Weekend training programmes

We know that some of us are extremely busy during the weekdays to attend any training programmes.  In partnership with Doxa Solutions, we are pleased to offer you weekend programme that will help to sharpen your skill and knowledge, at a relaxed pace.

Please feel free to contact us for any assistance.  Thank you and looking forward to hearing from you by return.

What shoppers really want from personalized marketing.

Anyone who has gotten an unsolicited and irrelevant offer related to something they’ve done online knows that creepy feeling that someone is watching me. This kind of reaction is the third rail of today’s drive to personalize interactions with customers.

That’s a problem because, when done right, personalization can be a huge boon for retailers and consumers. Targeted communications that are relevant and useful can create lasting customer loyalty and drive revenue growth of 10 to 30 percent. The challenge is to personalize in a way that doesn’t cross lines and delivers genuine value and relevance.  But how do you know?

To better understand what customers really value, we asked 60 shoppers to create mobile diaries of their personalized interactions with various brands over two weeks. With over 2,000 entries in total, we were able to see what kind of personalized communication works for customers and what doesn’t.

Here are the five things that customers said they value when it comes to personalized communications:

[For the rest of the article, read HERE]

For top sales force performance, treat your reps like customers

Companies that excel at sales growth are tightly focused on developing the talent they need by understanding how sales reps really work.

With as much as half of a company’s value creation resting with the sales force, sales-team effectiveness is crucial for growth. In fact, our research shows that the sales experience is one of the top drivers in customers’ purchasing decisions. And best practice has revealed that companies focus as much on the rep experience as on the customer experience.

Realizing that value, however, has become a lot harder. The sales landscape is more unpredictable and studded with multiple influencers, channels and buying options. Digitization is changing buyer behaviors and leading to more complex sales activities. Guiding decision makers through all the nuances and considerations requires sellers to demonstrate deep subject-matter expertise and the ability to quickly customize a message to each customer.

These challenges call for a new set of sales skills, training, and tools. Companies are having trouble filling that void, however, because many of them lack the means to identify and cultivate the skills they need. Performance can vary by as much as six to seven times between top- and bottom-tier sellers, yet few organizations have metrics that show why. As a result, hiring choices are often based on gut feelings, while development and training often default to methods that have been in place for years.

To better understand how the best sales leaders manage talent, we developed a “sales DNA” tool. It tracks and analyzes the talent-management practices of more than 100 sales organizations as well as the traits and attributes of over 15,000 sales representatives across a range of transactional, consultative, and other sales environments globally. The results reveal that organizations with the fastest growth know who their top performers are—surprisingly, many businesses don’t—and know the personality traits and skills that correspond with success. They’re also far more likely to customize outreach, tools, and techniques to the needs of different teams. In fact, as we analyzed fast-growing organizations, it became clear to us that top-performing sales organizations treat their salespeople like customers.

For rest of article, read HERE.

Experiencing customer service ...

"Everyone has a quality product and everyone has good service.  But customers will not walk into a competitor's showroom and have an experience like ours."

Telstra boosts international brand recognition.

Telstra has retained its crown as Australia's most valuable brand despite a marginal decrease in brand value and a significant slump in enterprise value.

The formerly government-owned telecommunications giant, which is ranked 125th in Brand Finance's Global 500 most valuable brands list, remained Australia's top brand despite what was a challenging year for the company with a series of outages across its networks.

Telstra's brand value came in at $14.3 billion, down from $14.6 billion last year, but still enough to hold onto the top spot comfortably. In 2016, Telstra pipped Woolworths to top Brand Finance most valuable brand list.

Telstra's branding efforts among B2B decision-makers in the international market have made great strides. Its international brand recognition grew to 26% in 2015 from 10% in 2014. This growth was underpinned by a simpler go-to-market products and services strategy, backed by its success in integrating Pacnet's network with its own. It now has the right network and services capabilities to help grow the brand further internationally.

Telstra's new brand campaign demonstrates growing success

Not only does Telstra enjoy a large share of its domestic market, but also its international brand recognition is increasingly getting better. For instance, the service provider has grown its brand awareness in Asia-Pacific from 8% in 2014 to 32% in 2015. With the integration of key acquisitions such as Pacnet progressing well, Telstra has launched a new brand campaign with a focus on the magic of technology. This helps it improve the customer experience, which remains a key measure of its success, as well as helps it create better ways to empower everyone to thrive in a connected world.

