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2020 ERP/CRM Software Blog Award Winners

January 19, 2021 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Hard work deserves recognition.

We are very proud to recognize our top bloggers and top members on ERP Software Blog, CRM Software Blog, and ERP Cloud Blog. Congratulations to all of these companies for their hard work.

Top Blogger Award – Top 5 members whose posts received the most traffic. This could be based on the volume of posts and/or the quality of the posts they published.
Top Member Award – Top 5 members that posted the highest number of blog articles this year and all members that posted consistently every month. Our version of the “perfect attendance” award.

ERP Software Blog – 2020 Top Blogger Awards

CRM Software Blog – 2020 Top Blogger Awards

ERP Cloud Blog – 2020 Top Blogger Awards

ERP Software Blog – 2020 Top Member Awards

Top 5 members with the highest number of articles in 2020:

Members that never missed a month:

CRM Software Blog – 2020 Top Member Awards

Top 5 members with the highest number of articles in 2020:

Members that never missed a month:

ERP Cloud Blog – 2020 Top Member Awards

Top 5 members with the highest number of articles in 2020:

Members that never missed a month:

All of our members on each blog site are appreciated. But these few deserve a little extra credit for their hard work. We look forward to honoring more members for 2021.

A special badge has been added to the profile page of each member on the blog site. Click the link of each winner to check it out, learn more about their company, and read their posts.

Interested in joining our group blogs? Contact us.

ERP Software Blog – Microsoft Dynamics ERP Partners (VAR and ISV)
CRM Software Blog - Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partners (VAR and ISV)
ERP Cloud Blog – Acumatica, Sage Intacct, Oracle NetSuite, SAP Business ByDesign, Accolent ERP, Microsoft Dynamics ERP (VAR and ISV)

By ERP/CRM Software Blog Owners

www.erpsoftwareblog.com

www.erpsoftwareblog.com/cloud

www.crmsoftwareblog.com

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

The 2020 BET Hip Hop Awards Winners Announced; Megan Thee Stallion Biggest Winner

November 3, 2020 Humor

This year’s 2020 BET “HIP HOP AWARDS” brought together some of the hottest names in music to celebrate Hip Hop’s biggest night. Comedians, actors, hosts of the “85 South Show” podcast and stars of “Wild N’ Out” – comedy supergroup 85 South (Karlous Miller, DC Young Fly and Chico Bean) co-hosted the annual show that premiered Tuesday, October 27, 2020, at 9:00 PM ET/PT.

Megan Thee Stallion ruled the night with three wins for ‘Hustler of the Year,’ ’Hip Hop Artist of the Year’ and a shared ‘Best Collaboration’ with Beyoncé for the “Savage (remix).” Beyoncé also took home an additional win for ‘Sweet 16: Best Featured Verse’ for the track. Roddy Ricch was a double winner for ‘Song of the Year’ and ‘Album of the Year’ for “Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial.” Pop Smoke was posthumously crowned ‘Best New Hip Hop Artist’ and UK rapper Stormzy took home the award for ‘Best International Flow.’

Cordae opened the show with a powerful freestyle about the importance of voting followed by ‘Impact Track’ winnerLil Baby performing his hit single “We Paid” with 42 Dugg. The City Girls blazed the stage with anthems ‘Kitty Talk’ and ‘Jobs’ in their first televised performance since JT’s release last year. Taking the stage for her television debut, Mulatto treated viewers to a medley of ‘Youngest N Richest,’ ‘B**** From Da Souf’ and ‘Muwop’ with an appearance from Gucci Mane. Quavo performed a special tribute to Pop Smoke that included “Shake the Room” and “Aim For the Moon.” Snoop Dogg honored the ‘I Am Hip Hop’ Award recipient Master P. 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne closed out the show in a major way with their hit single “Money Maker.” With the election less than a week away, Vice Presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris made a surprise appearance with an impassioned plea urging viewers to let their voices be heard at the polls.

During the timely “Hip Hop Cares” segments, G Herbo and Trae Tha Truth were spotlighted for their tireless work giving back to their communities and the world at large through social justice, mental health and environmental activism. Rappers Reuben Vincent, Bobby Sessions and Pretty Yellow shared fiery voting freestyles throughout the show.

The much-anticipated cyphers were hosted by DJ Hed and featured a bevy of emcees, R&B songstresses and reggae stars dropping hot sixteens including Beenie Man, Bounty Killer, Original Koffee, Shenseea, Skip Marley, ZJ Liquid, Adé, Buddy, Deanté Hitchcock, and Flo Milli. Singers Brandy, Erykah Badu, H.E.R. and Teyana Taylor joined forces for a show stopping, all-female collaboration. Rappers Chika, Flawless Real Talk, Jack Harlow, Polo G and Rapsody let their voices be heard in the first ever “Social Justice” cypher.

Presenters for the evening also included Hip Hop heavyweight T.I. and R&B superstar Monica.

The complete list of 2020 BET “HIP HOP AWARDS” winners are:

BEST HIP HOP VIDEO

FUTURE FEATURING DRAKE – “LIFE IS GOOD”

BEST COLLABORATION

MEGAN THEE STALLION FEATURING BEYONCÉ – “SAVAGE (REMIX)”

BEST DUO OR GROUP

CHRIS BROWN AND YOUNG THUG

BEST LIVE PERFORMER

TRAVIS SCOTT

LYRICIST OF THE YEAR

VIDEO DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR

TEYANA “SPIKE TEE” TAYLOR

PRODUCER OF THE YEAR

HIP HOP ARTIST OF THE YEAR

MEGAN THEE STALLION

SONG OF THE YEAR

RODDY RICCH – “THE BOX” (PRODUCED BY 30 ROCK & DATBOISQUEEZE)

HIP HOP ALBUM OF THE YEAR

RODDY RICCH – “PLEASE EXCUSE ME FOR BEING ANTISOCIAL”

BEST NEW HIP HOP ARTIST

HUSTLER OF THE YEAR

MEGAN THEE STALLION

SWEET 16: BEST FEATURED VERSE

BEYONCÉ – “SAVAGE (REMIX)”

IMPACT TRACK

LIL BABY – “THE BIGGER PICTURE”

DJ OF THE YEAR

BEST HIP HOP PLATFORM

THE JOE BUDDEN PODCAST

BEST INTERNATIONAL FLOW

STORMZY (UK)

BET launched its first-ever consumer products line timed to the 2020 BET “HIP HOP AWARDS.” Collaborations with New Orleans based artist BMike and outerwear apparel company Chalkline headlined the launch. These items and more are available now exclusively on BET’s new e-commerce site store.BET.com.

Connie Orlando, EVP Specials, Music Programming & Music Strategy at BET oversaw the annual show, with Jesse Collins, CEO of Jesse Collins Entertainment, serving as Executive Producer of the 2020 BET “HIP HOP AWARDS” along with Jesse Collins Entertainment’s Jeannae Rouzan–Clay and Dionne Harmon.

Audible Announces Exclusive Deal With Kevin Hart and Charlamagne Tha God

Chris Rock To Open Up On Busta Rhymes’ New Album ‘Extinction Level 2: The Wrath of God’

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The Humor Mill

Announcing the Women in AI Awards winners

July 19, 2020 Big Data

Watch all the Transform 2020 sessions on-demand right here.

We’re thrilled to announce the winners of the second annual Women in AI Awards.

The Women in AI Awards are part of VentureBeat’s continuing commitment to diversity in AI. With that commitment in mind, VentureBeat kicked off Day 1 of Transform 2020 with the Women in AI Breakfast and Day 2 with the Diversity and Inclusion Breakfast, featuring diverse voices from across AI.

This year the awards saw hundreds of nominations (you can read them all here). They have all made outstanding contributions in the AI field, from advancing the work in ethics and fairness in AI, to trailblazing research critical to AI innovation, to ensuring young women entering the field have the opportunity and mentorship necessary to thrive.

Chosen by VentureBeat leadership from the open nominations, below are your 2020 Women in AI Award winners. We would like to thank everyone for their continued commitment to the field of AI.

AI Entrepreneur Winners

Michele Romanow, Cofounder and President, Clearbanc
Sofia Elizondo, Cofounder & COO, Brightseed

AI Mentorship Winner

Meeta Dash, VP of Product, Appen

AI Research Winner

Anima Anandkumar, Bren professor and director of ML research, California Institute of Technology, and director of ML research at Nvidia

Responsibility & Ethics of AI Winner

Carly Eckert, senior medical director, KenSci

Rising Star Winner

Kate Kallot, Director, AI ecosystem and developer relations, Arm

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2019 ERP/CRM Software Blog Award Winners

January 18, 2020 CRM News and Info

Hard work deserves recognition.

We are very proud to recognize our top bloggers and top members on ERP Software Blog, CRM Software Blog, and ERP Cloud Blog. Congratulations to all of these companies for their hard work.

Top Blogger Award – Top 5 members whose posts received the most traffic and members with the highest number of clicks from their posts back to their website. Their articles get the most readers and inspire those readers to take action and learn more.
Top Member Award – Top 5 members that posted the highest number of blog articles this year and all members that posted consistently every month. Our version of the “perfect attendance” award.

ERP Software Blog – 2019 Top Blogger Awards

Visitors

Links

CRM Software Blog – 2019 Top Blogger Awards

Visitors

Links

ERP Cloud Blog – 2019 Top Blogger Awards

Visitors

Links

ERP Software Blog – 2019 Top Member Awards

Top 5 members with the highest number of articles in 2019:

Members that never missed a month:

CRM Software Blog – 2019 Top Member Awards

Top 5 members with the highest number of articles in 2019:

Members that never missed a month:

ERP Cloud Blog – 2019 Top Member Awards

Top 5 members with the highest number of articles in 2019:

Members that never missed a month:

All of our members on each blog site are appreciated. But these few deserve a little extra credit for their hard work. We look forward to honoring more members for 2020.

A special badge has been added to the profile page of each member on the blog site. Click the link of each winner to check it out, learn more about their company, and read their posts.

Interested in joining our group blogs? Contact us.

ERP Software Blog – Microsoft Dynamics ERP Partners (VAR and ISV)
CRM Software Blog - Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partners (VAR and ISV)
ERP Cloud Blog – Acumatica, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, SAP Business ByDesign, Accolent ERP, Microsoft Dynamics ERP (VAR and ISV)

By ERP/CRM Software Blog Owners

www.erpsoftwareblog.com

www.erpsoftwareblog.com/cloud

www.crmsoftwareblog.com

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

CRM Watchlist Winners 2019: Once Again, Pegasystems

October 21, 2019 CRM News and Info

So Far, So Good…Continued

Now six are done and seven to go. While my intentions have been to group the remainder in twos and threes, once again, here, in the interests of time and length, I’m going to group them in ones. So, this post will be on Pegasystems and the next one on bpm’online rather than my original plan of the two together. Sigh. I am way too verbose. But if you know me, you’re used to it. If you don’t, get used to it or it might be best for your blood pressure to stop reading me. Your prerogative. Obviously.

Here’s what I have so far:

And again…if you have any thoughts about any of them you’d like to share, please feel free to email me at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com. I’ll respond. Even if you’re mean to me. You know who you are.

Overview

So, rather than speak of both Pegasystems and bpm’online in the same breath, let’s just start this whole thing with Pegasystems. They garner my respect for their age – a company that has been around for 36 years.

First, a shout out to Pega before I get to the meat (or the grilled vegetables if you don’t eat meat) of this “treatise.” Like Oracle, they had a perfect submission; and, like Oracle, they were one of three submissions in the 13-year history of the Watchlist to be awarded actual points for the perfection of the submission.

Also, as always a reminder about the purpose of this post, as there seems to misconception about analysts (and sometimes by analysts) that if we’re not mean-spirited and tough in an alpha sort of way then we are not doing our job. Specifically, this is a post about why Pegasystems won the Watchlist. It’s about why they have the impact they have. It is not meant to bash them to within an inch of their life. Second, from a philosophical level, I once was told (as were many analysts in the same meeting) that the senior management of a major company was informed that the job of an analyst was to “tell the company that their baby was ugly.” What kind of jackass analyst actually would do that? Sadly, probably more than one. But, no. The job of an analyst is to say “hey if you raise the left cheek (on the face, people) a little and lower the right cheek a little, then the baby will be more beautiful.” Sure, we are here to point out flaws and gaps honestly, but it should be incumbent that if we do that, we point out how to resolve those flaws and gaps. We are not proving something to some internal audience that is deciding how tough we are. We are opining on what we think needs to be done to solve problems or weaknesses. Or improve on strengths. So, again, if you don’t like my idea of what I’m supposed to do, don’t read this. One more time, your call.

Pegasystems

Pegasystems could really be a leader on the strength of its most obvious achievements: Around since 1983, and about $ 1 billion in revenue; the top eight healthcare companies use them; seven of the top ten insurance companies; eight of the top ten global telecom providers use them. Ad infinitum. They have quite the marquee customer base and they have the revenue to support the proof of their success.

They also have something that I rarely point out as a strength, even when it is – an exceptionally capable, innovative and humane management team. Led by founder and CEO Alan Trefler, stalwarts like Don Schuerman, their CTO; Tom Libretto, their CMO, Kerim Akgonul, their SVP of Product Management, Rob Walker, their VP of Decision Management and Analytics and Jeff Nicholson, their Global Head of CRM – among others – have taken the company to its current levels by doing what they do best – their jobs – and doing them exceptionally well and over years.

But what makes this decades-old company the Watchlist winner is that they have not only adjusted their thinking as the world evolved, but at the same time they have changed the company culture, the company’s dialog with the outside world, the way it works and what it produces to meet the evolving needs of customers and the world at large. And they’ve done it with a deep and seamless consistency.

You might think, “so what? Since when does consistency define the impact of a company?” Consistency is ALWAYS part of the reason a company has an impact. When I say consistency, I don’t mean uniformity or anything so bland. What I mean is that no matter how much Pegasystems has evolved over the years, the transitions in the corporate narrative and all the things that are required to go with that, made sense to their existing customers, to the market, and to everyone else within digital earshot from one point to the next. I realize by saying this I’m going up against Ralph Waldo Emerson, “”A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” I’m not. Because this isn’t foolish consistency – its necessary consistency. Foolish consistency is constant uniformity that prevents innovative thinking. I’m defining necessary consistency in business as something that supports the provision of a story that makes sense of radical innovation and new directions for a market, customer base and world at large without causing major doubts and fears about the direction of the company.

Pegasystems and The Corporate Narrative: A Tale of One City.

