Joining Brent Leary and Paul Greenberg on the CRM Playaz episode of the PPN network discussing finer points on AI and its impact on organizations, talent, and society.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brentleary_gtm-martech-ai-activity-7166445090238877697-e1kT

My post about the event:

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7153469112457859074

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/anandthaker_2024-marketing-innovation-conference-activity-7153469112457859074-vJQP

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Thriving in the Marketing Arena During the Age of AI Disruption

The Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business Marketing Area and MBA Marketing Clubs are proud to present the 7th annual Marketing Innovation Conference @ Scheller on Friday, February 23, 2024!

AI is on the precipice of changing our personal and business lives. How will it impact us as marketing professionals? Attendees at the 7th annual Marketing Innovation Conference at Scheller (MIC) will gain valuable insights on how to create a career that thrives in the AI disruption space. From understanding the latest on new AI tools and technology to using AI as a competitive advantage in navigating the ever-changing career landscape, the MIC promises valuable insights for current students all the way up to senior-level business professionals.

The conference will occur at the Scheller College of Business with registration starting at 12:30 p.m. and the conference beginning at 1:00 p.m. The day will conclude with a networking cocktail party with heavy hors d’oeuvres and alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.

Conference speakers include:

Keynote Speaker

• Molly Battin, CMO, The Home Depot

AI Track 1 – Thriving in a Modern Marketing Career

• “How AI is Transforming the Modern Organization’s People Needs” – Anthony Diaz, Global Director, People Function, The Coca-Cola Company

• “Leveraging AI for Competitive Advantage in Your Marketing Career – Tami McQueen, CMO, BIP Ventures

AI Track 2 – “Workshops to Improve Your Skill Set in AI”

• “Predictive Analytics – Understanding What It Can and Cannot Do” – Tenisha Griggs, Founder and CEO, 37X Digital Marketing Agency, Former VP Terminus/AT&T

• “Building AI Strategies: From Zero to Go-to-Market in 60 Minutes – Sarah Woodward, Co-Founder and Head of Growth, and Sean Wood, Founder and AI Transformation Advisor, Human Pilots

Concluding Session

• “Keeping the Customer First – Transforming & Measuring the Customer Experience, “ Raj Sivasubramanian, Customer Experience Leader, Airbnb, eBay, Georgia Tech Alumnus

How to tune your GTM strategies to cope with budgetary headwinds (martech.org)

Grateful to the Martech.org editorial team for their help.

The article was also selected in Linkedin’s Collective newsletter “This Week in Marketing: Learning from the Best – Inspiration in B2B marketing” series.

Honored to have contributed some of our work in DI in our R&D and GTM/AI Apollo platform through IntelliPhi, which was a successful acquisition in 2018.

Link is a great read if you are new to DI and looking to understand its impact, challenges, and benefits to your organization.

The Decision Intelligence Handbook provides a more how-to resource for DI. While in-depth, realize having someone aid in navigating your review and restructuring of your decisions, protocols, and education.

If you need help learning more about DI or evaluating complex decisions, I would be happy to navigate the best resource/people for you.

https://martech.org/go-to-market-tactics-that-wont-work-in-a-post-pandemic-world/

To the report….”The State of Data-Driven Marketing 2023 (lxahub.com)“

How to use decision intelligence to tackle complex business challenges (martech.org)

Strengthening CFO-Marketer Relationships for Business Wins (cmswire.com)

Marking ‘takes’ and notes while streaming is distracting and disruptive.

Creating takes (or social cuts) in post-production is tedious because you have to review the *entire* recording… even if someone else makes them.

So for every hour of recording, you spend another hour or more on finding those ‘takes’ in post-production! I saw how frustrating and time-consuming this was.

…But you already know when those ‘takes’ happen *while* you are streaming or recording.

So I built this seamless browser extension, so while streaming, say in Streamyards, Hopin, etc., you can mark timings, add notes, and reference the takes afterward to navigate directly to them in post-production… saving you hours across all your shows!

