How can technology deliver happiness to the organization and its customers?
My mission is to seek a ‘balance of delight’ between the people within the organization and its customers. Without this balance, things are temporary.
Throughout my 23 years, I have helped build organizational capabilities to integrate, disrupt and scale revenue by finding and implementing a technology core.
By converting business theories into practical answers for organizations, understanding the people, product, customers and their needs, a business and its customers can be delighted and happy. An organization that overfocused on certainly is doomed to fail. An organization with no certainty is picked off by competitors. The right OS is designed to avoid the edges.
As Gary Kelly, CEO of Southwest says “all roads lead nowhere if you don’t know where you are going.” You can interpret this number ways. If you’re over focus where you want to go, you’re building a dirt road. If you’re creating more prediction, designed around your capabilities and the demands of customers, you have the ability to scale. I have made it a core belief by combining predictions of the future with real-time data and data from the past. No one version of data is better than the other. Its the combination of different sets that don’t always like to fit together. The overarching operating system that combines them all, as needed, where needed, is what organizations need. I have made an effort to build these systems. First, manually, then by consulting and finally using core technology built into the organization itself. It’s the same way you live life, the way you drive, the way things happen in the real world. We don’t write it down, and in business, we need to start. That core technology begins with who the customer should be and why they buy.
And it’s not consulting. We have to convert business practices into software. I learned from the masters such as David Oreck, who utilized the Sarnoff principles, as well as Clayton Christensen of Harvard. Their theories and practice are part of the way business operating systems should work. They don’t have a technology core but that does not mean you can’t make one.
I helped transform Performics from a 3rd place affiliate marketing technology into the world’s largest search engine marketing company. It became such because I utilized the Sarnoff concepts and scaled search beyond expectations. Brands embraced it, and we grew a company worthy of sale to Google itself.
My company, MakBuzz got 350+ brands online, worldwide, even before the platforms (namely Google itself) was ready. We pushed the limits of what digital was designed for. Built as a direct response medium, digital was and still is limited in driving the complete customer journey. In 2000, we challenged that, broke it and create hundreds of millions in value by 2004. We helped eCommerce establish itself and once drove a sizable amount of eCommerce transactions. But we did not sit still.
At Vodafone, I develop digital best practices in 18 counties. This work touched the majority of their 350 million customers at the time. By 2012, we changed how they measured digital, built global dashboards, created goals, means, and methods, which drove acquisition and how they valued a new customer.
Not content to remain a digital marketing practice, I saw the problems and limitations of digital marketing and moved onto sales intelligence automation and digital transformation. You cant do just one part of the business. The whole is far greater and more interesting.
I helped convert several brands from siloed digital practices into integrated organizations. By understanding the impact of all media to eCommerce, store and call center, I found a way to ‘right size’ the complete customer journey. By 2013, we presented our findings on Google’s main stage in Mountain View and several other venues worldwide. It was then the limitations of digital became apparent. As long as digital eys are cheap, it works. Not so much when the cost of a sale exceeds other means. When looking at CLV, the story gets complicated.
In 2015, I applied our advanced CRM technology at several organizations, discovering something media could never solve — why people buy and what delights customers. By segmenting people based on desire and need, I found a way to bypass media altogether. Creating a look-a-like CRM redefines how big the company is and where to prioritize departments and budgets.
Today, my focus is on running businesses. Many great ideas need sales intelligence and automation and a far better understanding of why people buy. No one part is more significant than any other part of the business. Knowing what to prioritize, And how much can be well-defined by understanding a precise, total addressable market. Not designed for and by media but in a way to solve customer delight and long-term profitability of the organization.
Significant opportunities exist to grow organizations. Most organizations operate at a fraction of capacity (like 20 to 30%) and thus, unlocking that value is happiness for many.
In my career, I have seen moments of pure happiness between the organization and its customers. Those are the times when people talk about what you sell, willingly, without incentive, without fear. The organization roars. It’s loud. Growth and profits come. The best of those times come with predictability. You know where you be in a month, a year and beyond. Confidence and certainty abound. The organization is not ripping people off and found a way to have balance, happiness, and scale.
Is this random? Nope. Organizations that don’t adjust to competitors and customers needs find themselves flat, lost. It’s the classic definition of disruptive innovation.
Understanding the various segments of customers and why they buy, what delights them, we can build an organization that is predictable. That same concept and software define the total addressable market; it defines budgeting and where investment should be spent to yield the most significant results.
To repurpose and distribute budgets and profits based on combining ‘data of the past’ with ‘theories of the future’ is the practical side of the modern organization. A budget is not a yearly event — its based on a genuine, total addressable market that is living and breathing in real time. It is the foundation of where the organization can go.
Just think: your dog knows where the Frisbee will go yet does not know polynomial math. How can the dog predict? Imagine the same for business. Built-in growth OS, not piecemeal point solutions.