Never underestimate the power of the consistent corporate narrative. Because the corporate narrative:

Defines the company’s story as it evolves over time – and explains that story to a public that is not looking for insider baseball.
Is the framework for the actual product, services, tools and experiences portfolio and how it all fits into the platform and the ecosystem.
Not only drives the overarching corporate messaging, but the individualized product messaging.
Drives all public relations, analyst relations and for even smarter companies, influencer relations.
It reflects the culture of the company – and impacts it.
Most importantly, it can be responsible for sustaining (or losing) the trust of customers.

Hold on a minute, Greenie!! How does a storyline determine whether or not a customer is going to trust a company?

I’ll tell you a story.

Several years ago, an unnamed mega-vendor who, at the time, was almost entirely on premise, acquired a company both for its functionality but also for its ability to open the door for the mega to transition its portfolio to the cloud. The acquisition was bleeding capital when it was acquired and if it was just for the functionality, probably wasn’t that smart. But add its cloud-based portfolio and its strategic purpose – and the deal looked good. The CEO of the acquired company had the reputation of being a bit of an ass and egotist and thus may not have been the best messenger to deliver the significant change in the mega’s corporate narrative at the mega’s annual conference, but nonetheless, with a huge dose of shortsightedness, he was tasked to do just that.

The way that he put it at the conference was: The cloud is the only thing that matters, on premise is a dinosaur, on premise is bad, on premise has nothing to do with the future of the mega. The problem with this is that there were 30,000 on premise customers of the mega listening to this message – live – in the audience – at the event. Arrrgghhhh.

It took what has been estimated by others two years to repair the damage that this caused – even though the change in the corporate narrative was right and led to an ultimately successful transition to the cloud by the mega.

Why the freakout then? Because the mega’s customers lost trust, at least temporarily, in the mega – they felt they were going to be abandoned because they were on premise. They couldn’t see the wisdom of the transition because they weren’t told a story that reflected the continuity of thinking and thus had any relationship to its own past. It came out as one day the mega was doing this, the next day, that. The unknown – the reasons the mega was doing it and the intelligence of the decision was lost in the delivery of the messaging.

What this simply means is that if you are successfully evolving with the market, you have to be damned sure that your story makes sense to the customers.

Pega nails it. I think that Pega’s corporate narrative’s evolution has been both consistent and at the same time nearly flawlessly executed. I admire it.

Pegasystems’ corporate narrative: From Soup to Nuts? Or…?

If I’m truly characterizing it, in the past eight years, Pega’s corporate narrative has evolved from mechanical to emotional and hasn’t missed a beat in the transition.

Why mechanical to emotional? Because they managed to make the transition from business process management to customer engagement – without stumbling and thus, without losing the trust of their customers or the market.

It went from BPM to CRMish – to CRM – to CX – to customer engagement.

BPM - Go back to the earlier oughts and Pegasystems was an established leader in the business process management (BPM) world. At that time, BPM was seen as agnostic as a process management effort could be. Six Sigma ruled the corporate airwaves. Process unto itself, and the efficiencies in those processes were what counted toward corporate success. The tech vendors in the BPM world saw their job as automating workflows and business rules to help effect more efficient operations at a company which led to substantial cost savings and streamlined activities.

CRM(ish) – But in the early oughts, we saw the rise of CRM toward its current dominance in the business technology pantheon. CRM’s early days were characterized by the interest in sales force automation (SFA) in particular though still defined by the overarching customer facing departments – sales, marketing and customer service. In 2010, to meet the needs of what they saw as a growing CRM market, they acquired Chordiant, a CRM vendor that focused on specific vertical industries, and, like them, had a strong process management focus. At that point they began to incorporate more customer-facing and reduced agnostic messaging into their corporate narrative.

CRM – The acquisition of Chordiant, though, had a more profound effect on Pega’s direction than I think that even Pegasystems thought it would. By acquiring Chordiant, they tapped into a major market that led them to develop full blown (process-strong) CRM applications – sales, marketing, customer service – that competed with anyone’s on the market. They, regardless of Pega claims, probably served the upper end of the midmarket and the lower end of the enterprise market best. What characterized them was how well built they actually were. They were polished and market ready. Their corporate narrative was reflected at PegaWorld by demos of the CRM technology that, while product- focused per se, were valuable in showing what this newer player, Pegasystems, had to offer.

CX – To the credit of Pegasystems, by 2015, as a well established player in the CRM world, they began to recognize they had to align with a market that was becoming increasing right brained in its requirements. The customer base was not only demanding efficiencies and cost savings, not just products and services, but the means to provide a great experience for their own customers. While this was an early, somewhat mis-characterization by the market of what tech companies thought they could do, (they cannot enable customer experience via technology), Pegasystems at PegaWorld showed their evolution toward the customer-facing emotional and behavioral by bringing uber-thought leader Brian Solis to keynote on the connected customer and customer experience. This signified a real evolution in Pega’s thinking yet, if you looked at their case studies and listened to the messaging, it was clear that they hadn’t forgotten their roots in BPM. The reliability of their process engine in providing the customer with their basic requirements – transactions, answers to questions, ease of use, consistency – meeting the ordinary and keeping it ordinary – was what they did. That’s what, in their eyes led to an excellent at best and sufficiently good at worst customer experience.

Customer Engagement – By PegaWorld 2019, the corporate narrative had not only come around full circle but had evolved onto a new plane. They saw that customer needs/demands/desires/requirements involved communicating at an unprecedented level with the companies that they transacted with. It didn’t mean that they actually did the communications but that the choice to communicate was available when they needed it in the format that they needed at the time. When this had to be done at scale, knowledge of the individual customer became orders of magnitude more important because while the company may have had to deal with millions of customers, the individual customer had ZERO interest in getting lost in the morass of those millions. They wanted the company to know enough about them to communicate with them intelligently and in a value that gave the customer a feeling that they were valued. That meant analytics and systems of engagement – which are communications systems fundamentally became of paramount importance. Pega’s corporate narrative shifted to customer engagement. But to their great credit, they knew they had a legacy strength too – the delivery of systems that effectively provided that engagement. So they focused on their strength – operational excellence tied to continuing customer engagement. The circle was finally closed, and the corporate narrative well aligned with both the contemporary needs of the market and the history of the company.

Notice the evolution of the narrative – and how it ties into the activity of Pegasystems. Because it also ties directly into the current incarnation of their platform.

PegaInfinity

Pega Infinity is unlike dozens of CRM products who are undergoing nothing more than a cosmetic name and category change. The bulk of the engagement platforms or solutions out there are just repositioned CRM solutions. Don’t get me wrong. There are times where just the repositioning of the solutions and a new message are tactically justifiable. But a lot of that kind of effort without the actual platform or ecosystem to back it up is why the engagement market such as it is (more of an evolving, shapeshifting protoplasmic entity at the moment) can be confusing. For example, you no longer see a market “category” for enterprise feedback management or gamification beyond remnants. Most of the companies from those categories have been acquired and folded into things that are tactically justifiably called engagement solutions. Marketo for example, several years ago changed its messaging from the hilarious (though attuned) revenue performance management to engagement marketing. When they made that change, they didn’t totally revamp their solution, so it looked less like accounting and more like engagement. They actually repositioned it to where it probably belonged and of course have been successful, up to their acquisition by Adobe in that repositioning. But it had little to do with an engagement platform. Pega Infinity, on the other is a customer engagement platform that can justify its claim to be one.

Before we go further, here is what it looks like.

pegainfinity CRM Watchlist Winners 2019: Once Again, Pegasystems — The Pega Infinity Platform

Source: Pegasystems

The value in this diagram is it is also what an engagement platform looks like rather than a rejiggered repositioned CRM platform. I would make the case, which they apparently don’t, that the digital process automation that they have carefully separated from customer engagement is absolutely part of a customer engagement platform because of its role in providing the processes, business rules, and workflows to maintain the ordinary (and deal with the extraordinary) business operations that a company needs to use in order to keep customer peace by meeting expectations. What I have always called “keeping the ordinary, ordinary.” Digital Process Automation (What Pega calls Robotic Process Automation) fulfills that function. This becomes an even more compelling engagement platform if you treat it in the context of HFS, CEO and founder, Phil Fersht’s aptly named and described Integrated Automation Platform which he argues is both an RPA-killer and a significant evolution in the application of business processes, etc. It is RPA+AI+analytics which if you look at the Pega Infinity platform, is actually the model that they use. Pegasystems, taken heed of what Phil says.

I will take it that step a further as I mention above – that it is also an integrated operational piece of a larger engagement platform and the combination that Pega describes as customer engagement and Robotic Automation with all the attendant underlying pieces is as close to a true engagement platform as I’ve seen in the industry to date.

The other thing that characterizes their platform is that they claim it is no code – and if you look at the Pega DX (presumably digital experience) architecture in the diagram it tends to support that – if you translate what you see labeled as components of their architecture into usable English. Journey-Centric Rapid Delivery for example has little to do with the active creation of benchmark customer journeys or the tracking of said journeys. It’s a customer centric approach to rapid application delivery with the customer centric part being the focus of the business processes being developed. The claim of the architecture being no code is based on the fact that both business users and IT can deliver these applications rapidly. The Situational Layer Cake isn’t a foodie’s dream (or nightmare if you hate dessert) it is their name for an architecture that provides reusable objects so that you can rapidly scale or even redesign what you need as a company quickly. Again, no code claims can be made. Software that writes your software – something that is remarkably cool despite its somewhat odd name.

These are distinctive pieces, but they are the enterprise architecture that underlays the actual platform and what it can produce. The combination of this platform layer and the CRM related customer facing solutions, the ML driven process automation, and the customer decision hub which incorporates an advanced decisioning engine and strong engagement focused AI, are what makes this an engagement platform, not a repurposed CRM platform. While I would organize and label this diagram differently, it does reflect, at least by its pieces, what a true engagement platform comprises.

But there is more to engagement than the narrative and the platform – and, when it comes to Pegasystems, they actually do understand that. Their innovation is not around the left brain, but the right brain, quite ironic for a company that came from the mechanical world of BPM.

Engaging the Right Brain

About two years ago at PegaWorld, my good buddy Jeff Nicholson, Global Head of CRM, came to me and asked me if I would be willing to get on stage with him and do a session on empathy. Two things made that a fascinating idea to me. First, I was just starting to both do work on empathy and, because I am at least a self-styled extreme empath, I was just starting to try to understand myself. That was the first thing – me. The second thing that fascinated me is that Pega of all companies was the company that was actually introducing the thinking around empathy – not something that any other tech company was doing at that moment, though companies like ServiceNow are addressing it now (I’m doing a webinar with them on November 13 on that very subject). Jeff had a framework for bringing empathy into technology which was early stage but interesting. So, we got on stage and riffed for about 45 as the last track session at PegaWorld. Surprisingly it was packed.

Fast forward to PegaWorld 2019 and holy crap, Rob Walker, their VP of Decisioning & Analytics, and all around mad scientist, announced Empathetic AI in a keynote session. Which is a sort of frightening name, but the effort itself is innovative and unique. Keep in mind, though, this isn’t full bore empathy in the way that you and I think about it – meaning you feel what the other person feels and are able to understand what they are going through – good or bad and thus, you can supportively act in ways to reduce pain or increase happiness. Its not the empathy that we understand to be an intuitive sense honed over years of experience with people. A formal definition, not definitive I don’t think, for those of you who are dictionary-lovers is: “understanding another person’s experience by imagining oneself in that other person’s situation: One understands the other person’s experience as if it were being experienced by the self, but without the self actually experiencing it.”

The Pega Empathetic AI, while aligned with the spirit of the definition, goes to a less romantic understanding of how the buyer/customer is behaving and learning about how to hone that increasingly well over time individual by individual so that you can anticipate behavior and act accordingly – in the business sense of action. What makes this different than just understanding intent is that it takes the emotional state of the customer into account and learns from it as well as the actions that the customer is taking or the customer’s manifested behavior. Still, this is a step forward from the algorithms at large that are typically trying to identify and anticipate behavior. Or it could be. I haven’t seen it in action yet so I can’t say that it is or isn’t.

Here is how they define it on their site and it pretty well dovetails with what the Watchlist entry has and what conversations I have had with them indicate (I’ve left in their links to various thinks):

“First, it’s essential for businesses to understand the outcomes they want to achieve through AI-based decisioning. Then, by defining rules related to company goals, customer journey goals, ethical goals, customer behavior, and the best actions to take depending on those defined rules, businesses will have a framework on which to apply adaptive analytics in an empathetic way.”

This is machine learning applied to the idea of empathy and the attempt to reproduce it in a business environment that still needs outcomes to understand what it is they are getting with this.

That said, to Pega’s support, this is the first attempt I know of that tries to understand how to proceed with a customer based on factors that include ethical goals among things that are a bit more the norm in customer journey decisioning engines. Its step one. And it can potentially add to the escalating impact that Pegasystems seems to be having.

But all of this considered, and these are among the many reasons they won the Watchlist, there are things they will need to do to sustain their impact over the next several years.

Three Things to Consider

Missing link – There is no question that Pegasystems’s target markets are the upper end of the midmarket and, even more so, the enterprise. To that end, Pega’s Infinity platform and the applications that sit on top of it – Sales, Marketing and Customer Service are comprehensive – and mature. However, if you are competing in the enterprise market at scale, there is a piece that is missing, Okay, no more suspense – ecommerce. To their credit, they acknowledge that ecommerce is important (see this comment from my buddy and Global Head of CRM, Jeff Nicholson on ecommerce), but they have nothing that they can deliver to those that will require it. Time to partner rather than build or acquire I would say but time to do something. Pegasystems is a company that is very committed to customer engagement as its vision, mission and theme. Ecommerce, while not CRM, is still a core (transactional in this case) component of a larger engagement ecosystem and offering.

Lasik surgery: from aspiration to inspiration – According to the Watchlist submission, Pegasystems’s vision is: “To be the leader in software for customer engagement and operational excellence.” They designed it this way because they defined vision as “what we strive to be.” As good as their messaging is, they are going to have to change what they define as vision and thus what their vision is. What they are seeing as vision is simply an aspiration on their part – not a visionary statement. Perhaps the best way to explain this is by one of the best vision statements I’ve ever seen – Ernst and Young (consulting side): “Making a better business world.” Simple yet the implications are significant for the EY culture, strategies, programs, and offerings. It is both aspirational and inspirational. This is how the company is hoping to interact in the world. In Pega’s example, it’s only what the company wants to be – aspirational. But there is nothing about benefitting the world at large (inspirational) or even a view of the world in the statement. Why did I say Lasik surgery – Pega needs to move from what is a somewhat nearsighted vision to clarity about the benefit they potentially can bring to the world. What is clear by all research done now, is that customers want to deal with tech companies (or any business institution) as more than a vehicle to transact with.

