I’m using this deck as a discussion point with customers and I hope its provides you with some insight to next year as well.

(please note: all graphics and statistics are credited to the source on the specific slide – just let me know if you’d like links to the individual reports.)

Speaker notes with additional statistics are available by clicking the cog below.

What trends in this deck are most striking to you?  What opportunities do you see these trends creating in your business?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

Build your own Bear

We took the kids to “Build a Bear” today.  A simple idea – your kids get to choose a teddy bear, then take it to get filled with stuffing, along with a little heart that goes in it and a recorded message that will play when they hug their bear.  Once they have their stuffed bear they get to choose an outfit for them – even some nice shoes if they want!

The kids loved it, and for these economic times the place was jam packed.  As they walked out with their bears I was thinking how different this would be if it was just a “Bear Shop” instead of “Build a Bear”

An experience not a product

By turning the purchase into an experience the kids got so much more out of it than just purchasing another toy.  It gave them a memory and they saw the little heart go in and spent the afternoon talking about how they had seen their bears get sown up and dressed.

Being involved in the process gave them more ownership

The kids have had other bears and even had their favourites, but by being involved in the selection, stuffing and clothing of their bears these were ‘their’ bears right from the start.  They have much more ownership because they felt they had created them.

Right now all the bears are tucked up next to their new owners for the first of many nights of cuddles.

It’s worth remembering in life that it’s not just about the product (whether an end product, a new CRM system or a new brand).  Getting your customers, partners and employees involved in an experience and giving them ownership of the process is priceless and will drive much higher commitment to the end result.

I hope you enjoyed this post!  If so, please share with your network, and have a great holiday.

As I previously blogged my number one takeaway was that the innovative companies are connecting their customers.  Business can no longer get away with dyadic hub and spoke relationships with their customers.

Take a look at the world of television which has become a two screen activity.  Shows like the X-Factor are taken to a new level with the ongoing conversation on Twitter, Facebook or “Tap to Clap” on their own apps.

At the Olympics nearly every athlete thanked their Twitter followers for their amazing support.  They are using Twitter to connect up their fans and build a longer lasting fan base.

Businesses need to pick up on this lead and dedicate time to understanding what value customers might get from connecting with each other.  As a customer of a water or electricity company I might want to know if others in my area are suffering an outage, or seek advice from others in similar properties about typical monthly bills.

Here are my slides from last night.  Click on the cog to access my speaker notes.  Just let me know if you have any questions.

Hopefully see you at the next Forcewest.

The message has moved on, and in almost every customer story we heard this week we saw how successful, innovative businesses are focusing on connecting their customers – to each other, to partners, and to their employees.

Take a look over history and you’ll see that some of the most important innovations have tapped into that human need to communicate.

• The move from horse power to cars and trains enabled people to get to each other quicker.

• Radio, telephony and television enabled people to speak to each other on the other side of the world instantaneously.

• Companies like Cisco became world-leading enterprises by plugging the internet together to enable email and web communication.

• Facebook nears 1 billion users connecting people online, enabling instant communication with your network.

Communication is a basic human need, and yet even today many Enterprises have a hub and spoke mentality.  The only communication channel is between the vendor and the customer – and even that is often broken consisting of a bill and and upsell offer every quarter.

It is very easy for a customer to leave in this situation.  They have no allegiance to anyone else.  If another mobile company offers a better deal then why not switch?  Price comparison sites are everywhere to help them do it.

But take a look at the sports team you follow.  Your relationship is much broader – you interact not just with the club, but with the thousands of other fans.  It is an experience not a product.  Just because your team isn’t playing that well this season you don’t switch – you are committed for the long term.

So what do we do?

Enterprises need to start empathising with their customers.  Look at it from their viewpoint and understand how they could enrich their experience by connecting them with the rest of the corporate eco-system – the employees, the other customers, the machines they are using and the partners that supply them.

We saw great examples from Coca-Cola with roadside coke machines that recognise who you are, prepare your preferred mix, and share it with your friends on Facebook.  We saw how Virgin America are taking seat back entertainment to a new level by allowing passengers to socialise with others on the flight and track their personal relationship with Virgin while in flight.  We saw how Activision are enabling gamers to connect and compete with each other through innovative apps and really feel part of the game design process.

Every business can do this.  Connect your customers one by one.  Use the cloud to do it.  Transform your business.

That was my key takeaway from Dreamforce.  What did you get from the week?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

To me it seems clear that the key to driving adoption of Chatter is Executive engagement.  If the Execs of a company use Chatter consistently then other members of your team will follow.  If they do not, then employees feel it is not core to their job and they remain on email leaving your corporate dialogue in their inboxes.

