Solving The Value Equation

Revenue Leadership For The Digital Economy: Why Buyerlytics

Today’s buyers have more information and resources than ever.  But they also have less time, trust their peers and friends for recommendations, and yet are still creatures of emotion and habits.

Sales analytics allows for faster, more robust and accurate personalization based on buyer preferences, budgets, and readiness. In short, analytics helps find the sweet spot in the market, focuses resources on customer when they are ready to buy, and provides the insights on how to best close the sell.

Buyerlytics is the application of analytics at every stage of the sales process. Buyerlytics enables us to understand each individual customer to create personalized sales and service customer experiences using science to identify, score, and segment buyers based on their preferences.

Cold calling is dead. Dialing for dollars is a legacy concept of the past and simply does not work in today’s Internet world. Pre-call research is a prerequisite to solution selling as customers want to buy and not be sold. A critical success factor is to know and understand the profile and preferences of your customers before the sales process initiates.

Sales analytics ensures:

• Scalability: Focus resources based on segments and preferences.
• ROI: Driven by business intelligence.
• Efficiency: Patterns in customer behavior govern sales and marketing actions around unique customer needs.
• Loyalty: Personalized experiences includes customized offers that evolve over time as customers’ behaviors change.

Work smarter not harder with analytics.

Analytics offers the crucial ability to transform data into insight and uncover opportunities for growth. The revenue science which can be applied using sales analytics includes:

1. Segmentation Analytics
2. Pricing Analytics
3. Profitability Analytics
4. Bundling Analytics
5. Prospecting Analytics
6. Channel Optimization Analytics
7. Workforce Management Analytics
8. Sales Resources Analytics
9. Predictive Selling

By taking a more scientific approach to selling and applying sales analytics judgment and intuition are aided with fact based decision making.

Read more online:

• Download more information on buyerlytics here.
• Buyerlytics presentations
• bringing science to selling whitepaper.

Breaking Silos to Improve Performance : The Social Management of Work

People are inherently social. The trouble is, organizations typically do not harness this natural inclination well. Rather, they create barriers that hinder how employees engage with one another, and limit agility in how they collaborate
and make decisions.

They do this by forming complex hierarchies and reporting structures, excessively layering new processes and controls without reviewing or removing existing ones, as well as creating functional silos with defined yet competing interests.
In an effort to control and converge the way people work, organizations have hindered their productivity and increased bureaucracy—so much so that traditional management think is no longer working. Employees and employers alike are looking for a new way of interacting that’s more productive, more efficient and more responsive to what’s happening here and now—not what was happening when all these processes and hierarchies were created.

By redefining how we manage, and by striving to better reflect how people want to work in an information-based knowledge economy, we can improve communication and collaboration, and eliminate waste. This is what social management at work is all about and we’re already doing it ourselves.

Read the full paper here:

The Social Management of Work whitepaper

The silos present in many traditional business structures have the effect of limiting access to critical communication—not only vertically but also horizontally.

While some hierarchy is necessary—the buck has to stop somewhere—social management ignores the idea that “cascades” must only occur within silos. Instead, it embraces a more transparent and flattened business structure, facilitated by perpetual (rather than linear) processes, and by social technology.

It’s new technology and a new mindset.

Businesses willing to implement social technology and to adopt the mindset necessary to support its complete adoption have seen the greatest gains. Those that implemented social technology in one vertical only, or for just one process, have seen fluctuating gains and inconsistencies.

 

Perpetual management processes, aided by social technology, allow organizations and managers to augment event management with process management. In an organization that follows an event management approach, the goal is
business as usual, and only the exceptions are exceptional. However, in an organization driven by a perpetual management approach, the goal is continuous
improvement on every front. When social technology is integrated into this approach, the gains can increase productivity up to 25 percent. However, the danger of social technology is similar to any other technology— companies that see the tool as the solution will stumble. It is critical that
innovation and advancement occur simultaneously.

Organizations that are interested in seeing the benefits must be bold enough to bring both the social technology and the management tools to their employees in parallel.

The way we work is changing, and businesses must be ready to tailor social technology to their own needs; integrate that technology into their business processes; and manage the people, the technology and outcomes effectively.
Instead of holding fast to linear, control-driven ways of working and managing, organizations must find ways to integrate social technologies across all areas of their business. They are now being challenged to manage differently, and in
a way that better reflects how people want to work in an information-based, knowledge economy.

Ultimately, social management—and the technology that facilitates it—is about improving communication and collaboration and eliminating waste. It’s about
finding ways to make better business decisions, to engage employees in the strategic intent of the organization and to improve performance.

Social management has worked for us and for many of our clients. If you’d like to know more, please get in touch. @ephorG

YTD 2013 M&A Transactions Recap

YTD 2013 M&A Forecast & Landscape:

We anticipate M&A activity to be quite robust over the next 9 to 18 months as SaaS technology expands and as service providers consolidate to become solution providers.

 

Mergers and acquisitions in the B2B software, information technology and BPO services continued at a fast clip in Q1 2013 (# of 2012 deals rose over 2011 levels).

• Strategic acquirers have been focusing on complementary acquisitions, with the majority of transactions less than $100M and seeking complimentary assets/capabilities and also distressed or stagnant businesses without access to capital (stuck in the growth capital liquidity trap).

For companies with less than $10 million in EBITDA there is a shortage of financial acquirers as private equity firms have focused predominantly on companies with $10 million in EBITDA or more.

The Bottom line: The race is on for both IP and market share dominance as BPOs and solution providers as well as enterprise software vendors look to fill gaps in their product and service strategies.

 

Related articles:

2013 Marketing services M&A Valuations, Multiple Outlook

How Cloud Computing Is Redefining the M&A Landscape

PWC 2013 US technology M&A insights