that we weren’t really focused on as a key growth account, but when we looked at all that data and the way we weighed it, it was popping to the top, right? And so it ended up creating a strategy to say, you know, here we have 20 of these accounts that really look like they’re potentially in growth mode, and we’re not really aligned from a sales and service perspective to treat them that way and engage them that way. So that’s just an example of, you know, just last week, how we used business intelligence and data to look at our business and perhaps make some different decisions about how we’re engaging our customers.

That’s a great example of how to use that to make some positive change in the organization. What about from the customer perspective? I mean, I could draw some assumptions from that as well that would be positives, but how do you think your customers benefit from this approach to data and business intelligence and really even just aligning sales teams?

Yeah, so I think there’s a couple things. From the data and intelligence that we provide as an organization to our clients, it’s been really critical through the pandemic and the past two years, more so than ever, right? The customer journey has changed. I’ll take an example from a restaurant. They’re one of a key vertical that we engage with. And they don’t know, on a given day, how are you going to engage one of your favorite restaurants? Are you going to go in and have lunch? Are you going to call in and pick up your order? Or are you going to have it delivered? 

So on any given day, their engagement with you as a customer potentially can change. And so that can be very challenging, for them to understand how do they actually engage a customer like you, right, who’s changing their minds? So we use some of our intelligence and our data from that perspective to help our customers and tell them how they should be engaging, how you would respond, what’s the best way to engage a customer that would be switching channels, for example, like you would. So that’s one example. 

Another example is that the very first time we started to talk about even really becoming one organization and combining and integrating the company, it came from one of our largest customers who was telling us that there were too many engagement points from a sales perspective. We had too many people calling on them at different areas, and there wasn’t just one point of contact. And it didn’t allow them to have opportunities to have a master service agreement and engage us in a much more fluid way. And that was really one of the sparks that said, “Hey, you know, we need to be easier to work with and we need to be able to offer our customers more.”

So I think that was a real positive. I think one of the things that our customers are trying to understand is, you know, we were these four siloed organizations and now we’re one company. And what is Vericast, right, and in the rebranding and in the evolution of the company, really bringing forward not so much just our products, which were a display ad, or mail insert or a direct mail or a check program or something like that, but really engaging us at that much higher level of of data and intelligence and using our technology and our platforms. So I think that’s where we have some work to do, just to really change that perspective and leverage that and really help our customers more along those lines instead of just a product- focused organization.

Let’s talk, a little bit, about the internal part of that. I mentioned we were going to talk about the people, process and platforms and how those things work together. So combining siloed teams makes a lot of sense to do, though sometimes in practice there are some team members that might be resistant to change, perhaps, even if they understand the basic reasons why some of these things need to happen. So in your work and your alignment, how did you go about ensuring that the people part of the change happened successfully? And what would some advice be that you’d give to other leaders that are about to embark on similar initiatives?

Yeah, I think, as I said, I think change really just has to become part of your culture, right? And I’m really trying to drive that type of engagement with the sales team and the cross-functional teams as well. You know, I think it comes with a couple of things. You really need to have alignment across the organization. You know, whenever there’s change, it’s not usually just within one segment, say, sales. It will affect client services, or it could affect marketing and things like that. So whenever we’re looking at a change in a go-to-market strategy, you need to make sure there’s alignment across the entire organization, and again, like I said in the beginning, that everybody kind of understands the short-term strategy and then where we’re trying to evolve to, right? Because normally the reason why you change is to stay current but also to evolve into something else which is more aligned to what customers want.

So having some real clear understanding and really communicating that’s key. The biggest key, though, is really having involvement of many levels of the organization, you know, people in the room while the decisions are being made, the conversations are happening, having a voice in the discussion as we’re aligning, so that, again, we’re making sure that we have a very balanced approach; we have a lot of different voices in the decision-making process of actually how we’re going to do this and why. And it’s really important not only at my next level but the leadership levels even below that because they’re really the ones that have to implement and take this organizational change to the sellers. 

So you know, really having a lot of discussion and a lot of involvement and empowerment of those teams is important in the change, and also to realize that, you know what? We might not get it 100 percent right. Most likely, we are not. So we will make a decision. We will move forward with a decision. And for some reason, if it’s not the right decision, it’s OK to change course and make a change, right? We can’t be afraid to evolve and, if we make a mistake, think we can’t fix it. We can always fix it. We can always reverse if we have to. So I think just having some of those fundamentals. So an example of that is one of the teams we were going to integrate right after the pandemic hit and there was a lot of disruption to the business and we were working through a lot of things, and we were on this road to integration. I mean, we had it all mapped out. We were going to put teams together. And one of the leaders said to me, “I just don’t know if this is a good idea to do this right now. It’s rather distracting. We’ve got enough on our plate.” And I thought about it for a couple days, and I went back to him and I said, “Yeah, you’re right. We shouldn’t do this right now. Let’s move it off to the end of the year. We’ll reevaluate it. But, you know, this isn’t probably the time to implement this change.”

