Is Microsoft bringing the joy and community of gaming to everyone?
The News On January 18, 2022, Microsoft announced the intention to acquire Activision Blizzard with the vision of bringing the joy and community of gaming to everyone, for $95 per share, which equals a transaction value of $68.7 bn. This is a bit more than eight times of the revenue that Activision Blizzards expect to have in the fiscal year 2022. With this acquisition, Microsoft can add 400 million monthly active users to the already existing 25 million Game Pass holders. Until the acquisition closes, the companies will run independently. After completion of the transaction, Activision Blizzard wil report to Phil Spencer, the newly appointed CEO of Microsoft Gaming. This acquisition makes Microsoft the third largest gaming company by revenue, after Tencent and Sony. The stock markets reacted with a sharp increase of Activision Blizzard shares to about $87, while Microsoft stock largely followed its pre-existing slight downward trajectory. Here my analysis in a brief video. The bigger Picture We have currently around 3 billion people and growing, who are actively gaming. Millennials and younger do not even know a world without social media and smart phones. They often play using mobile devices. Microsoft, on the other hand, is available on basically every device and offers quite some hardware, too, either directly or via partners. Additionally, Microsoft already before was a known entity in the gaming market, e.g. owning gaming platforms like Minecraft and Doom. Still, according to Shacknews, Microsoft seems to have missed the own growth targets, even though an increase of Game Pass holders from 18 million to 25 million in the year 2021 is quite significant. Apart from the...
The secrets to improving Sales Operations and thereby making your salespeople love their system
Three times is the charm. Our first attempt was disrupted by Texas getting off the (power) grid due to a winter storm, the second one due to Streamyard going offline (courtesy of a Google problem), now we finally made it happen and talked with an enterprise software user about sales operations. Based upon real life experience, how can sales ops be improved, how can it contribute to sales success? Does it need process, tools, or what? Well, the answer to that one is, of course, both. But what comes first and how to make sure that people love to use the resulting system? Our guest Thomas Verly, VP of Sales and Marketing at EagleBurgmann has quite some interesting answers. Also to the question whether Revenue Operations is really a thing. Is it new wine in an old bottle or rather old wine in a new bottle. Thomas has some truely interesting stories to tell that help us identifying what is really important for a sales organization, even if it is in a quite specific industry. At EagleBurgmann they identified the secret of what makes their sales reps use the system – and they have a truly astonishing adoption. Hint: It is not force but they managed to make the people want to use the system because it delivers value to them. How? No spoiler here besides: Don’t digitalise chaosSimple is beautifulHarmonisation is a good thingDon’t forget about change management Watch the episode. It is worthwhile. More than...
A CMS contributes to customer experiences, does it?
Everybody is talking of “creating customer experiences” – even I, although I am convinced that any experienced is created by the person on the receiving side of an engagement. But then, how to formulate this in only a few words? Nevertheless, when it comes to engaging with customers or prospects, we are immediately also talking content, be it images, texts, videos, podcasts, 3D rendered objects, or whatever the future will bring us. We are also talking about more than just marketing processes, but also service- or employee-facing processes. Which brings us into the realms of knowledge management, product information management, web content management, enterprise content management and enterprise search. Or the question about how the same content can be used in different scenarios? How can it be found, so that it can be made available? Does it need a platform? What type of platform? Looking at individualised marketing campaigns that theoretically ask for individually tailored content. How much can this scale? Where is the limit? Spoiler here: Manpower to create the content … Still, how is a technology stack helping marketing, sales and service functions with prepared and personalised relevant information – that then also resonates? What is the role of “headless” in this whole picture? Is headless a thing at all? Shouldn’t be the content headless after all (which then solves the content problem across the metaverse – oops, now I used the buzzword)? Lot’s of unanswered and very interesting and important questions! This creates the perfect need to talk to someone who knows. So, we discussed with Dina Apostolou of Contentful how a content management system can be of help. And...
CRMKonvos – The all time hot 5 including some surprises
The new year just started, so it is the perfect time to look at some data. To keep you curious: There are some interesting data points. I looked at and reviewed the success of our CRMKonvos. We are streaming live on various channels, including my LinkedIn profile, several Facebook channels including mine, the one of Ralf Korb, Korb & Kollegen as well as Tante Emma 4.0 and occasionally Kompetenztraining Ralf Korb. Of course, we are on Twitter using @twieberneit and @loneRangerCRM. Last, but not least we stream to our YouTube channel CRMKonvos. We are live every Tuesday at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET / 7 pm CET. Why do I say that? Because we are serving an international audience and timing matters for live shows. On all of these channels the videos remain available for viewers who could not make it to the live episodes. Shameless plug: Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel! Streaming to Twitch doesn’t seem to be that successful for us. I think, this is due to being live once a week is not often enough to build an audience. And then Twitch is full of gamers, who might be less interested in the latest and greatest of CRM and CX, delivered via good discussions with our expert guests. A hard part is that we haven’t found a solution that gives us detailed statistics, like views over time, duration of the view, engagement, etc. across platforms. Means, getting this data it is all manual work. If there is anyone who has a solution for this: I am all game, let me know via the comments or ping me via my LinkedIn or Twitter profiles. So, I did the data collection and am now able to tell you the 5...
