Give Me What I Really Want: Best Customer, Best Practice |  |
- Give Me What I Really Want: Best Customer, Best Practice
- Daisy Hernandez of SAP StreamWork: Collaboration in the Cloud
- Pay Attention Jensen!
- Important Questions Can Define Your Small Business
| Give Me What I Really Want: Best Customer, Best Practice Posted: 16 Mar 2012 11:30 AM PDT When it comes to business, customers are everything. It's not the product, the fancy name or the cool logo. It's the people that know, like, trust and want what you have. If customers are primary to your business, then there are a few things to always pay attention to.
Who is Your Best Customer?Not only do you need to know who your target market is, you need to know them by name. There is a big difference between a casual shopper and the loyal customer who sings your praise like you're a best friend. In “Meet Customer Centricity: CRM's Dynamic Replacement,” Yvonne DiVita interviewed Peter Fader, author of Customer Centricity and he says:
In order to do that, you have to know who your best customers are and take extra special care of them. What Does Your Customer Need to Hear From You?It's not about the story that you want to tell or the catchy phrases that you want to use. It's about the story that your customers need and want to hear from you. Instead of being clever with your marketing, just tell your story. In “What Commercials Can Teach You About Your Customer Base,” Diane Helbig says:
Sincerity has a way of connecting. To make the most of it, know your audience and then tell your story in every medium that you can. How Do You Make Sure Your Customer is Satisfied?You ask, and then make adjustments to what you hear. But instead of the typical questionnaires and data research, John Mariotti in “A Sure Way To Know Customers Were Satisfied” suggests that you narrow your survey down to two core questions:
Your customers — potential and current — will tell you what they need and want. Learn to hear them.
From Small Business Trends |
| Daisy Hernandez of SAP StreamWork: Collaboration in the Cloud Posted: 16 Mar 2012 08:30 AM PDT Collaborating in the cloud has opened up a whole new world in business, especially with so many now working mobile or virtually. Gone are the days of time lags when attempting to get your hands on the information you need, right here, right now. Cloud collaboration permits access to this information immediately and it allows everyone to be on the same page, in real time, and this can now even include clients and customers. There’s a lot going on in the cloud and Daisy Hernandez of SAP StreamWork joins Brent Leary to discuss the benefits. * * * * *
Daisy Hernandez: Sure, currently I run the business strategy for SAP Streamwork. Prior to being with SAP, I have come from Oracle which acquired BEA, which acquired Plumtree. My primary responsibility is really around collaborations suite, collaborative business software and how to bring people together in terms of gaining information that they need and driving productivity. Small Business Trends: How has the cloud changed collaboration from just a few short years ago? Daisy Hernandez: Certainly one of the powers of being in the cloud is the ability to extend your social network beyond just the company walls. Every day we think of working with our colleagues, but in actuality, we work with partners, vendors and customers all the time. A lot of the interactions are collaborative in nature, trying to evaluate an RFP (request for proposal) for a customer or trying to close a deal. Small Business Trends: When most people think about the cloud and collaboration they tend to focus on the external side of customer/company engagement. Do you think they take full advantage the other benefits of the cloud? Daisy Hernandez: Certainly customer acquisition is very important and one style of collaboration in the cloud. But collaboration is really built into almost every single business process that you can think of. Imagine a world where you are able to now bring data from all of these customers that you are talking to and now drive business processes internally by having collaborative discussions around how can we turn around this market, or how can we improve our top line and make concrete decisions with your colleagues. Small Business Trends: Are there some particular areas in the organization that you see have the biggest or quickest benefit? Daisy Hernandez: Sure, right now at SAP we are certainly using that feature to engage with some of the customers. The professional services organization definitely can leverage the collaborative nature of being able to engage with the customer throughout the life cycle of the project or the engagement. Having everyone on the same page as far as where they are on the project and any issues they can address quickly. Because of the way the application triggers notification to people, making sure they are still engaged with that particular project. The reason why they are able to do this with the customer is because in the cloud, the customer can easily join in the activity space they are using to handle that kind of engagement. Small Business Trends: What kind of organizational/culture changes does a company need to do in order to take advantage of this kind of collaborative? Daisy Hernandez: The most important company cultural change is openness and transparency. There has to be a willingness to hold yourselves accountable and not feel uncomfortable with the fact that this engagement is progressing and everybody knows. Small Business Trends: The impact that internal collaboration has on customer acquisition has to be important. Daisy Hernandez: There are certain decisions that a company has to make in order to figure out how to improve. We need to make this information or these conversations available internally. Then we have to drive the next set of conversations to figure out what the next steps are. Then you can determine how we are going to make this change to the