Blog | MindTouch

2013 Top 100 Influencers in #KM – Knowledge Management

April 11th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Most Influential

In an effort to chart the power nodes in the social graph of various technology industry disciplines, MindTouch has a history of researching and producing a list of influencers. This began as an internal project to understand sectors important to MindTouch and since 2009 MindTouch has published these reports to the advantage of the community at large. Last week we shared our internal annual report of Techcomm influencers that we produced using LittleBird. This year, MindTouch also analyzed Knowledge Management influencers. As has been the case in the past, MindTouch is again making this list available to the community with the hope that this will strengthen the community, create new relationship and hopefully spark some discussion.

If you have customers, knowledge management is a huge deal companies can not ignore. As the complexity and cost of KM tools becomes more accessible the usage of these tools are spreading to small and medium enterprises that previously couldnt afford the cost or complexity. Moreover, these technologies are getting dramatically better as the become more collaborative. As we’ve mentioned before, all content streams eventually lead back to your company’s doorstep so harness that knowledge and manage it well.

Knowledge management is part art, part science, and maybe even a little voodoo. Here’s the first 25 influencers in our list of folks who really know what KM is all about:

Here’s the entire list of 100 names to know in #KM. Now, before you get riled up because you know that Kate Leggett and Esteban Kolsky are hugely influential and they (or someone similar) are not in the top 100, consider this:

Aaron Fulkerson writes

GetLittleBird does an amazing job of assessing influencers based on a variety of factors native to Twitter (today just Twitter). One principal indicator of influence is the number of influencers that follow a given person on a specific network. In this case, that network is Twitter. If one is not active on the network being measured will they rank highly? No. Does this mean they are less influential? Yes, on that network.

We know there are several profoundly influential people not represented here. However, it should be clear that this list constitutes a core group of influencers in the KM space on Twitter.

Most Influential KM Are you on the influencer list? Congratulations, here’s your badge! You’ve earned it for your work in pushing the edges of your field. You’re an innovator who’s elevating and promoting your field. Thank you. Grab the code below and display your badge with pride. You’re in excellent company.

Grab this snippet to add your badge to your website or blog:

<a href="http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2013/04/10/influencers-in-knowledge-management" title="MindTouch Most Influential in KM"><img src="http://cdn.mindtouch.com/www/KM_influencer.png" alt="Most Influential in KM" border="0" ></a>

Check back to find out who made the list of top 100 influencers in customer support and customer experience or follow us on Twitter to find out right away when we post the next list.

MindTouch Core and Platform: ‘This is the End, Beautiful Friend’

April 9th, 2013 | Aaron Fulkerson | MindTouch, Product

With the exception of existing customers, MindTouch will no longer support or maintain Core or Platform. If you are an existing customer of MindTouch Platform, this year—2013—will be your last opportunity to renew Platform, MindTouch will support and maintain your deployment for the full annual term and all future purchases of licenses will have to be of our current product. While those existing customer of Platform can renew this year, or buy a perpetual license, I encourage you to upgrade to our latest version, which is cloud only, literally two orders of magnitude more performant, more secure and just generally a much better product.

MindTouch Core, the free and open source version, was originally released in July, 2006. That early release was a prototype of what was to come. A year later Core was ranked one of the most popular open source projects in the world by Sourceforge.net.

In 2008, MindTouch introduced a commercial version we named Platform. Core and Platform have been used by many millions of people all over the world and these will undoubtedly continue to be used for years to come. Core has been forked and there are more hosting providers than I could count that provide packages and hosting. All of us at MindTouch are very proud of these two products. They’ve served more people than I ever expected at our humble beginnings in the basement of my condo in Maplewood, MN and Steve’s apartment in Redmond, WA.

Core/Platform has been used to build a variety collaborative applications; these have ranged from Amazon’s social network for book enthusiasts Shelfari.com to social Intranet infrastructures at the largest telcos and even in the Pentagon. When properly installed and configured the product is damn near bullet-proof. Over the years we’ve received awards for the engineering quality and I’ve had the privilege of hearing remarkable stories from all over the world that attest to the durability of our work.