Here are three tips I’ve heard to help drive Chatter adoption in your business.

Reverse mentors

This was mentioned in the Partner Keynote on Tuesday.  The idea is to take a handful of your social-savvy employees that understand what a hashtag is and what types of content to post, and to have them mentor a specific exec.

Remember that it doesn’t matter how senior you are, no-one likes to feel that they don’t know how something works, and reverse mentors can help bridge that gap for Execs, giving them the confidence to embrace Chatter even if they haven’t been regular tweeters.

Use Chatter consistently – “Chatter Me”

This tip I picked up in a Chatter session at Dreamforce last year.  The CIO of a large company said that he just stopped answering emails and only responded to Chatter.  Within days employees realised that if they wanted a response, they should Chatter him.  Your team members will communicate with Execs on the channels they use, so if you can encourage your Execs to be consistent and to ask team members to “Chatter Me” the company will follow.

Use Chatter on objects

For me this is the most powerful thing about Chatter.  A social network where you can talk about your day or ask for help is great, but asking for information about a specific opportunity, or following the story of a recent case – that is really cool.  Execs need to use Chatter on objects to ask about the status of an opportunity, or congratulate someone on servicing a customer.  This pulls in the rest of the team to Chatter and actually drives up adoption of the whole Salesforce platform giving you a better return on your investment.

Those are my three quick tips I’ve picked up.  I’d love to hear any other ways that you have been driving Chatter adoption in your business!

I sat in the Partner Keynote today and it was highlighted that a sales team would not be expected to function without a system of record – the Sales Force Automation, or CRM system.  A contact centre could not be expected to function without a system of record – a CRM system tied to the telephone.  But when it comes to Marketing, CMO’s have had to rely on multiple discrete systems holding differing sets of data about their prospects and customers.  There has not been one single system of record for CMOs and their teams to rely on and this week Salesforce intends to rectify that.

In 2011 Salesforce acquired Radian6 – a leading social media monitoring tool that lets companies sieve through the mass of social mentions and respond to those in greatest need.  To date Radian6 has remained a separate product with its own look and feel and has yet to be integrated with the core platform.

Earlier in 2012 Salesforce acquired Buddy Media, adding the capability to manage social campaigns on sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Again, as a recent purchase there has yet to be any integration.

This week we hope to see these two products become more entwined with each other, and with the core Salesforce platform – bringing together a single marketing solution for business.

McKinsey estimate that over $1 trillion is allocated to annual marketing budgets across the globe, with much of this being spent on un-tracked, un-auditable expenses like display advertising – as the famous saying goes “half of my marketing budget is wasted – I just don’t know which half!”  This week Salesforce hopes to offer CMO’s a new way of looking at marketing, treating customers as people instead of contacts and tracking them in one single system from tweet, to Facebook post, to ad click, to purchase.  Such a system of record offers CMO’s a concrete ROI that can help drive decision making and further accelerate the revenue engine.

For me, the one part that is still missing from the offering, but is offered by a range of great Salesforce partners, is the inbound marketing platform.  Companies like Hubspot, Marketo and Eloqua provide content marketing solutions that are a core requirement for the modern CMO.  It will be interesting to see if Salesforce makes an acquisition at some point to round out their Marketing Cloud offering!

What are your thoughts about Salesforce’s advances in this space?  What acquisitions would you like to see Salesforce make?  I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

1. See QR Code
2. Decide that it is worth scanning QR code
3. Get out smartphone and open QR code app
4. Worse still – go to App store and start browsing available QR code apps
5. Snap photo of QR code
6. Arrive at website/video/offer

For me this just seems a crazy amount of processes to get the consumer to your intended destination.  And I am a techy-geek.  I wouldn’t even want to imagine explaining what any of those list items even mean to my parents!

I can’t help thinking that the new world of Inbound Marketing has led some marketers to drive forward the QR Code craze.  Until recently it was acceptable to say “Half of my advertising budget is wasted – I just don’t know which half!”  Today that is not cool.  Today’s data driven marketer needs to know where every dollar is spent.

So what better way to track every TV ad, every message, every poster than dropping unique QR codes on them?  Suddenly you can identify every individual campaign without having to ask your consumers to quote TV027 to get their 10% discount.  On the face of it this is a valid strategy - but not if it is at the total expense of getting people to your content.

The problem is that in the drive for data you forget about the consumer and the problem you are trying to solve for them – getting them to valuable content as easily as possible.

