Sales/Marketing

Your company’s product—no matter how unique or superior to a competing product, no matter how affordable or cost-agnostic—isn’t enough anymore. Winning the war for customer acquisition and retention is no longer a product game, it’s a relationship game. The battleground is omni-channel consumer engagement. This requires a holistic view, which can only be achieved by having a complete customer platform.

Make no mistake; the world of sales is changing. Technology seems to be driving the sales vehicle in today’s society, but it’s the old school, tried and true, consultative techniques that separate the good from the great sales professional.

Former Valeant Pharmaceuticals chief executive Martin Shkreli may be the poster boy of price gouging run amok, but the heat is increasingly on for the rest of the industry to tamp down on drug price increases and base growth more on productivity and less on arbitrary hikes to please shareholders.

Millennials live in a world that is increasingly virtual. They text, Snapchat, and tweet instead of picking up the phone and calling one another, and Skype instead of going out for coffee. That is part of the reason companies are having a hard time filling a growing number of open sales positions, a profession that requires a great deal of personal, face-to-face connections.

While upgrading legacy systems can be costly and cumbersome, a growing number of middle-market companies are nevertheless investing to digitize both their back office and customer-facing operations.

Is dynamic pricing good for the bottom line? It depends on whether companies handle the varying pricing structures in ways that don’t turn off would-be buyers, experts say.

In late July, Yahoo released a disappointing sales forecast for the third quarter and, just days later, announced the appointment of Lisa Utzschneider as chief revenue officer. After integrating all of the company’s disparate sales teams together, CEO Marissa Mayer was hoping Utzschneider could uncover new ad revenue streams. Should you be doing the same?

Appealing to millennials who are making careers in science, technology, education and math is becoming a top priority for manufacturing CEOs as the fate of nearly every industrial vertical these days increasingly is tied to innovation in digital technology and other “STEM” disciplines.

We’re living in the age of the customer where companies are expected to be accessible 24/7/365, and consumers are growing accustomed to having their needs met at the drop of a hat. To remain relevant in this climate, CEOs must make optimizing the customer experience a top priority throughout all departments of their organizations—a seemingly tall task that can be made much easier through the use of connected technology.

Now that more mid-market companies are operating full-size call centers, providing meaningful customer service has never been more important. And a number of new technologies are available to help mid-market CEOs ensure that their companies are coming through on that score.