How customer voice
drives business

Finding the right prospective buyers to engage with, and hopefully turn into customers, can be a headache for both marketing and sales teams. For marketers, having a pile of questionable leads can mean more time sifting through and nurturing them before they are ready to be passed on to the sales team. And for salespeople, there is almost nothing more frustrating than trying to entice a prospect who just isn’t that into it – it being your pitch, brand, product, service, etc. As both teams know well, a long lead list and a full pipeline doesn’t always equal high-quality prospects. And having good quality leads is now a top priority for 68% of B2B professionals. Unsurprisingly, finding these high-quality leads has been recognized as a top challenge for 59% of B2B marketers. This is where marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM), and sales intelligence software can make all the difference. These technologies help automate the process of collecting relevant information on leads, storing that data, and using it to craft targeted and personalized content to nurture your leads. Marketers can save time they might have spent manually segmenting and scoring lead lists, and make sure only high-quality leads get handed […]

We have all been there – waiting on a line to reach customer support. Whether you needed to solve a problem with your banker, airline, or online purchase, your first step was to call customer support. This has been a predictable part of our customer experience. However, in the SaaS community, customer support has evolved. Companies have transformed their customer support agents into customer success teams. Not sure what the difference between customer support and customer success is? The rest of this article will dive into what customer success and customer support are and how they are different. From there, we’ll take a deeper look at what customer success is all about – and why it may be one of the most important things for your business. What is Customer Support? Customer support is the service a company provides clients with when they have questions or complaints about a product. When there is a ticket that needs to be resolved, team representatives are on it. Customer support is continually utilized throughout the entire customer lifecycle – from planning and implementation to maintenance and upgrades. Once associated with call centers, customer support now spans many digital channels, including email, phone, instant […]

First things first: A Definition Streaming analytics is an emerging software space that has gained considerable prominence due to the increasing importance of big data, and specifically the Internet of Things (IoT). But what is it? Streaming analytics software makes it possible to analyze data in real time, as it happens, by plunging into the stream of live data and analyzing it in flux. This is profoundly different from analyzing data at rest. The entire business intelligence space has been working on the data at rest analysis problem for decades and the possible approaches are well understood. But the techniques for analyzing data in motion are relatively new. Essentially, the software constantly calculates statistical analytics while moving with the stream of data. The value of this real-time data is transient, and insights must be acted on almost immediately to gain real value. Some Examples of How these Products are Used Streaming analytics technology was first adopted by the finance and capital markets industry. In capital markets, real-time data is a crucial tool to understand what is happening right now and take appropriate action. For example, a streaming analytics model might watch market data streams with instructions to take specific action […]

In our last post, we mentioned Millennials in the 2018 TrustRadius B2B Buying Disconnect. In short, this research study highlights the perspectives of buyers, distinguishing what buyers like, dislike, and need from vendors in a software buying process. Millennials proved to be a dominant demographic in the TrustRadius study. This makes perfect sense, being that this age group (22-37) make up over one-third of the workforce. In fact, when it comes to making technology purchasing decisions, 73% of millennials who work in business are involved in the decision making process for their companies. We recently discussed what Millennials seek when buying a product from a vendor. In the end, Millennials are looking for a product to commit and be loyal to. When they find the right product, they are notoriously vocal about their approvals and recommendations. Overall, 84% of all buyers, millennial and non-millennial alike, are willing to share their perspective with other buyers. That being said, more than half of millennial buyers use reviews when making a purchasing decision, much more than other generations, and there is a reason for that. So what can younger buyers teach other buyers? Here are some takeaways you can adopt from millennials. What […]

Millennials are used to being considered the ‘others.’ They have negatively been seen as self-absorbed and entitled from older generations. Why? We do things differently than older generations, we think differently, and we were shaped differently. But the fact is we are no longer the “others” in the workplace. We are the ones driving business and consumer behavior. We are the up-and-coming executives, experienced developers, and buyers. Lastly, we are the driving force of growing businesses. One key trait of millennials is that they love sharing and reading (or watching) others’ opinions. Millennials publicize their opinions on everything. Their thoughts on coffee shops, travel spots, politics, customer experiences, and favorite products are all on public display on the Internet–a medium millennials grew up with. In turn, they appreciate the opinions of others and engage with others before coming to a conclusion. They use public forums, social media, and review sites to interact with the world around them and make informed decisions. This is true not only of experiences and preferences in millennials’ personal lives but also in their professional lives. Millennials use these same online avenues to give and receive career advice, job offers, feedback about employers and company culture, […]

