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Selling Through Partners: When and How To Do It
Channel sales allows you to scale up your sales operations and reach new customers without adding to your head count. Whether you’re selling consumer products or computer software, an effective channel sales program can help you achieve revenue goals. In fact, channel sales is so important, I wrote an entire chapter on it in my book.
Selling through partners is changing faster than ever as new channels emerge and the pandemic challenges our status quo. What worked five years ago or even five months ago may not work today, so sales leaders need to constantly seek ways to keep partners engaged, supply chains moving, and customers happy.
I recently reached out on social media to get a frontline perspective on what indirect sellers are experiencing and what questions they may have (previously, I answered questions about direct selling). Below are my answers to 10 questions using real examples from LIKE.TG customers and channel sales leaders.
1. What advice would you give a business considering launching a channel sales program for the first time?
First, ask yourself: what is your product? Who is your customer? How do they want to buy? Unfortunately, consumer purchasing habits are a moving target right now, especially with the explosion of online sales channels. That means you must first understand what channels your prospects prefer. Rarely is it only direct or only indirect, most companies have a blended channel strategy to accommodate different go-to-market and customer requirements. If you choose to include indirect sales, then you will need to create a separate organisation to focus on this new channel. This includes channel leadership, channel account managers, and channel program managers to design and develop the framework for your partners.
Most companies have a blended channel strategy to accommodate different go-to-market and customer requirements. Click to Tweet
For instance, toilet paper is a product often sold and distributed using a channel sales model. You usually can’t purchase it directly from the manufacturers. They will direct you to one of their partners, either online or offline. When retail partners ran out of toilet paper earlier this year due to hoarding and supply chain issues, it created huge frustrations for everyone.
These partners provide tremendous scale, logistics, distribution, and sales capabilities. When setting up the program, channel program managers should consider not only the cost of goods sold, but also ease of purchase, customer preferences, and additional logistics capabilities. This approach maximises your sales and market coverage.
Once you’ve decided to create a channel sales program, you’ll need to put the right resources behind it so you’re setting partners up for success.
2. My company puts more resources toward direct sales than indirect sales. How can I get executives to prioritise and invest in the channel?
Most organisations grow up selling directly to customers. It creates a level of comfort. It becomes their muscle strength.
Many sales leaders I talk to believe direct sales bring higher profitability and margins. This is a common misperception, and it doesn’t consider the additional sales expenses transferred from the company to the partner organisation.
With direct selling, you’re absorbing all the costs: commissions, employee salaries, health insurance, office space, and mileage. Those expenses don’t exist in channel sales, so while the product’s profit margins may in fact be lower, much of that can be offset by the reduction in selling, general, and administrative expenses.
Indirect sales can also help your organisation tap into new markets. Case in point: when LIKE.TG started selling in various Asian countries, it relied on local partners. Stephen Casey, Regional Vice-President, Alliances, LIKE.TG ASEAN, says that “Selling through partners in Asia is instrumental to thego to market success strategy at LIKE.TG. Partners allowusto scale across a very diverse and complex region.A clear and consistent channel program helps us ensure the success of our customers.” Getting back to #1, if the executive team is committed to the “why” of an indirect sales channel, then they will prioritise and invest in that channel to ensure greater customer and market coverage and success.
3. What skills should a channel sales leader have?
While building and nurturing relationships is the job of every seller, managing channel partners and supporting others’ selling efforts requires a nuanced skillset.
The channel organisation looks and feels a lot like a direct selling organisation, but channel account managers or partner account managers are their company’s brand ambassadors responsible for galvanising, training, and supporting resources who work for another company.
Let’s go back to the toilet paper example. Your local retailer probably stocks several different toilet paper brands. Each one of those brands has a channel sales manager who is fighting for shelf space, funding marketing campaigns, training other companies’ employees, managing inventory, and the supply chain, all while navigating their own internal sales responsibilities.
Channel sales managers are responsible for getting partners to give their company more mindshare than its competitor. Understanding the interconnectedness of sales, marketing, and customer success is key.
4. There is a ton of investment in technology on the direct sales side. What technology do you need to manage your channel program?
When you have just a handful of partners, you have a lot more freedom in how to manage them. It could be something as simple as a spreadsheet, or even a very basic tool. However, if you hope to scale your indirect business, attract new partners into your ecosystem, and leverage the additional reach third parties can bring, then you will need a more sophisticated solution to help you manage the entire lifecycle of a partner relationship. (Hello, Sales Cloud Partner and Channel Management software.)
When companies use the same tools for partners as they do for direct selling, such as a CRM, it can lead to unintended consequences. Lead management is hugely important to partners, and the lead management system used in the direct business may not meet partners’ needs. Does it have a structured system for tracking leads all the way to closure in a two-tier or three-tier distribution channel? If not, the reputational and opportunity costs can be huge.
Technology that enables a better channel partner experience translates to a better customer experience. Click to Tweet
Technology that enables a better channel partner experience translates to a better customer experience, too. By replacing their legacy platform and its siloed systems with the more user-friendly and personalisable Sales Cloud partner management solution (PRM), Dropbox unlocked channel visibility, and partner productivity — resulting in a 310% increase in registered deals and a 68% increase in partner training completions.
5. Should I invest my resources in already high-performing partners or high-potential partners? How do I identify either?
Not all partners are created equal – not in their performance and not in their commitment and engagement with you. If you are able to determine which partners fit which category or at least have a good idea of how many fit into each category, then you can allocate the necessary resources, marketing dollars, and support efforts to each.
However, just like not all partner organisations are created equal, the resources supporting them should have different remits. Channel sales managers covering high performers should focus on maintaining current momentum and supporting the initiatives both companies are collaborating on. It is less about selling to your high-performing partners, but rather keeping them engaged. You are responsible for ensuring your joint customers are successful.
High-potential partners have a lot of upside with the right effort (people, process, and systems). Target them for business planning sessions to outline the best way to realise joint success. That type of planning can help define where you focus on providing leads, co-selling, using market development funds to stimulate new joint opportunities, and provide the training and enablement to point them in the right direction. The business planning session can very quickly validate how serious they are about the partnership. If they don’t engage or put forth any real effort during the planning process, that should be a clear indication they may not be worth the effort.
6. When should you stop doing business with a partner?
Partners who are not engaged with you in any meaningful way, yet still demand time and resources can be draining for channel sales managers. Those are the ones you want to consider eliminating from your ecosystem.
If you are a smaller organisation with limited resources, you must pay attention to the companies you recruit into your channel program from the start. This way you don’t waste time and energy on those who were never going to provide the returns you seek. The takeaway: choose wisely.
Unfortunately, even with the best intentions, when both companies are committed to the partnership, things may change, and you have to make hard choices and remove them from the program. The channel sales manager needs to evaluate partners based on engagement, opportunity, and fit on a regular basis. Then remove the ones that no longer make sense. This ensures your ecosystem is healthy, your customers are happy, and you have the right level of partner engagement.
7. Why do so few partners actually take advantage of market development funds? How can I change this?
Market development funds (MDF) — money companies give to partners so partners can market to their customers — have been a focus for many companies over the past decade. Some companies spend millions of dollars on MDF (annually or even quarterly). It is the engine that keeps the leads flowing, deals moving forward, and partners engaged. However, there is another side to the MDF story.
Sometimes partners don’t use their MDF, because they don’t have a marketing department to plan and execute a campaign. Sometimes it’s because the dollar amount is so small, they feel they can’t do much with it. Or sometimes the partner takes a short-term approach to marketing or isn’t focused on selling that vendor’s products during the specified time frame.
Since so many partners lack their own dedicated marketing departments or resources, an easy way to encourage engagement is to share pre-built campaigns, trade show in a box or brandable content with them. That way, you’re knocking down barriers and making it easy for them to begin to market with less upfront investment. Plus, they’ll have professional looking materials at their disposal that are still in line with your brand guidelines and standards.
8. In challenging economies, do you expect to see more companies creating channel sales models? If so, why?
Yes! You see companies that originated as a direct-to-consumer model, and now that they’ve built a radical fandom, they’re expanding their go-to-market strategies by including indirect selling partnerships with large big-box retailers. They’ve realised that if they really want to get scale, it’s hard to do and very expensive on a one-to-one basis.
One example is Mitsubishi Chemical Cleansui Haili. Haili is the sole distributor of Mitsubishi Chemical Cleansui, Japan’s number-one water purifier brand in Vietnam. It recently opened other distribution channels through a new business to business to consumer (B2B2C) model. These channels are managed through the LIKE.TG Partner Relationship Management (PRM) tool. According to Trang Le, Business Marketing Manager at Haili, “The advantage of this model is that we do not need to recruit too many sales people and we are able to increase our speed to market as well as consumer coverage. Dealers are our extended sales army.”
9. How can I tell if my partner is representing my brand in the best way possible?
The way a partner represents the brand is important. Companies won’t be able to reap the benefits of scale and reach if selling through channels damages their company’s reputation. Channel leaders should monitor the satisfaction of customers who purchase through partners so they can address any issues that might arise. One way to do that is to survey the partner’s customer directly. Were they satisfied with their experience? What went well? What could be improved?
While a survey might sound easy enough, this is fairly difficult to execute, because you don’t always know who the end customers actually are. Some companies use product registration to create that direct customer connection, so they can survey and uncover unmet needs or service issues. Others might require partners to register customers, so that the company knows who ultimately bought the product. Others have no visibility into the end customers at all, and that closes the door on being able to survey at all.
If you are able to survey and get real time customer feedback, you can keep your partners accountable for the quality of service you expect. If they don’t live up to your standards, you can lower them in the program or maybe stop doing business with them altogether.
10. What changes have you seen in channel sales and what should we expect going forward?
Selling through partners looks very different today than it did just even a decade ago, because of all the new selling platforms and online channels we have at our disposal. You can sell on social media, brick-and-mortar retail, online retailers, and more. The good news is the list is endless. The bad news is the list is endless.
However, just because there are more sales channels to leverage doesn’t mean that you should. Less is more. Unless you have a significant amount of resources, marketing budget, technical capability, and need, I would avoid adding new channels until you have achieved stability and proven success in another.
This goes back to: who’s the customer and how do they want to buy? If your customers are teenage girls, then they may be more inclined to buy makeup on Instagram rather than a department store. If your customers are men over the age of 50, then you might choose to partner with a sports podcast rather than TikTok. It’s easy to get caught in the comfortability of “we’ve always sold this way.” Use the current market context, what your prospective customers expect, and where your customers shop to help shape your future go-to-market plans.
Got more questions?
Ask me on social media. You can connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.
For more tips and strategies on indirect selling, check out our free training on Trailhead.
Finally, learn more about how our Partner and Channel Management Software can help you build your partner ecosystem,here.
This post was originally published on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
In Crisis, IT Leaders Are Keeping Teams and Customers Connected
As office workers switch to remote work en masse, information technology (IT) leaders are doing the heavy lifting to improve employee and customer experience. Vijay Iyer, Head – Employee Customer Experience Specialists, leads a team of Employee Customer Experience Specialists at LIKE.TG. He shares what we can learn from IT leaders who are proving very good at keeping teams and customers connected.
Six months ago, Chief Information Officers said one of their biggest challenges to the improvement of employee experience was ‘IT is treated like a support function instead of a business partner’.
What a difference six months makes.
It would be very difficult to find an organisation today that does not consider IT a core enabler of success. In an entirely new and, by necessity, immensely flexible work environment, all stakeholders require trust in the fact that their data is being encrypted, that they have access to the right information, and that they can access the information needed to do their work from anywhere and at any time.
IT leaders and their teams have had to pivot quickly to meet specific and urgent needs. The simple act of onboarding and training a new employee, at their home instead of in a centralised office, takes on an entirely new level of difficulty, for example.
The shape of IT teams has become fluid. Team members have been redistributed to cope with constantly changing demands.
IT departments have also become at least partly responsible for the emotional wellbeing of staff. Some staff have been separated from their families. Others were forced to return early from their honeymoon. Some have been unable to come back into where they’re primarily based. Every individual – whether they have faced one of those situations or not – has felt uncomfortable and uncertain at different points in this process.
The work of a IT leader and their team – whether an app, a chat platform, expanded virtual private network capabilities – enables a sense of belonging and security that helps people cope during difficult times. While everyone is experiencing this current climate ‘storm’, we are all in different boats.The purpose of IT leaders has changed dramatically, and we’re hearing some spectacular stories from their endeavours.
The IT leaders who are hitting it out of the park
Two examples of IT leaders who helped their companies to provide excellent employee and customer services come to mind:
Maxicare
Maxicare is the top health maintenance organisation in the Philippines. When COVID-19 struck, Maxicare’s first priority was to take care of their employees and ensure that they could safely continue to work.
According to Sylvia Stolk, Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Maxicare’s employees had to transition from working at Maxicare facilities to working from home. Maxicare set up a “Maxicare WoW (Ways of Working)” microsite that helped employees with adapting to working from home. The microsite had learning materials on how to set up home networks, access systems, and leverage user productivity tools for collaboration. Maxicare also used Service Cloud to orchestrate services and ensure continuity of care.
Maxicare’s transition to remote work was successful and as a result, Maxicare was able to provide uninterrupted care to its members.
SingEx
Headquartered in Singapore, SingEx is a leading meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions (MICE) company partnering businesses on customer-insight driven audience engagement solutions. It is also a venue operator and manages Singapore EXPO MAX Atria, Singapore’s largest purpose-built MICE venue.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, SingEx repurposed Singapore EXPO MAX Atria into a temporary community care facility for recovering COVID-19 patients. In view of the scale of operations and the need to urgently align multiple parties on site for rapid response times, SingEx used Service Cloud and Community Cloud to set up a digital command centre. This gave a single view of the facility’s operational requirements such as internet services and waste management.
SingEx used Service Cloud to manage onsite providers and agencies, including the facility’s managing agent, medical groups, security services, and infrastructure agencies. These onsite providers and agencies were also enabled to use the digital command centre.
