Filling a Market Gap: SAM (Strategic Account Manager) Enablement fills a gap in the marketplace. The gap exists with the 3 million Account Managers who are not served by Sales Enablement, CRM or any of the enabling technologies built for... Continue reading

There’s thousands of enterprise cloud-based apps for businesses available on Google's Apps Marketplace, Salesforce's AppExchange, and Amazon's AWS Marketplace. When you look through Google's recently updated Apps Marketplace, you realize there’s technology to do pretty much any and every business... Continue reading

Most software for the enterprise has a bad reputation for dense unfriendly interfaces and non-intuitive workflow. Most of the time this is because developers try to pack as much function into the software to cater to an entire organization. Even... Continue reading

The Customer Module is a major milestone in our Render journey. This step has been all about helping sellers to sell. We’ve learned what a salesperson wants: what value prop they are supposed to sell, what it is worth to... Continue reading

As we have said, we started the business where we needed to start…creating great methods for defining a DVP and Render Workspaces for teams to get that work done well and efficiently. Now imagine there are many, many DVPs and... Continue reading

We have experienced the workflow within companies of how they build, manage, and improve their value propositions. Sometimes it is straightforward, using one DVP...Other times it is complex, nesting a bunch of DVPs together against one growth objective. Sometimes the... Continue reading

Our friends at Polar Unlimited put together a nice video summary of our book Winning With Customers and provide some helpful advice to those using social media in B2B markets. LINK Couldn't agree more. via blog.valkre.com Continue reading

Spring is here and so is RENDER 3.0! I love this time of year in Chicago! Everything is in alignment. The Cubs are in last, the Bears are going to win the Super Bowl, the Bulls are still trying to... Continue reading

In the next few days we are releasing Render 3.0. This is an exciting time for our company! For those of you who have not been following our story; five years ago we started building a SaaS platform with Owens... Continue reading

I can’t help but laugh when I see this picture. Declaring to be Customer Centric and telling employees to deliver Customer Value does not make it so. Through my experiences, here is what I have learned about sustaining and scaling... Continue reading

Declaring that one creates value for customers is a popular thing to do. Could you imagine the opposite declaration, “no, we don’t create value for customers and have no intention of doing so”. The reality is at some point every... Continue reading

Dorothy was clearly feeling she had entered an unfamiliar place when she told Toto they were no longer in Kansas. I think companies trying to be more Outside-In, more Customer Centric, while operating on the principle of Customer Value have a lot in common with Dorothy. They are scared of the unfamiliar place and simply want to go home…home to managing from the Inside-Out, everything in their control. So why don’t we change the story, Dorothy stays in Oz, the Land of Customer and Customer Value. Continue reading

I am perplexed as to why the idea of “Customer Value” is not a more defined science in business. If you think it is well defined, then Google it…you won’t find much. No ads, no purchased space, and little content... Continue reading

Our Mike Cardinale figuring out "Customer Value" of Animal Health and Crop Science in the Australian Bush. We love it! Continue reading

I just attended the BMA Chicago breakfast where Andrew Dorn of Acxiom presented “Using Data to be a Customer-Centric Company”. The presentation was focused on the B2B side of business rather than B2C. This point alone made the presentation interesting.... Continue reading

There is nothing simple about B2B companies…customers who have complex needs served by suppliers who have complex solutions. There are timeless questions and emphasis on Value Proposition (are you solving problems for your customer today?) and Innovation (are you collaborating... Continue reading

This was our second year at Breckenridge. The weather, snow, food, accommodations, and camaraderie were all “the best so far”. When we started doing this trip 5 years ago it was definitely as a reward for hard work and a... Continue reading

In professional sports the separation between the pro’s and all others is discussed as the “speed of the game”. Not being a professional athlete, I never thought I would experience the “speed” phenomena first hand. But if you are in... Continue reading

Thank you ISBM! Great conference on Data, Insights and Action necessary to drive Customer Value. Here, as promised is the link to the presentation I shared on the new “Speed of the Game”. View on Slideshare Download ISBM Data Action... Continue reading

Warning: This May Cause Irritation What is scaring your C-Suite is a rapidly changing world. They are scared that customers will leave them behind. They’ll be forced to tell stakeholders why they are guiding the company into stagnation. Or worse,... Continue reading

Whatever you may think about Customer Value or Customer Centricity, if you are not working 24/7 with extreme urgency to improve your Outside-In business muscle, helping your customer's business, then you are about to get swamped by a giant wave.... Continue reading

I presented this morning to the BMA Chicago. Great group, great attendance and Marketers who are eager to learn. Marla Schrager and the team are doing a nice job with the Chicago chapter. Here is the presentation:Download BMA Chicago Jan... Continue reading

You know there are certain times during the history of a company that cause you to stop and reflect. Our recent open house was one of those times for me. Building a business is so much about the community of... Continue reading

BIG news! We will be presenting with GE at the upcoming BMA, May 30 through June 1. We couldn't be more honored and excited to share a little of what has consumed us for the last two years. It was... Continue reading

We were at the annual Strategic Account Management Association (SAMA) conference a few days ago. We presented there with Owens Corning (more on that in a later blog post). Something that really caught my attention during the 3 1/2 days... Continue reading