On the Techcrunch comment I made the point that the problem with a QR code is that you can’t remember it.  Let me expand on that.

Take this blog for example – CharlieThinks.com.  If I met you at a drinks party and bored you with how I write a blog called CharlieThinks.com it’s in your mind.  You can remember it instantly and access it from any device later – your smartphone, iPad or work PC.

More so, you can easily share that information with friends, “I met this guy who writes a geeky blog – CharlieThinks.com.”  Your friend can easily remember and access that on any device they want.  I experience that when I see visitors arrive at the blog having searched for CharlieThinks or CharlieThinks.com.

However with a QR code you lock your consumer down to the single device they have in their pocket (unless they manually share links to other devices) and they are unable to share easily with their friends:

“I saw this awesome travel offer the other day!”

“Cool, how do I get to it?”

“Oh..there was this code….”

The challenge for marketers is to make it simple for consumers to get to specific pages using their memory (like “check out our Facebook page facebook.com/company” or “search for company name summer offer”).

Start with cool content, then work out how to get your consumers to that content easily and then work out how you track who has seen what.

I’d love to know what you think about QR codes!  Have you ever clicked on one?  Have you failed to take up an offer or go to a site because it required you to use a QR code?  Do you love QR codes and think I’ve got it wrong?

I hope you enjoyed this post, if so, please share with your network and scan the QR code to subscribe! (joke – enter your email address in the sidebar!)

Take email security for example.  Prior to cloud solutions a reseller might be expected to buy a box for a customer, install it at the customer site, connect it to their firewall, create and manage a rule base, and when it let viruses through jump in the car to get out to site and fix it.

With cloud based email services much of this disappeared – the service was turned on remotely and it just worked – the channel started to ask “Why would customers need us?”  For many the answer has been to co-brand, or re-brand services, or to bundle them up into a single front end application that the customer purchases – unaware perhaps of what sits behind.

The way customers buy is changing

But whilst the cloud army has advanced another revolution in enterprise technology has been taking place in the background – content marketing.

Marketing is no longer about one hit wonder activities – an expensive tradeshow or buying a list of names and calling into them.  Modern marketing understands that the modern buyer has access to all the information they need – websites, forums, social networks, blogs, e-books and so on.  The educated buyer demands that this information is available to him or her and once they have made their decision, then they will engage with a sales person.

The scary phrase in there is “once they have made their decision.”  No longer do you go to a computer store and ask the teenage shop assistant to advise you of the relative benefits of a PC, a Mac or a Chromebook.  You walk straight into the Apple Store (or online) and buy your Macbook with memory upgrade and laptop case.  You know what you want.

Forward thinking vendors understand this and are unleashing content marketing masterclasses – YouTube channels, e-books, content packs, training courses, How to Guides, Pinterest boards, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages.  Vendors are reaching out like never before to build that personal relationship with their potential customers ensuring that at the time when they are looking for a solution to a problem they are top of mind.

The challenge for the Channel is to understand where they now fit in to this new world.  If I have spent the last 18 months building up a relationship with the vendor directly on social networks and now you want me to buy through a third party I’m going to be confused.  I’ve decided I want to buy an Apple, but now you are selling me something called a Pear?

For Channel Partners to succeed in the world of content marketing they will need to embrace the vendor’s brand – and accept that the customer is already immersed in their message.  The concept of “reselling” (buying and selling on) is passing.  VAR’s will need to focus on the VA and less on the R.  Value Added Consultants may be a more appropriate term.

Channel partners can still provide significant value by being local, by offering a consistent high level of support around purchasing (helping the client through the buying process), implementation (leveraging their experience) and ongoing support (triaging support questions quickly) and for this reason many cloud businesses are busy building substantial channel programmes.

Channel partners should embrace their vendors’ content marketing programmes.  In the past vendors provided a partner portal where resellers could download unbranded datasheets and product info with the view of rebranding it.  It was expensive, it didn’t work, and it wasted a lot of time.  By leveraging the vendor’s content marketing programme, ensuring that their customers are attending webinars, visiting websites, reading e-books and following Twitter feeds channel partners can ensure their customers are educated and understand that they really have a trusted advisor working with them.

What do you think of the risk to Channel of content marketing?  How can channel partners evolve into the new world?  I’d love to know your thoughts on this idea!

But I have a problem.  My head can’t cope.

On each of my networks I have different groups of friends, so if I want to discuss the Olympic Opening Ceremony for example, I need to decide which network to post it on.  If I post it on multiple sites, I now need to follow conversations on each site.

