Adapting Our Minds to Perpetual Change

Customers' expectations continue to grow. They want instant, convenient, personalized, customized, predicted, recommended, rewarded and private. They want their own curated lifestyle mirrored back to them. They want control. They want mobile and fast. They desire digital experiences that are simple, consistent, beautiful and elegant. They want massive quantities of information – but in bite size quantities. They want to manage their lives from a smart phone anywhere at any time. The want to work from a coffee shop and be 100% productive.

Most of the world has already embraced the digital revolution. Our lives and behaviors are changing. The way we think and act are evolving as we integrate digital tools into our habits and processes. We constantly reach for our second brains (i.e. Wikipedia, search engines, apps) to access all of the information needed to both survive and thrive in the digital age. Our memories have been altered. We remember how to find information, rather than knowing the information itself.

These changes are rapidly impacting marketplaces, industries and even global economies. We use our smartphones for everything from meeting romantic partners, finding jobs, investing our money, ordering food, finding a ride, remembering to breathe, paying the water bill, monitoring our health, analyzing our DNA and even finding and buying our homes.

John Boyd, a renowned military strategist, taught that life is a process of adaptation, and that winners/survivors will find ways to exploit change and to adapt to it in order to survive and win. He taught that adapting and winning requires three things:

1. People - must be trained to think, and act in ways conducive to winning in their environment
2. Ideas - learn ideas (doctrines, strategies and tactics) conducive to winning in their environment
3. Things - utilize the best technologies, equipment, materials, design, etc. available to exploit change and win

My Interview with Digital Marketer, Account Based Marketing Expert and Terminus Co-Founder Sangram Vajre

Sangram Vajre

This transcript was edited for readability.  The original video recorded interview can be watched here.

Hello, I’m Kevin Benedict, Senior Vice President of Solutions Strategy here at Regalix, and I want to thank all of you for joining this Digital Expert Interview series. I’m just thrilled to have as my guest today, Sangram Vajre. Sangram, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me, Kevin. I’m excited.

Sangram is the co-founder and chief evangelist of Terminus. Why don’t you tell us about Terminus?

We started Terminus in 2014. We thought that something was wrong with the way marketing and sales worked. Forrester came out with this research around 2014 that reported less than 1% of leads turn into customers. Thinking about that, there’s something fundamentally wrong with the way B2B marketing and sales is working if only 1%, or less than 1% is turning into customers.

We are on a mission to build the best-in-class account-based marketing (ABM) platform and community to help B2B marketers be heroes in their organization. That’s our mission statement.

Our platform connects with Salesforce and LinkedIn and you can literally say say here is a list of companies I want to go after. Here are the types of people, and the roles we want to go after. We’ll help you advertise to them across mobile, LinkedIn, web and videos. It will also give you analytics at the account level. You can answer the question, the age old question, “Where’s my money going?” We can also help you understand which accounts are spending what money.

Digital and Account Based Marketing Expert Interview with Terminus' Co-Founder Sangram Vajre

In this episode we dive into the strategies, tactics and digital technologies involved with account based marketing (ABM) – one of the hottest trends in marketing. We learn how ABM evolved, how it is different from traditional marketing, plus the impact it is having on sales and customers’ experiences today.  This information is not just important to marketers and revenue officers, CIOs and CDOs are now supporting and responsible for digital customer and prospect interactions so this information is important to all leaders.

Even before a prospect becomes a customer, they are evaluating vendors based upon the quality of their experiences.  ABM is about using data, digital technologies, analytics and personalization to provide the best possible experiences for a prospect during their path-to-purchase journey.  It is also, of course, about sales teams being more effective at closing deals.  Enjoy!



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Kevin Benedict

Senior Vice President Solutions Strategy, Regalix Inc.

Website Regalix Inc.

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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

AI and Marketing Mix Modeling

In the course of my research on the impact of artificial intelligence on sales, marketing and customer experiences, I have been learning about Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM).  If you are not familiar with it, here is a quick description from our friends at Wikipedia.

"Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is a way to optimize advertising mix (where money is spent on advertising) and promotional tactics with respect to sales revenue or profit.  It is an analytical approach that uses historic information, such as syndicated point-of-sale data and companies’ internal data, to quantify the sales impact of various marketing activities." 

As I dug deeper into MMM I saw both the value and the complexity involved.  However, my liberal arts degree, in no way prepared me for it.

The ideas and concepts around MMM have been used in the CPG (consumer packaged goods) industry for decades, but little outside of that industry.  The reason - it required massive volumes of data and greater computing power than was available at an affordable price.  Today, however, with digital transformation, increasing numbers of digital customer interactions, the abundance of data, algorithms, analytics dashboards, artificial intelligence and everything-as-a-service, MMM is rapidly expanding.