On My Mind
There is good news after all! While my belief in humanity is restored by this Boston Marathon runner, I am thinking about marketing again and old and new habits and work etiquette that helps buyers buy and sellers sell.
First there are usage reports. Just like engagement and MQLs, trying to drive renewals off ‘usage reports’ is ridiculous. Do I want to go to a platform and use it 50 times for 50 hours and never make a good decision? Or do I want to have one interaction that saves me oodles of dollars in one swift answer followed by a 30-minute call with an expert or a chat with them via said platform?
This is another false God in the world of information services and content-enabled SaaS. It’s the flip side of engagement or maybe what comes after. Either way it’s about the quality of outcomes not the number of times we use something that matters.
For years we have advised buyers of information and content-enables SaaS solutions to give up asking for usage reports. It’s a hard habit to break and an argument we may never win. Better to measure ROI and ROE but few will do the work.
Years ago, at an information firm I worked for, we developed ROI-oriented report cards. They made a huge difference at renewal time. It wasn’t a perfect methodology, but it beat usage reports and sales as a disservice that sent customers flying when it came time to re-up.
Also top of mind is how fast search habits have changed and how fast the cost of good decisions continues to come down, commoditizing access to knowledge at lightning speed. Yesterday, I was doing research about the role of IT Admin in SMBs. One quick search provided robust answers (goodbye links!) and from that I had what was needed to make an informed call to a couple of resources including having regional salary information at my fingertips. Job description? No problem — three seconds later a full one is drafted.
In the span of a year we have moved largely from search as a discovery tool to questions as an answering tool. It’s magic.
Providing answers and actionability is the name of the game. This isn’t new. We wrote about predictive and prescriptive analytics a decade ago. It’s just that it’s now ubiquitous and the user expectation in enterprise use cases too.
Just look at this week’s announcement about Chron or the LLM created by Wellesley’s SAPInsider. Google search changed expectations for B2B enterprise information access and the same thing is now happening with the pathway to answers.
Delivering them at speed and without friction is critical. This is now the norm. This is beyond rethinking interfaces. It’s a whole new way of supporting knowledge work much of which can’t be enabled by workflow. This last year has brought a sea of change. Siri and Alexa and chat bots were just the beginning and will change, and are changing so many businesses in our industry, including ours. Unique and proprietary data and information is the moat. Answers are the castle. Just look at the collaboration between CAS and Cleveland Clinic.
And while I’m thinking random thoughts about doing business in our industry, I wonder when it became ok to record and transcribe calls with an AI tool in the room without asking if it’s OK?
This is a particular bugaboo of mine. It’s etiquette. Common decency. It’s like going to a dinner party and turning on a recording device. Or bringing extra people who aren’t invited. I was raised in a Greek household where it was always OK to bring more people and the mantra was ‘there is always enough food.’ But still, we asked.
For meetings whether for internal or external purposes — especially sales meetings, it’s not doing the host any favors to just whip out a listening device and have it show up as another video tile in the room without asking if the person is OK with the call being recorded and transcribed.
Automate note taking. Just take three seconds to get an OK. I’ve been in too many meetings of late where this common courtesy is missing in action.
It’s an exciting time. One colleague yesterday described life right now as a roller coaster. My response: it’s a wild ride but a heck of a lot of fun.