In late 2009, we set a course for MindTouch that would ensure the end of Core/Platform. We were determined to move away from packaging and shipping on-premise software. It just doesn’t make sense to ship software. The effort required to package and test for several flavors of Windows, various Linux distros and virtualization environments was effort that can be invested in making the product better for customers. It was clear that a cloud delivered product meant we could innovate faster and provide a vastly superior product to our customers.

The End by Peter Zoon via Flickr

In 2010, MindTouch launched our first enterprise grade cloud delivered product. We moved from a 4-6 month release cycle to a weekly release cycle and we haven’t looked back since. By the end of 2010 we began the process of upgrading our Platform customer base and informing Platform customers that this on-premise product would be sunsetting over the next two years. Well, it’s been more than two years now. We’ve managed to produce a major version release since then and put out more than the promised two maintenance releases a year for Core/Platform (average was four per year).

Today 90% of our business is on our cloud product. The difference between our cloud offering and the old Core/Platform builds is sufficiently profound as to render the two entirely unrecognizable. These are two completely different products. If you’re a Core/Platform user I encourage you to request a trial of MindTouch cloud. We stopped selling new Platform licenses in late 2011 and today we have a small base of customers that should upgrade because the cloud product is just so much better. If you wish to maintain a MindTouch deployment, but you can not use cloud—presumably because corporate security constraints are more stringent than the Central Intelligence Agency—you can purchase a perpetual Platform license.

What does this mean if you’ve already purchased a renewal this year? Nothing changes for you other than you will not be able to purchase a new Platform license next year. You will still receive the same level of support through the term of your license. If you have an annual license this will expire next year. If you have a perpetual license you can, of course, continue to use this license in perpetuity, but after the term of your support plan purchased this year you will not be able to purchase support again.

What if I have a perpetual Platform license or I am interested in purchasing a perpetual Platform license? Great. Business as usual. However, I strongly encourage you to consider the cloud product for the aforementioned reasons.

Will MindTouch continue to maintain the MindTouch Core code base? No. Today the MindTouch Cloud codebase is already 4 years forked from MindTouch Core.

Will MindTouch continue to maintain SGMLReader, MindTouch DReAM and continue to contribute to other open source projects you have in the past ? Yes.

Images by Peter Zoon and Andrew Feinberg.

2013 Top 100 Influencers in #Techcomm

April 4th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Featured Post, Let's Talk Techcomm, Most Influential, Tech Comm

It’s time once again for the annual MindTouch list of top influencers in techcomm, customer service, customer experience, and knowledge management! As in years past, our goal is to give back to the community based on tools we use to make our business better. We used the nifty Twitter search and reporting service Little Bird to compile lists of the 100 most engaged and connected people in each of the four categories.

Our lists go beyond the influencers you might already know and direct you to the ones you should know. Little Bird calls these influencers the most emergent — they may not be on your radar screen yet, but they will be soon.

We’ll announce the top 100 influencers in customer service, customer experience, and knowledge management in the next few days but let’s get started right now with the top influencers in #techcomm. Here’s the first 25:

Now go check out the full list of the top 100 influencers in #techcomm. Because we want to make your life easier, we’ve also compiled a Twitter list so you can follow all of these amazing folks with one click.

Are you on our influencer list? Congratulations, here’s your badge! You’ve earned it for your work in pushing the edges of your field. You’re an innovator who’s elevating and promoting your field. Thank you. Grab the code below and display your badge with pride. You’re in excellent company.

You can use this snippet to add your badge to your website or blog:

<a href="http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/2013/04/04/2013-influencers-in-techcomm" title="MindTouch Most Influential Techcomm"><img src="http://cdn.mindtouch.com/www/techcomm.png" alt="Most Influential Techcomm" border="0" ></a>

Check back to find out who made the list of top 100 influencers in content strategy, customer experience, and knowledge management, or follow us on Twitter to find out right away when we post the next list.

Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang on Building an Effective Customer Interaction Strategy

April 3rd, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Customer, Customer Experience Strategy

“Delight your customers.”

“Content is king.”

“Embrace your user community.”

These are a few of the many key phrases that continually crop up in conversations about customer engagement and they’re clearly very important. Trouble is, they define the why these concepts are necessary but fall short tackling the question of how to make it happen. Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, Inc, has some answers.