Imagine holding a party with your work friends, your family, your personal friends and some people you met on a work trip.  But instead of taking them to a bar, you invite them to your house and put each group in their own room.  You now spend the rest of your evening going to each room in turn asking a question, or telling a funny story.  As you move from room to room you start to forget which story you told in which room, which room gave you the answer to which question, and which of your friends knows each other.

The stress of it actually makes my forehead warm up!

You could say the aggregators like Tweetdeck or Hootsuite are the answer – but their value really lies in pushing messages out to multiple channels, not listening to all your conversations in a single view (yes they are on a single screen, but it isn’t one conversation).

Social online is like social offline – listen 10 times more than you speak.  So, having an aggregator to push out your messages is great, but my problem is about listening to 5 different conversations at once.

And so ultimately I have to make a decision to pick one room to stay in, at least for a day, or a week.

Most evenings, it is Twitter – I love the constant stream of tech news, inspiring quotes and TV commentary.

Some days it is Facebook – this worked a treat on the Opening Ceremony as my wife was out, but many personal friends were online.

LinkedIn’s new stream is an improvement, but its not something that I would spend more than a few minutes on yet.

Google+ I love, and I really hope more people start using it actively.

Are Social Networks doomed like IM was?

My problem is, that as more social networks arrive, the time spent on each decreases, and potentially the value of the network reduces.  IM ultimately failed to dominate because it wasn’t federated, and the same is happening again with social networks.

I don’t know what the answer is, I just know it is a problem.

What do you think?  Does your head hurt trying to stay on top of so many social networks?  Do you get drawn back to one, just because that is where your friends are?  Could an aggregator like Tweetdeck ever make it seem like one single conversation?

I’d love to know what you think!

A key part of Eric’s book is the concept of build, measure, learn.  Build your MVP, measure it’s success against some key metrics, and learn what you need to do to improve your numbers in the next iteration, then build it, measure it and learn again.  Now power through this cycle tens or hundreds of times a day if you can.

But what metrics should you measure?  Eric splits them into:

• vanity metrics (how many sign ups this month?)
• actionable metrics (what percentage of this month’s sign-ups logged in?)

With vanity metrics it is easy to make yourself feel happy.  You just laid down money on a marketing campaign and the number of signups has gone up.  But this doesn’t teach you anything (other than to spend more money on marketing and PR).

With an actionable metric we can look at the percentage of signups that logged in, and come up with ideas that could turn it up – perhaps a change in the position of the login button on the site, or better wording.  We can then split test, or just make this single change, and observe the result.  If our test proves successful we keep the change, if not we revert and come up with a new test.

All of your actionable metrics together become your funnel, and any start-up CEO should go to bed thinking of their funnel, dream about their funnel, and wake up in the morning ready to optimise their funnel.

Chief Funnel Officer

The stages of your funnel

In a start-up you have a handful of committed people who all have wide ranging responsibility for keeping the ship afloat.  But what happens in Mid-to-Large enterprises?  At this size departments are set up – Marketing, Sales, Product, Operations, Legal, Finance – all working as silos into their own Director or VP who reports into the CEO.

Where is the funnel now?  Who owns it?  No-one.

Here are some critical areas of large business that are well known to be broken and the actionable metrics that could represent them:

• attendees at webinars and events that turn into leads/trials (% of names that become leads)
• the handover of leads from marketing to sales (% of leads that convert to opportunities)
• the movement of opportunities from stage to stage (% of opps that move to the next stage)
• the legal contract with clients (% of deals that are lost due to contractuals)
• the closure of opportunities (conversion ratio)
• the successful implementation of closed deals (% of won deals that get delivered)
• the successful billing of deals (% of won deals that pay on time, or at all)
• the successful first 30 days (% of won deals that raise cases in the first 30 days)
• references (% of won deals that act as references via case study or recommendation)
• renewal (% of won deals that renew after minimum contract)
• referral (% of won deals that refer in new business leads)

In most businesses no one person owns this funnel and has responsibility for all the actionable metrics within it.  As such the handover between marketing and sales, or sales and operations, or operations and support is ripe for inefficiency and poor communication.  He said, she said, and the customer loses out.

Consider having a single cross-functional role, reporting directly to the CEO who reports every month on every metric in this funnel – you might call them a Chief Funnel Officer, or a Chief Customer Officer. Optimise your business and you might prevent a Lean Startup snapping at your heals!

As a larger business do you manage your funnel to the same degree as a startup?  Do you have a Chief Funnel Officer (or Chief Customer Officer) who is responsible for the end to end process?

I’d love to hear your thoughts here on the blog!