I want to take you higher, HIGHER – Aside from me being a Sly and the Family Stone fan in the 60s (I saw them do a tour de force at Woodstock), this is something that Pega needs to do – using colorful metaphor. As you see above, Pega has done an amazing job with their messaging and corporate narrative. Make no mistake about it, they are setting the tone for the clearest and most concise message around customer engagement. However, if they want to continue to set the tone, they are going to have to step it up in one area that they are not doing that. That, my friends, would be thought leadership. They have a surprising paucity of material in any medium on thought leadership. Ironically, they are actual thought leaders and visionary thinkers (see above) in areas like empathy. The aforementioned Jeff Nicholson and I at PegaWorld 2018 did a track session on empathy and at that session eventually led to Pegasystems developing an AI that embeds empathy. But where is the market research? Where is the engagement and allying with third parties who are specialists in customer engagement? Where are the best practices and methods for successful engagement that don’t involve using Pega’s software (at least not directly) but show that Pega can be a trusted adviser? I can go on, but the point is simple. Pegasystems needs to step up being the thought leader and trusted adviser on matters of customer engagement.

So, Pegasystems, congrats on winning the Watchlist and please at least read what I suggest you do. I’m aware that its no more than my opinion but I will say that you have done a lot of impressive things in the last year and that won you the Watchlist. But to continue to win the Watchlist, which translated into useful English means continue to have an impact in the markets that you are in, you will need to continually have an A-game. Do these three (and several other things that I am cleverly withholding so you’ll ask me about them) and you will continue to impact it in an escalating fashion. You’re on the right track. Impact isn’t yours to win, its yours to lose. I’m betting that you don’t lose.

Next up: bpmonline, who will be named something else by the time I write the post.

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Congratulations to the Winners of the “Back to School” Contest!

September 28, 2019 Self-Service BI

For our Back to School contest this year, we had so many amazing entries, showcasing creativity, design expertise, excellent use of Power BI, and of course a genuine love for education! Before we get to the winners, I want to take a moment to introduce our judges.

Because this was a Back to School contest, we could not have picked the winners without the help of two educators:
James Burke | Middle School STEM Teacher

Nicole Lange | Former High School Biology Teacher

Additionally, entries were evaluated by several members of the Power BI Product Team, including Rien Hu, June Punkasem, Kim Manis, Amanda Cofsky, Tessa Hurr, and Miguel Martinez.

Contest Winners

Our first place winner is Periodic Table of the Elements by David Eldersveld.

We loved how useful this lesson is; it’s a perfect supplement for any high school chemistry course.
Also, the author showcased superb use of Power BI features, such as report page tooltips, bookmarks, dynamic conditional formatting and dynamic measures.

If you are interested in learning how exactly the lesson was made, the author published a video playlist demonstrating the various parts of the creation process.

Our second place winner is Learning to Stay Healthy by Paul & Martin Consulting.

The lesson leveraged a wide range of Power BI capabilities to create dynamic backgrounds, What If parameters, and included several custom visuals and data sources.
It’s a visually fun and inviting lesson that we could easily see in any high school nutrition class.

The third place winner and also the community favorite is Estimate Electricity Energy Usage and Cost by Duc Nguyen.

The lesson was a creative, fun way to connect energy to our daily lives; therefore, it’s very useful for middle school and high school energy lessons.
The author demonstrated great use of Power BI by creating a truly interactive lesson, spanning across several data sources.

Congratulations to all winners and thank you to everyone that participated this year!

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CRM Watchlist 2019 winners: The big engines that could part one — Infor and SAP

June 21, 2019 CRM News and Info

So, the little engine that could — meaning, what passes for my writing skills — is still chugging along, and thus the two winners with distinction, Adobe and Salesforce (see below for links), are done.

CRM Watchlist 2019 Winners with Distinction part one: Adobe

CRM Watchlist 2019 Winners with Distinction part two: Salesforce

An admonishment and warning

In order to proceed with the final eleven winners, I need to make something clear. Every single year, when I announce the winners, I make a point of saying that there is no categorical winner. The winner that appears first on the list — other than the top scorer — is first, alphabetically. There are levels of winning, driven by the final, weighted score: Elite, with distinction, and winner. But there is no category that you win, like Marketing Automation or Enterprise or SMB or Analytics. There is only “winner” at whatever level you were.

That said, when I do the posts, for my own benefit, I tend to group them together. Again, these aren’t categories that have any meaningful existence other than to allow me to group how I present the “why they won” to you. For example, there are four multi-billion-dollar companies in this round of posts. I’m breaking them into two posts — one that will include Infor and SAP and another that will include Microsoft and Oracle. This isn’t even alphabetical. You know why I’m doing it that way? Because I want to and that is literally the only reason. There is nothing scientific. The four largest remaining winners are grouped together because I think the comparison between equivalently large companies can be useful. There are two posts because they get big. The first (Infor) and the last (SAP) in what would have been alphabetical order are in the first one, and the two middle ones are in the second, mostly because that’s the way the dice rolled. So please, please, please don’t think there is anything more it than my grouping for comparison’s sake only. Because that’s the only reason. The rest is pretty random.

Also, one caveat. Because Adobe and Salesforce were the winners with distinction, they each got a post of pretty decent length. These posts from here out from the winners are shorter per company. Still pretty, big but a little shorter. (For example this post is more than 7,000+ words for SAP and Infor combined — big. But not as big as Salesforce or Adobe combined, which they weren’t. Just so you know.)

OK, now, let’s get on with the good stuff. In this post, why SAP and Infor were winners, and, of course, what they can do to sustain impact.

Let’s start with SAP.

SAP

SAP is always fascinating. Brilliant in so many ways, a powerful force in the technology business universe and yet, as much as any other major player if not more so, not quite achieving the enormous potential they have. Yet, I must tell you, peel away the onion skin and you see the sheer depth and breadth of the company, and it’s always remarkable and at times breathtaking. But what’s really very hard to do, and it often obscures much of what they are doing, is peel away the layers of that rather large onion. I’ll attempt that, because I got to see more than the norm out there with their Watchlist submission, and aside from being the second-best quality submission in the entire competition (meaning how well it was written, the quality of the content et. al), it revealed some of what makes this a brilliant, enigmatic company that has some real impact in the real world.

Interestingly, and this makes their victory even more significant, SAP actually had a more difficult road than most to be able to win this year. In May 2018, they announced an all-out pivot of the company, which put all things customer-facing at the core of their entire being as an entity. That meant not only did the then-rebranded and refreshed SAP hybris become SAP CX, and the focus of the entire practice became how to engage customers so that they have the quality of customer experience that they need to become sustainable customers, but they also pivoted the SAP company culture toward the front in their effort to become a much more personal and personable company — one that is focused on interacting with their customers and to a greater extent than ever, though a work in progress, the world at large.

Before I get into the details, keep in mind that this is an impact award that depends on you having serious impact in your chosen markets and direction. If you are a company making a significant change to something you are doing, that impacts the markets that you have been in and are starting to be part of. That impacts what and how people think of you. That means that, as a Watchlist “contestant” you must prove your impact in your new direction, not what you were. Very hard to do. Yet, SAP did it, and at the same time showed enough to give me enough concrete evidence to show me that they could sustain their impact. Additionally, my independent research, which in their case was a bit more than normal due to the pivot, led me to conclude that they were on the right track. But I did see some things that they had to do to maintain their newfound direction and thus, their impact over the next three or so years — three of which I’ll reveal later on. Not the complete list but a start.

SAP in the light of day

There is no question whatever that SAP has some remarkable strengths — the ones that won them the Watchlist this year. I’m going to spend a bit of time listing and describing six of them for you so you can see what powers this industry leader.

The Overarching: Vision, Mission, Social Conscience… — Back in 2018, when SAP pivoted, they also unveiled a more certain (at least in principle) direction, and thus a newly minted mission and vision, as well as new, far more appropriate (for them) messaging at the global level and manifested a deeper and heavily revamped connection to the world at large. Some of that was just a reshaping of their messaging — without any necessary changes to the outlook. Some of it was a rethinking of how they were going to interact in the world. This could arguably be their most dramatic change, though I imagine many analysts would argue, which is why I said “arguably.”

Without going into their past submissions per se, I will say that they seem to have a renewed sense of purpose and their stated vision is strong and appropriate to the 2018 pivot. The way that they put it:

“At SAP, our purpose is to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. This is our vision, cause and enduring higher purpose….

To our core, we believe in a future where technology helps the world run better. Where responsible, healthy business and empathy for one another, are just as important as the bottom line. Where our economy, environment, and society prosper together.”

Noble words indeed, and, as a glass three-quarters full type of guy, I want to believe what I see. But what I need to corroborate that statement is to see a combination of what they are willing to be accountable for in word (statements to the public) and deed (what they actually do to make this real).

Well, again, this is a post on why they won the Watchlist and when it came to the realization of their vision in actual deeds and public proclamations, they were able to make the case. As one example, they actually told a rather moving story about their work with an organization dedicated to stop rhino and elephant poaching, a.k.a. murderers. Elephants, Rhinos, and People (ERP… ironically) working with SAP have drones — “eyes in the sky” — that are monitoring herds and using SAP’s IoT framework, capturing, and harvesting data from the collars on animals in the herds and transmitting the data to park rangers to then be able to spot and stop poachers and protect the herds. SAP, as I have found prior and since, does a fair amount of this kind of good, but reflective of their historic problem, does very little to communicate it. However, that doesn’t take away from the good that they are doing nor the impact it has in the areas that they are doing that good.

The other thing that reflects their commitment to this vision, at least in word, is, oddly, a commercial. Time to explain.

SAP has always had a strong commitment to sustainability. But their messaging around sustainability wasn’t really all that inspiring, though the dedication was honorable. I remember a SAPPHIRE (SAP’s annual conference) several years ago (I don’t remember the exact year) where they were exclaiming, rightfully, about the importance of reducing the carbon footprint — and they had in fact, both reduced theirs dramatically with a significant amount of employee participation — and also had developed some sort of technology that would support that effort. All good. Except their reasoning was reducing the carbon footprint-made businesses more profitable. While that is I assume true, that is hardly what the world needs to hear from SAP when it comes to the good that they do. Just so wrong.

Fast forward to now, when SAP’s transformation efforts as a business are ongoing. Now watch this commercial with the brilliant (and brilliantly chosen) Clive Owen as the SAP spokesperson:

There is something in this commercial significant to understanding the change in SAP. This commercial talks about how business can help solve the big problems of the world. Sustainability, in this context, is seen as something that can help solve multiple damaging world problems (environmental, etc). SAP is not talking about profitability or SAP tech running business, but about business, as Marc Benioff says, being a force for change. And it’s done in that brilliant Clive Owens, self-deprecating, droll wit — which, as a corollary, also humanizes SAP. But the framework is now truly solving the world’s problems for the world’s sake, not the profitability of business. That is something that the world needs to hear, and, even more germane to this post, SAP needed to say — and do.

… and Messaging They have revamped their messaging, which for the last several years, suffered under the “SAP Runs Simple” mistake, to one that I think expresses the overarching value of the offerings of SAP exceptionally well. That is “Intelligent Enterprise.” What this does is show what SAP S/4 HANA and C/4 HANA combined provide end to end for enterprises. The only other companies that I think can make at least a similar claim are perhaps Oracle and Infor. What this does, if you incorporate the framework that should be around their pivot, though, is bring to light business units at SAP like their Digital Supply Chain (under the ownership of the brilliant Hala Zeine), which is distinctly a technology that supports and enables an effort whose success and failure has a substantial impact on customers. But the idea of “Intelligent Enterprise” goes to the heart of what SAP has immediately available to particularly large enterprises — an end-to-end technology ecosystem that can sustain a complete business — and the means to align it to the needs of the 21st century customer via the smart technologies (like IoT) that are available. The alignment of their messaging — and alignment for SAP as they pivoted is a big deal — is important to SAP’s ability to gain the trust of their customers and prospects and the world at large, and show that they are doing what customers are looking for companies like them to do: Be a trusted adviser and resource for enablement of outcomes up to the largest enterprise possible.

But what makes this equally important is that despite their historic issue — getting across a message that resonates – they have always been well prepared when it came to the media to broadcast their message. From TV to social to content portals to communities to radio to Instagram, SAP has built some of the best organized communications media that I’ve seen, with some real proficiency in social communications. They have a strong presence in traditional media such as TV — advertising frequently on national TV and regional TV with ads like the Clive Owens commercial. Of the big guys, only Microsoft — at least in my non-scientific observations — advertises more than SAP. “Big deal,” you say (or if you are a Lewis Carroll enthusiast, “Piffle”) “TV is old school.” Yeah, but guess what? Traditional TV is still considered the most influential advertising medium by a very large segment of the population, including, in some studies, millennials — so the power remains. Plus, a lot of what you do and say is still shaped by TV — and that you grew up in the medium. Think current YouTube video production values. Where do you think you got your view of what constitutes quality video from? SAP is making a wise bet on the medium.

But fear not, contemporary digital cognoscenti. SAP meets the standard and then some in their social media use too. The combination of an active presence on Twitter via active participation in ad hoc conversations, quick responses to tweets that relate to them, a large number of people consistently monitoring its traffic and organized and enjoyable tweet chats with thought leaders (which are a lot of fun… I did one of their first ones with them) put them far ahead of most other vendors in the category. One simple benchmark if you are an active business tweeter — how much (relative to the others) does SAP (not the fans of SAP) show up on channels and in conversations that aren’t around their conferences. How responsive are they during their own conferences? I was at another conference recently at the same time that SAP CX Live/SAPPHIRE was going on and tweeted some things related to both conferences. The conference I was at normally had maybe one like and maybe a retweet. No direct responses in any way — and I put out about 100 tweets. The SAP entries had about 15-20 likes and 10-30 retweets and SAPers responding to me via public tweets or DMs. Totally different and I wasn’t even there. But their social comms presence in-conference and non-conference is impressive. It is far and away, head and shoulders, miles, galaxies better in its use of social than about 95% of the vendors. They are not oblivious to the results that they get either. They have KPIs set around interaction with their customers but also the world at large on social media.

There is much more to say on this, but as I said, this is some of the reasons, not all of the reasons that they won. If you want more, ask and maybe I’ll tell you. But maybe not.

