Buying Matters More Than Selling

The biggest recent change in the communications industry is not a product or technology. The biggest change is in how products and services get acquired.

The old model was well understood. Prospects were small teams of technical staff that followed a predictable sequence. The selection process went something like exploration, evaluation, and engagement. Sellers tracked this journey in phases such as awareness, consideration, and decision - often depicted as a funnel.

The problem today is buyers no longer adhere to this well defined process. The buying process evolved, and the linear funnel was replaced with a chaotic process. Further, vendor sales teams are involved later in the process, and thus have much less influence over the journey.

These changes are not unique to enterprise communications. Consider car sales which once began when the prospect arrived at the dealer. Now prospects first arrive at the dealer well informed, often only intending to confirm what they already know. Today, the buyer (cars and enterprise communications) gets pretty far along before asking for sales assistance.

Today, enterprise communications get evaluated by cross-functional teams - many representatives are non technical. There’s far less focus on feeds and speeds, and more on experience and ease of use. The selection team explores, evaluates, and engages with vendors in concurrent stages. The teams rely more on their self driven research (via public and premium online portals) than vendor presentations.


Read more at:
http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-strategies-views/buying-matters-more-than-selling.aspx

Soleio Cuervo, head of design, Dropbox on DESIGN Concepts

Consumer technology has evolved significantly in the last decade alone. When I first started in the business at Facebook, we designed products for one environment—the desktop web browser. Today, we find ourselves fully immersed in the post-PC era, where people use technology throughout the day across a growing combination of laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. And the number of devices that people need to access their data will likely only escalate over time. So it’s important for businesses to be design-centric and maintain a deep appreciation for how their products and services fit into the cadence of a user’s daily life across different devices.

At Dropbox, we focus on how to make things reliably simple for our users. People’s stuff is commonly on the brink of disaster—hard drives crash, devices are lost, and phones are accidentally dropped and broken. Safe, reliable online storage is a fundamental building block of our service, but we have ambitions far beyond mere backup. We want to build software that makes people’s lives more productive and memorable. I credit the cofounders of Dropbox with being very design- minded. Even in its earliest form, Dropbox

was an elegant product—a “magic folder” on the desktop computer that was native to the operating system environment people were already familiar with.

The design organizations I’ve worked with understand two things. First, in order for a product to have global appeal, it should be conceptually basic and universally intuitive. Conceptual simplicity comes from a deeply empathic and highly iterative approach to design. Second, world-class experiences require technical experience coupled with an understanding of how a product fits into a person’s day-to-day life. These two concepts continue to grow in importance as we become an increasingly connected society. Managing a user’s attention and transferring context across devices require a multidisciplinary approach to exploration and prototyping.

It is also important for business leaders to understand that great design doesn’t happen on the first try, or even on the tenth try. Designers should get in front of consumers, field-test their prototypes, and relentlessly iterate on their work in order to achieve perfection. As products have increasing amounts of access to personal data about their users—names, locations, interests, the people they work and socialize with—software makers have a powerful opportunity to personalize product experiences in ways that were previously impossible. We

can “roll out the red carpet” and offer a singular experience that makes our customers feel as if the product or service was handmade for them. The true potential of digital engagement is creating experiences rich with empathy and context across multiple touch points—driving customers from being users to loyal advocates.

Simple, elegant, and intuitive design can be a competitive edge for a business, and it begins with executive leadership buy-in, an uncompromising focus on hiring top talent, and a cultural commitment to great design. When designed accordingly, digital engagement can provide seamless, accessible, personalized solutions for customers.

Read more at:
http://dupress.com/articles/2014-tech-trends-digital-engagement/