Sell, sell, sell
Jinfo Blog

5th April 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Bosses are shifting their priorities from cutting costs to keeping customers, according to new research from Gartner. IT has a significant role to play in this, it believes – but other evidence points to opportunities for information managers as well. ‘IT must make investments in understanding customer intent, predicting the impact of business conditions and connecting strategy to outcomes,’ says the Gartner report, CEO Concerns: Peering Into 2010 and Beyond (outline and link to full report at http://digbig.com/5bbhny). Chief information officers should be impatient for gains from newer lighter-weight technologies such as social networking, virtualisation and mobile device applications, one Gartner expert advises. In the vanguard when it comes to exploiting the gains to be made from the gradually returning customer confidence will be Sales & Marketing – and information providers have been gearing up with improvements to the tools at their disposal. As Penny Crossland reported recently, Hoovers has taken a ‘big leap forward’ with a new platform clearly aimed at sales and marketing professionals, but offering benefits to information managers too (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28195). Incidentally, Hoover’s parent Dun & Bradstreet announced when reporting its 2009 results recently a two year strategic technology investment programme aimed at improving its own current technology platform. Even though the economic outlook remains ‘cloudy’, D&B’s head Sara Mathew still sees this as ‘an opportunity to transform our customer value proposition’ (http://digbig.com/5bbhpa). Meanwhile, customer relationship management specialist Salesforce has now released the developer preview of its much trailed Salesforce Chatter platform. This allows developers to instantly add social features like profiles, status updates and real time feeds to any Force.com application (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e27071 for background). Announcing the launch, Salesforce lists a raft of possible uses – profiles to promote collaboration, real time monitoring of business processes or systems, group information sharing, importing Facebook information, filtering Twitter feeds. Any one of them could suggest possibilities to alert information managers (http://digbig.com/5bbhpb). So how to capitalise on these and other similar developments? A timely report from Outsell might give some useful hints. No one is closer to revenue production than the sales force suggests the report, Enhancing Sales Performance: Information Management Follows the Money (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5bbhpc). Information managers are waking up to the fact that by partnering with sales groups they’re making their own funding more secure, it says – but they may need to do some homework first. Sales professionals don’t think of themselves as searchers or information managers (although they do manage a lot of information), the report warns. To support sales functions, infopros will need a solid grasp of the sales workflow and how information is integrated into it.

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