policy; or make this change in the campaign; or change our strategy. You can see the cycle and map back to how the decisions help improve customer acquisition, which then in turn, cycles back and says, “Now we look back and do we actually meet our measures of success? Was our decision a good one? If not what would we change?” Small Business Trends: What are some ways people can measure the impact and the importance of collaborating in the cloud? Daisy Hernandez: Assuming that we are talking about collaboration in the context of business processes, with decision making; certainly the time to address obstacles, the time it takes to close out exceptions – basically time. How do you now improve and drive the top line by improving the business processes you now have internally? Small Business Trends: What are some of the best ways to get started leveraging the cloud to be more productive and more collaborative internally? Daisy Hernandez: First and foremost, it is to have a use case. What I mean by that is, if people have identified a business process where they feel can be improved through collaboration, I think that is the most important thing. The reason why I said that is because right now with the first round of social collaboration, it is a lot of commoditized features of broad based social networking. Is it an important piece of function that you need in collaboration? What is infectious is getting the work done, not finding out what someone had for lunch or what they did over the weekend. If customers or people really are interested in being serious about getting cloud and social collaboration into their business so that it becomes adopted, it needs to have business value, and the only way to have business value is if it actually impacts a company's top or bottom line. Small Business Trends: Where can people go to learn more about stream work? Daisy Hernandez: SAP StreamWork. This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.
From Small Business Trends This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now |
| Posted: 16 Mar 2012 05:30 AM PDT
Animals in meetings are funny. They just are. Whenever I’m stumped for a cartoon, I take a random species, populate a conference room with it and see what happens. For this cartoon it was cats. What would they talk about? What was their agenda? Would they all be asleep? Before this final version I think I had them on their smartphones comparing nap scheduling, but I ended up with something inspired by one of my own cats. When asked to move off of my spot on the couch, she looked at me for a moment, then at the paw she’d been licking, and then kept licking as if I were never there. From Small Business Trends |
| Important Questions Can Define Your Small Business Posted: 16 Mar 2012 02:30 AM PDT Sometimes starting and running a successful small business has to do with constantly asking the right questions. In this post, we decided to share some important examples to get you started. Think we missed one? Share it in the comment section below. Key ConsiderationsHow does your product or service stand out? Sure it’s important to do some marketing, but your business also needs to gain attention on it’s own merit. Get dressed up in a silly outfit, if you must, but also remember a quality product or service is most important. WSJ How can you avoid these seven tech blunders? You wouldn’t be the first and won’t be the last, but as you build your business remember, technology will almost certainly be an important tool. Don’t let it be a liability as well. Inc.com Startup & GrowthAre you getting lost in the details of start-up? You know what we’re talking about, of course. There are a million details to launching any small business. But getting mired in the little stuff can stall your forward motion. Small Business Trends Do you have a customer referral program that works? The key to success for your small business in the early days will be referrals from satisfied customers. Keeping this in mind, how easy have you made it for your fans to spread the word? Black Dog Education Communications BasicsIs your blog achieving the right results? There are plenty of ways a blog can help your business. Heck, sometimes your blog is the business. But don’t give into the hype about making huge revenues from blogging. Here’s the reality. Marketing Professor How do you publish your eBook to Kindle? It may become as influential as publishing a blog. Creating eBook content gives you another important opportunity to get your message out there. Here’s a step by step guide. Copyblogger Support & OperationsHow can you make it easy to accept credit cards? We all know it’s an important part of doing business these days. Accepting credit cards makes things easier for your customers, but how can you avoid all the hassle connected with the process? Bloomberg Businessweek What key information must you protect? Your business information is your business these days. That’s the case, whether you run your business from a laptop in an isolated corner or from a downtown business suite. Extreme John Final TipsWhat important tax tips can help your business? There are plenty of tax tips out there this time of year, but we picked some that tackle the mistaken perceptions many small business folks have about filing their returns. Tire Review How can you train a social media marketer? You know the importance of social media to your business, but you may not have time to handle that detail yourself. Here are some ideas for training someone else to handle your social media marketing. Social Media Examiner From Small Business Trends |
Small Business Trends: We are going to talk a little bit about the cloud and collaboration, but before we do that can you tell us a little bit about your background?
Whether you’re growing your business or starting a new venture, BlackBerry solutions provide you with the freedom you want and the control you need. [Series sponsor]
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