Rizwan Hazarika, Chief Digital Officer, said that after SingEx’s success with Service Cloud and Community Cloud, the company is now looking into how else LIKE.TG can complement its current efforts to transform and recalibrate internal work processes. The next challenge: Strengthening core capabilities for a digital-first world.
IT leaders must set priorities
Every organisation is unique in its operations, meaning every IT leader must set priorities before deciding where and how resources must be distributed.
At LIKE.TG, we created a COVID-19 Customer Response Hub and quickly addressed three priorities:
All current information related to COVID-19, so the teams have one place to find everything they need to support our customers and community with help quickly and effectively.
Expanding our employee wellness resources, with different programs each week to help everyone stay focused and feel good – online childcare activities, education and training, and our ‘BeWell’ sessions (featuring speakers including Trevor Noah and Arianna Huffington) that we are now sharing with external audiences to enjoy.
Ensuring all team members are being enabled to help our customers pivot in these uncertain times, with offerings such as Work.com.
All three platforms relied heavily on the IT team and offered unique challenges, as well as exciting new opportunities, to the technology team.
I’d expect the complexity of the tasks, as well as the combination of challenge and opportunity, to be no different in any other organisation.
IT leaders are now central to employee and customer experience
We’re seeing the role of the IT leader changing day by day. Those changes are not going to stop any time soon. So what are the essentials? Where must IT leaders focus? A helpful framework is the ‘three Rs’.
Reassurance: The IT leader must let the organisation know they have everything under control, that everybody can continue working and that they’ll be ready to move no matter what changes.
Redistribution: As demands change and as different skills are needed in various parts of the organisation, the IT leader must lead the charge by redistributing their own team to ensure business continuity. Success in this venture will come from deep listening in all parts of the business.
Rebound: What direction can the business take to bring itself out of a dark space and into the light? Where are the exciting new opportunities, particularly those that can be scaled through the use of technology? What are the channels the company hasn’t used in the past? If one thing is for sure, it’s that the IT leader will have the attention of the entire leadership team, so they should make the most of it.
Finally, we must lead with empathy and trust. If IT leaders lead their businesses to a better place and ensure stakeholders feel safe and protected along the way – if they offer a parachute at a time that many stakeholders feel they are falling – imagine the bond that will be formed. The IT leader role has never been more important for building trust and providing security.
To learn more about the relationship between technology and employee engagement, download the APAC Employee Engagement Report.
This post originally appeared on the A.U.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
How To Use Data To Boost Growth Marketing
The remit of marketing has expanded beyond branding to encompass business growth.
Therefore, marketers have to adapt to new metrics and decision-making frameworks. Data integration and analytics to measure impact are the new essentials.
Datorama is a LIKE.TG company that provides a AI-powered marketing intelligence and analytics platform for enterprises, agencies, and publishers. Recently, Datorama and researchers from The Leading Edge conducted qualitative and quantitative research with more than 1,000 marketers in Singapore, Thailand, the Philippines, India, Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong.
The results show how marketers in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region are responding to the new growth mandate. This research also uncovers the challenges marketers face with data integration and analysis, and their solutions.
Here are four highlights from the Marketing Intelligence Report:
1. Growth marketing is the new focus
The vast majority of marketers – 91% – recognise the major role marketing plays in driving revenue.
This growth mandate is also reflected in marketers’ priorities. About 94% of respondents say that their priorities have changed to focus on marketing-led growth.
Approaches to growth marketing, however, vary greatly:
54% of marketers say they think of driving growth and efficiency as a long-term play that builds equity and loyalty.
11% look for short-term gains including increased sales, acquisition, and retention.
35% describe a mix of long- and short-term goals.
Time periods aside, the top growth-related sales initiative for marketers across APAC is connected customer experience across marketing, sales, and service. This means the top barrier – misalignment across teams on measurement and reporting – is essential to overcome.
2. There’s opportunity for those who can manage cross-channel data
Many of the barriers to effective growth marketing stem from inadequate measurement of cross-channel activity and performance.
The average APAC marketer is managing 7.4 marketing channels. A third experience challenges unifying data from different sources, and 64% spend a week each month – or more – doing this.
Data-driven customer engagement and personalisation at scale can increase lifetime value and assist in immediately boosting returns of investment. This represents a straightforward growth marketing opportunity for the 71% of marketers who are still integrating data manually.
3. Optimisation requires investment and problem-solving
Data accuracy – rated the most important factor for marketing performance – is fundamental to effective analysis and optimisation. It must be solved first, before other challenges can be effectively addressed.
These other challenges include sharing and collaborating on data analysis (faced by 37% of marketers) and connecting marketing investments to business outcomes (faced by 35% of marketers).
By looking deep into marketers’ processes, our research uncovered three major underlying issues with marketers’ data practices:
54% don’t have access to real-time reporting or daily reports.
68% don’t have fully automated cross-channel reporting.
40% operate in silos, measuring performance independently within each of their tools or relying on spreadsheets.
4. A data culture is key
Marketers are optimistic. Sixty-six percent say they’ve made excellent progress in gaining executive support. Sixty-four percent rate the progress on aligning key performance indicators across teams, regions, and partners as excellent.
In the data revolution, tools and processes are vital. But so is a data culture.
People need enablement. They also need to be part of a culture that:
Shapes decisions and actions around data insights at every level.
Gathers and manages the right data mapped to desired outcomes – now and for the future.
Prioritises the democratisation of real-time data so that it is not locked up in the IT department.
By understanding and utilising these data integration insights, marketers can lead data-driven decision making to deliver better performance and return on investment. In this changing business environment, that knowledge is essential to business success and growth marketing.
Find out more about how marketers are using data to fuel growth marketing. Register for the Datorama APAC Marketing Intelligence Report Webinar.
Over 20,000 New Jobs in Thailand by 2024 in the LIKE.TG Economy
LIKE.TG and our partners’ ecosystem will create 24,260 new local jobs by 2024. That’s what the recent addendum to The LIKE.TG Economic Impact white paper finds. It also projects the creation of 33,570 indirect new jobs and THB 15 billion ($1.6 billion USD) in new business revenue in Thailand between 2018 and 2024.
The data accounts for its impact and relies on updated IT and cloud software spending predictions, in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The data also aligns with recent country GDP forecasts.
“The LIKE.TG ecosystem is capable of generating business and job growth, even during a pandemic,” said Sujith Abraham, SVP and General Manager for ASEAN at LIKE.TG. “Because we’re all working remotely, our solution — and our partner ecosystem — answers the need for digital transformation and is essential for our customers as they continue to deepen relationships, and ready for their place, in the post-pandemic economy.”
IDC estimates that, for every dollar LIKE.TG made in Thailand in 2020, the LIKE.TG ecosystem made THB 161.72 ($5.21 USD). That number increases to THB 218.83 ($7.05 USD) by 2024. The research shows every LIKE.TG cloud subscription sold often leads to the sale of additional and related third-party products and services. And that extra spending often exceeds the expenditure on the original subscription. In this way, the LIKE.TG ecosystem is expansive, more significant than LIKE.TG itself.
What is driving these economic benefits in Thailand?
The growth of cloud computing is driving these economic benefits. It has and will grow 19%, from THB 6270.08 million ($202 million USD) in 2018 to THB 17972.16 million ($579 million USD) in 2024. Meanwhile, spending on non cloud software will increase by 3% over the same period.
Between 2018-2024, there will be 24,260 new LIKE.TG and LIKE.TG customer-created local jobs.
Over the same period, LIKE.TG customers’ cloud computing use will add a net THB 15 billion ($1.6 billion USD) in new business revenue to Thailand’s economy.
Because a spend on cloud computing subscriptions also increases spend on ancillary products and services, the LIKE.TG ecosystem in Thailand in 2019 was 4.7 times larger than LIKE.TG itself. By 2024, it will be 7.1 times as big.
For over five years, IDC has predicted cloud computing’s economic benefits will free up information technology (IT) resources from routine tasks, allowing for more innovation.
Additionally, since cloud software in 2019 was 18% of software sales, the economic benefits can accrue for years to come.
Source: IDC white paper sponsored by LIKE.TG, The LIKE.TG Economy in Thailand: 24,260 Jobs, $1.6 Billion in New Business Revenue from 2018 to 2024 (May 2020)
Like the rest of the world, Thailand’s enterprise organisations continue to undergo a digital transformation extending into the foreseeable future. As the pandemic continues to demand outdated systems go digital, cloud computing will grow faster than general information technology. (In fact, according to IDC’s global forecast, nearly 50% of cloud software spending in 2024 will be tied to digital transformation and related technologies.) At the same time, those enterprises also react to the uncertainty of the new post-pandemic economic environment.
Training and reskilling for the LIKE.TG economy
Just as cloud computing spend increases in Thailand, a workforce ready to support implementation and operations is also needed. The World Economic Forum believes significant workforce shifts will occur by 2022, with up to 35% of the current skills in demand to change. Existing workforces need training and reskilling to prevent an undesirable scenario where talent shortages accompany technological change, mass unemployment, and growing inequality. Though we, understandably, did not foresee the pandemic economy, individuals now must take a proactive approach to their lifelong learning and reskilling, and governments need to nurture these efforts.
As many business and IT executives assess the implications of these coming shifts, expansion of digital transformation through the region will impact the skills companies need. Not enough employees have the skill sets required to take on the digital changes they’ll soon have to roll out. Already, 52% of IT leaders say skill gaps are a significant challenge at their organisation.
“The pandemic ensures cloud computing spend will increase in ASEAN and beyond. And, we know job growth in the region is dependent on a skilled workforce,” said William Sim, VP Trailhead Academy, APAC at LIKE.TG. “That’s why Trailhead, our free online learning platform, is available for anyone who has internet access to get the skills they need to ready them for a career in the LIKE.TG economy.”
The extra money spent by new company employees as the LIKE.TG economy grows and shifts in Thailand will lead to more jobs in the retail and service sectors. And, there will be 33,570 additional jobs created in the supply and distribution chains serving those LIKE.TG customers. Economists call these ancillary jobs indirect or induced jobs.
Takeaways for Thai organisations using cloud software
New working environments will speed up the adoption of cloud computing and digital transformation.
The payoff to the broader organisation — in business agility, shaping customer experiences, and bringing new products to new markets — is more beneficial than the impact on the IT organisation.
Successful cloud software implementations require concerted efforts (something LIKE.TG has unique expertise in) on the part of the customer, cloud providers, and ancillary services and products.
Forecasts show significant returns from investment in cloud computing by 2024. Still, spending on public cloud computing in Thailand will be less than 5% of total IT spending. Which means there is an opportunity for almost unlimited cloud computing growth.
Dig into The LIKE.TG Economic Impact white paper and the Thai economy addendum to learn more about the LIKE.TG economy. Tap Trailhead to learn additional skills for the LIKE.TG economy.
How To Be a Climate Champion Every Day
Patrick Flynn is the Vice President of Sustainability for LIKE.TG.
The science is clear. Human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases, the root cause of global warming, continue to increase year after year. If we don’t act now, the damage will be irreversible. To avoid the worst impacts of climate change we need (according to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [U.N. IPCCC]) “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in every aspect of society.” Quite the call to action, isn’t it?
Now, as our global workforce travels less and mostly works from home, you may have heard that less air travel and commuting is lowering carbon emissions. However, the pandemic has shown that even with a significant reduction in air travel and reduced commutes, global emissions are expected to drop by only 7% compared to 2019. These emissions cuts are viewed as only a blip on the radar. We need bigger declines in global emissions, and we need them every single year from here on out. The extreme measures taken in lockdown are impossible and unrealistic to maintain. As Bill Gates put it, “What’s remarkable is not how much emissions will go down because of the pandemic, but how little.” Only through catalysing global systemic change can we hope to build the future we all want and we all will share. Those are the facts, and, yes, they can be unsettling and might make you feel uneasy. Know what the antidote is to that feeling? Action! And each of us has a role to play in addressing climate change.
We launched the Sustainability at Home Guide, intended to provide suggestions to make working from home more sustainable by sharing actionable ways to improve your workspace and protect the planet.
Below, in no particular order, are a few highlights:
Protect and plant: Scientists estimate that protecting and restoring nature can get us 30% of the way towards averting the worst climate emergencies. In your own backyard you can grow an herb garden to directly connect with your food and save money while sprucing up your meals. But we also need to protect and plant everywhere.In January we helped launch the 1t.org initiative, dedicated to conserving and restoring one trillion trees within this decade by connecting, empowering, and mobilising a global reforestation community. You can help us achieve our goal by donating to our project via Plant for the Planet on the LIKE.TG tree tracker.
Update your menu: Every day we make decisions about what food to eat. Every day these decisions impact our health, our wallet, and our greenhouse gas footprint. It is estimated that 14% of the average person’s carbon footprint is related to the food they eat. Switching to a plant-based diet could cut 70% of food-related greenhouse gas emissions. For most people, a complete switch won’t happen, but all of us could aim to do better, like: eating less meat and dairy and more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables.
Beware of vampires: Even when not in use, electronic products that are plugged in may still suck up energy. These parasitic energy losses are often called “vampire energy.” Unplug devices that aren’t in use, enable “sleep mode” or “eco mode” on electronics, and use smart power strips to reduce energy wasted by “standby power.” This reduces your carbon footprint and saves you money too.
Go low flow: Sink aerators and low-flow showerheads reduce water and are easy to install. Newer designs that add pressure make it so you may not even notice a difference. Low-flow toilets consume less water and deliver the same flushing results.
Manage waste: Waste management is more important than ever with the continued growth of landfills and marine debris, such as the Texas-sized island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, one of several harming the world’s oceans. We often hear of the 3 Rs, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,” but there are six Rs in the waste equation — refuse, reduce, repair, reuse, rot, recycle. As we strive for a zero-waste planet, we can all commit to one or two, such as refusing plastic bags at the store when you have your own bag, or reusing a container to extend its life.