A Set of Products by Any Other Name Would Smell as Suite –A company and its offerings when well aligned to the markets it targets, can greatly extend its impact. In an effort to do just that, SAP made a significant effort to both rename their products and also rename the practice that handles its customer facing efforts. Historically, SAP has had a very difficult product naming convention. I was once asked to help them name something and after all the conventions were satisfied — meaning the things that had to be in the product name, there were literally three letters left to work with. No joke. I swear. But again, to SAP’s credit, realized that this wouldn’t do in an era where the distribution and consumption of information needs to be immediate — and the ability to find that information via search is a significan convenience for their potential customers and of critical importance to SAP itself. .What did they do? They renamed their products Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Customer Data Cloud, among other things. But you might say, what’s so great about that? Everyone’s sales offering is Sales Cloud, everyone’s marketing offering is Marketing Cloud etc. Exactly! I am of the mind that when someone is starting to search for a salesforce automation solution, they are not typing in really clever names for things. They are typing in Sales Cloud because that’s what they hear and know, regardless of its lack of poetry. A really clever name doesn’t show up in the search unless someone literally knows it in advance. Sales Cloud does. This was an extremely important move for SAP’s alignment with the market — and it works. It almost automatically increases their footprint. Because their footprint becomes more luminescent in search.Oh, one other thing. Thankfully, they finally got rid of the name SAP hybris as their customer-facing business unit name and renamed it SAP CX — much better aligned with the world as it is and how they need to address it.

Brilliantly Acquisitive — I said, acquisitive, not inquisitive. SAP’s acquisitions have been consistently brilliant. One reason for that, despite many other things that may need to be fixed, their view of technology ecosystems that are built around supporting their CX portfolio, are not one of them. They have been making significantly important additions to their CX offering for a long while, starting with hybris (2015), continuing with Gigya (2018) and CallidusCloud (2018), and followed by Qualtrics (2019) — all of which provide them with exceptional technologies that enhance their CX offering. The core functionality — the sales and customer service and, more recently, the marketing basics have been an SAP staple since roughly 2007 — when Bob Stutz led the SAP CRM practice and built SAP’s first true CRM solutions (called, unmagically, SAP CRM 2007). But what all these acquisitions did is make the case for SAP to compete with tools and solutions that support and enable customer engagement at scale and support the operational requirements for all the customer-facing departments of a business.

Vertically Remarkable — SAP, largely on the back end, has been a dominant force in verticals — a.k.a. specific industries. They have roughly 24 industries that they have covered — and thus — established the best vertical process maps in the entire tech world. Unlike most of their competition, they also understand the value of industries penetration that goes beyond monetary. For example, one of my favorites in fact, is their very deep commitment to the sports industry. They have a strong practice lead who came from the sports world, Scott MacIntosh and they are putting the time and effort into working with and sponsoring teams. As an interesting corollary, a former SAP Global CMO (one of the best in the entire industry when he was) Jonathan Becher, is now in fact, the president of the San Jose Sharks National Hockey League team. (thanks to him being there, now my second favorite NHL team after the Rangers. Hey. I’m a New Yorker. What do you expect?) Nonetheless, sports while laudable, is a small part of the SAP vertical strategy. Their strength historically lies in areas like public sector, oil and gas, (and other regulated industries) manufacturing, and, of course, financial services.

Thought Leadership — The CX thought leadership portal, which goes by the acronym CEC (Customer Engagement and Commerce) is the best in the industry. The quality of the content, the look and feel and ease of use of the site, pushing out of the content to the various audiences who value it, all are done consummately well and highly professionally. The writing, more often than not — is not boring and in fact combines useful information, with the writer’s voices often clearly there — meaning SAP’s legal department is more likely than not hands off now — though I imagine they set out the initial parameters for the site. The posts are even sort of funny at times. CEC is a textbook case study on how to do this particular type of thought leadership, they have significant initiatives to drive good quality content via video, audio and even radio programs. They have for many years. Are there missing pieces in the thought leadership strategy and execution? I would say so. One example (and the only one I’m giving here), they need to (this one I don’t think is optional — but, then again, that’s my opinion) expand the scope of CEC to thought leadership around broader customer facing things that go to their Intelligent Enterprise message — e.g. supply chain and impact on customers — one of a zillion examples of what they could do. The pivot made this particular thought leadership portal the most significant at the company but also expanded its scope as a result. They are touching on that more expansive effort, but not nearly enough. But they still remain No. 1. Only CMO.com comes close.

Ecosystem Magnus — The SAP ecosystem has had years to develop. It’s had its ups and downs (see Vinnie Mirchandani’s excellent book on SAP Nation 3.0 here for details), but one thing has been irrefutable. They have had a framework and a global strategy to evolve an ecosystem that encompasses partners, competitors at times (coopetition) customers, employees, agencies, academia, and even governments on occasion. Over time, it’s led to the creation of communities like SDN, which is a community five million strong of developers, SAP employees, and others in the technical heart of SAP’s products. It’s supported the creation of and participation in initiatives like the Open Data Initiative (ODI) — an alliance between SAP, Adobe, and Microsoft for the creation of a data standard that provides their joint customers and future joint customers with common data attributes and components and interoperability. It isn’t meant to be a global data standard (not at the present), but something for all three companies to work on that defines data for their three companies. Over the history of SAP, it produced things like the Customer Value Network (CVN) of the amazing Jim Goldfinger (no longer at SAP), which was easily the best customer network I have ever seen at any company bar none. The ecosystem outlook even drove co-creation with customers such as Siemens and Salesforce. All in all this is a huge strategic advantage for SAP that will have repercussions (in a good way) for years to come.

These are only a few of the reasons that SAP won but, like everyone else, they could do something that either they don’t do or do them better in order for them to sustain their impact over the next few years.

Three things to consider

Upgrade and Update the Marketing Cloud — It is clear that in the marketplace for CRM, CX and customer engagement, marketing is a key component — and has been subject to tech overkill for the past 5 to 6 years. MarTech has gotten its own designation and the famous Scott Brinker MarTech infographic is up over 7,000 companies that are considered MarTech providers at the moment. Which is north of ridiculous. And galactically north of the completely confusing to a buyer. That said, the stakes are obviously higher than they ever have been when it comes to what a marketing cloud needs to provide. SAP’s Marketing Cloud, despite some strong capabilities falls short in both the core functionality and the needed value adds, though they are moving to improve it. But, last time I saw it, it was not competitive with Salesforce or Oracle. Certainly not with Adobe/Marketo. I would redouble the investment in the SAP marketing cloud. Retriple it? Either way bring it up to par with their other offerings.

Bring Back the Customer Value Network — Jim Goldfinger’s tour de force was not just the most advanced customer network I ever had the pleasure of interacting with — but the most collaborative. What Jim did, partially due to his genuine love of people and thus customers — who despite all protestations to the contrary — are people, wasn’t just the creation of an SAP customer success team outreach to the customer base. Well beyond that. The customers and SAP were bonded at the hip and with Jim’s knowledge of SAP’s partner network, he was able to incorporate them both strategically and opportunistically with the CVN members. Jim also was able to get incredibly valuable feedback from the customers who trusted him and those associated with CVN. There are/were several employees at SAP recruited straight out of the CVN. The relationship was unique and fascinating. Since Jim left, SAP’s attempts at recreating this have failed pretty dramatically. Some of that is due to the network being run by someone else. But most due to lack of knowledge on how to recreate it. Especially in the age of the demanding and even entitled customer, this level of interaction with customers isn’t only a differentiator but it drives advocacy and revenue.

Influencer Relations, Corporate Communications – SAP, like any other of the big 4.8, has the standard analyst relations/public relations model. Uniquely, until recently, they had a business influencer program, which, in its heyday worked with independent analysts (I was in this program), academics, business influencers, etc. Analyst relations worked with the Gartner/Forrester/IDC “cohort” and public relations worked with agencies and media (journalists). Now the business influencer program is either gone or on hiatus and though I hear it’s coming back, we shall see. I hope so. What I’m proposing here for SAP’s benefit is something that is slightly different. I’d like to see SAP start framing their program as Influencer Relations — or something like that. The reason I think that the Salesforce model — because this is what this is to be entirely candid — works in the case of SAP is that SAP already has the elements in place. But if they are taking their own pivot seriously, they need to broaden their outlook. Salesforce takes a more customer success like approach to the influencers — characterizing Gartner, Constellation, Paul Greenberg, Professor V. Kumar, etc — as one and the same in terms of the time effort and engagement they provide. Note I didn’t say their investment in — I said their approach to. I understand that they are going to want to invest more dollars and time into Gartner, Forrester, et al due to I would say two things. First, that Gartner particularly and Forrester get the most customer inquiries. Second, they all feel compelled to be part of the Magic Quadrants and Waves of the world. Understandably. Of course, they should invest all that in all of them at the levels that they require. Like anything else, they have limits of course — on budget, time, number of people, etc. But where they need to do a bigger job is to expand the importance of the “others” beyond Gartner, Forrester. It will give corporate communications more control over something that occurs anyway. SAP leaders and influencers of all kinds commingle all the time. Been happening for a long time. To be clear, this is not a criticism. Again, SAP won the Watchlist and their AR/PR/Corp Comms helped them get there. And there is a lot more nuance to it than I am presenting and someday I am going to write about it, but SAP, who has the talent in the manpower they do devote to the effort already, needs to broaden the thinking around influencer relations and then institutionalize that breadth. But they need to think more inclusively and institutionally in their deliberations with an understanding of the value of each influencer segment.

SAP is a company that had a real impact on the whole world, not just the tech world. As ironic as this is going to sound, now is the time for that world to find out about it — and for SAP to sustain it.

Now, we go to Infor, my year’s biggest surprise.

Infor

To be entirely candid, Infor was not just the biggest, but my most pleasant surprise. Despite the fact that I’m the only judge (or as they, whoever “they” may be, say in a more dire way, sole judge, jury and executioner), I don’t actually know how a company is going to do with the Watchlist due to the rather complex weighting system that I’ve developed over the years. (I mean complex to someone with the mathematical skills of a moth. That would be me). Infor was one of the companies that I have held out a lot of hope for but hadn’t quite seen the company’s evolution or growth at the level I expected — or so I thought.

But I was surprised that the problem wasn’t Infor, it was clearly me. Infor had made enough strides to win the Watchlist and given my SOB-ness this year, that is quite an achievement. Hey, I was fine cutting the hearts out of the contestants at the slightest misstep.

But I’ll tell you why they won and what I was wrong about. I’ll also tell you what I am going to suggest they do to either continue to prove me wrong or to make me a stronger believer. Keep in mind, I like this company and have for years. They used to be my client in their customer-facing heyday under George Wright’s CRM leadership. They have been on my radar for a long time and continue to be long after any active engagement with them ended. They own one of the iconic products in the customer-facing world — Epiphany now called Interaction Advisor — a still excellent real time interaction management (RTIM) engine. Until Thunderhead came along, it was literally my favorite product ever.

But needless to say, it isn’t only Epiphany a.k.a Interaction Advisor — in fact, it isn’t really Epiphany at all that got them the winner’s mantle. There is so much more.

Infor wins. Why?

Well, they are a leader in design, they are a leader in end to end industry solutions; they are social activists that have a significant impact. I’ll keep going later but let me elaborate a bit.

Infor describes itself really well in a press release announcing their AI layer Coleman in 2017:

“Infor, a leading provider of beautiful business applications specialized by industry.”

I don’t think that I could have said it any better than this. If you read that and then read on, you will understand why Infor was a CRM Watchlist 2019 winner. Man, I really love that self-description. Concise. Perfect.

Just the numbers alone impress

Even though in the customer facing world it tends to be a bit of a best kept secret, better known on the back end, Infor has just “dang” (never used that before in a sentence) impressive numbers. Let’s cap (recap would be repeat right? LOL!):

68,000 customers
15,000 employees
60 offices
Customers in (get this) 170 countries
71+ million cloud users
176 new products
And near and dear to me — Global HQ in New York. (How great is that? Coming, of course, from a born and raised New Yorker)

This is foundational impact. That level of penetration of markets and companies and that level of use tells you off the bat that this is a company that should be reckoned with.

But it is only the beginning of what Infor is as a company with impact (Note: I am never going to use “impactful” — though it is, shudder, recognized as a legitimate word now).

Design thinkers par excellence

One area that Infor has always shone — and I mean bright and blazing — has been their industry leading UI and UX work. For many years Hook & Loop, Infor’s internal design company, led the way to what I would now call contemporary user interfaces and user experience. They were not only cutting edge but really the industry’s best. Infor founded them in 2012 by hiring in a short time, over 100 creatives, not tech people, including if my memory serves me, one of Michael Kors’ chief designers and the guy who did the special effects for the earlier Transformer movies, when they were actually good. They designed stunning UIs and they designed the interior of the global headquarters that Infor resides in, and they worked with customers to make sure that the omnichannel user experience and navigation was easy, convenient, and so good looking. But at that point, their entire raison d’etre was to be a digital agency for Infor’s internal purposes. They weren’t competing in the marketplace.

But in 2016, that changed, as did Hook & Loop’s scope and name (Hook & Loop Digital) and vision. They went from internal design to a customer-facing digital agency that sold not only design services but design strategy services and technology services that were focused on a data extraction layer that would allow integration into core applications. This was very well put by Derek Du Preez in a Diginomica article at that time.

Essentially, Hook & Loop is now also a customer facing agency that not only strategies with companies around what ‘digital’ means for them, but also integrates companies’ systems into a structure that works for a digital environment (creating an extraction layer for data). It then also builds and runs the applications for Infor customers as-a-service.

But there is more to this than meets the eye. This isn’t just about Infor building out a new revenue stream from the capability that it has created by investing in Hook & Loop. This is just as much about Infor further creating ‘stickiness’ with its customers, by H&L Digital further co-creating key services with customers that can then be integrated into core products.

This didn’t stop them from producing borderline beautiful — meaning if you can call tech interfaces beautiful — interfaces and mobile products. Not at all. But it allowed them to sell services that would be both a true value add to the customers that bought them and at the same time create pathways for other things with the customer. Wise move for Infor, though I have to admit, I liked the purity of the original intent. But the value proposition of Hook & Loop went from design services to transformation services and that is powerful indeed.

Here is an example of their work:

crmce dashboard CRM Watchlist 2019 winners: The big engines that could part one Infor and SAP — The Infor CRMCE Dashboard is an example of the beautiful enterprise solution grade user interfaces that Hook & Loop Design does — making the user experience that much better.

Published with permission of Infor (2019)

This visual of the Infor CRM Dashboard is a perfect example of what the founder of Hook & Loop, Infor former Chief Digital Officer Marc Scibelli, once said about UX: “Sometimes the best UX is no UX at all.” A sort of Phillippe Starck minimalist worldview. but for technology and user interaction. This CRM Dashboard screen says it all with its incredibly attractive and clean and seemingly easy to use look. To me at least. I’m not an artist, nor even a vaguely competent art critic, but this goes to the ‘I know what I like” realm.