The competition for recruiters is more demanding than ever, with 72.8 % of HR professionals “struggling to find relevant candidates.” Depending on your industry, the recruitment process can become even more difficult in the winter, when holiday travel and festivities slow everything down. Key stakeholders are often traveling, and it’s the end of a fiscal year, before new budgets are available. So how do you set your company and job openings apart as unemployment rates are falling? The number of recruitment tools promising success to HR professionals is, quite frankly, dizzying. But recruitment is, and always should remain, a human-centered activity. An effective recruitment plan doesn’t rely solely on all automated tools or manual outreach. Instead, the plan blends the two to create efficiency with a personal touch. Below, we’ve identified both the challenges and trends you’ll need to take into account this winter. In turn, we discuss how you can design your recruitment strategy to tackle the holiday season. Here’s how: Rethink Your Strategy From the Ground Up Millennials aren’t afraid to leave a job that isn’t making them happy. In fact, this prevailing demographic job-hopped at nearly double the rate of their predecessors within the past 20 years. […]

TrustRadius will be awarding the Top Rated products within popular categories. This award is based entirely on user feedback via reviews. This means that these awards are based on your personal accounts of the products as professionals who use them day in and day out.   How Exactly Are Top Rated Products Chosen? There are three key criteria behind which products earn the Top Rated award for a category: 1. Recency: To receive an award for 2019, products must have at least 10 reviews written or updated in the past 12 months.This ensures enough users have shared feedback recently about the product for buyers to find the information they need. Each round of awards will have a different 12-month mark, so check below for the correlating dates. 2. Relevancy: A product must have a meaningful market presence in the software category (more specifically, it must receive at least 1.5% of the category traffic, which means it’s a product that enough buyers like you are interested in). 3. Rating: A product must have at least 4 stars ( a trScore of a 7.5 or above). If you are concerned with bias in these selections, keep in mind that the scoring algorithm […]

For several years, e-commerce companies have enjoyed a tax-free advantage over traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, as many of these online purchase were essentially tax-free unless ordered from a company operating in the same state as the customer. Many states and local governments have argued that they are missing out on tens of billions of dollars in revenue each year as a result of this tax loophole. However, on June 21st, 2018, the Supreme Court 5-4 ruling in South Dakota v. Wayfair granted the state authority to impose sales tax obligations on out-of-state transactions which could affect remote sellers. This ruling overturned the 26-year-old precedent established by the Quill Corp. v. North Dakota case, which ruled that catalog retailers (Quill in this case), did not have to collect sales tax in North Dakota if it did not have a physical presence in the state. The impact of this recent ruling cannot be overstated as it will likely have a dramatic impact on American companies, local governments, and consumers for decades to come.  According to the Government Accountability Office, up to $13 billion more in sales tax could have been collected in 2017 if states were allowed to require sales tax from online […]

From web developer to circus studio co-founder Alison Headley is a web designer with 20 years of experience. She’s no stranger to technology, but up until last year she didn’t really have any experience running a business. What she did have was a passion for aerial and circus arts.  Two years ago, Alison became a rigging apprentice at an aerial studio in St. Louis. For a year, when she wasn’t coding web pages, she was learning how to safely hang aerial hoops, silks, and trapeze equipment to hold the weight of a human. During that time, Alison and her rigging teacher found they shared a common dream: to open their own aerial studio, with fitness classes, practice space, and performance opportunities for adult beginners and circus professionals alike. Thus St. Louis Aerial Collective was born. As business partners, they spent 8-10 months looking for a space and working on their business plan. In September 2018, their studio finally opened its doors. Start thinking about tech early A crucial part of the early planning process was thinking about the Collective’s tech stack. It would need to include four components, standard for a small business in the fitness industry: Booking system Payroll […]

What is Data Science? The best starting point is to clarify what a data science platform is and what it can be used for. There is so much buzz around data science and its close analogs machine learning, deep learning and AI, that what is actually meant by these terms continues to perplex. Data science is a technical discipline that is all about using code and data to build complex models that can make predictions in the world. Data science as a discipline uses machine learning and deep learning are techniques for building data science models. What kinds of things can data science predict? Models built by data scientists are used to predict actual events in the real world. Examples of the kinds of questions that data science models can answer include: How can I reduce customer churn? How can I optimize my supply chain to ensure on-time delivery? How can I ensure that the right site visitors are seeing the right ad? How many units of product x will I sell next year? How can I spot errors on health insurance claims? How can I detect a data breach at the moment it happens? Some questions, however, are harder to […]