There’s a lot at stake, but the good news is we already have the necessary ideas, systems, and solutions to stop the worst effects of climate change. Every individual, institution, government, and corporation has an essential role to play in this transition. Making the lifestyle choices outlined above are important steps each individual can make to support the environment and lower carbon footprint while working from home. And while lifestyle changes are important, they cannot be decoupled from advocating for climate action — and this is why we need you. We each have a unique skill set and resources that we can use to deliver impact that the planet might actually notice. You are just in time. You are a stakeholder. And to quote Paul Hawken, “You are brilliant and the Earth is hiring.” There are countless ways to apply your unique skills and positions to make change in the world. The climate crisis needs champions of all types, so take what you do best and apply it to addressing climate change — the greatest adventure humans have ever faced.
Sustainability Cloud lets you track, analyse, and report environmental data to help reduce your carbon emissions and drive sustainability. Learn more about Sustainability Cloud here.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
VT-What? How LIKE.TG Gives Back To ItsRainingRaincoats
ItsRainingRaincoats Founder Dipa Swaminathan grew up in Bangalore hearing about the need to be ‘other-regarding’ often.
In Singapore, she noticed a divide between the country’s migrant workers and the rest of the population, and looked for a way to create connections and support migrant workers.
We’ve been honoured to work with ItsRainingRaincoats as part of our volunteer time off (VTO) and by providing LIKE.TG Care. We hope you join us in supporting your local community.
Learn more about our four core values and impact.
5 Sales Skills Every Rep Needs To Master Right Now
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, you’ve probably come to expect the unexpected. But how are you supposed to adapt to it in your job as a sales rep?
“As a salesperson, when you pick up the phone, you really don’t know what you’re going to hear on the other end,” said LIKE.TG Executive Alison Gooch, who leads companysales developmentefforts.
Your prospects might be at wit’s end reminding their first-grader to sit still for virtual school. Or they might be worried about an aging relative in another state. Or their partner keeps grinding coffee beans right next to their workstation at the kitchen table.
Whatever the case, reps need a mix of hard and soft sales skills to meet this moment. You need to see things from your customers’ point of view, and find a way to make virtual communication feel personal and human. You must also know how to act on hard data and strategise in an environment that is always changing.
The following are the five top sales skills sales reps need tosucceed right now:
1. Empathy
Empathy is by far the top sales skill that can help you meet customer and prospect needs.
Showing empathy means seeing things from the customer’s perspective, and being sensitive to their situation. That situation may be working at home alongside kids who need attention, or it could mean seeing their business through a round of layoffs.
Flexibility with customers and personalised outreach were two of the top five tactics sales leaders considered crucial for success over the next year, according to LIKE.TG’s latestState of Sales report. The research surveyed nearly 6,000 sales professionals globally, including sales operations, sales representatives, and sales leadership.
Early on in the pandemic, LIKE.TG advised sales teams to lead with empathy, “really try to not have an ask at the end of the call,” Gooch said. That guidance changed over time, as we learned that showing empathy and making sales are not mutually exclusive. Your products or services meet a need. So find the people who need them.
When you contact a prospect or customer, start the conversation with open-ended questions. Your goal should be to make them feel comfortable. You might ask:
How is your business adjusting?
How has it been working from home, for your teams?
How have your priorities changed based on the current climate?
How have your customers responded?
How has your role changed?
Sharing how conditions have impacted you can also help to build a connection. For example, are you struggling with homeschooling kids on top of work? Is there something you’ve witnessed during the pandemic that makes you hopeful? Maybe you’ve seen your neighbors step up to support someone who was struggling due to illness or job loss.
When you open up with the person on the other end of the line, you encourage them to let down their guard and feel more comfortable.
2. Data fluency
“You don’t need to be an expert in data manipulation, but you do need to be able to analyse your business,” said Willard Monroe, senior director of Sales Strategy at LIKE.TG. That means understanding territory and industry trends, and knowing what that data means as it relates to your customers.
Data also informs overall team focus. Most prospects who took meetings with Gooch’s teams in March and April were in manufacturing, professional services, real estate and engineering, and high-tech.
Sales teams responded by leaning into these industries. In April, 60% of meetings with Gooch’s teams happened in those fields; in May, 73%. That shift led to a higher return on invested time, Gooch said. In addition, sales reps converted 10% more qualified opportunities than they did even prior to COVID-19.
“Stated otherwise, we called people who were ready to be helped, as opposed to calling everyone equally,” Gooch said.
3. Customer research
Another critical sales skill is the ability to build knowledge about your sales prospects. Spend time learning about their industry, and get familiar with other data about them. How many employees does their company have? How long has their company been around? Are theygrowing?
Reps in high performing sales organisations are more than twice as likely to monitor customer purchase history and customer staffing changes than their underperforming counterparts, according to the recentState of Sales research.
Before reaching out to prospects, look at available information to gain insights about them. Have they announced plans for employees to work from home? For how long? How is their industry or region impacted by the pandemic? If they have a call centre, call it. How long is the wait time? What could that say about how busy they are or their staffing levels?
There might be impacts unique to their company that the data doesn’t capture, or they could be experiencing personal hardship.
Being observant also helps. Are there kids, partners, or animals in the background who could be causing a distraction? If you’re on a video call, does their body language seem closed and protective, or open and relaxed?
Gooch said matching tone is a key sales skill. If you reach a prospect and they tell you not to call, because they just laid off employees, respect their wish and give them space. You can still call them back a few weeks later to see if you have a solution that can enable them to do more with less, helping them get through the crisis so they can hopefully hire those workers back.
4. Virtual presence
You’ve already scrambled to throw together some form of ahome office. But developing yourvirtual presenceis about more than just logging into work from your couch or dining room table. It’s also about how you present yourself to people on the other end of the video call.
It should come as no surprise that sales professionals surveyed by LIKE.TG named video conferencing as the top tool that has become more valuable since 2019.
If your computer meets the minimum technical requirements to run your video call tool of choice, that’s great, but it may not be enough. Make sure people can see and hear you clearly. Your colleagues may be able to provide feedback. If your audio is cutting out or your picture is blurry, you may want to invest in anexternal micorwebcam.
Make sure you have alight source in front of your face, and that your camera is positioned at eye level. “If someone is making eye contact and showing signs of active listening, they might be in a place to receive,” said Monroe. It’s not always possible to avoid distracting noises, but try to if you can. And even if you’re not heading into the office or out on the road, you should dress like you’re ready to do business.
Be mindful of “Zoom fatigue.” Your customers or prospects may be exhausted from too much screen time. Offer them a choice between video call and phone call to ensure highest comfort.
5. Building relationships
Think about all the in-person interactions you used to have during the sales process. You took prospects to lunch. You met customers at their office. Maybe you invited sales leads to events like baseball games.
These rapport-building interactions are hard to replace, but there are some ways to adapt. Being able to build relationships under changing circumstances is a more critical sales skill than ever.
A webinar is one of the easiest virtual experiences to set up. Anyone can do it, and it doesn’t have to cost you anything. From a technical standpoint,hosting a webinaris no different than sharing your screen with colleagues during a video call. To get set up, you need: a video call tool like Google Hangouts or Zoom, a slide presentation on your selected topic, and a plan for how to present it.
You can also get creative with other virtual event options. LIKE.TG has offered customers free livestreamed classes, such as yoga and cooking with prominent chefs. The key is to design activities so it’s easy for prospects to participate. For example, a cooking class for making pasta would only require customers to have flour and eggs on hand.
Or try free activities offered by third parties. For example, theLIKE.TG B-Well serieshosts regular livestreamed conversations with celebrities and wellbeing experts. Working with a customer whose kids play soccer? Invite them and their children to sit in on theB-Well episode with Megan Rapinoe.
A final tip: Remember the essentials
While much has changed since the coronavirus outbreak became a global pandemic, many parts of the sales process remain the same. Remembering that can help restore a sense of normalcy to your work.
Sales reps initially build rapport over email and through phone calls post-COVID-19, just as they did pre-COVID-19 said Gooch. So to eventually close deals, you still take the same first steps.
Alex Colbert, LIKE.TG regional vice president for enterprise sales in the Americas, said sales reps should remember the power of demos, which they can still offer live over the internet through webinars or one-on-one interactions.
Most important, though, is being mindful of how current events impact you and those around you. “Work and home is now blending for everyone, and it’s hard to step away so it’s easy to burn out,” Gooch said.
Look for ways to maintain a positive mindset, and ask your team for support when you need it.
To learn more about trends happening in sales, read our fullState of Sales report.
Why Empathetic Marketing Is the Key To Building Consumer Trust
Today, marketers must meet increasing demands for personalisation, while carefully managing consumers’ data privacy concerns. Chris Jordan, Head of Data, Personalisation and Marketing Intelligence, ASEAN, consults with key strategic customers around the use of data and technology in the context of digital marketing. In a recent webinar, he joined marketing leaders from Proton and Kimberly-Clark to discuss why empathetic marketing is important in gaining consumer trust.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, consumer expectations and behaviours are shifting with unprecedented pace. Strong consumer demand for personalisation is driving new urgency for marketing transformation.
Personalisation requires consumer data. Yet, consumers are concerned about data privacy. How can marketers earn consumers’ trust, in order to deliver personalised consumer experiences?
The answer lies in offering clear value to consumers. Marketers must show consumers how their brands fulfill unmet consumer needs, which can be uncovered by listening to feedback. By doing so, marketers can demonstrate clear value to consumers. This value exchange is at the core of empathetic marketing.
In a recent State of Marketing webinar, I met Vijayaratnam Tharumartnam, Director, Group Corporate Communications at Proton, and Rahul Asthana,Senior Director, Business Transformation APAC at Kimberly-Clark. We discussed what marketing innovation means in a world with COVID-19. Here are some key insights about personalisation, data privacy, and empathetic marketing that surfaced from the webinar:
Understanding the personalisation paradox
According to the LIKE.TG Sixth State of Marketing report, more than 60% of marketers say that they have improved personalisation across all channels.
To do so, marketers must understand and engage consumers as individuals. Data plays a lead role in achieving this. According to the report, 78% of marketers describe their customer engagement as data driven.
Marketers also expect to use an increasing number of data sources. The report reveals that the median number of data sources used by marketers increased to 10 in 2020. That number is projected to increase to 12 in 2021.
However, data privacy is still a concern among consumers. According to the report, 58% of customers are comfortable with their data being used transparently. Yet, only 63% of consumers say companies are generally transparent about how their data is used.
This is the personalisation paradox. Consumers demand personalisation. Marketers need customer data to improve personalisation. But without transparency into how businesses use that data, marketers risk losing consumer trust.
The ad blocking backlash
Tharumartnam warns that there may be consequences for brands that fail to provide data transparency. He says:
“I think there will be a consumer backlash at some point. It is a very slippery slope from where we currently are with data management to reaching a point of insidiousness.”
This backlash is evident in the consumer uptake of ad blocking plugins, which remove advertising content on webpages. Ad blocking demonstrates that many consumers are no longer responding to digital advertising, and are taking action against it.
Therefore, Asthana recommends a move away from advertising. He says marketers should instead focus on offering a value exchange to consumers:
“Digital is such a versatile medium. A lot of the engagement you can have with consumers doesn’t need to be an ad that they can block. You need clarity around what value your product adds to the life of the consumer. Communicating that value exchange in simple language improves consumer engagement and trust.”
The empathetic marketing solution
This value exchange is at the core of empathetic marketing. Empathetic marketing marks a mindshift away from advertising, towards value-based marketing personalisation.
Tharumartnam likens empathetic marketing to a Hollywood film script. He says marketers need to cast the consumer as the protagonist, identify the consumer’s obstacles, and provide a solution:
“In Star Wars, for example, there is Luke Skywalker. He needs to overcome Darth Vader, but he doesn’t know how. Then along comes Yoda, who offers him the Force. As brands, very often we try to be Luke Skywalker. But we need to learn to be Yoda.”
Tharumartnam used empathetic marketing at Proton during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company identified consumer anxiety around safety. Their Yoda move was to replace the existing filters in their cars with N-95 filters. He says:
“There is a fundamental rule in marketing to listen to customers. We should be using customer feedback to change the product, so that we can come to consumers as a hero with a solution. Otherwise, it’s just fancy words.”
Building trust with informed consent
However, effective empathetic marketing relies on proper consent management. Consumer data plays a vital role in identifying consumers’ unmet needs. But poor consent management will risk eroding the consumer trust that you’ve built.
Many consumers are questioning how their data is being collected, stored, and managed. Therefore, marketers must be transparent and clearly express the value exchange.
Asthana emphasises the need to replace jargon-heavy opt-outs with clear consumer language:
“This is known as informed consent. There was a time when opt-out language was so opaque that as a consumer, I didn’t realise that I was required to do something. We need to place the consumer at the heart of everything we do and say as marketers. If we do not have anything of value to say, then let’s not say it. It’s that sincerity that sustains long-term connections with consumers.”
As consumers demand more personalisation, marketers must provide data transparency to ease privacy fears. Shifting to empathetic marketing based on a clear value exchange helps to build trust and maintain long-term connections with consumers.
Download the Sixth State of Marketing report to learn more about empathetic marketing and other key marketing trends.
How SEEK Asia Uses Data To Understand and Help Job Seekers
At LIKE.TG, Nichola Palmer works with customers to bring their stories of innovation and transformation to life. In this article, she shares how the SEEK Asia team took an empathetic and data-informed approach to help job seekers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
SEEK Asia connects job seekers with employers. It operates as JobStreet in Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, and Singapore, and as JobsDB in Thailand and Hong Kong. SEEK Asia typically handles more than 23 million applications every month, from around 1.5 million applicants.
But today’s job market is a whole new ball game. The COVID-19 pandemic created lots of fear and uncertainty. To stay connected, relevant, and helpful to its customers, SEEK Asia needed entirely new marketing strategies.
SEEK Asia’s Chief Marketing Officer, Ramesh Rajandran, and Bernard Chong, Regional Head of Personalised Marketing Insights, share more about how SEEK Asia adapted to the new job market:
Searching for the truth in data
“The new approach to the market required pure empathy in these highly challenging times” Ramesh says, explaining the laser focus on job seekers’ and employers’ needs above all else. “The marketing plans we made at the start of the year didn’t make sense anymore.”
