So, in a return blog post (NB: I haven’t blogged anything for a while now as you can see if you have been following), I aim to define what will happen over the next say five to ten years globally and ten to fifteen years locally (Australia). NB: I may be a bit rusty on my writing at first so bear with the personal monologue. Also remember, this is like a whole new series of articles so I am basically going to develop and dedicate a separate ‘mini-blog’ which is yet to be ‘named’.
Ok – so in the past twenty years we have seen the real proliferation of micro-economic reform the transition from the industrial age into what is now being referred to as the Network Economy. In this type of economy, things such as centralised decision making and mechanical business processes have evolved into democratic, participative and ‘emergent’ open processes and systems. In mediocre examples, we see the utilisation of state of the art electronic and computer infrastructure which has accommodated the rise in e-business and related tiers of business phenomena that is happening on the internet.
Of specific interest to me is how this ‘Network Economy’ will define the next transition of the business value chain – i.e. mergers, vertical and horizontal integration and most significantly, conglomerate style diversification. Now, we need to be very careful here when you look at these things separately.
Firstly (my view) – which is consistent with a report sponsored by Cisco Systems tagged the Economist Intelligence Unit: Foresight 2020. Here, I would like to talk about what the report has classified as Atomisation. Essentially, this is a state whereby it states that as “network technologies” and “globalisation” proliferates; firms will be able to “better use the world as their supply base for talent and materials. Processes, firms, customers and supply chains will fragment as companies expand overseas. As a result, effective collaboration will become more important. The boundaries between different functions, organisations and even industries will blur”.
So basically its saying that with businesses in the network and internet age operating purely on an e-business, value-laden model will need to seek other like minded or complementary businesses for strategic partnership. These partnerships form the basis of intra-company collaboration and will define how value (through better product/service) will be delivered to the customer or supply chain partners.
So, with Atomisation, effective collaboration becomes the point of focus and organisations will need to develop powerful conversational frameworks (aka ‘rubrics’) to cultivate this culture of ‘reasonable enquiry’ and understanding of clients (internal or external) needs.This like ‘needs analysis’ will take a whole new form and shape and we will also have the emergence of ‘financial supermarkets’ which require project focus on product innovations in ‘white labeling’ or anything that creates vertical value-add to the business model (i.e distribution partners).
Now its interesting to take a slight tangent here – I mean all the business speak and nerds these days always talk about cost right? Ofcourse they do! Now my perspective which aligns with the report prophesizes that although retail face to face branches or anything of that sort to offer financial products and services will exist – but – with a much limited function.
State of the art contact centre technologies that integrate social media and targeted campaigns such as the experiential marketing post I blogged earlier will mean that finding growing demand for advice on managing personal wealth outside of disappearing final salary pension schemes, including helping individuals to invest funds under defined-contribution pensions. Such self-directed investments will, over time, greatly exceed the volume of investments managed under final salary or defined-benefit pension schemes, particularly as pension funds gradually lose their tax-advantaged status owing to fiscal pressures. This is aligned with the directive predicted by Mr Watt of Martin Currie Investment Management where “individuals rather than organisations will make pension decisions…there will be more savings outside of pension funds, and more funds in wealth management. This is where niche players in fund management will find growth markets”.
Wow, I mean that’s nice! But how are you going to create that ‘kick-ass’ sales delivery ecosystem?
So for this post (which is series I of the II where I delineate the good, bad and ugly of the network economy); the network economy sheds some gloom on the sales service delivery model. For starters, I am developing my own integrated sales model yet to be known. Open to feedback, comment or send me an email!!
So here it goes, we all know that in todays dynamic world sales conversion is contingent to the value of the conversation.
Conversation is graded with higher grades equalling higher probability to transfer to the conversion or sales close part. All contact centres have some kind of call quality dictionary on what is acceptable in these instances (or compliance frameworks per sa).
To enable these conversations, sales campaigns (internal or external to any system) need to be integrated right through to a channel to speak directly with agents who perform the conversation.
For more details on this, lets say outbound campaigns are generally tiered with each tier defined through internal or collaborative sales/business process engineering.
So lets say these are metrics, and metrics only make sense on a scorecard and maintaining focus on 1) the sale and 2) retention where relevant. This brings to mind what Stephen Corey once said about focus “the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”.
Interestingly, with this in mind, the report cites the top three skills to be the following:
In an upcoming blog post, I make detailed references to the Economist Intelligence Units Foresight 2020 report which outlines those future employees will be technologically and social media entrepreneurs with organisational incentives such as performance indicators or ceilings/floors to certain minimums or maximums to this whole sales process.
So in nut-shell, part two of series one of the Network-Economy: Doom or Bloom, we will look at this ‘future employee’. As a hint, it may have some biological references – so you nerdy scientists may be impressed!