Do you struggle with picking the right technology product for your business? Cutting through marketing noise, figuring out how products are actually different from each other, checking in on some of the claims from sales reps, making sure you’re investing in the right choice for your organization or making the case internally to ensure the check gets signed are just some of the challenges you might face. Reviews could be the secret to vanquishing your buying process blues. Buy Right: Using reviews to make better buying decisions TrustRadius recently hosted our first-ever buyer webinar. We hosted three buyer panelists: Chris Salles, Director of Learning & Knowledge Management at Audible, Dana Mortimer, Human Resources Manager at Milne, and Bethany Chan, Customer Success Manager at Supplyframe. Chris, Dana, and Bethany each played a major role in helping research, evaluate, and select new software for their companies this past year. (One of them is actually still working to get the deal done – shhh!) They talked with us about their particular trials, tribulations, and triumphs as buyers, and shared tips for others working on buying projects. If this sounds like you, read on. You’ll learn from Chris, Dana, and Bethany’s experiences so that […]

The temperature is dropping, the leaves are falling, and all the other usual signs of changing seasons are upon us. In short, winter is coming, and the holiday shopping surge is coming along with it. Deloitte’s annual holiday season forecast predicts that retail sales could exceed $1.10 trillion in the 2018 holiday season. Essentially, ecommerce is a key player in this story. It plays an ever-larger role from year to year, with online holiday sales this year expected to rise 22% over 2017’s season. That translates to an expected sum of $134 billion in ecommerce alone. What’s more difficult to know at a glance is the nitty-gritty of how brands and businesses are updating their ecommerce marketing strategies to handle the shopping season on the horizon. In what follows, we’ll try to make these particular signs are little easier to read by tapping into vendors, marketers, brand managers, and other key players on the supply side to see what they expect and how they’re prepping for this year’s holiday blitz. Ecommerce Basics Gone are the days when the corner store where everyone knows your name represented the norm in retail or customer service. Like so many other facets of our […]

Gone are the days of having quick, polite, and ultimately superficial customer interactions. The people have spoken, and what they want is personalization. It’s no longer enough to make sure your agents are hitting target KPIs such as average handle time or average wait time – although these metrics are still important – and call it a day. The customer service industry has realized that customer experience (CX) is king. Enhancing CX is one of the best ways to set your business apart from the rest. It’s likely to reap higher ROI too. As of 2017, 81% of companies surveyed in Dimension Data’s Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report identified customer experience as a key differentiator, and 79% observed the cost-saving effect of investing in CX. However, customer service companies, like contact centers, still have a ways to go in delivering quality customer experiences. In their State of the Connected Consumer report in which they surveyed over 7,000 global customers and buyers, Salesforce identified that 66% of consumers and 65% of business buyers will switch companies if they do not have personalized experiences with companies – or vendors.  A recent CX study also discovered that 58% of customers feel as if […]

”Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – Peter Drucker Having a good company culture relies on a variety of tangible and intangible factors. It is something that needs to be cultivated over time and practiced by managers and employees alike. And in today’s business world it is extremely important and can often be the “make or break” factor for your company. In fact, millennials–who make up around 35% of the US workforce–value company culture over many other things, including money. Additionally, company culture is important as it can have positive effects on your employee retention, engagement, and overall performance. Having good company culture also leads to happier employees, who are proven to be more engaged and perform better–12% more productive to be exact! Now that we’ve discussed the significance of a good company culture, here are 5 helpful tips to promote it in your workplace. Communicate and define your values “Having a clear mission and making sure you know that mission and making sure that mission comes through the company is probably the most important thing you can do for both culture and values.” – Brian Chesky, CEO, Airbnb According to an employee engagement poll, 1 in 4 employees are “indifferent or […]

Now that it’s 2019, 2018’s digital marketing landscape has seen trends that picked up in 2017 gain even more momentum. Video content, influencer marketing, outreach on social channels, augmented reality, SEO, and data-driven advertising strategies continue to be leading tools of choice for savvy brand-builders.   Predictions can be dicey. If there’s one constant in our technology-saturated times, it’s that the changes keep coming—often in unforeseen ways. We’ve got 2018 behind us, and can now make a few educated guesses about the trajectory of social media marketing in 2019. So saddle up for a tour of current trends and coming attractions. The Natives Are (Still) Social Let’s start with the Great White Whale of recent online marketing trends—the mad dash to master social media marketing. It is important to note that, recent events and marketing tactics have created a sense of distrust among users. This includes everything from privacy data breaches, political “trolls”, and the overuse of #ads on social platforms. Despite the 11 point decline in trust from users, social media still remains a strong contender for marketing. Now, brands are beginning to take a new, more authentic, approach to how they reach consumers. In recent years, social channels like Facebook, […]