SEEK Asia knew the employment market was looking for strong solutions in the midst of uncertainty. But before it could react in an empathetic manner, SEEK Asia had to ensure it properly understood the current environment. That involved going back to its customer data to find out what was driving the intent of job seekers and employers.
Data drove the SEEK Asia response
To conduct this deep dive into the market, Ramesh, Bernard, and their team turned to LIKE.TG Marketing Cloud and Social Studio. SEEK Asia used data from the beginning to shape the way it connects with and understands customers. Social Studio, in particular, offered revealing insights around what people were talking and asking about.
“We use Marketing Cloud to understand our customers, both job seekers and employers, and be relevant to them. That has always been about personalisation, about knowing their mindset and answering their needs,” Ramesh says.
As the COVID-19 situation evolved, the SEEK Asia team quickly realised that it couldn’t answer all the needs in the job market alone. It needed to work with governments. In the Philippines, for example, SEEK Asia worked with the Department of Labour Employment to discuss how they could partner to help more Filipinos find employment.
Real-time data also allowed the team to see interactions with applicants across multiple channels. The next step was to use that data to nurture relationships.
“We collected different signals from our candidates, so we knew which part of the customer journey they were on. By knowing which stage in the job process they were at, we could offer them very personalised content,” Bernard says.
“So, if a candidate was an active job seeker, we could offer useful, relevant advice. The data meant we could be completely relevant to each person, in that moment, and be of real assistance to them.”
Making a real difference with data
The SEEK Asia team refined and personalised communications with individuals to meet their needs. It could then focus on using their data to help solve the social and economic crisis of mass unemployment.
While some industries were facing challenges, others were suddenly and unexpectedly booming. Businesses in the booming industries urgently required new staff. However, many were not equipped to find and onboard staff under such tight deadlines.
Recognising this, SEEK Asia moved quickly to develop the #WorkNow program to help match thousands of people with employers that urgently required staff. The program has had an overwhelming response. To date, more than 100,000 people have tagged their profiles with #WorkNow.
“As a team, we are fiercely proud of our marketing pivot,” Ramesh says. “We wanted a sense of purpose about helping the community around us and #WorkNow has been able to help many people find new jobs.”
Learn more about data-driven marketing in the sixth edition of the State of Marketing report.
How To Build a Strategy Framework That Works
For her first blog in this Strategy series, Lee-anne Knight explained what strategy is and why it’s so fundamental in the success of a business. Now, Lee-anne shares how you can start building your own strategy.
Did you know that 74% of executives are concerned that they have not translated their strategy into tangible actions? Did you also know that only 35% of those executives believe their strategy is going to lead them to success?
What’s going on?
While we know having a solid and inspiring strategic vision is great for rallying the troops and stakeholders, it’s not what gets you to your destination. So, how can you create tangible actions and a plan to help you deliver on your strategy?
The answer is with a robust planning framework.
And there is no better framework to start with than LIKE.TG’s V2MOM, which stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles and measures.
V2MOM: a robust planning framework
Before we discuss how you can utilise the V2MOM framework, let’s take a look at how the V2MOM method works. To give you some context, V2MOM is the methodology that helped grow LIKE.TG from a four-person company to one with over 50,000 employees globally. As our Founder and CEO Marc Benioff said: “Success depends on constant communication and complete alignment – we’ve been able to achieve this through V2MOM.”
Has this strange acronym piqued your interest yet?
At LIKE.TG everyone creates a V2MOM, from Marc Benioff down. It provides transparency and alignment, which in a matrix organisation can be somewhat of a challenge! From an alignment perspective, the V2MOM method allows every employee to clearly communicate what they plan to achieve each year and how. Updated yearly, the V2MOM keeps us all connected as we conquer the year ahead.
From a strategy perspective, the V2MOM framework is just as robust in building a strategic plan. The beauty of the framework is it can span multiple years, and can be an instructive reference and checkpoint to ensure you’re holding your course. That doesn’t mean things can’t change along the way; important changes are discussed, agreed, and strategically referenced in the V2MOM.
Building a strategic V2MOM
Now that you have a better understanding of how the V2MOM method works, let’s dive into how you can use the V2MOM to build your own strategy framework that will lead to a successful delivery of your vision.
Vision: What do you want to accomplish?
A clear vision is a great starting point for building your strategy – it’s the encapsulation of the big hairy goal you’re aiming to achieve. The vision should be bold, clear, inspiring and importantly, short! If I can’t understand your vision without you explaining it, then go back to the drawing board. For more practical tips on creating a strategic vision, take a look at Gamestorming’s Cover Story exercise I mentioned in my first blog.
Values: What are the principles that matter?
Let’s be honest: How many of you have read a company’s values and thought they were fluff? Company values are not just ‘nice to have’, they guide us in our everyday decision making and tradeoffs. Values can be what keeps stakeholders engaged, just as they keep us all honest about the intent and impact of the work we’re doing. It’s why it’s so important to be strategic when it comes to determining the values that will help build your strategy. Don’t let them be fluff!
Ask yourself these questions:
What are the top three values that are key to the success of implementing my strategy?
What values are core to my organisation and how we work?
Are your strategy values aligned with your organisational values? Do they work in harmony or are they counter-intuitive?
Are these values clear and can everyone in the organisation uphold them?
After answering these questions and you find there is misalignment, you will need to review your strategy values. Remember, be holistic with your approach and allow your values to build on one another.
Methods: What are the actions needed to achieve the strategy?
Here’s where you can outperform those executives who weren’t sure how to turn their strategy into tangible actions. Methods are really where the rubber hits the road, outlining the key ‘chunks’ that start to form the strategy. Or in other words, how you are going to achieve the vision.
For example, if NASA’s vision was “to put the first man person on the moon”, the methods could have included:
Forming a team with the right expertise
Finding the right location for launch
Engaging other countries and teams for knowledge sharing.
Methods allow us to break the work down into manageable pieces, articulating the how and providing clarity on what each of the chunks is focused on delivering. It’s what leads people and strategies to success.
Obstacles: What stands in your way?
The value of a roadmap is not just knowing where you’re going, it’s having a view on what might stop you getting to your destination. Being able to plan for potential challenges before they arise, means you know how to deal with them when they manifest – saving a lot of future headaches. Although, not every obstacle is identifiable – COVID-19 is a perfect example of that – however, getting into the habit of thinking about and planning your way around obstacles builds the strategic thinking muscle.
Heard of the 80/20 rule? It’s officially known as the Paretto principle, and in this case, it means 20% of obstacles will cause 80% of the roadblocks you’ll encounter on a typical strategy journey. When the unexpected does happen, the muscle built discussing and identifying obstacles provides a fast path to escalate out of the challenge when your strategy strays off the path.
Measures: Planning for success
Every step in the V2MOM process leads to this final destination: ROI. Measures challenge us to call out, right from the start of our journey, what success looks like – and holds us to it. Without having a clear perspective of what you’re aiming for, you won’t know it, much less celebrate it, when you’re at the winning post.
A final word on V2MOM
The V2MOM is a great tool to use in a collaborative way, ensuring stakeholder engagement and buy-in right from the start. But executive ownership is key – the executive owner has to and must hold everyone accountable to the final plan.
Just as with Gamestorming’s vision exercise, building out your strategy roadmap is not a singular activity. At LIKE.TG the V2MOM is a living document. Reviewed on a regular basis, providing a level of accountability that is perfect for the ‘test, revise, deploy’ frameworks necessary to build the roadmap to deliver a successful strategy.
Need help writing your V2MOM? There’s a trail for that! Take our Write a V2MOM trail over at Trailhead.
This post originally appeared on the A.U.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
How to Build One Team Around the Customer
Peter Doolan is EVP of Digital Transformation Innovation. He shares what it takes to change mindsets, overcome silos, and put the customer at the centre of the business.
Who owns customer centricity? Ultimately, everyone in your organisation does. That means collaboration must be your top priority.
In a previous article from this series, we talked about the need for customer-centric business processes, which lie at the heart of any customer-focused business. How do you bring these processes to life? You have to act as a unified team across silos so employees closest to the end customer are empowered to create enduring relationships.
Customer-centric companies have silos, too. They have clear designations of who’s doing what for efficiency. But they empower distinct departments to share, collaborate, and deliver integrated customer experiences — down to even the most junior employees.
Empower every employee to deliver the full force of the company
There is a good reason for silos: speed and efficiency. In the past, you could leave that statement and move on, confident in its accuracy. In today’s — and definitely tomorrow’s — digital world, rigid silos might be fast and efficient at repetition, but they are slow, expensive, and critical of change. To move your company from product-centric to customer-centric, you can keep silos but you have to advance them with new tools, new language, and new culture to ensure they become flexible, hyper-collaborative, and sensitive to customer needs.
What happens when customers have a poor experience with your brand? They speak to the first person they get from the company, and they don’t care what department the person is in. Unfortunately, and all too often, the customer ends up having to navigate the org chart to get what they want. Employees are simply not empowered and connected to serve the customer’s needs.
This requires us to abandon the top-down organisational structures we’ve inherited from the early 20th century, with rigid divisions between sales, service, marketing, and IT. And in a world where your customer is at the centre of your organisation, what the highest-paid person in an organisation wants may not be as important as what the customer wants.
It’s time for flexible, flatter, and empowered team structures.
Customer-centric companies think carefully about the customer experience and develop a customer-first culture to improve it. They overlay this culture with the tools and information everyone needs to make it easy to collaborate across teams and departments in the service of the customer. These same companies cultivate information transparency and celebrate team behaviour.
Thousands of our customers are born digital and customer-first. For them, the challenge is one of formalising the culture and collaboration tools as they scale. For thousands of larger companies, the issues are slightly different. They see immediate results, especially around NPS and CSAT scores when they formalise multidisciplinary teams dedicated to a location. This case study on T-Mobile shows how bringing together cross-functional teams delivers improved revenue, NPS scores, and customer retention.
Make a plan with internal stakeholders to get started
To start to make this discipline a reality, review your goals and KPIs with peers or departmental leaders outside your team — even those that don’t normally work together. Explore how you can help each other, and find goals you can share. Celebrate successes as a broader team as you step away from partitioned, traditional responsibilities.
Review the following list. How can you move from the department-specific approaches on the left to the customer-first set on the right? Have you listened to all perspectives, especially from those who are on the front lines with customers every day? Who is responsible for designing the end-to-end customer experience and where are the internal bottlenecks?
To become a customer company, you must have the mindset to evolve your business model, culture, and organisation. One example is the Chief Technology Officer of Edelman Financial Engines, who evolved his department from functional product teams to “customer journey” teams.
Technology is only an enabling platform for change. The real transformation takes place when everyone within the organisation shares the commitment to place the customer at the centre of everything.
For more information on building your team around your customer, check out the customer 360 playbook.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Celebrating Partners and Customers Together: Asia Winners for APAC Partner of the Year Awards 2020
Every year, we recognise partners who have gone above and beyond to overcome their customers’ business challenges and deliver a significant impact. These awards reflect the vital role our partners play in our success and, more importantly, the enormous value they create for our customers.
We are continually inspired by our partners’ determination in solving unique customer challenges. We are also impressed by the speed at which they’re able to deliver value. In today’s environment, our customers know that transformation needs to happen in weeks, rather than years. That’s why one of the key criteria for our awards is time to value.
Additional criteria include:
The compelling nature of the business challenge solved by the partner
The innovative use of LIKE.TG solutions
Demonstration of measurable success
Our three award winners in Asia have excelled in all these areas.
Spotlight on our winners
Best Multi-Cloud Partner of the Year: Telcowin
Telcowin is a LIKE.TG Gold Consulting partner in Malaysia and our Best Multi-Cloud Partner of the Year. This award recognises Telcowin’s collaboration with UEM Sunrise Berhad (UEM Sunrise), one of Malaysia’s top property developers.
UEM Sunrise Berhad had embarked on digital transformation, with several objectives in mind. It wanted to simplify its business processes and establish a single source of truth for customer data. It also wanted to establish end-to-end visibility over its sales lifecycle.
Telcowin helped UEM Sunrise by seamlessly integrating LIKE.TG solutions. It implemented custom components that expanded UEM Sunrise’s digital capabilities on the service front and improved sales visibility. This gave the sales team the agility to connect and engage with customers across multiple digital channels.
“This award is proof that we chose the right path when we decided to focus on consulting and implementing LIKE.TG products. The continued trust we build with our customers and opportunities awarded to us will be the important factor for us to keep going, exploring, and expanding our horizon.”
Hafiz Izwan, Chief Executive Officer, Telcowin
Mid-Market + Implementation Partner of the Year: II Group
II Group Public Company Limited is a LIKE.TG Gold Consulting partner in Thailand. A life insurance company turned to II Group to improve their complaint management processes and provide a better service experience for customers. The solution provided by II Group included improved case monitoring and automated triggers to ensure cases are responded to within the defined service level agreement (SLA). This resulted in a 34% reduction in cases exceeding the SLA.
“Our entire team has worked so hard over the past several years to be the best in what we do to help LIKE.TG customers in Thailand achieve business value for their transformation initiatives. To win this award is extraordinary, but to keep it up is even more challenging. That’s exactly what our team will try to achieve.”
Khun Somchai Mekasuvanroj, Chief Executive Officer, II Group
SMB Implementation Partner of the Year: TechMatrix Pte Ltd
TechMatrix is a LIKE.TG Gold Consulting partner that is headquartered in Singapore. Aureus Academy, a music school in Singapore, turned toTechMatrix Pte Ltdto consolidate multiple legacy systems. The school also wanted to create a seamless and high-quality self-service experience for customers.
TechMatrix automated and streamlined various processes for Aureus Academy. These include enrolment enquiries, class scheduling, and subscription billing. To improve customer experience, TechMatrix implemented a customised mobile application and self-service web portal. Finally, TechMatrix automated Aureus Academy’s customer journeys and made them more personalised.
The solution resulted in a 30% increase in enrolment, a 50% increase in productivity, and zero service backlogs.
“We are very excited to win this award two years in a row. It is a testament to our customer-centric approach and our team’s hard work. It also serves as a motivation for us to continue partnering with our customers and driving results on their behalf. This focus on customer success will be key to our approach and success.”