Vertical power

Throughout its entire history, Infor end to end has been a major player in multiple industries. In fact, it’s so refined a strategy and effort, that Infor calls what it has a “micro-vertical” focus — and that’s a fair self-assessment. They not only the basic stuff — industry process maps, etc — really well, but they also are incredibly smart about using the vernacular that each of their target industries use and, something I find very powerful, they have industry specific analytics.

Because a lot of what Infor has done historically has been back-office specific solutions (e.g. ERP), many of the industries that they are strong in are the less sexy ones but backbone industries. Manufacturing and distribution great examples of what I mean. They have an extraordinary set of logos — marquee customers in those industries — that are a testament to the strength of their offerings and to the relationships that they have.

Don’t get me wrong. They have some other highly visible specific industry logos too, though not necessarily deep penetration into those industries. Sports, which is one that I love to highlight, because it is an immensely valuable industry for impact though not as much for revenue is a great example for Infor. The New Zealand Crusaders, the Super Rugby team uses parts of the Infor CX Suite — particularly CRM and campaign management and have seen a ticket sale increase of 10% with an ROI of $ 7.66 U.S. for every dollar spent on Infor CX. This is a high profile, high visibility logo, but not in an industry that they participate that much. But the fact that there is a real value proposition and a solid outcome means that the Infor CX Suite is extensible enough and flexible enough to handle a diversified set of industries, not just the hardcore operational ones.

Infor’s industrial breadth is mind boggling. Here are the industries they serve:

Aerospace & Defense
Automotive
Banking & Financial Services
Chemicals
Construction
Distribution
Energy
Equipment
Fashion
Food & Beverage
Healthcare
High Tech & Electronics
Hospitality
Industrial Machinery & Equipment
Industrial Manufacturing
Logistics & 3PL
Professional Services
Public Sector
Retail

Another reason for their victory. They impact vertical markets broadly and deeply. Do NOT underestimate what they can do here. They have a meaningful strategy, and a powerful set of products that are more platform-like than any other part of their portfolio.

Front of mind social conscience

Interestingly, one of the things that gives Infor a leg up upon those who didn’t win is, that despite their not-as-visible-as-Salesforce-social-conscience, they have one, it is visible, and they are an activist organization — not just donating to charitable causes with money and services but involved in active outreach to other companies to jointly not just support but work together to solve problems. Here is just a sampling of their diverse (in the sense of widely disparate, not the political sense, though that too, in spades) and conscientious active good works.

Habitat for Humanity — Infor partners with them nationally with a combination of donations and active volunteerism.

GenOne — They have a national partnership with #YesWeCode that launched the GenOne initiative. The objective? Increase the diversity of the workforce in one generation. Started in 2018, this is coordinated with the Infor Education Alliance Program (EAP). The game plan is to recruit and train and employ underrepresented talent in the tech world. It’s a four-month high intensity boot camp that prepares and then finds employment for its graduates. The EAP overall, has already trained and placed more than 1400 students, of which 200 work at Infor.

Networks — They have the Women’s Infor Network (WIN) and the Veteran’s Infor Network (VIN). Fifty percent of all of Infor’s female employees are WIN members and there are more than 50 chapters who are hosting monthly events and publish a quarterly newsletter and keep an active Intranet site. There is 1:1 coaching for men and women. VIN is described by Infor as “…dedicated to the enablement, advancement, and retention of Infor’s veteran employees through recruiting, community, awareness and mentoring support.”

Diversity — Infor and CEO Charles Phillips personally (through his Phillips Charitable Foundation) work with and support STEM related initiatives for minorities, women and work with veterans. There are dozens of organizations ranging from CodeNow to Big Brothers & Sisters of NYC who are engaged with Infor through donations, volunteers, and outreach. They are actively reaching out to other tech companies to form a joint initiative among tech companies regardless of whether they are competitors or not.

All of this which amounts to many millions of dollars in donations and grants and thousands of hours of volunteer time and outreach for joint actions at the highest levels of the company.

Three Things to Consider

Bolster the CX Suite — The Story, the Product, The Ecosystem — What makes this a bit difficult to talk about is that a very decent chunk of what Infor provides with its CX Suite is certainly technologically sound and a solid contender in the market. But there are gaps in the product, and the story that would be wise to correct. The portfolio is strong enough in the areas that you would expect — vertical solutions, real time interaction management, sales, and marketing resource management (due to their 2012 acquisition of MRM powerhouse, Orbis Global). But there are two obvious needs they have. First, they have had a strong overreliance on Marketo and even with the acquisition of Marketo by Adobe still seem to rely on Marketo more than they reasonably should — thus reflecting a weakness in their own marketing automation product. That needs to be fixed and fast. Second, their service offering while decent in traditional customer service capabilities such as case management and newly traditional self service (e.g. Infor Concierge, lags behind in other significant areas significant areas such as conversational interfaces, chatbots, etc., which are becoming table stakes if they aren’t already. In fact, they don’t even advertise customer service on their CX Suite landing page. If you are claiming CRM, this is a must have. Finally, they need to begin to examine what they do from the standpoint of an engagement (or CX if they insist) ecosystem. How their offering provides what their customer base needs from end to end. They have a solid portfolio that is built around their cloud platform, Infor OS. But they need to do the work that gives them an idea what their customers want end to end — the customer ecosystem and the overlays with the enablement necessary to provide the outcomes the customers/prospects are looking for.
Aggressive Behavior — Up… It – If I go to an industry event — a Gartner conference, CRM Evolution, a CX related show, I see more often then than not, Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft and Oracle. I see Adobe showing up more and more than in the past. But I never see Infor. Never. This is a company that has had an impact, or they wouldn’t have won the 2019 Watchlist. I am reasonably certain that they can sustain that impact over the next couple of years, or they wouldn’t have won the 2019 Watchlist. But they are not terribly aggressive in their pursuit of visibility in the industry in which they reside (CRM/CX/Customer Engagement). Not the verticals… they do show up at the shows for the specific industries, but the horizontal industry that they are part of. They have a very good analyst relations program that covers not only their ERP, logistics etc. offerings but CRM and CX. To their great credit they fully understand that the world no longer consists of influencers from institutional analyst firms and that’s it. They see that boutique firms, independent analysts, and even non-analyst influencers are part of the mix that is required to maximize company impact. If I was looking for anything for them to do better in the AR side, and there isn’t much they could, I would think they should engage the non-institutional analysts more formally than they do. Thus, while they are very good at establishing a cadence with analysts, and that provides them with some industry visibility, they are not showing up in places that I should be meeting them in person…unless its their own event. Salesforce had that problem for awhile many years ago — now they are everywhere. I think Infor and I need to meet up in person somewhere that I’ve never seen them before. For real.
Thought Leadership? CX Storytelling? How Do You Like It? More, More, More - Infor’s corporate vision and mission is solid — and honorable. They see their vision as “a business world where technology plays an integral role in success, providing automation, streamlining processes, and offering intelligence so that personnel can focus on creative problem-solving, product innovation and creating meaningful relationships with customers and company stakeholders.” Solid. Infor’s mission is “to help companies achieve conscientious global citizenship.” Noble. Then it goes here. “By setting examples, producing thought leadership, education and solutions which support achieving human potential…” Education and solutions? Check and mostly check. Thought leadership. This is where they need to step up their game. Simple proof of point. Go to the Infor site. Go to the Resources section. Go to the White Papers. When you get there, go to Search and you’ll see your choices are by Industry and by Product. When you go to By Product, you see a dizzying array of products and sandwiched in there are some general offerings like Customer Experience Suite or Customer Relationship Management. Click on one of them. You get a “fill in the form” page saying a business representative (implied salesperson) will contact you in 24 hours, not a choice of thought leadership material. Or pick a product and see what crops up. Maybe one of three pieces is actually thought leadership piece and the others are a product piece. The game needs to be played before it’s stepped up. Time to play, playa.

Get the picture. They are doing some great things at Infor and deserved to win the Watchlist. To sustain their impact, though I would suggest that they improve their thought leadership, involve themselves more in the industry they are part of and examine, and decide on the full end-to-end product offering they need by identifying the customer/prospect ecosystem and what would be required to fulfill the needs of those fine folks.

These guys have one of the strongest industry presence in the tech world and are only improving day to day. They have an eye-popping set of customer logos that any company would be proud of. They are great corporate citizens impacting the world at large as well as the world they serve directly. They are a company with arguably beautiful technology and visionary designers. Mind the gaps and they will be a force for years to come.

Next up: Microsoft and Oracle.

Note: If you are interested in participating in the CRM Watchlist 2020, please email me at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com and ask for registration form. Remember, you will have to qualify to participate. There are criteria. Also, if you are interested in reading my new book on customer engagement, The Commonwealth of Self-Interest: Business Success through Customer Engagement (2019), please go here.

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CRM Watchlist Winners with Distinction part two: Salesforce

May 20, 2019 CRM News and Info

Last week, I not only revealed my bias and how I deal with it when doing the Watchlist (or anything I do as an analyst in fact), but I also covered one of our two winners with distinction this year: Adobe. This week, it is Salesforce’s turn, and as you can see, its for very different reasons that they are one of the two Winners with Distinction in this tough year to win the CRM Watchlist at all.

Salesforce

As you all know, I’m a diehard Yankees fan. When the Yankees win at Yankee Stadium, they play Frank Sinatra singing New York, New York over the loudspeakers. So awesome. What makes this germane to this particular discussion — Salesforce’s Winner with Distinction award for the CRM Watchlist 2019 is two lines in New York, New York.

“King of the hill,

Top of the heap.”

This has been the Salesforce position in the business technology universe for about a decade — the clear alpha among alphas. No disrespect to any other company (they all deserve respect for what they’ve done to date, too), but Salesforce’s impact has been well beyond the tech landscape and bleeds heavily into the world at large.

Why do they differ from other vendors? What is about Salesforce? While they are the fastest-growing enterprise software company in the world — fastest to $ 10 billion, fastest to $ 13 billion — they are still smaller in revenues by a substantial margin than SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle. And yet, they are the ones that everyone competes with; they are the ones that their competitors have the strongest and strangest reactions to — again, what is it about Salesforce?

Must read

It’s the culture, silly

It’s the culture. But even more so, their ability to externalize, institutionalize, and even humanize their culture to reach a broader population that goes beyond their customer base. It’s also their willingness to go beyond their customer base and generally take socially conscious and political stances that are aligned with their culture and to even do it at the expense of possibly losing a customer or two. Plus, invest in the efforts to make sure that they are internally aligned with the public postures that they do take.

Also: Impressions #1 (2019): Random thoughts on the customer-facing world in the new year

For example, at a Cloudforce event in Washington DC a couple of years ago, the speeches and discussions revolved around gender equality in pay. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced to the crowd that they had found the women who worked at Salesforce were being paid 19% less than the men. So, in November 2017 (if my memory serves me), they upped the salaries to equal the what the guys were paid. Then, acquisitions lowered the female pay scale 19% again, so they upped it again. They put their money where their mouth is.

But what makes them a corporate (note: I didn’t limit it to strictly business) leader for the foreseeable future is that they managed to externalize their culture and then name it – which then helps institutionalize it. First, they call their culture, Ohana, primarily due to a residence of Marc Benioff, and they draw on Hawaiian traditional morays to explain their efforts at inclusion.Then, with the culture and its foundation clarified, they have, and this is particularly interesting, extended it via a semi-activist approach. The effort around the extension to the larger body politic is what they now call Trailhead.

Trailhead actually began as their training program and methodology, and it was seen in the earliest days as where Salesforce admin MVPs were created. This was arguably the best technology training methodology I’ve ever encountered. Leading enterprise analyst and mega-influencer Josh Greenbaum agreed, and in 2016, he wrote a piece about the Trailhead DX conference. It has a very well encapsulated discussion about Trailhead as a good training methodology. That post has historical significance, because since then, Salesforce has made Trailhead its methodology for establishing not just training — but a cultural beachhead in the tech world and the engagement universe. Its where Salesforce finds its “Trailblazers” successful customers, who are also not just technology-competent, but cultural leads at their companies in multiple different roles.

What Salesforce has been able to do — unlike any other company except perhaps Zoho (and while Zoho isn’t doing it at the scale of Salesforce, they are magnificent in their own way, too) — is to create an environment that envelops employees, customers, prospects, and even those who are not in their sales orbit to want to participate in something greater than just a transaction. They want to participate in a culture, an environment, not a company, per se, which goes beyond just another business relationship. Salesforce says you can work here, you can buy here, and you can do good here. And the people believe. I’m not being facetious. They do truly believe.

This has created an organic ecosystem around Salesforce that shows itself in the way that their partner network operates and the way that a significantly large group of Salesforce devotees. For example, every, Saturday in multiple locations around the globe, there are Salesforce Saturdays — where Salesforce developers, MVPs admins, et.al., get together, hang out, code, talk through best practices, etc. (See the description in the center of this post on Ohana by SalesforceBen for a good brief idea of what they are). Informal, organic, independent of (but supported by) the company. They do it because they feel part of something “Salesforce-y.”

But the reason that they win the Watchlist year after year, goes beyond even this — though getting to this level alone is something that shows the tip of the impact-iceberg.

Products and market reach

What I’m not going to do here is cover the vast range of products, solutions, and tools that Salesforce offers. Most of the bigger companies have a range beyond the comprehension of mere mortals like me. But what I want to cover is what underlays the product portfolio.

Two things have characterized the Salesforce product portfolio. First, since 2002, they have been clear that they are a platform play, not an applications suite. Although they have applications/solutions aka “clouds,” including the core basics of CRM such as Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud, as well as a dominant position in the market, they have been, are, and always will be a platform, first and foremost. You saw that with force.com, Heroku, ad infinitum up to the (very well named incarnation) Customer Success Platform. Einstein, their AI product, is a layer in their platform, not a stand alone add-on solution.

Also: Best Buy, the worst buy: Lessons from the field and online

To that end, as a layer in the platform, it gives them infinite capabilities to produce specific outcomes using Einstein, and they have dozens of use cases — hundreds even — and have built the various, at this stage, horizontal applications of Einstein. The most recent, prominent and important one being Einstein Voice. They have just begun to venture into the vertical world with Einstein, with their very recent announcement of Einstein Analytics for Financial Services. But the potential possibilities remain endless (though my favorite one — using Einstein to create a Storytelling proficiency for Marketing Cloud — still hasn’t happened).