Wang acknowledges that the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty high when it comes to engagement. He says that to be effective, companies need use multiple channels to identify customers, figure out what motivates them, gain acceptance, establish credibility, hold their attention, and keep them coming back for more — all without creating what he calls “channel fatigue.” That’s a tall order to fill from a very small window of opportunity.

Worry not, fearless business owners. Wang has come up with a scaffold of nine engagement strategies you can build around your company’s customer outreach plan to strengthen your market position and let customers know you’re listening.

Wang outlined his key concepts during a Software Advice video interview at the 2013 SXSW Interactive Festival. His discussion, “Building Your Interaction Strategy with the 9 C’s of Engagement,” takes a hard look at what components are necessary to create a three-pronged strategic approach of people-centric values, delivery styles, and right-time action designed to get results. We encourage you to watch the short video for a clear understanding of how Wang’s action plan works.

Take special note of the “Currency” component, where he share some terrific ideas on non-monetary customer engagement and why it’s important. Here’s a sneak peek from Wang’s guest post over at Harvard Business Review:

The last piece is choosing the right time drivers to provide a why, when, and where in engagement. The goal is to inspire action through context, catalysts, and currencies…. [C]urrencies influence behavior through an exchange of value. Monetary models include traditional cash, bonuses, rewards, and rebates, but non-monetary currencies such as virtual goods, recognition, access, and influence can often be more powerful.

Intangible currencies like recognition and “influencer status” can be enormously motivating to customers. Indeed, entire business models are built around the idea. Fortunately, in-house systems to support up-voting or other methods of highlighting accurate, helpful user-generated content are easy to implement.

An amazing customer experience strategy is no longer just a goal in a dusty mission statement or something that just passively happens while you’re off building the next version of your product. Use Wang’s “9 C’s of Engagement” as a blueprint for taking charge of your customer interaction and making it awesome.

Image: InfoMoFo

Updates from the Code Caves

March 29th, 2013 | Aaron Fulkerson | Product

MindTouch engineering and Devops run their own product blog at http://blog.mindtouch.us where they provide weekly updated on new features, performance enhancements and bug fixes. Yesterday, we released new features for all MindTouch Cloud customers and a few weeks ago we announced performance improvements that were pretty outstanding.

Based on customer feedback, MindTouch has made sweeping changes to user and group management that makes the experience easier and faster.

Managing Users

Administrators now have the ability to filter users live by the following attributes:

Status (Active/Inactive)
User Type
User Role
Group Membership

In addition, options for editing users such as adding to a group or deactivating a user will show up when a user is selected.

For more information read the administrator guide. Reading about support for Active Directory/LDAP and single-sign-on might also be of interest to you.

MindTouch Launches Product Experience Platform: Proactively Supports Customer Success

March 28th, 2013 | Tasha Swift | Featured Post, Press Release

New Cloud-based MindTouch Software Drives Product Strategy, Customer Loyalty, Content Strategy and Customer Support by Transforming Product Help

SAN DIEGO, CA. March 28, 2013— MindTouch, today announced a new product experience software application that provides web-based self help, knowledge-as-a-service, user driven machine learning optimization and dynamic content organization with conditional and personalization capabilities.

“What we hear repeatedly is companies want to make the customer experience proactive, not reactive,” said Aaron Fulkerson, founder and CEO of MindTouch.

MindTouch, the company that applies web, social and mobile software innovations to product help, serves a range of Fortune 1000 enterprises and small-to-medium enterprises with software to power product help experiences as a strategic initiative to improve customer support, customer retention programs, inform product strategy and become increasingly effective with content strategy.

“With contextual and personalized product knowledge plugged into all customer channels, you make advocates out of your customers well in advance of them needing reactive help to a specific problem. We believe MindTouch is the first company to offer product experience software. This is about a proactive customer success experience that stops customer problems before they occur.”

Introducing the MindTouch LightSpeed Content FrameworkThis new MindTouch cloud-based software includes a web based self-service help center, in-product contextual help system, seamless integration with CRM and case management software like Salesforce, SAP OnDemand and Zendesk and with it come powerful performance enhancing features:

With the launch of this MindTouch platform comes the LightSpeed Content Framework, an ultra fast and easy to use, specialized content framework. Delivering multi-channel product help is now easier, faster and more effective than ever before. Content can be collaboratively authored in a web-based environment that allows subject matter experts from across the organization, or even external partners and customers, to contribute their knowledge seamlessly and rapidly without having to become experts in using an authoring tool. What is more, content within LightSpeed is dynamically organized to maximize discovery. For example, readers can browse linearly, across topics and are presented related knowledge paths to accelerate understanding.