A look beyond the hype – and some humble wishes
It is the end of 2021 and I do not have anything better in mind than writing a last post for the year. So let’s do it. There have been some terms that were used more than others with some of them actually being quite hyped. Some of them for the right reasons, some of them for the wrong ones. My favorites of these terms include in no particular order: MetaverseNFT (non-fungible token)RPA or robotic process automationHyper personalizationHyper automationCustomer Journey OrchestrationLow code / No codeArtificial intelligence / machine learning Hyper personalization I already did a short video that expresses my thoughts on hyperpersonalization. You cannot really avoid the term when browsing the web with anything related to CX in mind. Back in the day, what is now called hyper personalization was called one-to-one marketing. This was in the eighties. The problem was that we didn’t have the technology nor the computing power to technically implement a contextually relevant 1:1 approach at scale and in real time. That’s why we worked with segments. Now we have the technology and computing power to address individuals contextually relevant in real time, nearly regardless of the size of the audience. Technologically, this is quite amazing, and if used consciously is of great benefit for customers and prospects. But there is nothing “hyper” about it. It is still personalization, maybe individualization. My wish for 2022: Let’s do away with the hyperbole before we start to desperately look for the next hyperlative – or should I call it ultralative? Robotic process automation No doubt, RPA is an important technology. It provides a fast and easy – maybe too fast...
How to make an impact on CX – with your supply chain
Amazon is surely an example for a company that has the reputation for good CX. Where does it come from? After all, the site is ugly. Too much advertisement, too. But then Amazon has outstanding supply chain and logistics. Customers like having alternatives even when they buy habitually. Amazon was good at delivering in 2-days and forgiven for not doing so during the pandemic. So they established their reputation before disruption upset it. Amazon also focuses on consumer experience. Many other firms don’t manage their supply chains that far forward. We are discussing with Steve LeMay, Associate Professor of Marketing and Logistics at the University of West Florida, and Professor Emeritus of Marketing and Logistics at Mississippi State University. Steve has a long history in researching supply chain, supply chain ethics and circular closed-loop supply chains. And he is the person who knows Paul Greenberg longest – apart from Paul’s brother … This makes him the perfect guest to talk about the impact that supply chains have on CX, and how to make sure that they contribute to a good CX. Have there be learnings from the Covid crisis? Or from the 2021 blockage of the Suez Canal? Which ones? Are they being implemented? Are lean supply chains too lean? How to make them lean and resilient? What is the state of research? Steve shares a wealth of experience and examples in this episode, which make it well worth reviewing it. Enjoy the last CRMKonvo of the year 2021. CU again on the other side of New Year’s...
Your ultimate 2021 hit list of most read articles
It is this time of the year and I want to extend a heart-felt Thank You! to all my readers who honour me by investing your time into reading my posts, sharing and commenting on them. Thank You! Below is the list of the top 10 posts read by you in 2021 #10: How to avoid the looming CRM crisis #9: The Dirty Dozen of 2021 Trends (maybe I should revise this one for 2022?) #8: CRMKonvo – Freshworks on Platform, CRM and useful AI #7: Outlaw Spirit – Lessons from The Zoho Analyst Day 2021 #6: How to orchestrate customer journeys in real time at scale #5: Digitization, Digitalization, Digital Transformation – A Stake in the Ground #4: With Oracle Fusion Marketing into the Future of CRM? #3: Together, Zoom and Five9 shape a new market (well, in the light of this merger having failed … they could have shaped a market. Still, a very readable one) #2: Nimble strengthens its ability to be where the user is #1: Ecosystem Play, One Game at a Time Obviously, I do not know yet in detail what I am going to write about in 2022. however, I strive to make it as valuable for you as this year – at least Bonne...
Death to the silos – long live the silos
The word is that it takes two to Tango. It turns out that sometimes it needs three! I will not spoil the excitement by naming who they are, though. Why do we have silos in enterprise software? How to remove them? Do they even need to be removed? Does throwing more software at a software problem help? Aren’t the problems a software problem after all? If more or different software helps, what type of software can or should be used? Or are corporate silos even a Wallstreet problem? Great questions and even better answers by Joshua Greenbaum in this #CRMKonvo. This one got even bigger than I expected. But then, Josh thinks in big lines. And he has wits, a lot of wits. He did not disappoint, really! Apart from a lot of knowledge, that is. Listen in to our CRMKonvo. I can also highly recommend to read Josh’s article “Death to all Silos, with Aphorisms”. It is worthwhile, promised! Death to All Silos, With...