But the other immutable part of Salesforce’s product strategy is that all their products are directed to customer-facing applications. CRM was their basic one, and now they are beginning via mobile and other media, to move into the customer engagement world. Unlike Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft, which are both front and back end, beyond a brief flirtation with Infor several years ago, they haven’t ventured to the back end at all really — leaving that up to partners who build on their platform like FinancialForce. Their commitments remain customer facing.

But one place they have both backtracked and progressed simultaneously is in their understanding that the world is not going to be run only by Salesforce technology, nor is on premise(s) going away all that soon. So, they acquired integration platform Mulesoft (No. 2 after Informatica) for a cool $ 6.5 billion last year. No matter what you think of the price, it was a really good acquisition by Salesforce — and is a lynchpin in their product strategy and platform strategy going forward, and will just increase their reach.

But Mulesoft will help them do a lot better than just extend their reach by deepening their ability to gain access to data and also in the knitting of disparate systems – as long as Salesforce doesn’t treat it as an “Integration Cloud,” but is treated as, in old school terms, middleware and part of the Customer Success Platform. Salesforce benefits from the horizontal application of Mulesoft.

Their Mulesoft acquisition was, I think, the second-most significant acquisition of 2018 in terms of impact on the direction of the acquiring company. And it is also something that most likely will significantly increase Salesforce’s impact in the coming years. It provides what Salesforce hadn’t been able to: Integration with other systems including on-premise(s) systems. It’s also a tacit admission or at least acceptance on Salesforce’s part that on premise(s) systems are going to be around for a while longer despite their decline. It is also a recognition there are a lot of other systems that aren’t Salesforce — on the back and the front end 00 that they are going to have to play nice with. Mulesoft gives them a deep proficiency in doing just that. Plus, access to a lot more potential customers because of that. Thus increasing their impact.

And they already have a more than just significant business impact in both the CRM(ish) markets. Take a look at these IDC figures for 2018 (this is from the Salesforce Watchlist submission, though I changed the order, despite the quotes around it):

“According to IDC, Salesforce held the No. 1 position in sales for the six year in a row in 2018, with market share of 38.5%.

According to IDC, Salesforce held the No. 1 position in customer services for the fifth year in a row in 2018, with market share of 40.4%

According to IDC, Salesforce held the No. 1 position in digital commerce for the first time in 2018, with market share of 12.8%

Salesforce held the No. 1 position in CRM for the fifth year in a row in 2018, with market share increasing from 18.7% to 20.3%.

* No. 1 in CRM in U.S.(22.2% share, up from 21.5% last year)
* No. 1 in CRM in Canada (13.5% share, up from 9.9% last year)
* No. 1 in CRM in UK (16.7% share, up from 15.4% last year)
* No. 1 in CRM in France (18.8% share, up from 17.1% last year)
* No. 2 in CRM in Germany (7.3% share, up from 6.5% last year)
* No. 1 (up from No. 2) in CRM in Netherlands (12.6% share, up from 11.2% last year)
* No. 1 in CRM in Japan (19.5% share, up from 18.4% last year)
* No. 1 in CRM in Australia (14.9% share, up from 14.6% last year)”

That’s real impact. Can’t do a whole lot better.

Vision, Mission, Realization

But the impact goes much deeper than merely product breadth and depth with Salesforce. They are very much driven by their vision and their mission. What makes it as powerful as it is, isn’t just that Marc Benioff is arguably the greatest marketing maven in the world (and I’m not trying to be overly effusive or hyperbolic here, he is that good), but also that Salesforce — through its efforts to externalize culture and its efforts to effect some kind of ‘social good’ — is also making an attempt to make the company more approachable and more human. What I call “a company like me.” By succeeding at that, they make their vision and mission more realizable by the listener — not just the presenter, so to speak They make the listener want to be part of the effort.

Also: Conversational experiences: Building relationships one conversation at a time

This was best reflected in the 2018 Dreamforce keynote. The classic mainstage big keynote follows this pattern: 1. CEO speaks about the world; 2. Brings on customers; 3. Shows demos. Salesforce added in the spirit of their corporate philanthropy a non-profit that they had chosen to support that year. This year was very different. First, Marc spoke to the power of business as an agent of change. There was no chosen non-profit this year — the idea of doing good was on the table at the level of the world stage. The only product announcements was Philanthropy Cloud, which was the joint effort with United Way and played directly to the theme of doing good in the world.

The CEO of United Way Brian Gallagher moved many to tears (including me) talking (on a video) about why he joined United Way. You should watch it here. All other cloud product demos, usually part of the opening keynote, were relegated to their respective sessions. The backdrop to this very different keynote was that it humanized Salesforce. Salesforce became a company made up of people who had real lives and partners who were led by human beings. This wasn’t a world of personas, but of persons. This was the beginning of the humanization of Salesforce.

This is where the other big piece of Salesforce’s impact comes in — the drive to make changes in the world for the benefit of the many. I’m not trying to ennoble Salesforce. But they are a company with a purpose. Marc Benioff is conscious of Salesforce’s mission and actively propagates for it. The outlook is best reflected in an interview with Jim Kramer (mentioned in the San Francisco Business Times), right after he and Lynne Benioff acquired Time Magazine:

“Lynne and I so strongly believe that business is the greatest platform for change,” Benioff told the ‘Mad Money’ host. “When I went to business school, they said, ‘Focus on your shareholder, Marc. The business of business is business.’ That no longer applies. We have to erase that from our history books. The business of business is improving the state of the world.”

Their social impact as a company on issues, ranging from diversity and equality to sustainability and homelessness, has been enormous due to the leverage of the company as a major employer in many areas and to their willingness to stand for something and take the actions to accomplish it. Are they perfect? Nope, they are not. But this post is meant to be about why they won the Watchlist. Its not a deep dive into their strengths and weaknesses. This can mean anything from investing in future leaders to leading drives to eliminate homelessness in San Francisco to large scale global volunteerism. If you’d like to see more of what they are doing, go here and download their 2018 Social Impact report.

But please, keep in mind that’s impact in the past and the present. What also concerns me when I am scoring the companies is their future impact, which is more along the lines of: How are you organized and what have you done to provide the kind of sustainable impact over ensuing years that I’m looking for? Also, what are the signals that you can provide me to show me that it’s not just B.S.?

They are masters at creating motion and pipelines that accelerate that motion. People are attracted to motion — and that unto itself, can be good or bad, depending on what is associated with it. Its motion as a blank slate at first. But motion and action without organization and program, dissipates. Witness Occupy Wall Street who made a point of no leaders, no programs. But Salesforce manages, through its good works, to apply an actual (and visceral) purpose, direction and programs to its motion — and thus can focus and direct the motion and thus increase the impact it has on the world and on individuals. From that stems its powerful message and the effect of its vision.

But there are two more things necessary to remember. Salesforce is a business, not a political or social movement, no matter how much social good it does. Its still selling stuff to people in a for-profit way. Second, to sustain impact requires a strong institutional framework.

So, how does this business continue to grow the business and also maintain and accelerate its impact as a force for change? How do they win the Watchlist to put it in self-serving terms?

The Whole Thang

Salesforce puts a lot of time into thinking through the execution of its vision and mission. Keep in mind its vision and to a lesser extent its mission is what Marc said to Kramer: “The business of business is to change the world.” But its also to sell things if you are for-profit. As actively as they are propagating social change and doing good works, they are equally as proud as to be the fastest company to $ 13 billion in history.

Also: Impressions on SAP CX Live, SAP during a walk on Calle de Vendedor

Salesforce’s execution, though, is to make sure that they are effective doing all the things they have to do. On the propagation of social good they:

Recently merged (though technically it is in the form of an acquisition) Salesforce.org and Salesforce’s commercial business. Though, I still don’t quite get this one, it was presented to me in the form of efficiencies and effectiveness. It does do justice to the “business as a force for change” purpose of the company.
Have a Chief Equality Officer. Tte absolutely amazing Tony Prophet, who oversees not just all diversity efforts, but also the Ethical and Humane Use of Technology efforts, led to the creation of a separate unit inside Salesforce for its propagation.
Created what might be their most important cloud: The Philanthropy Cloud in partnership with United Way. This creates the framework for employees at any large company or in fact among large companies (it could be smaller, but realistically, it’s for enterprises) to participate in not just donating, but the life of the companies that they are donating to and with the others who are as interested in the cause as they are. The alliance with United Way gives the employees access to a staggering 1.3 million non-profits. Yeah, you got that right.
Were named the No. 1 company in giving back in 2018 as well as the No. 1 company to work for in 2018 (No. 2 in 2019) by Fortune magazine.

But they are a highly organized force for business impact — meaning direct impact on influencing customers to buy from them — too.

Outreach: Their outreach program, under the aegis and guidance of the long-time thought leader and industry influencer, SVP of Market Strategy John Taschek, is bar none the best in the industry. Their analyst relations program is comprehensive, is effective, and has some of the nicest and most qualified professionals in the industry.

What makes it unique is its mission, which really sees itself as an influencer relations program, one that extends well beyond just analysts. The other outstanding characteristic is that there is no charter to prevent the staff from becoming personal friends with the influencers. They are trusted to know their jobs, and it is recognized that human beings are human beings and that relationships and bonds form because they are human beings. No one is told to keep their distance. That trust allows the team to do their jobs exceptionally well, with high levels of engagement with influencers on a global scale. Additionally, their social media strategies are well designed and effective. They take advantage of their business visibility (aka fame…and their willing audience of advocates to broadcast a larger than life presence far and wide. Smart.

Marketing/events: A strength of the company getting better. They have a slightly unusual organizational setup — each of their entities has its own CMO for the most part — and there is also a corporate CMO. So, each cloud has its own marketing strategy, and, I would imagine, budget. They have, at the corporate level, the world’s greatest marketer: Marc Benioff. And I say that without an ounce of exaggeration. However, where they truly shine is events. Dreamforce is no longer an event. It has literally become the tech industry’s Coachella. Or if you prefer to keep the analogies a little purer; it can be argued that it has replaced SXSW (a.k.a. South By) as the destination for tech. Okay, a lot of you will disagree, but take the point at its metaphorical intent.

But as interesting or even more so is the Cloudforce conferences that Salesforce runs by locale. What makes them unique, besides their significant attendance (in the many thousands at each, most of the time), is their highly explicit regional focus. For example, I attended one in DC, my backyard, a few years back — where there were more than 1,000 non-profits in attendance (more than any I had ever seen even at a non-profit specific event).

More recently, again in DC, the focus was on public sector and gender pay equality. In Boston, they trot out Tom Brady (ugh). Sad, but smart. Regardless, they are laser-focused on the regions that they are in. There is nothing cookie cutter about any of their Cloudforce conferences. In the past, they hadn’t been participating in outside events all that much. Over the last four or so years, they have been — recognizing the value of propagating the Salesforce culture outside of Salesforce itself. So, they attend, sponsor, or even co-host Sales Hacker, CRM Evolution, and many others.

Awards: Without going into details, aside from the myriad of Gartner and Forrester MQs and Waves respectively that they participate in and end up in whoever’s leader quadrant or wave, they have extended well beyond that to many others including the aforementioned Best Place to Work and Best Place for Giving Back. And, of course, the Watchlist. They get a lot of visibility by their participation, and it impacts what the customers think, because it creates an impression “they won for that, and that, and that, and that” — volume and depth. That make customers very interested in checking them out initially and later on, more comfortable in their selection of Salesforce as a vendor. They become a high caliber, trusted, familiar organization

Summary

I haven’t even addressed PR or Marketing Strategies, etc. There is just too much. Suffice to say, what makes Salesforce as effective in gaining the visibility, creating the impact, and sustaining that impact over years is their willingness to invest in it, their deep commitment to social good/philanthropy, as well as the ordinary requirements of doing business, and their brilliant efforts to externalize their culture as an extension of their vision to change things in the world for the better. People see the company as a place that they not only can do business but participate in a culture that is driven by a greater good. That is impact.

Also: Microsoft-Adobe’s amazing partnership: Creating a new category?

But there are somethings they will have to do to sustain their impact over the next several years — at least according to the standards of the CRM Watchlist. Here are the three I’m willing to share with you all.

Three Things to Consider

Significant Extension of Thought Leadership Work: This might sound ridiculous, given what you think you know about Salesforce. But while they are among the most advanced thinkers when it comes to technology, and they are battling toward being the trusted adviser to companies via programs like Ignite and other customer success possibilities, where they fall off is in a highly directed, focused, and campaign-driven thought leadership effort.
Unlike Adobe or SAP, they have no centralized place for thought leadership. They need to have a single source — a portal for customers, seekers of knowledge, influencers, and the human family in general to find what they need to understand the concepts, ideas, intellectual frameworks, best practices, etc. Here, they need more centralization, not decentralization. Plus, they need to show their expertise in the verticals. I see a lot coming from their competitors when it comes to public sector, for example. But none from Salesforce. I’m not saying it doesn’t exist; I’m saying its not evident. If it exists, make it evident. If not, make it exist.
Stop and Talk about the Smell of the Roses: Salesforce’s release feature, solution, etc. Release schedule and breadth of their offering is breathtaking for its size, ambition, and speed to release. But it is coming out in the form of one press release after another, actually on top of each other. Einstein Analytics for Financial Services (May 7); Pardot Business Units for enterprise Marketing Teams (May 6); and the acquisition of Bonobos (May 6) were all right on top of each other. That’s great and exciting, but almost too much, given that the velocity and volume of announcements is almost too much to take in. What is needed too is a reaffirmation of product strategy and direction to the market. It also needs to be in the context of a cohesive ecosystem.
Otherwise, this is looking like zillions of random things being released — each of which has a purpose, but very hard to ascertain where the pieces fit overall in where Salesforce thinks its going. The mission (not the vision) is getting cloudy. A big picture view of the mission would be welcome at the various Cloudforce conferences and Dreamforce I think. This means explicitly fleshing out the corporate narrative and making it known to the public. When you are as many faceted as Salesforce is the bigger story can get lost in the details. Time for the bigger story to emerge. That is not just the “business as a force for change” story, but the explicit Salesforce story beyond Trailblazers and their chatter about being a “movement.” It is also time to reaffirm their product strategies in terms of the needs of the customer ecosystem it serves.
Continue to expand the Go to Market (GTM) Partnerships: This is an area that, in the past, Salesforce didn’t do too well at. There are some very promising signs recently that they’ve realized this isn’t a go it alone world anymore. Customers/constituents get engaged and stay engaged when you are able to meet their needs with an ecosystem — not just products and services or even the prior two and consumable experiences. You need the extended ecosystem to make what the customers get from you increasingly broad (but within the scope of possibility) and increasingly convenient to attain. Salesforce’s partnership with United Way; their first-ever (to my knowledge) OEM (Interaction Studio built on an OEM of Thunderhead), the customer engagement/journey orchestration platform; the extension of their strategic alliance with Google around some highly practical capabilities — not just for show; all bode well for the future. Salesforce’s next step is to take their bewildering, extensive, and massive array of capabilities, map out their customer ecosystem requirements, do what Adobe is doing around the Open Ecosystem initiative, and figure out the key strategic partnerships they need to make them “whole”

That’s it. Done. On to the rest of the winners.

