Digital Value Creation

My interview with Thomas Rasmussen, who's operating at the intersection of marketing and finance. We talk about how to attribute value creation to marketing strategies and whether digital marketing truly outperforms traditional marketing techniques. 
We cover the relationship between the CMO and the CFO, exploring traditional and digital media. Also how strategies that are measurable are not necessarily the most effective.
How does the CMO actually answer the question from the CFO, "What happens if I take half of your budget?" What strategies would the CMO sacrifice to still hit the pipeline goals?
Thomas explores the range of activities in marketing from branding to activation and argues that all marketing pillars contribute to the final customer engagement. Digital marketers sometimes argue that because digital strategies create more data and are more measurable therefore they are clearly more effective. Thomas argues that such a focus on activation ignores all the research on branding and traditional marketing channels like TV on influencing customer choice.

I recently interviewed Alex von Gramatzki. Alex is a serial entrepreneur with 40+ M&A transactions and dozens of early-stage investments across real estate, tech, health, and digital rights. 
Alex has a unique perspective on value creation, digital automation, and disrupting various sectors that refuse to innovate at speed.
In a wide-ranging conversation, we cover his approach to leveraging machine learning and analytics in investments and running a business and also identifying areas where disruption is likely to happen. We discuss where he thought the promise of digital was realized and also where it fell short.

I had a great discussion with Peter Fader, who is a Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School and best known for his decades-long research in customer lifetime value. Peter is also a serial entrepreneur and in 2015 sold his customer analytics company, Zodiac to Nike.
We discuss how the new frontiers of customer analytics help us better understand not just the value of the customer but true enterprise value as well.

We also look into why some companies missed the opportunity in the crisis to transform their customer relationships to retain customers and gain market share. In his signature candid style and through vivid anecdotes, Peter points out how companies sometimes chase shiny digital tools and forget to analyze the vast customer data they already have. He asserts that digital technology in marketing is often ahead of where the companies are in their maturity. 

We dive into the most important dialog around value creation and how the CMOs and CFOs need a better way to agree on growth initiatives that benefit the enterprise.

He encourages us to take the long term view of the customer value and make sure we all understand which segments are truly profitable and help us grow our business and what needs those customers actually have. 

Peter's latest research on customer-based corporate valuation (CBCV) has introduced a framework and common language to fundamentally change the dialog between the shareholders, CEO, CFO, and the CMO on what it takes to build world-class, sustainable high growth businesses.

My guest this week is Stephen Messer, co-founder and Vice Chairman of Collective[I], an AI-driven B2B sales network platform. Stephen was also instrumental in creating the affiliate marketing category with Linkshare in 1996. He comes from an entrepreneurial family and spent his life trying to reimagine and disrupt the way business historically operated and to find ways to create outsize value. Stephen is also an early-stage venture investor.

He shares his insights on how COVID changed the speed of digital transformation in sales and also how companies stopped tolerating inaccurate sales forecasts in the crisis and what that may mean for the future of sales and marketing.
He also talks about why collaborative and network-based business models consistently outperform isolated and rigid processes.

He provides insight into why he believes that beyond AI, quantum computing may be the most revolutionary part of the technology developments.

We also discuss how executives have a growth mindset outperform those with an efficiency mindset, especially when it comes to digital innovation. 

We cover topics from society, digital transformation to the future of technology.

An investor asked me last week: what questions should they ask about their companies’ digital projects?
I thought wow, what a great question. I told them I actually would have a great answer to that because as a weird habit I write down every question executives ever ask me 
So I went back to dozens of old notebooks to find the answer. Do digital leaders ask better questions?
Here’s what I learned

I discuss the challenges in the future of digital transformation in manufacturing and the automotive industry. My guest is Dharm Sadasivan, VP of Marketing of Thirdware. Having spent a quarter of a century digitizing and automating the manufacturing industry- he has unique insights into the challenges in the industry.  

I had an amazing session with Vinnie Mirchandani on the future of digital.  Vinnie is an award-winning analyst, author of several best-selling books on technology and its impact on society and business. 

We discuss topics like the evolution of digital transformation and how the current crisis accelerated the adoption of digital. We explore the differences in how technology innovation moves in different industry sectors and what makes leading digital adopters different from laggards. 

Vinnie shares plenty of specific examples of how companies dealt with the crisis and what transformation has already happened. We also get to peek into the future and consider how the changes will be permanent in healthcare, education, and other sectors.

As businesses return to normal - the question of consistent value creation with digital is again top of mind. One way to look at the difference between leaders and laggards is what key levers they use to keep projects generating value.

Digital transformations don't fail for lack of data scientists or technologies, the issue is often lack of digital strategy or leadership.

 As businesses hire and train digital talent like data scientists - many companies now wonder if they need to train their executives as well leading digital transformation .

As businesses look at digital disruptors and they start to emulate their tools and tech. All too often the real power of disruptors is not that their tools are digital but their business model is. 

As one PE investor put it: digital projects fall into two categories: 

• digital disruptions, that create value and 
• digital distractions that destroy it.   

Projects with clear value cases and strong alignment with strategic KPIs are taking off. 

The ones that are struggling typically have no clear business case and no process in place to track EBITDA attainment