Underpinning that is a desire to transform from being a telco to a technology company, and to be the architect of a "better way" to do things. This means that Telstra will focus on helping companies create transformative innovation, reach global markets, liberate the enterprise workforce, optimize IT, and secure networks.

The new brand campaign nicely complements modular products and services as they become available in the market. Enterprise customers can expect the following:

• A simpler customer engagement model. The new brand campaign highlights the ease of doing business with Telstra. Ovum believes this is accurate. By unifying product teams across geographies, international customers will have more of a voice in terms of service innovation, creation, and propagation. Moreover, management and support will become a more streamlined effort in the near to mid-term. Telstra is also investing in global service desk capabilities – this will make it easier for the service provider to support superior SLAs and better customer experiences.
• Telstra to drive greater innovation with Telstra Programmable Network. The brand promises to bring transformative innovation and help optimize IT for customers. This is reflected by Telstra's almost complete integration of Pacnet's network with its existing regional and global networks. The launch of the Telstra Programmable Network is the culmination of that effort. It is also using dedicated teams to migrate customers off Pacnet onto Telstra, or, where the Pacnet capability is superior, to migrate that component to the Telstra Programmable Network. It aims to complete customer migration in 2018. The Telstra Programmable Network's advantages are many, but key innovations that will guide its development include automated, on-demand, and real-time provisioning; ability to control the Telstra Programmable Network using UIs; a consumption-based model (pay per use); and the use of analytics to provide customers with data from the network and tools to interrogate and exploit the data.
• Mobility and securitycapabilities as key differentiators. Mobility and managed security services (MSS) sit across its modular international connectivity, platforms, and applications layers. While Telstra does not own international mobile networks, it offers managed mobile services including its IoT platform to regional and global customers with the aim that global customers will create IoT applications off its IoT platform. It has identified MSS as another key regional and global requirement, and it is adding key capabilities to its cybersecurity team. While some of the buildouts of global services (mobility, IoT, and managed security) are a work in progress, it intends to invest significantly in global product availability. Enterprises will see a more comprehensive buildout of MSS, mobility-as-a-service (MaaS), managed public cloud, and cloud contact center in the near to mid-term.

United Airlines, a public relations that went very wrong.

Shares in United Airlines' parent company have dropped after footage of a screaming passenger being dragged off an overbooked plane went viral.

Stock in United Continental Holdings dropped by more than 4% at one point on Tuesday, and at one point nearly $1bn (£800m) was wiped off its value.

Its CEO defended employees' conduct and said the passenger had been "disruptive and belligerent".

But the company has come under intense criticism online.

Outraged customers have threatened in droves to stop flying with United and the CEO's response to the incident has been pilloried.

Share prices recovered slightly later in the day, but were still below opening prices.

[For rest of article, read HERE]

The heartbeat of modern marketing : Data activation and personalisation

We’ve come a long way from “People who bought this, also bought that.”

Consider the experience of a representative customer we’ll call Jane. An affluent, married mom and homeowner, Jane shops at a national clothing retailer online, in the store, and occasionally via the app. When visiting the retailer’s website in search of yoga pants, she finds style choices based on previous purchases, the purchases of customers with profiles similar to hers, and the styles of yoga pants most frequently purchased on weekends. She adds one of the offered yoga pants to her shopping cart and checks out

With the exception of a follow-up email, most interactions with the customer stop there. But here’s what this example looks like when we activate Jane’s data: Three days after her online purchase, the retailer sends Jane a health-themed email. Intrigued, she clicks the link and watches a video about raising healthy kids. One week later, she receives an iPhone message nudging her to use the store’s mobile app to unlock a 15 percent one-day discount on workout equipment. Though she has never bought such items at this retailer, Jane takes advantage of the offer and purchases a new sports bag. What began as a simple task of buying yoga pants ended up being a much more engaged experience.

Such data-activated marketing based on a person’s real-time needs, interests, and behaviors represents an important part of the new horizon of growth. It can boost total sales by 15 to 20 percent, and digital sales even more while significantly improving the ROI on marketing spend across marketing channels: from websites and mobile apps to—in the not-too-distant future—VR headsets and connected cars.

[For rest of article, read HERE]