Next up: CRM Watchlist 2019 Winners: The remaining enterprise players strut their stuff

If you are interested in participating in the CRM Watchlist 2020, send me an email at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com requesting a registration form. Registration has been open since February 2019.

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CRM Watchlist Winners with Distinction 2019 part one: Adobe

May 18, 2019 CRM News and Info

In February I announced the winners of what was arguably the most difficult CRM Watchlist to win. For example, fewer winners by 50% than ever before. No elite winners, and only a couple of winners with distinction. Really hard. Yet, there were winners, and two of them were with distinction.

I was busy flying around, so I wasn’t able to start writing up the winners as I have done for most of the 13 years I’ve had anything even resembling a Watchlist winners group. I had to get out my book (400 pages on customer engagement, and it’s called the Commonwealth of Self Interest: Business Success Through Customer Engagement). I had clients to tend to, and endless conferences to attend. All that — except getting the book out — is still my excuse, but I’ve decided it’s time to give you the whys when it comes to what made the 13 total companies the Watchlist winners, and the what — each of the conversations about the company will come with a limited set of suggestions on what they need to do next to sustain their impact.

Before I get to the actual analysis of the two 2019 CRM Watchlist Winners with Distinction, Adobe and Salesforce, over the next week or so, I want to give you some idea of what I have to deal with when doing this — which also addresses something that, if you ever think about what analysts do, can be interesting unto itself.

Must read

Bias in service of the work

One thing that any honest analyst will tell you is that there is a bit of science, a bit of art, and a bit of pre-existing bias that impacts the development of these analyses. For example, it was once put to me by an institutional analyst from one of the larger analyst firms that he tended to do more for free for the companies that have good people and that have a good relationship with him. Not a paid relationship. A good relationship.

This is a simple and unencumbered example of how human bias — the very same ones that make or break a customer’s long-term experience with a company — have an impact on even the most seemingly unbiased thinking. If you as a company or as an individual show that you value someone, they will feel valued and respond accordingly. No one is entirely emotionally agnostic when it comes to how they relate to being made to feel important or at least wanted.

If I’m a customer, that is what I want of you. Make me feel valued and in return your company will receive value from me. If I’m an analyst and thus write about companies, if I like the company I’ll tend to lean toward the positive. If I don’t, I’ll tend to lean toward the negative. If all other analysts want to deny this, fine. Go right ahead. I won’t question you. But I will, at least, speak for myself.

Also: Impressions #1 (2019): Random thoughts on the customer-facing world in the new year

The initial question I asked — after spending weeks trying to get on my radar — was: How do I put my bias aside to do the cold-blooded, left-brained research to come up with a judgment that was devoid of emotion about the companies that I covered?

The feedback I got from myself was: I can’t. Not going to happen.

I realized I had asked the wrong question. The real question was not “How do you put the bias aside?”, because much as I’d like to, I know I’m not really doing that by saying I am, but instead, “How do I use the biases to help me in the analysis of the companies I cover?” It took me a while, but I figured it out. What’s funny is that it was obvious. While I’d love to have called it an epiphany, which would have made me sound like I was really smart and prone to important breakthroughs, it was more like “Duh! Why didn’t I think of this years ago?”

The answer was in the question. The way to step outside the bias was to use them by looking at why they existed in the first place. Why is it that I like this company for that or dislike that company for this in the first place? What are they doing or not doing that gives me that emotionally positive or negative patina when I think of them, deal with them, or write about them? In other words, what are the actions, policies, programs, and who are the people that were the molten material that forged the biases to begin with? What was it that created the biases? For example, in the case of the two current Winners with Distinction, it is probably no coincidence that both have exceptionally good analyst relations programs run by people who I respect, personally like a great deal, and who, in a few cases, have become my personal friends.

“OMG,” you might be thinking (though I’m not sure you think in acronyms, do you?), “He is so prejudiced that the Watchlist can’t be trusted.”

Hold up, buster. Don’t take this too far. I’m telling you things that impact me as an actual person, not a persona. And how I can use those things that are quarrelsome potentially to make what I do work even better. There are a lot of caveats to this — and a lot of other factors that go into every decision I make when it comes to serving the public, which is who I see myself responsible to as an analyst.

The first broad framework that I operate from is, in the tech company world, I don’t give a hoot as to who wins the competitive wars. Client or not, company I like or not, people I love at the company or not, I don’t care. The market is huge. CRM alone is $ 40 billion, and if you take the larger, still somewhat amorphous customer engagement technology potential (I hesitate to call it a market yet), it’s so much bigger than that. Plenty of room for all the companies out there to do remarkably well without trashing each other or without me and others making them our knights. That is one way I am utterly agnostic. Human bias to this end is irrelevant. I can love you or hate you (though that is far too powerful a level of emotion than I have for any company), but I wish you well in the market.

Also, the bias is not the conclusive reason that any of the companies who win or don’t win the Watchlist win or don’t win the Watchlist. Adobe and Salesforce might have great analyst relations programs, but that is one of an incredible number of factors that are determinant in victory or loss.

For example, there is one winner, who I will leave anonymous out of respect for their win, who’s AR department I don’t think does a great job at all, but they still won and scored extremely well all in all. Another winner has an AR department with a person I don’t really care for because of their arrogance, but I have no real proof that this is anything beyond their relationship with me, because I am an independent. This individual thinks independents are meaningless in the world of influencers. Only Gartner and Forrester “count.” But the company that they represent won. “They” are not the company. There are several companies with excellent analyst relations people and/or programs who didn’t win because they were deficient in other areas that carried more weight.

I am always going to try to be fair. I can use the bias I do have because, when I examine their origin, I often find that they show me what led to them. It could be the culture of the company or the way that they have institutionalized a process or procedure or the effort that they make, which I can then corroborate because other analysts I use as a sounding board confirm it to me. I make decisions not only upon reflection, but upon inspection.

The reason I am telling you this is because I am the sole judge of the CRM Watchlist, and I would like you to understand what goes into making the decisions I make. I need to be at least honest with you. (I hate using the word “transparent” or “transparency” — so overused and so not actually the case with so many of those using it). I peruse thousands of pages of submissions and score everything myself. I’ve had 13 years to hone the criteria and the methodology and to reduce the amount of subjectivity in the decisions. I am proud of that. But I am a human being, and over the years I had to deal with those things that could change an outcome due to personal bias. I have done that by putting those biases in service of the effort as I described above. They become servants of the effort rather than the arbiter of the effort to choose the winners. The reasons for the biases become factors in the decisions. Regardless, I must be ruthless — the final weighted score, which I don’t know until I’ve plugged in all the numbers (a lot of numbers) is the final score. If your company loses by a tenth of a point, whether I love you or not, you lose. Even if you are my best friend and saved me from a fire years ago. By the way, that never happened. There was no fire. And very few of you are my best friends. Though I like you.

There you have it. Some definition of my thinking, my decision making, and my behavior — and how they impact the final choices I make in the Watchlist. A truly long-winded introduction to the actual reason for this post. But one that had to be said.

OK, with that clarified, on to the winners with distinction — and since Adobe was the highest scorer this year, let’s start with them. Next week, Salesforce.

Adobe

Many years ago, probably a decade ago, I got a request from Adobe to have a 90-minute conversation on something that they wanted my thinking on. They were not my client, but then again, I’m honored that any company cares about my opinion, so I had the conversation. To be candid, it was a horrible conversation — one of the most annoying ones I ever had. It was on whether positioning their technology as customer experience technology was a good idea in the context of a broader discussion on whether or not there was a customer experience technology market.

Also: Best Buy, the worst buy: Lessons from the field and online

At the time, I said emphatically there is no such thing as customer experience technology. And to this day, given what I meant and possibly what they asked I remain adamant. What I meant at the time (and still mean) was/is simple. There is no way to enable the larger idea of a customer experience via technology. Customer experience — the overarching kind ––is how a customer feels about a company over time. You cannot enable via technology how a customer feels about anything, including their feelings about your company.

That said, Adobe made the right decision to ignore me. Maybe I misunderstood what customer experience they were talking about and in deference to their victory in the Watchlist, I’m willing to say that I did. Maybe they weren’t evolved to where they are now, and I wasn’t misunderstanding that. But either way, they have evolved to what Joe Pine defined in his seminal book The Experience Economy as far back as 1997 as modular experiences — and what I call consumable experiences. In this case, what Adobe has done is create an almost unstoppable engine for the creation and distribution of those monetizable, consumable experiences.

What do I mean by consumable experiences? To put it simply — think Disney or American Girl stores or Baseball Fantasy Camp. They are not products or services; they are events marked by time that evoke a memorable emotion. You’ve had them. I don’t know what they are since I have no clue at all who is reading this, but it is just like the one that you’re thinking about now. It’s a potential ‘wow’ and, minimally, a satisfied content memory. Oh, and you’ve paid for it. A lot, usually. Someone of my generation who goes to a Baseball Fantasy Camp is going there to basically make believe they are playing major league baseball — not because the environment is holographically reproducing a stadium with a screaming crowd, but because you are being taught and playing with a ball player who you watched when you were a kid, even idolized. And you are paying $ 3,000 for the weekend. You might come out of there with a product — some physical souvenir — but you paid for the experience and the memories and the revivification of your youth. That’s what I mean when I say consumable experience.

Adobe, to their great credit, is actually one of the only, if not the only, company that can make a real claim and prove the claim that they have the technology to create and distribute those consumable experiences. That not only makes them possibly unique but, given all the other things they do in the context of the 21st century connected customer, makes them a powerhouse that has done nothing but grow once they made several of the truly right decisions over the last four or five years — starting with their purchase of Neolane in 2013. They have grown to become one of the most important and interesting technology companies on the planet.

The CRM Watchlist is an impact award and it is hard not to see Adobe’s impact on the market and on how people use tools to create and distribute that aren’t strictly just marketing related. For example, for years, they’ve owned one of the two standards for digital documents, PDF, used by almost every business in the world as their standard for legal digital print. Meaning not only is it in the format that they want people to read when they send it to them, but also it is used as the base format for documents that need legal verification be it a (digital) signature or an audit trail. But they go much further than that. Photoshop is the industry standard for photography and imagine production and manipulation to the point that Photoshop is used as a verb for changing an image in some way. You know you are embedded in the infrastructure when your products name is a verb for an action or for a generic use of a product (i.e., tissue is Kleenex). It’s actually a big deal.

But none of that would get Adobe the CRM Watchlist Winner with Distinction. What took them to the promised land on the Watchlist (well, at least the entry at the River Jordan) is a change in their strategy and business model in 2017, when they realigned the company to the requirements of the market.

Platforms and Ecosystems

One thing that has characterized the communications revolution of the past decade and a half and all the successful efforts at digital business transformation over the last five years has been a vision, mission, strategy, programs, and worldview, governed by platforms and ecosystems.

Also: Conversational experiences: Building relationships one conversation at a time

What do I mean by that? First, let’s start with definitions and then we’ll continue with Adobe. The definition I’m using here for ecosystem is the original one that James Moore posited back in 1993 in an article entitled “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition” (Harvard Business Review):

“An economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individuals—the organisms of the business world. The economic community produces goods and services of value to customers who are themselves members of the ecosystem. The member organizations also include suppliers, lead producers, competitors and other stakeholders. Over time, they co- evolve their capabilities and roles and tend to align themselves with the directions set by one or more central companies. These companies holding leadership roles may change over time, but the function of ecosystem leader is valued by the community because it enables members to move toward shared visions to align their investments and to find mutually supportive roles.”

What I mean by platform is defined in a vastly oversimplified way by Techopedia as:

“… a group of technologies that are used as a base upon which other applications, processes or technologies are developed.”

Again, vastly oversimplified but for the purposes of this post, fine.

Adobe figured this out that the business world was moving toward customers and the platforms and ecosystems that were there to serve them. They began to retool and revamp their entire company to this end in 2017. It began with a semi-public announcement and discussion at the 2017 Adobe Digital Marketing (Now Adobe Experience Cloud) Summit. Abhay Parasnis, Adobe’s CTO, announced to a group of analysts that they were going to move the company to a model defined by platforms and what he called an Open Ecosystem. What that meant in practical terms is that the three clouds they have — Creative Cloud (Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Lightshop, Audition, etc.,), Document Cloud (Acrobat, etc.,), and the then Digital Marketing Cloud (Campaign, Target, Experience Manager) — were going to be integrated to a single platform. The clouds would of course still exist, but a platform that would integrate them all and allow you to build across and through them would be a priority for the engineers to accomplish by 2019, and thus, for the 2019 Watchlist, they had accomplished that.

The best reflection of the platform was/is the evolution of Adobe Experience Manager into a solution worthy of its name. If you take it back several years ago, it was a good product, but it was very misnamed for what it did. It was a digital asset management tool. An effective one, but not an “experience manager.” They even had cool demos around it (e.g. showing them how to drag and drop a video file in Salt Lake City that on a live screen changed a video being shown on one of those big screens in Times Square). But ultimately, all they really did, as cool as it was, is swap assets.

But that changed in 2018, when they showed a demo of Experience Manager integrated with Campaign, Photoshop, and their remarkably mature AI, Sensei. They were able to design experiences, create experiential marketing campaigns, deploy the campaigns, and get results using Experience Manager and Adobe Analytics. What made it even more valuable was the use of Sensei to identify the elements, assets, and attributes that were likely to be most effective and appealing in those campaigns meaning get the best results. Sensei, which had been announced in 2016, turned out to be remarkably mature for a two- or three-year-old product.

But that still left the ecosystem. What made their idea of an Open Ecosystem — specifically, not just an ecosystem — powerful was their perception of what that meant for their business model and technology offerings. They defined their ecosystem in terms of the customer: What do Adobe customers (of varying sorts) need end to end? They understood, as anyone dedicating to an ecosystem perspective does, that they already provide some of that, are building other aspects of that, can acquire a company or two to fill in gaps, and can partner with other companies to fill in the remaining gaps. But what made them even more progressive in their thinking was that they also realized, while they might offer something, someone else might offer a better version of it, and thus they would be willing to partner with them. No one else that I’ve come across was willing to take what was called in the late 90s coopetition as a model — meaning partner with your competitors for the betterment of the customers and the benefit of the partners.