Dharamvir Sharma, Managing Director, TechMatrix Pte Ltd
Find a partner to unlock your success
Finding the right partner can help you to accelerate your organisation’s transformation journey and unlock greater success.
We suggest those like our winners who have demonstrated best-in-class attributes and proven success. It’s also more important than ever to find a partner who can accelerate time to value. Look for a partner with experience and intellectual property that are specific to your industry. You’ll also want a partner who understands your unique challenges.
To find your ideal match, visit our Consulting Finder on the AppExchange.
Small Businesses Lean Into Tech and Customers During COVID-19 Pandemic
The fourth edition of the Small and Medium Business Trends Report analyses the responses of more than 2,300 small and medium-sized business owners and leaders. Chris Yio,Regional Vice President leading the Small and Medium Business (SMB) segment in Asia, shares some key report insights.
Business as usual has been anything but “usual” over the past six months.
In early 2020, as the global economy thrived, most small- and medium-sized business (SMB) leaders were focused on how to win new customers and access capital. But, the onset of COVID-19 brought new challenges, including a health and economic crisis. As a result, SMB leaders have had to adapt, but a surprising number remain optimistic about the future of their businesses while navigating uncertainty.
Today we released the fourth edition of the Small and Medium Business Trends Report. The report looks at how 2,300+ global SMBs are evolving in the midst of so much change. These include SMBs from the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. We had the unique opportunity to survey these business leaders in March 2020 and again in August 2020. Obviously, a lot has happened during those months.
The report shows how much SMBs have shifted their business operations over the past six months. These insights can help SMB leaders adapt and prepare for the next normal as the business landscape continues to deal with the pandemic.
Here’s a look at what’s changed for SMBs between March and August:
Businesses are doubling down on customer communications
It’s more challenging than ever to meet customer expectations. All businesses have to worry more about safety and clean work environments, meeting local health mandates, and offering contactless service. Implementing these measures is one thing, but making customers aware of them is another. So, it’s no surprise that 55% of the SMB businesses surveyed are more careful about how they communicate with customers — and almost half have expanded the ways customers can get in touch with them.
Unsurprisingly, SMBs are leaning into technology to keep customers close. Over half of growing SMBs say tech drives their customer interactions or customer base growth. Really, businesses are meeting customers where they’re most comfortable: 63% of millennial consumers — and 61% of Gen Z consumers — surveyed in July 2020 say they’re more likely to support small businesses with a digital presence.
SMBs now lean into customer-focused tech in all kinds of ways, from offering online ordering for curbside pickup or delivery, to putting more focus on email and social media messaging. We also see a continued embrace of business technologies like customer relationship management (CRM). SMB leaders who use CRM cited delivering better and faster customer service as the technology’s biggest benefit.
Malaysia-based property development company Myra is using CRM technology to improve customer interactions. Managing complex customer journeys was difficult with the company’s cumbersome paper-based CRM. Ken Goh, Head of Marketing at Myra, knew that digital transformation was the way forward.
“With LIKE.TG, we are now able to act more as a consultant than a standard property developer,” he says. “We can provide advice and support throughout the entire customer journey — from finance to interior design. That has helped to reduce our drop-off rate from 6.7% to 1.45%, while achieving a 65% to 70% reduction in the cost per lead.”
Growing SMBs are accelerating their use of technology, but use fewer apps
We mentioned SMBs use technology to keep customers close as they figure out how and when in-person business can happen safely. The pandemic is also driving those able to invest, to consider ways tech can help shape their future for the better. Growing SMBs, in particular, focus on three key areas where technology can help: customer interactions, workflows, and internal communications.
What’s really interesting is businesses are using fewer apps to get more done — and they’d love to use even fewer. The average number of apps SMBs use to run their business dropped over the past year. This coincides with a 24% increase since 2019 in SMBs’ use of a CRM system — CRMs are now used in more than half of SMBs and offer centralised systems for sales, service, and marketing within the same app. The technology (68%), consumer products (68%), and manufacturing (64%) industries are the biggest users of CRM systems.
Insurance company gm, which is based in Singapore, is using LIKE.TG to overcome that challenge.
When CEO Douglas Chia took over the company from his father in 2013, he wanted to simplify insurance. This meant offering straightforward protection for the things his customers care most about. To achieve this vision, he needed a trusted and user-friendly CRM solution.
“We looked at a few different CRM vendors, but they were too complex,” he says. “Then we found LIKE.TG. We could use it straight out of the box for a simple deployment, and the intuitive user interface enabled fast adoption. Our move to LIKE.TG delivered a revenue gain of 30 to 40 per cent.”
Learn how SMBs are navigating the present and preparing for the future, by downloading and reading our latest Small Medium Business Trends Report. Plus, find out the new technology trends reshaping the business world and see how they can help set up your business for growth.
This post originally appeared in the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Infographic: 5 Ways WhatsApp Can Help Scale Your Conversations
Meeting the needs of today’s ultra-connected customers means delivering service on their terms.
It’s about two-way conversations, consistent service, and being there at the right moment. It’s also about making customer service effortless. Your customers want to engage with you via the same messaging apps they use in everyday life. One of the most popular apps is WhatsApp.
The mobile messaging app reached 2 billion users in 2020 and has been embraced by businesses across Asia as a way to service their customers. These businesses range from early-stage startups to companies like AirAsia. AirAsia launched an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot that responds to simple enquiries in several different languages.
So, how can you use WhatsApp to better engage with your customers?
As a start, WhatsApp should be used alongside all your other channels to deliver a connected customer journey. LIKE.TG can support you with this by providing you with a platform that allows you to manage all your channels and data in one place. It also lets you manage multiple text conversations at once so that you can deliver faster service and boost productivity.
Let’s take a look at how businesses are using WhatsApp and how it can help you to scale your conversations.
Learn how LIKE.TG and WhatsApp can help you have two-way conversations with customers at various points in their customer journeys. Join us for our on-demand webinar on how to leverage conversational platforms.
How Customer Engagement Has Changed, According To 15,600 of Them
To say this year has been different would be a huge understatement. Storefronts went digital, kitchen tables turned into conference rooms, and how we live, work, and shop have been generally turned upside down. What hasn’t changed for businesses, however, is the importance of providing an outstanding customer experience. In fact, 80% of consumers and business buyers say experience remains as important as products.
Of course, how to deliver those differentiated experiences transformed as life moved online and economic uncertainty moved in. Our fourthState of the Connected Customerreport, based on a global survey of over 15,000 consumers and business buyers, details how, and provides invaluable insights for business leaders navigating their paths back to growth.
The report details key elements of customer engagement in our radically changing times, including:
Earning trust pays dividends
People want to do business with brands they can depend on. While that was true before 2020, it’s an undeniable fact in a world taken by pandemic, social justice movements, and environmental crises, among other issues. Eighty-two percent of customers agree a company’s trustworthiness matters more than it did a year ago.
Like most relationships, gaining trust doesn’t happen overnight. Businesses mustearn trustthrough their actions over time, and it’s not getting any easier to accomplish. Sixty-one percent of customers say it’s difficult for a company to earn their trust – 7 percentage points higher than the previous year.
Evolving customer expectations present an opportunity for businesses to get closer to the audiences they serve through their actions. How are they showing up and what are they saying on issues beyond their particular industry? Ninety percent of customers say how a company acts during a crisis reveals its trustworthiness. And, this year, 56% of customers say they’ve reevaluated the societal role of companies. Customers want to see brands prove they’re interested in more than simply surviving through the pandemic and other crises. They want to see goodcorporate citizens making a differencein the communities they serve.
A company’s ability to build trust is inherently linked to its values. Customers expect brands to share their values and communicate honestly and openly. Brands that turn their back on doing the right thing risk taking a hit to their bottom line. Consumers will take their business elsewhere. The majority (62%) of customers say they have stopped buying from a company whose values didn’t align with theirs.
Empathetic, unified teams build differentiated engagement
Whether customers shop for themselves or on behalf of their companies, they expect interactions with brands to not only be convenient and digital first, but also infused withempathy and understanding. To no surprise, our survey results show customers want organisations to relate to their specific needs and expectations at every touch point. And they are making purchasing decisions based on personalised experiences.
There’snever beena more critical moment for companies to know their audience and relate to what they’re experiencing. Brands that get this – and actually invest in appreciating their customers’ varied perspectives – can gain a competitive advantage by delivering connected and contextualised engagement. While 66% of customers expect companies to understand their personal needs and expectations, only 34% say they usually do so. Moreover, more than half (52%) of customers expect offers toalwaysbe personalised.
So, how can companies get it right? One important way is for brands to ensure everyone under their roof has real-time information. When customers engage with a company, they shouldn’t have to worry about reaching the right person. Our research shows 76% of customers expectconsistent interactionsacross departments. However, 54% say it generally feels like sales, service, and marketing don’t share information.
“Disconnected experiences used to inconvenience customers,” noted Tiffani Bova, Growth and Innovation Evangelist at LIKE.TG. “They still do, but they cause so much more damage in our current environment because they signal insensitivity.”
Prior to 2020, customers were well on their way to becoming more digitally dependent in their interactions with brands. From Amazon to Hulu, more and more customers grew accustomed to having their wishes granted at the push of a button. In a socially distanced environment, those same customers – and many new converts – have come to viewdigital engagementas not only a convenience, but a necessity. Brands, in turn, have had to accelerate their digital transformations.
In just one year, online customer interactions grew from 42% (2019) to 60% (2020). While the sharp increase is, in part, a reflection of our overnight transition to a socially distanced society, the upward trend shouldn’t come as a surprise. Most brands were already in the midst of transforming their digital capabilities to cater to customers. COVID-19 just gave those plans a push. Customers agree, with 88% saying they expect companies to accelerate theirdigital initiativesbecause of the pandemic. Furthermore, 68% of customers agree that COVID-19 has elevated their expectations of brands’ digital capabilities.
In 2020, people are living and working much of their lives online. In fact, the vast majority (68%) of consumers say they’re online more often than not. As a result, they’re looking for companies to provide more digital options. Fifty-four percent would like companies to introducenew productsor services in response to the pandemic.
“To me, this really drives home the point that, yes, digital transformation is essential, but we need to think about it as part of something bigger,” observed Brian Solis, Global Innovation Evangelist at LIKE.TG. “The companies that use this moment to understand not just how to digitise their existing businesses, but how technology can drive new, innovative experiences that set them apart will prove more resilient as we move into the next normal.”
More insights to explore
The findings uncovered by our research reveal a customer base that craves personalised, digital-first experiences from brands they can trust. As our world continues to adapt and shift day by day, business leaders have an opportunity to use this knowledge to revamp how they engage their customers. In addition to the broad trends covered above, this research offers insights across demographic subsets and geographic boundaries. To further dig into this data, check out ourinteractive Tableau dashboards.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
From Push To Personalisation, How AI Is Transforming Sales
With inputs by Alekhya Bodingari, Lead Solution Engineer, and Shantesh Akerkar, Lead Solution Engineer.
Sales as a business function is undergoing an accelerated transformation. Thanks to technological innovation, customers now expect personalised engagements and recommendations from sales representatives. The burgeoning role of sales in customer experience is no more a secret. But to rise to these new responsibilities, sales reps need deep insights into customer expectations to make effective decisions throughout the sales pipeline.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in decision-making helps sales teams take prompt, accurate, and insights-based decisions, transforming their engagement with prospects and customers. Here’s how AI tools support effective decision-making in the field of sales:
1. Better lead prioritisation for improved conversion rates
Lead and behavioural scoring is about predicting the leads that are most likely to convert. Several factors go into building a lead scoring model, such as:
Behavioural analysis: Understanding how potential buyers are interacting with a company is critical to lead conversion. For instance, someone visiting your pricing page is more interested in your products than someone who visits your home page and bounces back.
Company information: For a B2B enterprise, factors such as the annual revenue or any recent mergers and acquisitions (MA) of its leads are important parameters for lead scoring.
Engagement: The level and frequency of engagement shown by a lead for your content is also an indicator of their interest in your products. For example, someone subscribing to your newsletter is keen on engaging with you.
As customer journeys become more fragmented, and the volume of unstructured data rises, it can be easy to miss vital pieces of information. The use of AI tools can fine-tune lead scoring models such that the ‘hot leads’ are at the top of the pipeline. Besides, AI algorithms can continuously analyse consumer behaviour and adjust lead scoring criteria as the markets change.
Effective lead scoring accelerates an enterprise’s sales pipeline, helping reps close more leads faster.
2. Personalisation of sales strategy
Knowing when to reach out to a prospect and with what value proposition is just as important as who you are reaching out to. Historically, sales reps have relied on their experience and instinct to engage with prospects. But when sales reps use AI tools in sales, they rely on customer data to suggest a strategy.
Even unstructured data such as emails, social media posts, and minutes of a sales meeting can point to customer sentiment. When combined with factors such as a prospect’s annual revenue, territory, competitor involvement, and seniority of decision-makers involved, AItools like Einstein Account Insights and Einstein Opportunity Insights can suggest the best path forward for sales reps.
3. Better insights with automated data capture
Most customer relationship management (CRM) software are good at collecting structured data. But when it comes to unstructured data such as activity-data (emails, calendar events, minutes of meetings), CRMs often fail to capture it efficiently. Since activity data is alsoimmensely useful for extracting customer insights, sales reps capture it manually, which can be time-consuming. Enterprises want sales reps to spend more time selling. Ironically, sales reps today spend just a little more than 33% of their time selling. The rest is distributed between researching prospects, entering sales information, and generating quotes and proposals for prospects.
Sales Cloud uses Einstein to offer featuressuch as Einstein Activity Capture, which automatically syncs all emails and calendar events with the corresponding prospects in Sales Cloud. Thiseliminates data entry tasks for the sales team, translating to higher productivity, and eventually, better sales. It also helps sales reps find sales information in real-time with all the data pertaining to a prospect neatly collated in one place.
4. Accurate forecasting for an optimised sales strategy
Accurate forecasting is another way AI tools drive better decision-making in sales. Using AI tools, sales teams can do away with the guesswork and accurately predict how much revenue they stand to generate at the end of a forecasting period. The predictions are based on factors such as the past performance of a sales team, and the history and other recorded details of accounts in the sales pipeline.