Launching MindTouch HelpRank

MindTouch HelpRank is a collection of new proprietary algorithms that continuously optimize the customer help experience. By analyzing end user and support agent behavior across all customer channels, MindTouch HelpRank dramatically and continuously improves both search results as well as the organization of knowledge within the LightSpeed framework.

Now, for the first time, companies are able to quickly detect trends in customer support, help content, product experience and customer lifecycle and react immediately across all customer channels to improve customer experience.

Industry Perspectives On Growing Importance of Self Service Customer and Product Experience:

Growing importance of proactive customer care: 29% of enterprises are currently investing in proactive outbound communications according to the Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey. In its recent report “Customers Expect Proactive Outbound Communication,” Forrester’s Kate Leggett wrote, “We predict that the range of channels for proactive outbound will increase, and will include service alerts, workarounds, customized cross-sell and upsell offers, and new knowledge base content.”
Customer Impatience: 71% of customers require help within five minutes (nearly a third demand help immediately) states the LivePerson survey of more than 5,700 consumers in 6 western countries, which then goes on to show that 48% of these survey respondents said if they don’t receive help within 5 minutes, they abandon the web site.
Revenue and economic impact: US enterprises lose an estimated $83 billion each year, reports folono, due to poor customer experience resulting in defections and abandoned purchases.
Corporate costs of poor social help: A survey of more than 1,400 customer care executives by CustomerServiceInTheCloud.com (a community of customer experience professionals) found that when social help fails, 40% of customers pick up a phone and call a company which costs $15 per call; 15% of customers go to an online chat session which costs $5 and 17% of customers send an email which costs $3.

Additional MindTouch Materials

Using Knowledge-as-a-Service for Proactive Support: offers insights into a proactive support program by MindTouch CEO Aaron Fulkerson.
Salesforce.com and MindTouch Announce Partnership:This video between MindTouch and Salesforce in the Fall of 2012 talks about how the two companies will work together to integrate products and the value that integration will bring to Salesforce customers.

Image Resources

http://www.mindtouch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/customize-successfactors.png

http://www.mindtouch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/organize-learn.png

http://www.mindtouch.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/help-rank.png

About MindTouch

MindTouch is revolutionizing the way companies deliver help and product content by applying a decade of innovation from web and social software to make customer support faster, easier and more satisfying. With MindTouch, consumers and support agents get the right answers faster. Collaboratively author or convert existing technical, help and product content into a two-way communication channel that increases self-service support, agent effectiveness and customer happiness. As a cloud delivered product, MindTouch can be deployed in a day and begin delivering value that same week. Millions use MindTouch every day. Great companies like SuccessFactors, Intuit, Paypal, Autodesk, Hewlett-Packard, Palm, HTC, RSA, SAP and EMC rely on MindTouch. Read more at www.MindTouch.com.

Contact:
For MindTouch:
Bret Clement
Clement Communications
303.462.3057
bret.clement AT clementcom.com

MindTouch 2012 – Busting Records

March 25th, 2013 | Aaron Fulkerson | MindTouch

Hello World! MindTouch had a great 2012.

Roe Fulkerson

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged at MindTouch.com. As I start to write this I find myself a bit giddy. Sure, in part because of what I’m about to share, but primarily because I really miss writing for the MindTouch community. I’m scheduling some time every week to get a post out right now…

…Ok done.

Now about 2012, we crushed it. Here’s how:

we more than doubled our customers on MindTouch Cloud and
we increased sales by 450%.

For calendar Q1, 2013 MindTouch has grown by ~30% putting us on track for ~300% growth in 2013. Q1 is typically our slowest quarter though #justSaying.

Some of the new big names we added as customers in 2012 (off the top of my head) included: Blackboard.com, SuccessFactors, HTC (announcment with all the exciting details due out in April), Wind River, Citrix, XRS Corp, Gensler, RSA, Paypal Germany, Wolters-Kluer, Rogers Communication and Hewlet-Packard. I’ll throw in Zuora as a bonus too because I love those guys.