This came to fruition in the Adobe-Microsoft partnership announced in 2017, one which I’ve written extensively on, because in my eyes at least, this is a paradigm for how a strategic go to market partnership should be run. If you want to read more on this from me — read this here. I call this the GARP — Get a Room Partnership (remember the movie the World According to Garp? No? What! It was also a book by John Irving. Still no. Hopeless. Adobe and Microsoft are intimate. They are sharing code, products, infrastructure, sales teams, leadership, and much more. This was a huge step for Adobe (and for Microsoft — which managed to fully integrate significant pieces of the Adobe Experience Cloud into their Dynamics 365 offering).

Recently, as part of Adobe extending their Open Ecosystem, they announced a partnership with ServiceNow will extend their impact into the world of customer experience and customer engagement, though most likely from its operational side. Its well worth reading these couple of paragraphs from the press release on the partnership, because this breaks new ground for both Adobe and ServiceNow.

Adobe and ServiceNow will enable integrations between Adobe Experience Platform and the ServiceNow Now Platform to enhance Adobe’s real-time customer profiles with rich customer data. This will create a more comprehensive view of a customer across their entire digital journey — from acquisition to service.

Additionally, Adobe Experience Cloud solutions will integrate with the ServiceNow Now Platform, including its Customer Service Management (CSM) solutions to enable better customer and employee experiences across both companies’ applications. Adobe and ServiceNow will partner to enable their mutual customers to integrate and leverage digital workflows, service catalogs, intelligent content, and knowledge management capabilities.

Will this rise to the level of GARP? I can’t say that though to be entirely candid, I doubt it. There are certain elements not present in this relationship such as the closeness as friends of the CEOs that are in the Microsoft relationship. Regardless, it will still be a valuable partnership if both sides execute on the commitment to it.

The other partnership that is worth mentioning here is the Open Data Initiative — a partnership between Adobe, Microsoft, and SAP to create a common data standard for interoperability. To be clear, this isn’t meant to be, to my knowledge (which I think is pretty accurate) for now at least, a universal common data standard — that would involve a different approach. This is meant to be for the companies that use any or all of the three companies’ technologies — each of which has its own specific data type(s).

Acquisitions

The extension of their impact and their ecosystem doesn’t stop with the partnerships though. In 2018, they made two acquisitions — both incredibly smart. Magento, a capable mid-market ecommerce platform and Marketo, an enterprise ready B2B Marketing Automation (or if you listen to them — customer engagement marketing) platform.

Also: Impressions on SAP CX Live, SAP during a walk on Calle de Vendedor

What made these interesting — and risky — is that both are in areas that Adobe had little-to-no experience in or even historically an appetite for. E-commerce was hardly at the center of their thinking when they made their last major acquisition — Neolane. At that time, they were interested in filling out their B2C marketing offer, and Neolane’s core became Adobe Campaign. But e-commerce is an area that the major players — Oracle (ATG via acquisition for on premise and more recently their capable cloud offering, Commerce Cloud); SAP (acquisition of hybris, which was the best of the e-commerce platforms), Salesforce (acquisition of Demandware — B2C e-commerce and now Cloudcraze for B2B e-commerce), and Microsoft (at least so far, via partners like Episerver, et al.,) were all interested in for extending their platforms and, with engagement and experience at the forefront, their entry into that part of the world of customers. Initially, some of them tried to justify the acquisitions by calling it “the fourth pillar of CRM,” which, of course, it wasn’t and isn’t). After some fast pushback, they dropped that silly idea and recognized that it is an important avenue to and for customers on its own. Adobe, thankfully, never took that messaging up and instead recognized that their acquisition of Magento simply made sense — e-commerce transactions are typically not just the product of the utilitarian nature of the transaction but of the experience that the customer is having in the course of that decision to buy and the actual transaction. But Adobe’s customers were enterprise B2C marketing, so the question of being able to scale Magento still remains just that — a question. That isn’t something that they have resolved yet. But will have to. But they have the additional capability and it definitely increases their footprint in the customer-facing markets.

The acquisition of Marketo gave Adobe something they didn’t have: B2B Marketing, which, again, places them nearly on the level of the Big Four in their impact and scope. Marketo was the last remaining major independent player at the time of the acquisition. With both acquisitions in hand, new markets and greater impact in the market are both starting to be realized. But before you all get too giddy with glee over Adobe’s growing impact, please make sure you see the things they need to do to sustain and/or grow that impact below. There are three I’m identifying, but there are more than three needed. Three is all you get in the Watchlist posts. The rest is off-book.

But before we get there, there is another reason that Adobe was this year’s highest scorer and an impact player in the foreseeable future — and that’s their continued thought leadership.

Thought Leadership — Creativity in the Service of Thinking

Adobe, for the past several years, has been a consistent force when it comes to providing genuinely valuable thought leadership. Their CMO.com site has been the center for high quality content that ranges from thinking at the conceptual and framework level for customer experience to the how-to level when it comes to Adobe Experience Cloud products. Their approach to thought leadership is diverse. It is delivered in multiple formats via multiple media. The reports, and the site is well designed, not surprising given the creative side of the company. CMO.com itself is I think the second-best thought leadership central site in the industry (slight edge to SAP’s future-of-commerce site for reasons explained when I write up SAP). Look at this example. It shows the quality and diversity of the content and the look and feel:

cmo com CRM Watchlist Winners with Distinction 2019 part one: Adobe — Adobe’s CMO.com Thought Leadership Site

That level of thought leadership and attention to engaging design makes this an industry “Go-To” site — one that enhances Adobe’s reputation as not just a leader in the market but a trusted adviser to their customers — present and future.

But there is also one more area in which Adobe excels that pretty much will guarantee their future impact.

Outreach

Adobe is very good at Analyst Relations and Public Relations. Their outreach to analysts and their establishment of a regular “cadence” (their word, not mine, though if I use it, its mine too, I guess), is complete and consistent. When analysts need something, they get it. When news goes out, analysts hear about it. They don’t kiss the analysts’ butts, but they make sure that the analysts get what they need to do their job. They understand the nature of the influencer world (for the most part though they could do incrementally better if they choose to) and thus the institutional, boutique, and independent analysts and influencers who aren’t necessarily analysts, all slurp at the same trough. Their small AR team is among the best in the biz.

Also: Microsoft-Adobe’s amazing partnership: Creating a new category?

That continues on the PR side, too. The combination of internal PR and agencies they work with get hundreds of placements every year. Shantanu Narayan, Adobe’s CEO, is available and out in the market as often as he needs to be. What makes that part interesting is that most other CEOs are tied up by operations and think they can’t leave or the ops will fall about. Shantanu Nayaran thinks the opposite. He will handle what he can, but others can handle the ops, and he needs to be out amongst the people — and the impact of that decision is obvious in the impact they have on the market.

Summary

What does this all mean so far for the Watchlist? Think of it this way. The Watchlist is an impact award, and it is based on the impact you’ve just had in the immediate year that has passed and the likely impact you will have roughly three years from that date. Adobe, through these alliances and the evolution of its platform, is becoming not just a unique player in its ability to create consumable experiences and deploy and manage campaigns (i.e. experiential marketing); not just a thought leader in the customer engagement world, but a market maker — one with a vastly increased distribution network for its efforts via the strategic partnerships that either have been announced or they may have in the works (though to be clear, I am unaware of any others beyond Microsoft and ServiceNow). From 2017 to now, they have increased their impact in the markets they are part of — and continued their alignment with customer needs and demands as the markets have evolved/matured. A year ago, they were the 0.5 of the Big 4.5 (Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP being the 4.0). This year I called it in January the Big 4.8, because of the almost visceral increase in Adobe’s power/impact/influence. They were the No. 1 scorer this year on the Watchlist because of all the attributes that I have identified here. I only see it continuing but they have other things they need to do to be able to sustain that impact — and grow it.

Here they are:

Three Things to Consider

Scale up their “Good Works” — and make it known: They do some good — spending more than $ 36 million around the world donating time and money, but at their scale and size, it would be wise to increase the efforts and organize programs to support organizations that are doing good. Part of the world that they (and we all) live in is governed by the good that companies do — and the demands from employees and customers that the companies that they deal with do more than just sell stuff is becoming increasingly strident. Plus, companies (and individuals) owe the world more than just a residence in it. Adobe, for its size, needs to scale up their efforts in the social sphere.
Marketo cultural and company integration: At the Adobe Experience Summit in March, Marketo had a nearly independent presence. It was almost as if there were co-located conferences for Adobe and Marketo. The lack of integration of the companies was apparent. While this may be a strategy, not just a slowly evolving effort, it is not something that should be allowed to occur a lot longer. Take the Magento model — an effective not terribly long-term integration of the two companies — and reproduce it with Marketo. I recognize that Marketo is a lot more difficult, but at this point given the forces in the market that are driving the idea that B2C and B2B are going away as separate categories (“at the end of every B is a C”), one which I agree with but think it has a slower arc that most analysts think, is going to require Adobe to get Marketo into the fold sooner than later.
Vertical strategies: Adobe has a vertical strategy. You see it when they speak about retail and entertainment/media, but it seems to be somewhat limp. With the acquisition of Marketo, their industries reach becomes greater by the acquisition, and the opportunity around vertically specific solutions significantly increases. They need to not only organize a broader, more encompassing vertical strategy, but they should be more public about their penetration into the industries. Their customer references, their public stage customer speeches and discussions all indicate vertical penetration, but their messaging around that doesn’t indicate any recognition of it (meaning the customers on the stage are not seen or spoken about at all as reflective of Adobe’s penetration into an industry). The net net? Develop a vertical strategy. Talk about it.

OK enough about Adobe. Next week, we move on to the other CRM Watchlist 2019 Winner with Distinction: Salesforce.

If you are interested in participating in the CRM Watchlist 2020, send me an email at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com requesting a registration form. Registration has been open since February 2019.

Previous and related coverage:

Modernizing B2B sales: Here’s a formula for winning the race

Today’s Formula 1 car is a high-speed data hub covered in sensors that measure every performance detail as well as the driver’s biometrics. Meanwhile, B2B sales is stuck in first gear. Here’s how to get to the top step of the podium.

Customer engagement: Context, meaning, and measurement

Industry expert practitioner Elizabeth MacAuley-Italiano gives her take on customer engagement, its definition, framework, and its practicality. Pay close attention — this can help define what you do moving forward.

ABM is good, but CBM — courage-based marketing — is better

Shail Khiyara, CXO of UIPath writes of something that is different and interesting and important for marketers and pretty much everyone to understand in the 21st Century: Taking chances, innovating, showing some courage in how you address the marketplace.

Adobe buys Marketo: Who wins, who to watch

Chris Fletcher, founder of the Aegean Group, former senior analyst at Gartner Group, and now an independent, opines on Adobe’s Marketo acquisition. You’d do well to read and listen. Chris has the chops. And the knowledge. And the experience.

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ZDNet | crm RSS

2018 ERP/CRM Software Blog Award Winners

February 23, 2019 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Hard work deserves recognition.

This year we have decided to give recognition to our top bloggers, top members, and founding members of the ERP Software Blog, CRM Software Blog and ERP Cloud Blog. All of these companies get our sincere congratulations for their hard work.

Top Blogger Award – Members whose posts received the most traffic and members with the highest number of clicks from their posts back to their website. Their articles get the most readers and inspire those readers to take action and learn more.
Top Member Award – Members that posted the highest number of blog articles this year and members that posted consistently every month. Our version of the “perfect attendance” award.
Founding Member – Members that joined our sites right at the very beginning and have stayed with us all these years.

ERP Software Blog – 2018 Top Blogger Awards

Visitors

Links

CRM Software Blog – 2018 Top Blogger Awards

Visitors

Links

ERP Cloud Blog – 2018 Top Blogger Awards

Visitors

Links

ERP Software Blog – 2018 Top Member Awards

Members with the highest number of articles in 2018:

Members that never missed a month:

CRM Software Blog – 2018 Top Member Awards

Members with the highest number of articles in 2018:

Members that never missed a month:

ERP Cloud Blog – 2018 Top Member Awards

Members with the highest number of articles in 2018:

Members that never missed a month:

ERP Software Blog – Founding Members (Joined June 2009)

CRM Software Blog – Founding Members (Joined November 2009)

ERP Cloud Blog – Founding Members (Joined April 2015)

All of our members on each blog site are appreciated. But these few deserve a little extra credit for their hard work. We look forward to honoring more members for 2019.

A special badge has been added to the profile page of each member on the blog site. Click the link of each winner to check it out, learn more about their company, and read their posts.

Interested in joining our group blogs? Contact us.

ERP Software Blog – Microsoft Dynamics ERP Partners (VAR and ISV)

CRM Software Blog – Microsoft Dynamics CRM Partners (VAR and ISV)

ERP Cloud Blog – Acumatica, Sage Intacct, NetSuite, SAP Business ByDesign, Accolent ERP, Microsoft Dynamics ERP (VAR and ISV)

By ERP/CRM Software Blog Owners

www.erpsoftwareblog.com

www.erpsoftwareblog.com/cloud

www.crmsoftwareblog.com

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

Tag Archives: Winners

ERP Software Blog – 2020 Top Blogger Awards

CRM Software Blog – 2020 Top Blogger Awards

ERP Cloud Blog – 2020 Top Blogger Awards

ERP Software Blog – 2020 Top Member Awards

CRM Software Blog – 2020 Top Member Awards

ERP Cloud Blog – 2020 Top Member Awards

AI Entrepreneur Winners

AI Mentorship Winner

AI Research Winner

Responsibility & Ethics of AI Winner

Rising Star Winner

So Far, So Good…Continued

Overview

Pegasystems

Pegasystems and The Corporate Narrative: A Tale of One City.

Pegasystems’ corporate narrative: From Soup to Nuts? Or…?

PegaInfinity

Engaging the Right Brain

Three Things to Consider

An admonishment and warning

SAP

SAP in the light of day

Three things to consider

Infor

Infor wins. Why?

Just the numbers alone impress

Design thinkers par excellence

Vertical power

Front of mind social conscience

Three Things to Consider

Innovation

Salesforce

Must read

It’s the culture, silly

Products and market reach

Vision, Mission, Realization

The Whole Thang

Summary

Three Things to Consider

Enterprise Software

Must read

Bias in service of the work

Adobe

Platforms and Ecosystems

Acquisitions

Thought Leadership — Creativity in the Service of Thinking

Outreach

Summary

Three Things to Consider

Previous and related coverage:

Recent Posts

Categories

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