3 Things to Know to Avoid Bankrupting Your Company
Read More >Robert Brodo
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One of the newest buzzwords to invade our business lexicon is “Omnichannel”. If you haven’t heard of it yet, you surely will very soon as many organizations – especially those who are in the retail space – are embracing it as a strategy. My prediction is that within the next 10 years Omnichannel marketing along with AI-based analytics will be the core part of foundational Business Acumen IQ.
If you need a definition, Omnichannel is a business strategy that enhances the customer experience by offering cross-channel, cross-platform access to products and services. In other words, an omnichannel strategy lets customers decide how they are going to receive their value proposition. Here is a simple yet provocative example. It’s time to buy a new pair of running shoes, so like most people you start with an online search and identify a couple of different models that you like but really don’t want to buy them until you try them on. You’ve been wearing Brand X, but think these new Brand Z’s look really comfortable. Knowing that you have some errands to run, you close your browser and head out to the local shops. Walking around, you walk into the local running store and see more running shoes that you like, but not that Brand Z that you liked so you leave. Later that evening, you go to the Mall for dinner and as you are checking your email, you are notified that the Brand Z store located in the Mall is offering a 20% discount for the next two hours. Obviously, this wasn’t a random group of independent events but rather a sophisticated coordinated strategy from the Brand Z company deploying an Omnichannel strategy that carefully orchestrates an integrated way of thinking about the customer’s relationship the organization.
Something very interesting happened to me and my team while co-delivering a Business Acumen / Business Leadership workshop for a client in South America this week. After months of careful, detail oriented preparation, we realized we hadn’t anticipated something that could have been very important to participants of the customized digital business simulation we were using to develop the Business Acumen and Business Leadership skills of our learners. Over dinner with our client and wonderful co-facilitators @BarbaraHauser and @MichelleHollingshead, we were reviewing the week and talking about the key learnings of our participants and ourselves. Somewhere around mid-meal I shared that I had a valuable learning because I should have anticipated the need for participants to have a new report generated by the business simulation that provided market share by customer segment in addition to market share by product line. My colleague suggested that we weren’t “prepared” which led to an awesome and robust discussion about the difference between preparation and anticipation. The center of the debate was my notion that we were actually extremely prepared to execute the training session; we just didn’t anticipate the need of our audience for that particular report.
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As most organizations are realizing, Business Acumen is a critical skill needed to achieve business success. Everyone has their own definition, and hopefully your organization has a strong program in place that provides it to every employee.
The other day as I was finishing the review of our Business Acumen learning solutions and fine-tuning the core business simulations we use to teach business acumen skills, I started to listen to the background noise about tariffs and trade wars. I realized we needed to increase the amplitude of these tariff issues in everything we do that’s related to Business Ac
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As readers of my blogs hopefully know, I dedicate this space and your investment of time to interesting and applicable topics related to the subjects of Business Acumen, Business Leadership, and Strategic Business Selling. I try hard to present different perspectives and include unique ideas that help build skills and the ability for you to make up your own mind and take your own actions in business decision making. A topic such as the government’s role in reducing pharmaceutical pricing is not an easy one and can lead to political debate which takes away from the learning debate. As I spend a lot of time working with clients in the health care space, this is a topic worth discussing and I do so with every intention of being as unbiased and non-political as possible.
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