For instance, with Einstein Forecasting, sales teams get real-time insights into predicted sales trends and how the team is doing against them. This data is available to the team on an intuitive dashboard that also offers graphical interpretations for maximum visibility and comprehension.
Leveraging AI for decision-making allows sales teams to do more with their time and sell more. It can also lead to higher revenues, enhance the overall customer experience, and enable richer relationships between your prospects and sales team.
To experience the power of AI in sales,tryEinstein for Sales Cloud.
This post originally appeared on the I.N.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
How To Become a Trailhead Ranger
Dreaming of becoming a Trailhead Ranger? Megan Petersen, Director Trailhead Evangelism, shares her advice and tips on achieving Ranger status. It’s more attainable than you think.
LIKE.TG’s online learning platform Trailhead has long been loved for its bite-sized content, badges and points. It’s gamified learning at its best, on a platform that anyone can use to build their skills. Trailhead is full of opportunities to ‘level-up’ – Trailhead Ranger is the highest rank.
It doesn’t matter if you’re starting from zero or already have 50 badges, becoming a Ranger is a fun way to learn, gain new skills and even help educate others.
To become a Trailhead Ranger you need to earn 100 badges and 50,000 points. It’s no easy task and not something you should try to do in a day or a week – the point is to learn and embed the knowledge gained, not simply to earn points and badges. If you’re keen to equip yourself with skills for in-demand jobs, make time for learning and plan your path, the #RoadToRanger program will help get you there.
Reskill for a changing world
Amid great change, Trailhead’s focus remains steady: breaking down the barriers to learning and empowering everyone to learn the skills needed for the jobs of today and tomorrow. With many people now working remotely and an increased business need for digital transformation, skilling up is more important than ever. That’s where the #RoadToRanger program steps in.
#RoadToRanger: the Trailhead Trailmixes that will help you level up
If you’re after a reliable way to achieve Trailhead Ranger status, the #RoadToRanger program will help you achieve your goal.
The #RoadToRanger program consists of three trailmixes (like learning playlists) with the perfect blend of badges and points that take the guesswork out of how to reach Ranger status.
Trailmix 1 — Get started with the basics about Trailhead, LIKE.TG, and important guiding principles
Trailmix 2 — Take a look at technology
Trailmix 3 — Get hands-on and earn points
Complete these and Ranger status will be yours ‒ I’ve done the maths!
Saying that, if you’re interested in certain topics or focused on certain roles I highly recommend you choose your own adventure. You can narrow your Trailhead search by applying filters based on roles, products and your learning level. Or if you know exactly what you’re looking for, type a relevant word into the search bar to find suitable Trailhead content.
Slow and steady always wins
It’s not a race. You should make sure you’re retaining what you’re learning. If you find yourself fading or losing motivation in the face of a tough module, don’t give up! Step away and do something you’re good at. Your positive mindset will quickly return and you’ll be much more motivated to tackle a module or unit you’re struggling with.
Aim for a mixture of fun and informative content, such as the Camp B Well Trail, as well as the more product-focused Trails like Building Apex Coding Skills, to keep your mind engaged.
The benefits of becoming a Trailhead Ranger
Taking the initiative to build skills shows you’re committed to self-improvement and giving back to the business model ‒ a great attribute in any employee. That’s part of why 25% of Trailblazers find a new job or score raises and promotions!
But the biggest benefit is to you and your ability to continuously learn. By the time you hit Ranger status, you’ve created a new, useful habit that makes learning part of your everyday life.
Earning Trailhead Ranger status helps you to develop the in-demand skills that lead to top jobs, like:
LIKE.TG Administrator
LIKE.TGArchitect
Developer
Business analyst or consultant
Whatever your role, Trailhead helps you on your certification journey and empowers you to help others along the way.
That Trailhead Ranger feeling
Wondering what it feels like to finally reach Ranger status? I’ll leave it to the experts to explain.
Ready to start your Road to Ranger journey? Sign up to Trailhead and complete the #RoadToRanger quest.
This post originally appeared on the A.U.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
What Organisations Should Know About Building Ethical AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) is having a big impact on organisations across ASEAN. From assisting with process automation and decision making to predicting customer behaviour, AI is changing the way we work.
According to a LIKE.TG commissioned YouGov survey in Singapore, 86% of managers believe embracing AI is important to their organisation’s ability to survive and stay competitive.
However, only 34% of these managers currently using AI in business processes, or planning to implement AI in the next 12 months, are very confident that they/their organisations understand the potential ethical risks of AI.
Importantly, the survey found that 82% of managers currently using AI believe that organisations using AI should have a designated person for Ethical AI. Yet, only 57% report having someone in such a role.
Only 28% of managers are very confident of their organisations’ ability to implement AI processes and systems responsibly by taking into account privacy and safety of consumers.This demonstrates that while AI can deliver an enormous range of benefits, there are some key ethical issues that must be addressed.
For example, data bias in AI algorithms can lead to discrimination. User safety can be compromised by malicious players. Customer data privacy also needs to be protected.
That’s why infusing ethics into AI policy is vital now, and as the technology evolves.
Creating an ethical framework
Edward Santow, Australian Human Rights Commissioner, makes a clear distinction between ethics in AI and the rule of law. Speaking in the LIKE.TG/Observer Research Foundation Infusing Ethics into AI Policy webinar, he said:
“AI is enabling us to do things we’ve always done, but in powerful new ways. As such, there are already human rights, anti-discrimination, and privacy laws in place that should be the first port of call in determining what you can and can’t do with AI.
“Ethical rules are secondary to the law. Ethics can help us uphold the law and fill the gaps where the law is silent.”
To fill those gaps, organisations must set ethical parameters that govern how they develop and use AI-based technologies. Speaking in the same webinar, Kathy Baxter, Architect, Ethical AI Practice at LIKE.TG, explained what those parameters look like at LIKE.TG:
“We need to empower our users. To do so, our AI needs to be inclusive and respect the rights of everyone it impacts. So we created an AI charter that lays out what our AI principles are as a company.
“We believe we must safeguard all the data we are entrusted with and ensure what we are building protects and respects human rights. It must be accountable, and we seek and leverage feedback from our customers and civil society groups. Transparency is also important. We must be clear about how we build our models and explain to our users how our AI makes predictions or recommendations.”
Designing ethical AI
This clear ethical framework must be built into the DNA of the AI design and development process. Baxter explained how this is achieved at LIKE.TG:
“LIKE.TG works on the agile development methodology. During the very early design stages, we do an assessment with the teams to identify all the intended and unintended consequences of the AI application. We do an analysis of the likelihood and seriousness of the impact, and ask ‘should this application even exist in the first place?’. If the answer is ‘yes’, we identify the strategies we need to put in place to ensure those unintended consequences are mitigated as much as possible.”
However, infusing an ethical framework into the design and development of AI-based technologies may not always be practical. David Hardoon, Senior Advisor on Data AI, UnionBank of the Philippines, explained during the webinar:
“We need to be careful of the term ‘by design’. If an AI methodology or solution algorithm is applied within a specific context or application, then you can hard code the ethics in. But if you have something that needs to be applied more generally from east to west you have to deliberately allow for certain flexibility. In these cases, we need a second line of defence.”
That’s why LIKE.TG also builds in user education and guidance to the company’s AI-based applications. Baxter said:
“LIKE.TG is a platform, so what our customers do with our product may not be directly within our control. But, in the vast majority of cases, harm occurs not through malice but through lack of understanding of the context. We build in guidance and education to make our customers aware of when they are using sensitive fields, how to understand training data, and how to identify if there is a disparate impact occurring.”
Building a second line of defence
Rahul Panicker, Chief Innovation Officer at Wadhwani AI, India, added that this second line of defence can be reinforced in a four-step process:
“When it comes to AI, it’s processes and systems that can save us, not anticipation of unintended consequences. And this is not specific to AI. There is a long history of how to establish processes that ensure safety in technology development.
“Start with control testing for safety. Then you move on to a controlled pilot, and into an uncontrolled pilot that tests whether it works in the real world but still with safeguards in place Finally, the most important step is post-deployment monitoring to catch the consequences we could not anticipate.”
As such, Panicker argued that government regulation of AI should be application focused:
“Self-driving cars need to be regulated differently than healthcare AI, which needs to be regulated differently than AI used in banking. It’s the application domain that identifies the use case, the potential risks, and the stakeholder ecosystem.”
Reaping the full benefits of AI
When developing and using AI-based technologies, organisations must adhere to relevant human rights, anti-discrimination, and privacy laws. Organisations should also create an ethical framework to govern AI development and use the framework where the law is silent.
This ethical framework should be built into the AI design and development process, and where flexibility is required, there should be additional focus on post-deployment monitoring. This will mitigate unintended consequences and ensure that organisations — and the people they serve — will experience the full benefits of AI-based technologies.
Learn more about how LIKE.TG infuses ethics into AI here.
Top 5 Business Priorities for ASEAN Sales Leaders in the New Normal
The COVID-19 pandemic and shifting customer needs have transformed the sales environment in Asia.
To learn more about what’s changing and how sales leaders are responding, LIKE.TG surveyed 600 sales professionals across ASEAN. These findings were captured in the 2020 LIKE.TG Trends in ASEAN Sales report.
In summary, the report reveals that digital transformation is rapidly accelerating throughout the region. Tools like Sales Cloud give sales leaders deeper insights into customers and enable more meaningful conversations.
Sales leaders are also focusing on reskilling existing sales reps to succeed in a remote selling environment. They use sales automation to gain better visibility into remote selling.
At the same time, the sales operations role is undergoing a strategic shift to provide more support for sales leaders who are eager to optimise sales processes.
1. Turning insights into closed deals
To build trust in the new normal, high-performing sales reps must become trusted advisors to customers.
Therefore, sales leaders must connect reps with the deep insights they need. This will help sales reps to anticipate customer needs and build consultative relationships.
For example, according to the LIKE.TG Trends in ASEAN Sales report, more than 90% of high-performing ASEAN sales reps monitor customer purchase history, customer communication history, and competitor activity at least weekly.
Speaking in The New State of Sales webinar, Carol Fong, Regional VP, Commercial Sales at LIKE.TG, said sales leaders can use these insights to drive more relevant conversations with customers.
“You can use the customer’s transaction or procurement history to identify how sales reps can be more proactive when reaching out to customers,” she said. “Those conversations will be more meaningful to your customers.”
2. Reskilling to support shifting business needs
The LIKE.TG Trends in ASEAN Sales report reveals that 82% of ASEAN sales leaders plan to meet changed staffing needs by reskilling existing employees. Just 57% plan to meet these needs by hiring.
“They have to because the world has changed,” Tom Abbott, Sales Optimisation Expert and Keynote Speaker, SOCO/ Sales Training said during The New State of Sales webinar. “We need to give our reps the tools they need to sell in this new environment. Don’t think about how to survive the next six months. Think about how to succeed for the next six years.”
Some tools that would be useful for sales reps to learn are customer relationship management (CRM) software and artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
3. Improving visibility as selling goes remote
Sales leaders need more visibility into sales activities in order to effectively manage remote teams.
However, this comes with a greater administrative burden. The frequency and length of pipeline management meetings is increasing . The enforcement of activity logging also reduces selling time.
According to the LIKE.TG Trends in ASEAN Sales report, 61% of ASEAN sales organisations say AI has made major improvements to visibility into rep activity.
Fong says sales leaders must give sales reps autonomy while maintaining visibility into their activities.
“The sales cycle is becoming longer as customers need more hand-holding. We need to give our sales teams the tools they need to manage this,” she said. “At LIKE.TG, for example, we’ve noticed our high performers will typically automate tedious tasks. They’ll also likely have a lead priority system at their fingertips so they know where to focus their time.”
4. Rethinking the role of sales operations
The sales operations role has traditionally been responsible for optimising sales processes and systems. Now, sales leaders expect more strategy-based inputs.
The LIKE.TG Trends in ASEAN Sales report reveals that 95% of ASEAN sales professionals say that sales operations is becoming an increasingly strategic role.
Abbott believes this is a move in the right direction. “Gone are the days when you could have a lone wolf sales rep out there running the show themselves,” he said. “We have to work as a team, and sales leaders are looking to sales ops to support them in the sales process.”
5. Accelerating digital transformation
Digital transformation is essentially the framework that supports the overall pivot to remote selling.
ASEAN businesses clearly understand this. According to the LIKE.TG Trends in ASEAN Sales report, 91% of salespeople say their digital transformation has accelerated since 2019.
High-performing sales leaders are turning to AI, mobile sales apps, and sales process automation to bring the value of digital transformation to ASEAN sales teams.
However, Abbot says that digital transformation can begin with a simple CRM automation: “ For example, instead of a leave-behind brochure after a physical customer visit, now you’re emailing that brochure. Or you’re automating that email through your CRM to stay on top of your business opportunity.”
Turning crisis into opportunity
Sales leaders across ASEAN are accelerating digital transformation to build more proactive customer relationships and improve visibility into sales activities. They are also turning to sales operations for more strategic support and are reskilling reps to better leverage new technologies.
But Fong reminds us that digital transformation isn’t just about technology. “It’s also about your organisational structure and your people,” she said. “When there is a crisis there is always an opportunity. But whether you grasp the opportunity depends on how you pivot and change to reshape your team.”
Thailand SMBs Turn To Tech as More Customers Interact Online
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a growing number of customers have found a new way to interact with small and medium businesses (SMBs). Increasingly, they are shifting their purchasing from in-store to online.
LIKE.TG research shows consumers estimate their share of online versus offline interactions with companies has increased from 42% online in 2019 to 60% in 2020. In fact, 68% of consumers say they’re online more often than not.
“The population is digitally savvy, but ecommerce is just starting to take off here,” says Nicolas Faquet, the CEO behind the most visited insurance website in Thailand, Roojai.com. “That is why Thailand is the right place for us to catch the wave that we believe is coming over the next 10 years.”