So I think there needs to be some agility, right, in this process. And I think, when people see that, and know that they have a voice, that if something’s not right, we’ll fix it, they have an opportunity to relax a little bit about the fact that this change is coming. I also think, though, one of the really important things is, even though we are under one Vericast, and I do have different business units or sales teams that roll up into that, you do need to keep some of the culture and identity of those teams, because they all work a little bit differently. They have different nuances about the way they go to market. And I always say we want to take the best of the best and mash it all together and put it across the organization. But you also want to make sure that you maintain some of the uniqueness that makes those teams really experts and good at what they do, and not mess that up as well. And so there’s got to be a balance of pulling it all together as well as keeping some of that sense of their own culture and their own missions.

You’re on the right show to talk about agility! I love that you mentioned that you’re not always going to get it right all the time, but you’re not going to get it so wrong that you can’t fix it and improve and iterate, and stuff like that. And even if you feel like it’s going well, you might not be doing as well as you could be. And so there’s reasons to experiment, whether things are going good or bad, so to speak. What role does data play in this? You talked about not wanting to undo good cultures that are parts of teams, yet aligning teams a little bit more together. How do you factor in the data part of that as well, where a team may be working well from a people and process perspective, but, as they would say, the numbers don’t lie. How do you work that numbers discussion in and still maintain those great things that you already mentioned?

Yeah, so obviously we’re in sales. So it’s always about measuring everything, right? For sure, we measure everything. But I think where, if I understand your question right, where the data kind of meshes together is when we look at some of the business analytics and the business intelligence that we have. You know, where are there opportunities, as one Vericast, as one organization, for us to leverage the different business units and really give people some opportunity when we do that, right? 

So, for example, we have a lot of retailers that are part of our customer base. And some of our retailers sit in our financial team and some of the retailers sit in our retail team. And so we’ve brought together what we call business teams, customer business teams, where there’s seven or eight customers that, you know, the different parts of our businesses touch, and they sit still within their own organizations, but we use the data from the different sales teams to just see how can we continually push and get the customer to adopt more of our solutions and more of our data. So there’s ways to use it in a siloed way but also bring it together into one unified organization. Because there are still sales teams that call on clients in different areas. So one might call from a financial institution area and one might call from a marketing area. One might call from a procurement area, right? So there’s ways to leverage that across Vericast within the different sales silos as well.

You’ve mentioned several different metrics of success, but I’m wondering if there are, beyond revenue and specific sales targets, how do you measure or come to understand that a team is aligned or that multiple teams are aligned? What kind of measures of success do you have to just make sure that things are moving in that right direction?

Yeah, so we have different dashboards that we look at from a sales enablement perspective, right? And the reason why I say they’re different is because the teams still are within their organizations. I don’t think that they all are doing the same things and need to be measured the same way. So there’s different characteristics of sales success that we’re measuring by team, that we look at. And those include your basic sales metrics, but some of them are different, so if we have a new business team, they’re going to be measured a little differently than maybe a seller that’s got a base business and we’re looking at retention and growth within current businesses versus, you know, new logo activity and things like that. 

But from an overall company perspective, and this is where I was talking about making sure that you have what I call cross-functional alignment, you know, we’ve got a plan this year, and the plan is very specific, in certain things that we’re trying to do, from launching new products, increasing our technology, retaining our current customer base, growing that base, new logos. And we have a KPI scorecard that we keep, that really holds everybody accountable, not just the sales organization but, you know, are the other teams doing what they need to do to make sure that this plan that we have, this go-to-market plan, is executing on time, is hitting the milestones we need to hit in order to ultimately hit the profit and the revenue goals?

About the Guest

Susan Rothwell is Chief Revenue Officer at Vericast.

Suan is leading the transformation of Vericast business. She is a talented Executive Leader in identifying and capitalizing on emerging market trends and revenue opportunities. An exceptional record of achievements, including company transformation, M&A, and integration expertise. Strategic and analytical approach to solving problems, bringing in customers, and accomplishing profit targets, and creatively marketing and selling Digital, Data, and Off-Line marketing solutions. Excels at developing programs that are the basis of a performance culture and the development of key talent.

About the Host, Greg Kihlström

Greg Kihlstrom is a best selling author, speaker, and entrepreneur and host ofThe Agile Brand podcast. He has worked with some of the world’s leading organizations oncustomer experience, employee experience, and digital transformation initiatives, both before and after selling his award-winning digital experience agency, Carousel30, in 2017. Currently, he is Principal and Chief Strategist atGK5A. He has worked with some of the world’s top brands, including AOL, Choice Hotels, Coca-Cola, Dell, FedEx, GEICO, Marriott, MTV, Starbucks, Toyota and VMware. He currently serves on the University of Richmond’s Customer Experience Advisory Board, was the founding Chair of the American Advertising Federation’s National Innovation Committee, and served on the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business Marketing Mentorship Advisory Board. Greg is Lean Six Sigma Black Belt certified, and holds a certification in Business Agility from ICP-BAF.