This has been another fun side project. My thanks to Brent Leary, Paul Greenberg, Amy Pankenier, Claire Suellentrop, Daniel Roberts, John Lawson, and many of the streamers/thought leaders who shared their pain points, tested it, and for the fantastic feedback.

I hope ChronoMarker solves a pain point for you and allows to more time to create and share great takeaways!

Visit: http://chronomarker.com

Chrome Store: https://lnkd.in/gJrpvwEk

Video: https://lnkd.in/gra7vixb

Anand Thaker, a martech consultant who keeps close watch on the companies, says it’s a reasonable deal for both parties. “SAP needs cash and this seems like an excellent opportunity for them to return those funds to the coffers. Silver Lake is likely to come out healthy of funds from the pending VMware deal [with Broadcom],” he said. That deal is still subject to regulatory approval.

Article: Qualtrics has $12B offer on the table to go private | TechCrunch

…additional thoughts.

Their offer per share is just above 18, which sounds in line. Confirmed that Egon, Silver Lake co-CEO, is still on the board, so no doubt he’s been navigating Qualtrics for this deal.

Over the last year, Qualtrics has been streamlining and refocusing to its core business of CX untangled from but maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship w. SAP and their goals.

SAP needs cash, and this seems like an excellent opportunity for them to return those funds to the coffers. Silver Lake is likely to come out healthy of funds from the pending VMWare deal.

I feel that Qualtrics has an excellent opportunity to use better intelligence – use of data and forms of AI – for greater productivity and content creation/delivery. These will be strong areas for next-gen customer engagement and growth, even in economically uncertain times.

Here are 11 key lessons from Howard Marks’ book “The Most Important Thing”:

1. Understanding risk: Marks emphasizes the importance of understanding and managing risk, as well as being aware of the risks inherent in any investment.
   

2. Being a contrarian: Marks suggests that investors should take a contrarian approach, avoiding the herd mentality and investing in assets that are out of favor.
   

3. Thinking for oneself: Marks encourages investors to think critically and make decisions based on their own analysis, rather than relying solely on market consensus or expert opinions.
   

4. Avoiding overconfidence: Marks warns against overconfidence in investment decisions, and stresses the importance of recognizing one’s own limitations and biases.
   

5. Maintaining perspective: Marks emphasizes the importance of maintaining a long-term perspective, and avoiding the tendency to make impulsive decisions based on short-term market fluctuations.
   

6. Seeking value: Marks suggests that investors should focus on finding undervalued assets, rather than simply buying into popular stocks.
   

7. Being disciplined: Marks stresses the importance of maintaining discipline and sticking to a well-thought-out investment strategy.
   

8. Managing emotions: Marks highlights the role that emotions can play in investment decisions, and suggests that investors should strive to remain calm and rational in the face of market volatility.
   

9. Staying humble: Marks suggests that investors should avoid arrogance and remain humble, recognizing that the market can be unpredictable and that mistakes are inevitable.
   

10. Staying informed: Marks encourages investors to stay informed and to continuously educate themselves on the markets and investments they are involved in.
    

11. Seeking out diversity: Marks suggests that investors should seek out a diverse range of investments in order to reduce risk and increase the likelihood of success.

Catalog items on Amazon and create a link for someone to add all items to a cart

Want to give your followers a link with MULTIPLE items to place into an Amazon cart?  The Amazon Cart Link Generator (ACLG) extension helps you build a collection of items and generates a URL link of an Amazon cart with your items that can be used anywhere in your content. 

1. Navigate to the item in Amazon (if you just installed the plugin, refresh the page)
2. Click on the extension to open the panel.
3. "Add Item" to your collection. Repeat until you are done.
4. (optional) Add your own amazon affiliate tag. Leaving blank helps us fund our efforts.
5. Click on the blue shopping cart button to copy the link for your content!

