Don’t listen to me. Go with the really smart guys. Harvard Business Review started the year out by identifying the twelve management trends of the past decade, and two of them play right into the digital sales and marketing wheelhouse.
Now, this is the past ten years mind you, not the past year. I’ll spare you the natural HBR obsession with IT, shareholder value, and open source technology. But I will focus on Behavioral Economics. “Okay, by now, you're all shouting "that's definitely older than 10 years" and you're right. But talk about a set of ideas whose time has come. In the prior decade, can you remember when someone with Steven Levitt's profile had a breakout bestseller? Or when someone modifying the word economist with "rogue" (or "rock star") could keep a straight face?,” says HBR. I’ll take it a step further. In 2000, could a brand consistently depend on reaching its most valuable customers with a customized marketing message? No. But they can today, and they can everyday through the part of behavioral economics that has become behavioral targeting.
Behavioral targeting has fed a rich set of analytics. There’s a whole science around analytics that can be intimidating without a doubt. But if you do as I do, and simply look at analytics as the numbers that define your client and customer behavior, you can take what you want and leave the rest to the research department. HBR says Competing on Analytics is one of its top management trends. It says: “Decades of investment in systems capturing transactions and feedback finally yielded a toolkit for turning all that data into intelligence. Operations research types, long consigned to engineering realms like manufacturing scheduling, got involved in marketing decisions. Managers started learning from experiments that were worthy of the name.” Digital marketing keeps moving from experiment to strategy to tactics. Good sales teams will push that envelope.