What do I attribute our growth to? Well, I’m glad you asked. We’re solving a hard problem for our customers and MindTouch does this in a very differentiated way. We’re helping our customers deliver an awesome Product Experience by helping their users receive proactive support across all customer channels. Here’s a nice overview that will help you understand this with more detail: http://mndt.ch/2brief.

Who’s Responsible for Providing Your Authoritative Content?

March 25th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post

Recently, we took a look at the how and why of authoritative content. Now that you’re convinced of its importance, lets talk about how who’s responsible for providing the high-quality content you need to best serve your customers. (Hint: It takes more people than you think.)

There’s no single magic bullet, master wordsmith, or staff role that provides you with all the content you could ever need, because authoritative content comes from many different places and all of them are important. In the same way that all roads lead to Rome, all content streams eventually lead back to your company’s doorstep.

Let’s take a look at the most common places smart businesses should mine for authoritative content:

Product documentation – This one is a no-brainer. You must have excellent online product documentation and it must be easily accessible the minute your customer needs it. This doesn’t mean you can slap a 42-page PDF on your site and hope for the best. It means, at the bare minimum, your content must be easily searchable, factually accurate, and continuously updated. Ideally, it is also created proactively before customers go looking for answers and also teaches users how to become their own product experts.

Marketing – The marketing department knows what customers in your space are looking for and what pre-purchase answers they want. Pick the brains of your marketing team to learn what authoritative content demonstrates that you’re a thought leader in your industry with the product and customer experience strategy to back it up.

Sales – As we’ve previously noted, the sales team can do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to helping your customers become their own product experts which, lets face it, should be the end goal of your product support. Sales knows what common barriers to entry potential customers face and can help you design content that will pre-emptively (there’s that word again) address common pain points or overcome implementation issues.

Tech support - These people are in the trenches every day with your product so put their knowledge to good use. Make it effortless for agents to share existing documentation with one another and with customers. Streamline processes that put immediate answers into the hands (or on the computer screens) of the people who need them. A content system that supports ticketing integration means support agents can simply drag and drop relevant articles, then click send. Users get the best possible solution and know where to return to self-serve.

Customers — Do not underestimate the power of your users to provide smart answers to questions that may never have occurred to you. They are the perfect group to collect odd, quirky, or unique user scenarios that you couldn’t possibly test for in pre-production. Sure, there may be only six customers in the universe who need your product to be cross-compatible with hardware made in 1972. However, if one of them figures out how to make it work and the other five customers find that information on your site, you’ll forever be the hero of a handful of devoted users. Wikis and user forums give customers a place to help each other noodle around issues without involving your escalation team in solving every obscure problem customers encounter.

Content strategist – It may make sense for some businesses to hire a content strategist to oversee all the cogs and wheels that go into creating exceptional authoritative content. If you’re maximizing all the resources at your disposal, from tech support to marketing and sales, you need someone — or several someone’s, depending on the size of your company — to make sure there’s a single unified voice delivering your content. If you’re not sure how to put together an effective content strategy, here’s a good place to start.

You know authoritative content is necessary but putting it together doesn’t have to be frightening. You already have the resources you need at your fingertips, it just needs to be collected from various silos around the company. It takes a village to raise good content so start talking to your neighbors.

Image: irrezolut

Grab Your Promo Code for 50% Off LavaCon’s Strategy Workshop Registration Fee

March 20th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | Community News, Conferences, content strategy

Organizers of the annual LavaCon Conference on Digital Media and Content Strategies have put together a three-day content strategy workshop and we’ve got the scoop on how to attend for half-off the registration fee.

The hands-on workshop, “How to Create and Execute a Unified Content Marketing and Multichannel Publishing Strategy” will be held in New Orleans, LA, April 23-25, 2013. LavaCon’s Executive Director, Jack Molisani, says,

It is not uncommon to have content marketing and product documentation initiatives in simultaneous production. Rarely, however, do Marketing and Tech Pubs coordinate their content strategies. Without a unified content strategy, companies waste valuable resources, create an inconsistent user experience, and let new revenue opportunities slip away.

Sessions will be facilitated by industry leaders from Red Hat, Adobe, IBM, MindTouch, and more. The workshop drills down into how to create a strategy, how to build the right ecosystem to house and deliver content, and how to execute your grand plan within your business environment.