For SMBs based in Thailand, finding the right technology to meet their needs is a key concern. This finding is highlighted in the fourth edition of the Small Medium Business Trends Report. The report looks at how more than 2,300 global SMBs are evolving in the midst of change. These include SMBs from the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, among others.
Technology drives 360-degree view of customer interactions
According to the report, customers are still top of mind for businesses. However, it’s now more challenging than ever to meet new and changing customer expectations.
Globally, 55% of SMB leaders say they’re more careful about their customer communications since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Forty-seven percent have expanded the ways customers can reach them. Further, 55% of growing businesses say technology drives their customer interactions.
In Thailand, keeping up with demand is the top challenge SMB leaders face in meeting customer expectations. This is a challenge faced by 80% of Thailand’s SMB leaders. Other challenges include bringing innovative offerings to market and personalising customer engagements.
“We launched Roojai.com on a traditional insurance platform, and we were using LIKE.TG as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool on top of that,” according to Faquet. “Very quickly, we realised how unreliable and painful that insurance platform was, and how much we were struggling to get things moving.”
Implementing LIKE.TG technology has enabled Roojai.com to grow its visitors per month to 1 million – 10 times the amount of its closest competitor – on the strength of an enhanced customer experience. WithService Cloud, Faquet and his team have a full 360-degree view of their customers. This enables them to deliver more customised solutions and a high level of customer service.
“From when the customer goes through the quote process, to when the customer buys a policy and then makes a claim, we have a full view of all interactions,” he says. “We are able to get so granular into the data set and can use it to optimise our marketing spend, and focus on the customer journey from origin to conclusion.”
Expanding customer base remains key
Beyond meeting customer expectations, the biggest challenge SMB leaders personally face when growing their businesses is acquiring new customers.
Overall, 72%* of SMBs believe a centralised application to manage business functions like sales, marketing, and support would be helpful. Increasingly, they have started adopting technologies like CRM to improve customer experience. In Thailand, 77% of SMBs have a CRM system, with 37% implementing it within the past year.
“Selling is science,” says Choonraki Singprasert, owner and managing director of Thai telecommunications company Riverplus. “You need detailed information to forecast and make sales. LIKE.TG gives us that information and helps us grow.”
According to Singprasert, the business lacked an effective solution to manage sales and was losing customer data and leads whenever an employee left. With the implementation of LIKE.TG, the company has been able to use data to better engage with customers and identify cross-sell opportunities.
“As a result of all of these activities, Riverplus has increased engagement with leads and customers and improved lead conversion by 30%. The company has also increased revenue by four times since using LIKE.TG, including two times growth in the first two years,” says Singprasert.
The way forward for SMBs
COVID-19 has caused a major shift in the way customers interact with businesses. Many are now comfortable with purchasing online.
To prepare for the future, SMBs need to adapt and change the way they operate to meet the new customer expectations. This includes digitising customer interactions, offering contactless services, and adopting technology.
To learn more about how SMBs are preparing for the future, download our latest Small Medium Business Trends Report.
The report is also available in Thai.
*Data from March 2020 survey conducted by The Harris Poll among 2,411 global SMB leaders.
How To Succeed in the All-Digital, Work-From-Anywhere World
Normally this time of year, we’d be with many of you in the APAC on Tour lounge in San Francisco, chatting about the amazing Dreamforce keynote we’d just seen. This year, LIKE.TG brought the magic of Dreamforce to our offices, living rooms, and kitchens around the world.
LIKE.TG Chair and CEO Marc Benioff stood before a holiday-themed LIKE.TG Park with a message of the power of community amid uncertainty. He celebrated those who have stepped up for their communities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Nothing is possible without you, our Trailblazers,” said Benioff. “A lot of the help – in the distribution, the acquisition [of PPE] and in the support, things we’ve really needed to provide – came in partnership with you.”
LIKE.TG Chair and CEO Marc Benioff delivers the Dreamforce To You 2020 Keynote from LIKE.TG Park in San Francisco | WATCH THE DREAMFORCE TO YOU 2020 KEYNOTE
While Benioff highlighted LIKE.TG’s exceptionalquarterly results, he emphasised that in a year of unprecedented disruption, the company has been guided by its core values.
“Doing right and doing good is what is driving our culture forward. Whether it’s innovation or philanthropy, or culture,” said Benioff. “We are trailblazers, together.”
Come on down, Slack
Benioff also welcomed Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield to the Dreamforce keynote, following the announcement of the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Slack*, saying that combining Slack with LIKE.TG Customer 360 will be transformative for customers and the industry. The combination will create the operating system for the new way to work, uniquely enabling companies to grow and succeed in the all-digital world.
“This is a pivotal moment and opportunity to transform the way we work.” – Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield (left) joins Benioff on-stage. | WATCH THE DREAMFORCE TO YOU 2020 KEYNOTE
“This moment is one that we will remember in a couple of decades from now,” Butterfield said. “I think this is a pivotal moment and opportunity to transform the way we work so that we’re not as reliant on the physical office, that we can have a digital HQ.”
Benioff also introduced Bret Taylor, LIKE.TG President and Chief Operating Officer, who reflected on the shift to digital that many companies have made over the past year.
“We’re in an all-digital, work-anywhere world,” Taylor said. “Doctor’s offices have moved to telemedicine, [we’re] doing business over Zoom, consumer goods companies are going direct-to-consumer via custom apps. We’re not going back.
“When I look at what it means to grow in this new normal, it’s Slack plus the Customer 360.”
Digital experience is an imperative
Every business, Taylor continued, across every industry, needs to deliver seamless, connected digital experiences.
“This year is all about change. We have gone digital overnight. And we’ve been using this phrase with our customers, ‘the digital imperative’, because, let’s be honest, it’s 2020. If you don’t have a digital business, you don’t have a business.”
“It’s 2020. If you don’t have a digital business, you don’t have a business.” – President COO Bret Taylor discusses the digital imperative. | WATCH THE DREAMFORCE TO YOU 2020 KEYNOTE
In this time of enormous disruption, customer expectations are changing rapidly. This year’s State of the Connected Customer report surveyed 12,000 consumers and 3,600 business buyers worldwide, and found that 88% expect companies to accelerate digital initiatives due to COVID-19. A huge 80% of business buyers expect to conduct more business online, while 58% of consumers expect to do more online shopping after the pandemic than before.
It’s a challenging environment, in which leaders will separate from the pack.
“Trailblazers are using this year as an opportunity to overcome that adversity and accelerate that move into digital. To really transform customer experiences and recognise that next year is going to continue to accelerate this move towards the digital consumer, and the digital customer,” Taylor said. “I talk to a lot of CIOs and I know this is really hard in practice. Data silos and legacy systems feel like an anchor that are preventing you from moving forward and getting to where you want to go. This is why we created the LIKE.TG Customer 360.”
“I talk to a lot of CIOs and I know this is really hard in practice […] This is why we created the LIKE.TG Customer 360.” – Bret Taylor | WATCH THE DREAMFORCE TO YOU 2020 KEYNOTE
Announcing Hyperforce: The world’s #1 CRM on major public clouds
Taylor also announced a significant upgrade to that Customer 360 Platform. With Hyperforce, the world’s #1 CRM platform has been reimagined to securely and reliably deliver LIKE.TG Customer 360 on major public clouds.
“Probably the most significant technological shift in this platform since Marc and Parker created it” – Bret Taylor announces Hyperforce. | FIND OUT MORE IN THE DREAMFORCE TO YOU 2020 KEYNOTE
“We have been working for the past two years on probably the most significant technological shift in this platform since Marc and Parker created it over 21 years ago. We call this new capability Hyperforce. We’ve had to completely re-architect LIKE.TG to work in this way,” Taylor said.
“As a consequence it is horizontally scalable. That means that if you happen to be a B2B company with 10,000 customers, or you’re a B2C customer with 100 million or more consumers, you can now use LIKE.TG as your single source of truth for all of that data.”
Announcing Einstein Automate: Making every experience intelligent
“Creating connected, intelligent experiences for customers, employees, and communities is of the utmost importance,” Sarah Franklin, EVP GM, Platform, Trailhead AppExchange, LIKE.TG, told us as she introduced the new Einstein Automate.
“Laser-focused on intelligence, integration, and automation.” – Sarah Franklin introduces Einstein Automate. | FIND OUT MORE IN THE DREAMFORCE TO YOU 2020 KEYNOTE
Franklin explained how these intelligent innovations are helping governments go digital, fast – and helping local businesses get back to growth by making every customer experience intelligent.
AI-infused flows and bots help organizations automate tasks and workflows. Packaged libraries empower organisations to be able to quickly use solutions specific for their industry.
“With Einstein Automate, every organisation in every industry around the world can go with the flow of change,” said Franklin.’
Announcing LIKE.TG Service Cloud Workforce Engagement
With stores either closed or offering limited hours, contact centres today are dealing with a huge surge in the volume of questions from customers across service channels like phone, chat, text, and social media.
Service leaders need to be able to organise their entire workforce from anywhere and distribute the right work to the right agents based on skills and service channel. Enter Service Cloud Workforce Engagement.
To be made available in northern-hemisphere Summer 2021, Service Cloud Workforce Engagement will help service leaders in contact centres predict demand for customer service, staff appropriately, and remotely coach agents in real-time to deliver trusted service experiences.
Find out more – watch the Keynote.
How Trailblazers are succeeding
To navigate uncertain times, Benioff delivered a playbook for customers to drive success in the digital imperative. The playbook has three chapters, focused on leveraging intelligence, unifying data, and creating great experiences.
To explain, Benioff shared three stories of customers taking a Trailblazer’s mindset to succeed in an unexpected year.
The State of Rhode Island’s COVID-19 story
When the pandemic hit, the government of Rhode Island – an east-coast US state with a population just over 1 million – had to look at new ways of moving into action fast. In the keynote, Marc Benioff spoke with Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo and we learnt how her team leveraged intelligence and automation to combat COVID-19 cases and protect the health of Rhode Island’s population.
Hear the story from Governor Gina Raimondo and her team in the Dreamforce to You Keynote
Bentley Motors’ Beyond100 vision
Live from Crewe, England, the Bentley Motors team shared how the organisation has transformed this year with a connected data strategy.
“With a 360-degree view of the customer, we can create a single source of truth that allows us to create extraordinary experiences for our customers and that’s what we need moving forward,” said Dr Astrid Fontaine, Member of the Board for People, Digitalisation IT, Bentley Motors.
Bentley had been a B2B company until the pandemic hit, and it had to market and sell directly to consumers. Today – less than a year into this transformation – Bentley brings the showroom experience to every prospect, digitally.
Customer Audience 360 is driving personalised and relevant experiences across every channel. Customer 360 Privacy Centre ensures Bentley Motors can collect and respect its customers’ privacy preferences and remain compliant. And with Tableau, Bentley builds a full picture of the business and turns insights and predictions into action.
Hear the story from the Bentley team in the Dreamforce to You Keynote
ATT: Seamless, connected digital experiences
Marc Benioff sat down with ATT Communications CEO Jeff McElfresh to talk about ATT’s seamless, connected experiences.
“They [ATT] were able to train more than 30,000 remote retail sellers on this new experience in under five months. That’s going digital, fast!” said Benioff.
Go along on the journey, with McElfresh and the ATT team in the Dreamforce to You Keynote
The show must go on – all month!
“We’ve heard some amazing stories today,” Benioff told us as he brought the keynote to a close. “But this is just the beginning of Dreamforce.”
Dreamforce to You runs for the entire month; and all Trailblazers can sign up at Dreamforce.com for the entire Dreamforce to You experience — including DreamTX starting 14 December.
DreamTX is four days, five channels, with hundreds of sessions deep-diving on innovation and new products.
Sign up for Dreamforce to You – you’re not too late!
This post originally appeared on the A.U.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
*Forward-Looking Statements
This communication relates to a proposed business combination transaction between LIKE.TG.com, Inc. (“LIKE.TG”) and Slack Technologies, Inc. (“Slack”). This communication includes forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Forward-looking statements relate to future events and anticipated results of operations, business strategies, the anticipated benefits of the proposed transaction, the anticipated impact of the proposed transaction on the combined company’s business and future financial and operating results, the expected amount and timing of synergies from the proposed transaction, the anticipated closing date for the proposed transaction and other aspects of our operations or operating results. These forward-looking statements generally can be identified by phrases such as “will,” “expects,” “anticipates,” “foresees,” “forecasts,” “estimates” or other words or phrases of similar import. It is uncertain whether any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur, or if any of them do, what impact they will have on the results of operations and financial condition of the combined companies or the price of LIKE.TG or Slack stock. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the parties’ control, that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in such forward-looking statements, including but not limited to: the impact of public health crises, such as pandemics (including coronavirus (COVID-19)) and epidemics and any related company or government policies and actions to protect the health and safety of individuals or government policies or actions to maintain the functioning of national or global economies and markets; the effect of the announcement of the merger on the ability of LIKE.TG or Slack to retain and hire key personnel and maintain relationships with customers, suppliers and others with whom LIKE.TG or Slack do business, or on LIKE.TG’s or Slack’s operating results and business generally; risks that the merger disrupts current plans and operations and the potential difficulties in employee retention as a result of the merger; the outcome of any legal proceedings related to the merger; the ability of the parties to consummate the proposed transaction on a timely basis or at all; the satisfaction of the conditions precedent to consummation of the proposed transaction, including the ability to secure regulatory approvals on the terms expected, at all or in a timely manner; the ability of LIKE.TG to successfully integrate Slack’s operations; the ability of LIKE.TG to implement its plans, forecasts and other expectations with respect to LIKE.TG’s business after the completion of the transaction and realize expected synergies; and business disruption following the merger. These risks, as well as other risks related to the proposed transaction, will be included in the registration statement on Form S-4 and proxy statement/prospectus that will be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) in connection with the proposed transaction. While the list of factors presented here is, and the list of factors to be presented in the registration statement on Form S-4 are, considered representative, no such list should be considered to be a complete statement of all potential risks and uncertainties. For additional information about other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements, please refer to LIKE.TG’s and Slack’s respective periodic reports and other filings with the SEC, including the risk factors identified in LIKE.TG’s and Slack’s most recent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Annual Reports on Form 10-K. The forward-looking statements included in this communication are made only as of the date hereof. Neither LIKE.TG nor Slack undertakes any obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances, except as required by law.
