One on One Interviews

Many products and services today come in a bunch of different configurations. Just think about the options you face when shopping for computers, phones, a car, or even plans for wireless and cable services. Screen resolution, hard drive size, color, etc. Keeping up with which customizable pieces work with others manually makes it more difficult to make the right offer to the right customer at the right time. That’s especially true in a world where customers expect immediate responses for everything.

Russ Chadinha, Director of Product Marketing at PROS, a software company that helps organizations use big data to sell more effectively, shares how CPQ (configure-price-quote) applications can help them sell more, be more efficient, and improve the customer experience with the sales process.

Sometimes a person who has a good business idea isn’t able to translate it into a successful business. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Rohan Gilkes was not the original founder of Wet Shave Club — a monthly box subscription service sending supplies to those men who prefer old-fashioned, traditional shaves. But he saw the potential in the idea, bought out the original owner, and turned his $4,000 investment into $350,000 in revenues in less than a year.

Gilkes shares with us how he and his team of 4 was able to turn someone else’s good idea into a great business in such a short amount of time.

As we discovered last month, marketers are building mobile marketing platforms out of smartphones to tap into how much time we spend looking at them. That is why mobile devices also make a great mobile customer service platform, providing opportunities to answer questions right where customers are looking — without making them jump around.

Tushar Makhija, Vice President of Business Development for customer support/engagement platform provider Helpshift shares with us how offering customer support assistance right from within your mobile app can craft the kind of experiences that create loyal customers.

Marketing to individual consumers is a lot different than marketing your products and services to other businesses. That is why Avanish Sahai, chief product officer for Demandbase, a targeting and personalization marketing platform for B2B marketers, says account-based marketing can improve your efforts to bring on more business customers.

Sahai explains what account-based marketing is and how it helps align sales and marketing efforts. He also discusses the impact it can have on new customer acquisition as well as extending the lifetime of existing customer relationship to uncover cross-sell/up-sell opportunities.

When Apple Pay was announced as part of the iPhone 6 rollout last year, it accelerated the adoption of mobile payments’ march to the consumer. But mobile payments is just part of the mobile wallets equation, which Mark Tack, Vice President of Marketing for mobile marketing technology company Vibes, says holds the key in turning mobile phones into full-fledged engagement platforms.

Tack shares how Apple Passbook, Google Wallet, iBeacons and other technologies are helping companies go beyond doing transactions over the phone, to creating full-blown experiences that cross the customer engagement life cycle.

Even in the age of social media, text messaging, chat and mobile apps, email is still the main channel marketers use to connect with customers and prospects on a large scale. But, according to a new study from Adobe, two-thirds of email marketers are unhappy with the service they are getting from their email solution providers.

Kristin Naragon, Director of Email Solutions at Adobe, shares with us some of the key findings from the study on why email marketers are not satisfied with the current tools they are using, and what they feel they need to get their jobs done today.

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