If your business is growing, you are most likely doing something right when it comes to marketing. You have your marketing automation and weekly blog posts down, your social media posts are all duly scheduled, and your PPC ads are set in place. But where do you go from there? Soon enough, you may be scraping the bottom of the barrel unless you are willing to invest in cutting-edge marketing tools that can bring your brand deeper into organic marketing. It is time to take your digital marketing to the next level. “Creating content is not enough. Rather, you need advanced strategies rooted in your objectives so that you can engage and persuade today’s social readers.” ~ Neil Patel Instead of investing more money in paid traffic, it’s time to make your content feel more organic for your audience. This article takes a deep dive into two more advanced marketing tools that the most successful brands use to make more intelligent campaign strategies: predictive analytics and A/B testing. Adam Wagner, Chief Strategy Officer at branding and advertising firm Raindrop, doubles down on the importance of finding organic ways to reach your audience. They tend to find warmer leads in your […]

Wrapping your head around the new normal in the marketing industry means working your way through a branching tree of innovations. The long list includes social media outreach; leveraging video with different audiences in different settings; the latest tricks and tools of search engine optimization (SEO); influencer marketing; high-tech business analytics and other data-driven advertising tools; and more. Another item that belongs on our list is affiliate marketing. The term refers to the practice of earning income from marketing someone else’s brand, services, or products on their behalf. If it sounds like a golden ticket to financial success, there’s a good reason for that. It can be a great source of revenue when properly carried out. But, at the same time, the simplicity of the concept can be deceptive. And because the idea lends itself to some easy misunderstandings, a few myths about affiliate marketing have grown up over time. Our job here will be to dispel those myths and lay out a roadmap for success in affiliate marketing based on some simple fundamentals. Keep reading to grab that map. What Is Affiliate Marketing? Put simply, affiliate marketing is the sharing of revenue based on shared marketing efforts. It’s a […]

E-commerce is as much about the experience customers have to interact with your brand’s site as it is about the product and price. There are a lot of options for consumers shopping online. Creating an experience that prioritizes convenience, trust, familiarity, and efficiency is key to running a successful e-commerce business. Whether you are working on creating a new experience from scratch, or you want to revamp your current strategies, we’ve put together twelve ways to create a customer-centric e-commerce experience. 1. Give mobile the respect it deserves People are using their mobile devices to make online purchases more and more. Because of this fact, it’s crucial to make designing your mobile experience a top priority. Your best approach is to build a mobile layout for your website and then adapt it for the desktop experience. If you take the opposite approach, you’ll find yourself having to remove features in order to fit everything into the smaller screen. Another good strategy for creating a smooth mobile shopping experience is to let customers checkout using their social media account. Encourage your users to sign in using their social media credentials, rather than creating a whole new account on your site and manually […]

Whether you are a small business or a Fortune 500 company, hiring is an imperative part of running your business. Unfortunately, finding top talent in today’s job market has become more competitive than ever. Gone are the days of posting a simple job ad and watching great applications roll in. Now, candidates have the upper hand. According to a recent survey, over 40 percent of employees surveyed said they plan on changing jobs in 2018. To keep up, employers will have to adopt new recruiting strategies to attract the best candidates. To help out, we have put together a list of unique ways to find top talent: 1. Use your employees as recruiters. In this highly competitive recruiting market, your employees may be the best place to look to for finding qualified candidates. Your employees are the ones who know what it takes to work for your company, and they want to find someone who would be a great addition to their team. Start by letting your employees know what you are looking for and incentivize if you can. Many businesses offer a referral bonus to thank employees for their help. Using your employees for recruitment may not only lead […]

Change is in the air in the world of print. It’s a cliché—but a true one—that the internet has transformed how we work, relax, date, socialize, consume culture, share news, and most of everything else we do. Something else that’s been redefined by big changes in digital tech is how writers write, publish, and promote their work. One thing that hasn’t changed is that publishing a book first requires writing it. Writing means wrangling with a manuscript, fussing over edits, proofing it, and all the rest. And because even the most polished final draft won’t sell itself, you’ve got to find your readers and get your book into their hands. On the traditional publishing model of yesteryear, writers typically needed an agent to do the promotional work and represent them to publishers. Here’s where things have changed. Today, there is an abundance of digital tools designed to help you spread your ideas and tell your stories. These tools can help you publish your work without traditional support from a publisher and an agent. With the right tools and some patience and determination, you can self-publish your own work, and perhaps even achieve bestseller-grade success. Autonomous publication has enormous potential to […]