By the time you leave, you’ll have a roadmap in hand to hit the ground running but if you need additional guidance, workshop attendees may purchase a monthly phone consultation package with any of the workshop’s presenters. That’s a great way to get personalized, one-on-one assistance to hammer out strategy details or implementation issues when you take what you’ve learned back to the office.

Schedule, session, and facilitator details are available online [PDF]. Register before March 23rd to grab the standard rate of $1,450 and get 50 percent off with promo code mindtouch50. We have a limited number of codes and they’re first come, first served so register now.

In order to receive the discount, attendees must register at the New Orleans Riverfront Hotel with a special group rate of $189 per night. Rooms at that rate are available as early as Saturday, April 20th so come to town a couple of days early and make a vacation out of it.

Next month’s workshop is being held ahead of the big event this fall in Portland, OR. LavaCon got its start in Hawaii in 2002 — lava, get it? The original intent of the conference was to help companies design technical communications projects but has grown to cover emerging concepts surrounding content strategy, mobile devices, social media, and more.

Registration for LavaCon is now open and session speakers are expected to be announced soon. In the meantime, check out session slides from previous LavaCon conferences.

Image: Bernat

Does Your Organizational Chart Torpedo Your Customer Service?

March 14th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | CRM, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post

Before you read too much farther, go get a copy of your organizational chart. We’ll wait.

Now, take a good look at it. If you’re like most businesses, your org chart is a pretty standard affair. Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support all have their nice linear slots, with everyone reporting to the CEO at the end of the day. Marketing shepherds your brand around the industry space while the sales team runs around gathering customers. Sales hands off new customers to Support to field post-purchase issues, and so the cycle goes.

That’s a perfectly respectable business strategy but is it the best option? Maybe not. The giant, gaping hole in this inherently reactionary process is that it doesn’t factor in customer experience. Marketing keeps busy behind the scenes building brand awareness and getting eyeballs on your product. Sales teams establish preliminary relationships with potential users but until those users become actual customers, they’re not basking in the glow of a brilliant product support experience. Support teams are fantastic for responding to user issues, but they’re not in the best position to proactively teach your users to become product experts in their own right.

Let’s dust off that organizational chart and look at who’s ideally suited to oversee a grand customer experience: The sales team. Think about it. Sales is in a great spot to help train customers to become their own product experts and position it as an additional selling point. Sales can pre-emptively show users how to get the the right answers with a minimum of hassle instead of simply handing over a toll-free number for the help desk after closing the sale. After all, if you’ve spent a bunch of time and money creating an exceptional product help system, you want people to use it. Given a choice between diving into phone-tree hell that’s rife with bad hold music and knowing where to grab answers for themselves, which option do you think your customers want?

Getting Sales involved the customer experience doesn’t detract from the valuable input Support and Marketing brings to the table, it enhances it. Support personnel are a bottomless well of product knowledge and the marketing department knows how to capture a customer’s attention. Sales is the ribbon that ties it all together.

If you need more incentive to let the sales team lead the charge toward outstanding customer experience, consider the positive impact it can have on your revenue stream. Christine Crandall, President of New Business Strategies, says sharing the customer experience workload might seem unfair, but an all-hands-on-deck approach is critical to keeping users happy.

“Marketing should share responsibility for revenues and customer experience, but in a recent Eloqua whitepaper only nine percent of marketers surveyed felt customer experience was the most important measurement of their ROI… Maybe Support should take more responsibility for customer’s lifetime experience, but that department is usually staffed with technical, rather than business, experts and measured on the speed of ‘one-and-done’ instead of persistent satisfaction and engagement.
“So it falls to you Sales. Whether you like it or not, to deliver on the revenue targets you’re beholden to. You’ll need to lead the entire organization to a customer-centric approach; sponsor research on the buyer’s journey, use your customer relationships to understand how the definition of value evolves over time, get the rest of your peers to change their ways to consistently deliver that value, and transform your own cold-callers into relationship stewards.”

If the thought of an org chart sea change terrifies you, start small. Come up with one or two ways Sales can tackle an aspect of your customer experience strategy and test the waters. The worst case scenario is you’ll need to retool ideas until you figure out what works right. The best case scenario is that you’ll have happy, loyal customers who love your product and the way you support it.

Image: cliff1066™