No Offer or Solicitation
This communication is not intended to and shall not constitute an offer to buy or sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy or sell any securities, or a solicitation of any vote or approval, nor shall there be any sale of securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction. No offering of securities shall be made, except by means of a prospectus meeting the requirements of Section 10 of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended.
Additional Information about the Merger and Where to Find It
In connection with the proposed transaction, LIKE.TG intends to file with the SEC a registration statement on Form S-4 that will include a proxy statement of Slack and that also constitutes a prospectus of LIKE.TG. Each of LIKE.TG and Slack may also file other relevant documents with the SEC regarding the proposed transaction. This document is not a substitute for the proxy statement/prospectus or registration statement or any other document that LIKE.TG or Slack may file with the SEC. The definitive proxy statement/prospectus (if and when available) will be mailed to stockholders of LIKE.TG and Slack. INVESTORS AND SECURITY HOLDERS ARE URGED TO READ THE REGISTRATION STATEMENT, PROXY STATEMENT/PROSPECTUS AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS THAT MAY BE FILED WITH THE SEC, AS WELL AS ANY AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS TO THESE DOCUMENTS, CAREFULLY AND IN THEIR ENTIRETY IF AND WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY CONTAIN OR WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROPOSED TRANSACTION. Investors and security holders will be able to obtain free copies of the registration statement and proxy statement/prospectus (if and when available) and other documents containing important information about LIKE.TG, Slack and the proposed transaction, once such documents are filed with the SEC through the website maintained by the SEC at http://www.sec.gov. Copies of the documents filed with the SEC by LIKE.TG will be available free of charge on LIKE.TG’s website at www.LIKE.TG/investor or by contacting LIKE.TG’s Investor Relations department at [email protected]. Copies of the documents filed with the SEC by Slack will be available free of charge on Slack’s website at investor.slackhq.com or by contacting Slack’s Investor Relations department at [email protected].
Participants in the Solicitation
LIKE.TG, Slack and certain of their respective directors and executive officers may be deemed to be participants in the solicitation of proxies in respect of the proposed transaction. Information about the directors and executive officers of LIKE.TG, including a description of their direct or indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, is set forth in LIKE.TG’s proxy statement for its 2020 Annual Meeting of Stockholders, which was filed with the SEC on May 1, 2020, and LIKE.TG’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2020, which was filed with the SEC on March 5, 2020, as well as in a Form 8-K filed by LIKE.TG with the SEC on June 1, 2020. Information about the directors and executive officers of Slack, including a description of their direct or indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, is set forth in Slack’s proxy statement for its 2020 Annual Meeting of Stockholders, which was filed with the SEC on May 5, 2020, and Slack’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2020, which was filed with the SEC on March 12, 2020. Other information regarding the participants in the proxy solicitations and a description of their direct and indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, will be contained in the proxy statement/prospectus and other relevant materials to be filed with the SEC regarding the proposed transaction when such materials become available. Investors should read the proxy statement/prospectus carefully when it becomes available before making any voting or investment decisions. You may obtain free copies of these documents from LIKE.TG or Slack using the sources indicated above.
Why SaaS Marketplaces Are Gaining in Popularity
One of the most exciting aspects of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market is the growing number of applications that businesses can readily plug into as new needs emerge. Businesses took advantage of this flexibility during the pandemic, resulting in a surge of adoption of cloud-based solutions. These included solutions for remote working as well as applications for more specific use cases like online learning.
The agility offered by SaaS and the ease of access to applications is clear. At the same time, business users tend to purchase these solutions at will. As a result, businesses find themselves with dozens, if not hundreds, of disconnected applications. This issue is known as SaaS sprawl and it can lead to siloed data, increased risk, and a range of other adverse consequences.
Global research firm Forrester highlights the issue of SaaS sprawl in a new report, The Forrester New Wave™: SaaS Marketplaces, Q2 2020. The report evaluates top SaaS marketplaces that can help to alleviate SaaS sprawl and bring everything back into line.
Here, we look at the advantages of SaaS marketplaces and break down the findings of the report.
How SaaS marketplaces provide a better buying experience
SaaS marketplaces help to tame SaaS sprawl by providing a centralised approach to finding, purchasing, and managing cloud-based applications. For example, they help businesses to find relevant or ‘add-on’ applications that are pre-vetted and peer reviewed. They also offer features like centralised management consoles to help reduce IT complexity.
The LIKE.TG AppExchange is one such marketplace. It features 6,000 solutions that allow businesses to extend the functionality of LIKE.TG across every department and industry. These include low-code and no-code solutions for nearly every business challenge. What’s more, solutions can be integrated with LIKE.TG and can be installed with just a few clicks.
What this means is that customers can benefit from all of the leading cloud solutions provided by LIKE.TG Customer 360, and layer on new capabilities from the AppExchange to create connected customer experiences.
Eighty-six percent of LIKE.TG users have installed one or more solutions from the AppExchange. Roojai.com is one of those. The online insurance provider was quick to pivot in response to the pandemic and used LIKE.TG and SightCall from the AppExchange to offer customers a video claims service.
Roojai.com has also built its own apps that it hopes to package and sell to other insurance companies through the AppExchange.
What sets the AppExchange apart from other marketplaces
While SaaS marketplaces are not new, Forrester’s report reveals that they’re gaining more attention these days. They’re also being enhanced with chatbots and other new features to support the buying experience.
The Forrester report evaluates a total of eight SaaS marketplaces against criteria such as availability of applications and buyer interface.
We’re delighted to share that the report says LIKE.TG “leads the pack with a mature marketplace with scale and breadth of SaaS solutions.”
The Forrester report states that the LIKE.TG AppExchange “will generally appeal to anyone in the LIKE.TG ecosystem.” It also specifically notes that “LIKE.TG has thousands of applications in its marketplace in a range of categories.”
LIKE.TG received the highest possible score of ‘differentiated’ in seven criteria – the most of any vendor evaluated. These include:
Availability of applications
Buyer interface
Due diligence and assurance
Management console
AI and automation
Roadmap, and
Market approach
In conclusion, the Forrester report acknowledges that, “Despite this being an overall newer market, LIKE.TG has a long history of running the LIKE.TG AppExchange and offers features such as private marketplaces and advanced search.”
To learn more, download The Forrester New Wave™: SaaS Marketplaces, Q2 2020 report.
Visit the AppExchange to find applications and partners to support your business needs.
How LIKE.TG and Its Partners Are Building the Workforce of Tomorrow
At LIKE.TG, customer success is one of our core values. Our commitment to this extends beyond our investment in our own products and services.
I alluded to this in September when I wrote about the expansion of our partners’ Global Talent Centres (GTCs) and how we’re helping to equip them with the skills needed to deliver digital transformation.
Our LIKE.TG Days training events support this capability building. Recently, we held our first LIKE.TG Days event in Asia. It featured eight days of training and culminated in a virtual Global Talent Centre Summit for our partners in Greater China and the Philippines.
With this event wrapped up, it’s time to take a more detailed look at GTCs and how we’re working with our partners to build the workforce of tomorrow.
Building opportunities for everyone
GTCs were born out of a need to meet global demand for LIKE.TG practitioners and are run by recognised LIKE.TG Partners.
According to the IDC LIKE.TG Economic Impact Report, thanks to the growth of cloud computing, LIKE.TG and its partner ecosystem will create more than 4.2 million jobs between 2019 and 2024. This global number includes 24,260 new jobs in Thailand alone.
We want to help partners meet that demand by upskilling current LIKE.TG practitioners and bringing new talent into the ecosystem. GTCs provide a central hub for training and operate as a community where partners and LIKE.TG can share best practices and resources.
Our recent LIKE.TG Days event was held to build up capability within the GTCs and therefore expand the pool of expertise available to our customers in Asia. Featuring more than 40 workshops on current and emerging technologies, the training provided up-skilling and cross-skilling opportunities for more than 2,000 practitioners.
LIKE.TG Days also offered entry-level sessions for those new to LIKE.TG. This included 150 new developers who signed up for Trailhead and earned a collective 300 badges.
Expanding the talent pool
Our partners in India have already embraced the GTC concept and currently employ a combined 1.5 million people. Several of our largest partners have come on board in Greater China and the Philippines this year and they are scaling up to meet growing demand for offshoring of digital transformation services. Finding new talent will be key and that’s why we’ve recently launched the LIKE.TG Talent Alliance.
Members of the Talent Alliance commit to ensuring that 20% of new hires come from outside of the ecosystem. They also pledge to adopt more inclusive hiring practices such as standardising interview processes through competency-based interview questions. Our partners find that a diverse workplace is a strong one. Especially when talented people bring real world experience from outside of the LIKE.TG ecosystem or our usual channels of recruitment.
Delivering more than just digital transformation
This is where the ultimate benefit lies. Through diversity initiatives and programs like LIKE.TG Days, we build a strong and diverse talent pool with the skills that our customers need today and tomorrow.
We’re also providing those located near the GTCs with the opportunity to move into new, well paying, and extremely satisfying jobs in which they can make a positive impact on society. This is the LIKE.TG economy delivering more than just digital transformation – it is also delivering societal transformation through local community based investment.
This matters to me a great deal and is at the core of the program.
Learn more about the LIKE.TG Partner Community and how you can join here.
How Growing Small Businesses Are Preparing for Future Crises
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way customers interact with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). More customers are shifting their purchases from in-store to online, and they expect SMBs to adapt and provide smooth online experiences.
In this infographic, we focus on how SMB leaders are preparing for future crises by adopting technology. According to the fourth edition of the Small and Medium Business Trends Report, growing SMBs are digitising their customer interactions, internal communications, and workflows. For example, more SMBs are using customer relationship management (CRM) software, which helps them focus on serving their customers well.
Learn how digital-forward SMBs are transforming their businesses and driving growth, now and in the future.
Marc Benioff & Tharman Shanmugaratnam on the Opportunity in Crisis
Amid the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have a powerful opportunity to break with the past and shape a values-led future.
How do individuals, businesses, and governments prepare for a post-COVID-19 future where nothing is as it once was?
As potential vaccines allow us to imagine a light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, it is more important than ever for individuals, businesses, and countries to make decisions and set actions around values that will drive future behaviours. This was the overarching message from Singapore’s Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for Social Policies, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, and LIKE.TG Chair and CEO Marc Benioff at the recent SG Tech Forum.
“Speaking of Singapore, our future is to be a hub – a hub for talent, local and foreign, a hub that’s connected to the rest of the world as efficiently as possible,” Mr Shanmugaratnam said. “Also a hub…which is predictable, reliable, and resilient.”
Such hubs are going to be a vital part of the smooth running of the reconfigured, globalised economy, Mr Shanmugaratnam said. But in this new reality, they require a special ingredient – a clear value set.
“We have to avoid thinking about economic objectives as somehow separate from social objectives,” he said. “They either inflict damage on each other, or they reinforce each other. If we’re able to run a competitive and efficient economy, we’re able to create a lot more opportunities for people.”
Mr Shanmugaratnam and Mr Benioff outlined the value-based decisions and considerations that must be made by individuals, organisations, and nations, to make the most of the powerful opportunities handed to us by the pandemic.
Compassionate capitalism
Business will not continue to be all about money, Mr Benioff told us. It will not be focused purely on shareholder returns.
“It is about a much greater mission than that,” he said. “What is required is a ‘new capitalism’ – a compassionate capitalism that is equitable, environmentally sensitive, and human.”
“At LIKE.TG, we put 1% of our equity, 1% of our profit and 1% of all of our employees’ time into a foundation the day we started,” Mr Benioff said. “We have delivered hundreds of millions of dollars to philanthropy and grants, and delivered five million hours of volunteerism.”
People investing in people
A major differentiator between nations during the pandemic, Mr Shanmugaratnam said, is whether people believe in the public good.
“It’s turning out to be quite an important differentiator,” he said. “If you think that wearing a mask, or respecting the norms required to keep COVID-19 at bay, are just about your individual rights or preferences then everyone is going to be worse off, including yourself.”
The nations that have the virus under control are those in which everybody is working towards the same strategic goal, and so they succeed. As a result, they all benefit.
Along those same lines “a big differentiator going forward is going to be where the companies and ecosystems of companies treat investing in their people as a responsibility,” Mr Shanmugaratnam said.
Do it well and the company will be more successful. The real power for the nation, however, is if every company does it.
“If everyone does the responsible thing, you find that skills will keep moving up and we achieve a more inclusive society,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to do in Singapore.”
Aligning values with operations
“We have to choose our values as countries, as companies, and as individuals,” Mr Benioff said. “Then, how do we operationalise our values?
If values are discussed but never operationalised, they will never become reality. That’s the heart of our culture at LIKE.TG, how we get alignment, communication, awareness. We have to be conscious of our core values.”
This pandemic, Mr Benioff said, can be “the great reset to a new, more compassionate, more fair capitalism–stakeholder capitalism.”
All it requires is for businesses to activate their values, rather than simply discuss them, he said.
Good business collaborates with good government
One of the benefits businesses in Singapore have over other nations is strong government, Mr Benioff said.
“Having a government that can manage during a crisis, this is valuable,” he said. “Singapore has benefited from having a phenomenal government.”
Just as important, Mr Shanmugaratnam said, is collaboration between the public and private sectors. This means leading companies find ways to invest in small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) up and down their supply chains, to help all businesses move upwards.
For example, the LIKE.TG Small Business Relief Grants Programme is a partnership with the Singapore Business Federation that helps SMBs to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and return to growth.
“If everyone does that, and if you do it across industry clusters, you end up with a spiral that moves up,” Mr Shanmugaratnam said.
Success in the future will be defined by values-driven actions, rather than rhetoric. It will be about collaborative thinking and community-minded behaviours, rather than winning at all costs. It will come from a combination of the economic and the social, creating an exciting, more humanistic future that is enabled by great business.
