Join us for this live webinar on Thursday, August 27 at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Register here for free.
Like a lot of traditional business sectors, the energy management industry is notorious for relying on face-to-face sales. But as a lot of B2B marketers have realized, that’s not a strategy for growth in a digitally-led world.
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Burns is SVP of digital marketing for Schneider Electric, a multinational energy management and automation company with 170,000 employees in over 100 countries. For Burns, growth has a lot to do with identity management and building one-to-one customer reationships at scale.
Central to this is building what Burns calls a single source of truth. And it’s what a whole lot of marketers are racing to figure out these days. How to bring together customer data files into one single, holistic source with accessibility to an entire organization — including marketing teams, sales teams, and inbound call centers.
It’s a strong focus for this webinar tomorrow in which a panel of experts, including Burns and VB Insight Analyst Andrew Jones will be joined by others and digging in deep to share what works and what doesn’t works in terms of customer identity management. While Jones will be sharing the findings of VB’s recent report on Identity and Marketing, including VB’s best bets for data collection and aggregation tools, Burns and colleagues will be sharing their best practice tips from the trenches.
“We know there’s an ongoing challenge of too many customer data files, and that only works against you,” says Burns, “So you really have to embrace a single source of truth. And it sounds simple but it’s one of the most complicated things for an organization to do because it requires governance, it requires an immense amount of change manageement, and it requires communication.”
The technology piece is paramount, but Burns also cannot overstate governance.
“If marketing wants to get credit for doing all this amazing effort to create leads and pipelines, then they have to be living and dying off of that technology solution, which in most cases, is the internal CRM,” he adds. And compensation needs to be tied to that adherance. That means compensating marketing teams not on what they do, but on the outcomes they achieve. “Anything short of that begins to look like ‘Hey, I’m running in the yard, look at me — I’m running in the yard.'” And that is how you get people to begin to build a single source of truth.
Yet, as paramount as that digital holistic view of the customer is, Burns has a cautionary note. To say today’s business world moves swiftly is an understatement — people move from job to job more than at any other time in history. Companies are constantly being merged, migrated, acquired, or even going out of business.
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“Data has a very short life span. You can spend many, many years building a rich customer database, and you believe that you have this amazing data warehouse to conduct business with and you realize very quickly that the world has changed.” Which is why it’s imperative for him to use just-in-time data — something too many businesses overlook when relying on customer identity.
Join us for this webinar as our panel explores essential challenges around customer data — and will answer the questions that are burning in your mind.
Don’t miss out!
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In this webinar, you’ll learn:
- Why customer identity is more critical than ever
- The challenges of collecting and unifying customer data
- Key tools for capturing customer data
- Best options for enriching existing customer profiles
- Methods and technologies to unify customer data
Speakers:
Andrew Jones, Insight Analyst, VentureBeat
Shawn Burns, Senior Vice President, Web and Digital Marketing, Schneider Electric
Scott Kabat, CMO, Prezi
Zouhair Belkoura, CEO, KeepSafe
This webinar is sponsored by Janrain. All research presented was done in advance and entirely independent of any sponsor.