Articles by Christopher J. Bucholtz

The term "customer experience" flows from the lips of business people so smoothly these days. It's very clearly the business jargon du jour; its importance has been trending upward for the last decade, and according to Gartner, by 2018 more than half of all businesses will implement significant business model changes in their efforts to improve customer experience...

About a year ago, I conducted a survey that led to my company's first-ever Sales & Marketing Sentiment Study. The idea was to get inside the heads of people in sales and marketing and reveal their feelings about the way they worked, the technology they used, and about each other. We split the results into sales and marketing responses (astoundingly, we had exactly one more sales response than marketing response) and compared them.

Business-to-business marketers know what customers want, in general terms, from initial contacts with the people they buy from. It's taken awhile, but through trial, error, some more error and eventually some actual thought, the mystery has been solved Before I give it away, just ask yourself what you want in any communication from anyone when it c...

Some things in business are very clear and binary: A company succeeds or fails. A customer buys from you or from someone else. A customer returns for additional sales or leaves for a competitor Other things are indeed relative: Sales numbers may be double the previous quarter but still fall below expectations. A customer returns for additional sale...

It's becoming increasingly clear that the nature of the sales profession is changing Salespeople are no longer the ones who introduce products to their customers -- in most cases, especially in business-to-business settings, customers have done a lot of research on their own and are close to a decision before they talk to a salesperson....

The era of digital transformation and the digital business, the customer experience as a key differentiator, and the movement toward smart machines are some of the common themes Gartner Distinguished Analyst Don Scheibenreif touched on in his keynote last week at the Gartner Customer 360 Summit in San Diego These are all phenomena that have been o...

Hardened sales veterans may hear the expression "customer experience" and shrug or scoff. What has it got to do with them, they may ask? A lot -- because it can add dollars directly to their commissions checks Granted, they may not be the ones creating the experiences -- although sales does indeed play a role -- but they certainly should be cogniza...

For many years, provocateurs have been able to stir people up by proclaiming the death of the salesperson. Ten years ago, in fact, Marc Miller authored the book Selling is Dead. It must be a lingering death, because I still know lots of salespeople. I sure hope they have their affairs in order, what with their impending demise foreshadowed for so long...

I recently conducted a simple, one-question survey, using sales pros as my target audience. The question was idiotically simple: What is the most important metric for people in sales? In this era of big data, deep analysis and predictive analytics, you might have thought that some new, performance-based metric would have surfaced as the new secret ...

We all use them. They're the default system for listing and tracking things. And no one (except, maybe for that one weird guy in finance) really likes them. I'm talking about spreadsheets. Whether it's Excel or Google Sheets or some other lesser-known variation on the theme, a lot of spreadsheets are created every year....

As businesses gain a new appreciation of the power of data, they're discovering new tactics for sales and marketing that go far beyond what was possible in the past. It's not just big data and a technology-driven revolution -- it's also a shift in attitudes about data's place in the selling process, its role as a guide or as a reality check, and its ability to fuel new processes that drive greater sales performance...

Customer experience is more than the experience of trading money for a product or a service. It's the experience leading up to that, and the experience customers have with what they've purchased, all the way until they stop using it Why is it, then, that the concept of "customer experience" seems to exist primarily in the marketing department? Mark...

Technology is giving companies an unprecedented view of their customers: demographic data; buying preferences; behaviors that signal the intent to buy; and analyses that enable them to develop expectations about how customers are likely to act during the buyer-seller relationship. Those abilities are new and, in many cases, hold a lot of promise Ho...

Despite vendors' assertions to the contrary, customer relationship management is not all about technology. Technology helps it scale, but CRM is really a discipline. It's the discipline of creating relationships that benefit both the buyer and the seller. What we call "CRM" (the product) is really great at organizing the data that makes it possibl...

In sales, we know customer retention is critical for success in the subscription economy. For many tech companies in the SaaS space, it takes three years to break even. In insurance, which has toiled in the subscription economy for more than a century, the average break-even time is an incredible seven years Because of that, sales compensation is s...

Within a few years, 1 million B2B sales roles will be eliminated, according to a recent Forrester Research report. That's 20 percent of them gone, thanks to the evolution of technologies like self-service and customers' increasing desire to avoid the hassle of speaking to sales reps Personally, I think that's a bit overstated -- or rather, a mischa...

There's a lot of devalued sales jargon out there, but the phrase that makes me wince the most is "sales enablement." First, it's misleading -- there are lots of things that equip sales people to close deals, but when people say "sales enablement" they usually mean content, portals, playbooks and on-boarding. That only "enables" part of the sale....

The idea of using incentives to drive business behaviors is not a new one. It happens in all areas of business, but it's most obvious in sales, where compensation is tied to performance This is the most basic type of incentive, and it's used to get people who sell for a living to sell. However, other incentives can drive behaviors more complex than...

I was doing a little reading about the concept of the customer journey. I have distinct opinions about it, and I was looking for things that might challenge or validate those ideas when I stumbled across a blog post from a major CRM vendor that got my goat The post proclaimed that 2015 was "the Year of the Customer Journey!" Really? This year? What...

In our high-powered, win-at-all-costs business environment, the word "empathy" often evokes derision and scorn. Who has time to be a squishy, touchy-feely wimp overflowing with empathy? We're all busy closing deals and kicking butt! Kicking, closing, etc., is great and all -- but empathy has genuine business value. Don't forget that CRM has "relat...