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The ‘Midas of Martech’ talks Digital Transformation

The New Boardroom Influencers: CIOs & CTOs

Highly recommend subscribing to the series.

2023 Predictions for Martech, Salestech, and Nexttech (lxahub.com)

As activist investors target Salesforce, what’s next for the CRM giant? | TechCrunch

Looking for CMO candidate standouts: 5 takeaways (martech.org)

Mistake killing startups and wasting company ops cycles… As a startup or brand, customer obsession isn’t just about your obsession.

It is about a deep understanding of the *engagement* between you and your collective customers… and… the partners, employees, and advocates (brand or ecosystem).

1. Understand & measure the product usage through the ENTIRE value cycle of your platform and service. Gating the final and most crucial value-add experience doesn’t help you gain true customer-market fit. Huge mistake by many early-stage startups.

2. Reminded twice yesterday. On a global scale, CX expectations vary greatly culturally. Thx Graham and Brent & Paul#crmplayaz as well as our portco company.

3. Customer engagement is as much a thoughtful fiscal exercise as chess strategy market share play. Congratulations Cory, BlueConic

4. Scaling CX culture is easy on an all-rise situation, but few ever run scenarios on skill shortages, a shift in customer behaviors (including economic conditions), and competitive catch-ups.

5. Journaling, especially in CX endeavors, not only documents but immerses you in your research for a better understanding…like a true researcher, where focus and obsession magnify your efforts.

Obsession over the customer without knowing how you can deliver is an unhealthy obsession.

Obvious but often forgotten, but a healthy obsession is about responsibly building the relationship.

Try this quick tip… Substitute customer ‘obsessed’ with ‘relationship’ in your decks/presentations and see how much it changes your perspectives on your work.

See the original post and continued comments: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7017113618521473024/

Vendors – Focus should be to ensure their clients are successful in becoming more effective and efficient. Pull back from the ambiguous customer-centricity conversations.

Analysts – Need to help clients navigate their fears and chart a path forward into uncertain times. The industry is already preparing for a modest and longer recession than the pullback from Covid. In my conversations and analysis, there are more discomforts and restlessness about the time to recovery. Set them up to be better position to leapfrog with new concepts in 2024.

Practioners – Aid in navigating the rhetoric and double down on the adoption and utilization for clients. They’ll have the tough job of ensuring how to maximize success for their clients to meet their goals and sustain through headwinds.

Special cut with my commentary….

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/brentleary_martech-crm-mergersandacquisitions-activity-7011424487275466752-ZXo-?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

Full conversation…

https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:7004550406169128960/

… more thoughts …

• Arresting the fears and painting a turnaround picture. Customers want plain and genuine conversation.

• Customers elevating (or keeping) their job, GSD

• Partners (partners) and M&A to value-add pipeline and revenue streams. Mid-tier is going to go after the enterprise.

• Appreciate the aspiration, but with budget cutting and global growth slowing, CRM will return to retention and market share capture in 2023

• Largely CRM overall has lost its ability to be a competitive advantage. It needs to find it again. Rethink the major elements of the platform.

• CX needs to have a clear objective northstar. Right now, explore space vs. lets land on the moon

• More Training (ops) Increase utilization –
  — The best way to win an RFP is to help write it … so how to develop your ICP w/ messaging and execute well & adapt.

• Spending time reviewing maintenance budgets. Wow. The costs are becoming immense. Transformation might be cheaper.

• As an individual, Less (but more relevant) data is more.

• CRM is a control room

• Vendors… customers want a relationship with a person, not just a brand.

• AI use case will be found, and rampant value/growth under existing and newcomer platforms will move strong.

• Customer at center of the conversation is becoming rhetoric without actionable plans… folks are still struggling to have customers see that value.

• Growing, optimizing, and harnessing the entire ecosystem (employees, partners, advocates, and customers) are the vendor’s asset. The more cohesiveness occurs then the more resilient the company…