Published May 29, 2014 by EngagementLabs

The C2MTL conference is taking place this week in Montreal, Canada. The event was conceptualized by Jean-François Bouchard, President of the Montreal advertising and marketing agency, Sid Lee.  Its objective is to celebrate creativity and innovation in commerce in a manner that is “somewhere between genius and insanity”. The end result: a conference that can best be described as a cross between Woodstock and Ted.  Since its inception three years ago, it has become one of the city’s biggest annual attractions. Executives and entrepreneurs from around the world travel to see famous speakers, such as this year’s keynote, Hollywood director James Cameron, or Nobel Prize winning economist, Muhammad Yunus. The event also includes hands-on interactive exhibits, workshops, bike tours, concerts, and more – definitely not your typical business conference.

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Using our evalue analytics platform , we’ve been able to rank the above speakers based on their respective unique evalue scores. We chose to analyze Twitter because it has long been recognized as the dominant platform that influencers engage on.

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Published May 27, 2014 by blogtalkradio

Join Beverly and Jonathan Becher, the CMO of SAP, in a LIVE conversation from C2MTL — an epic event that blends commerce, creativity and mayhem!

This won’t be an ordinary conversation … because C2MTL is no ordinary event, and Jonathan is no ordinary CMO.

With a keen interest in understanding what makes people tick, Jonathan studies human behavior and brings that knowledge into his role as the leader of SAP’s marketing efforts. More than just bits and bytes, he’ll share insights into how tuning into everyday habits and quirks can lead to better campaigns, better employee and customer relationships, and better experiences overall for business owners of all sizes.

Click here to listen to the interview

Published May 15, 2014 by ASUG News

It’s a time of transition at SAP—with the recent turnover in the executive ranks and the cloud taking center stage—and that will be on display at Sapphire Now in Orlando, which is co-located with ASUG’s Annual Conference.

The event formally kicks off on June 3 (with the ASUG Pre-Conference Sessions starting the day before), and in an interview with ASUGNews, SAP CMO Jonathan Becher gives his preview of SAP’s largest North American conference.

The Theme

SAP has pushed the “SAP Cloud Powered by SAP HANA” branding recently, and Becher says that will be reinforced “everywhere you go” at Sapphire Now. He says attendees should expect some “directional announcements” that will shed more light on the where and when of SAP’s goal to move every application to the cloud.

Bill McDermott’s opening keynote on Tuesday morning, which is likely to be his first big public speech as sole CEO, will incorporate SAP cloud acquisitions Ariba and Fieldglass in talking about “the networked economy”: How business networks are coming together via machine-to-machine technologies, the Internet of Things and social networks, as well as the impact on how businesses will operate in the immediate future, Becher says.

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Published May 11, 2014 by TNS

Good performance alone cannot crack the complex customer code that governs the strength of your customer relationships and the sustainability of your business.

In today’s highly competitive environment, it is essential to understand which customer experiences really matter, and deliver return on the bottom line.

Download the full report below, with insights into how to out-perform the competition to make a genuine asset of your customer relationships.

“Today’s customers are bypassing existing business models in favor of their unique experience and requirements, especially with instant access to peer reviews, competitor offerings, and pricing. Passivity in customer engagement is dead. If you are not actively engaging your customers by understanding their needs and providing the tools they need when they need them, you are losing,” Jonathan Becher, Chief Marketing Officer, SAP.

Click here to visit TNSglobal.com

Click here to read the full report

Published May 9, 2014 by AdExchanger

Jonathan Becher has a lot on his mind this week.

As CMO of global German enterprise software company SAP, which employs 67,000, he spearheads the messaging for a multi-billion dollar public business. And on Sunday, that business announced the departure of Vishal Sikka, one of its product pioneers who tirelessly evangelized SAP’s high-speed-everything engine HANA.

Furthermore, SAP has not had an easy ride in the image department. Some industry insiders say its media and marketing capabilities are playing “catch up” to competitors like Adobe and Oracle, which are acquiring and building digital marketing clouds at breakneck speed.

Becher fully acknowledges SAP’s perception of being rooted in the supply chain-centric world of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and big finance. But it’s an image Becher, who came to SAP seven years ago by way of acquisition (Pilot Software), is looking to change.

Becher spoke with AdExchanger.

AdExchanger: What’s SAP doing in digital marketing these days?

JONATHAN BECHER: Because we’re a technology company, we can experiment with a lot of technology SAP [already] has to solve marketing problems, and not just digital marketing problems.

Click here to read the full interview

Published May 7, 2014 by the Harvard Business Review

One of the central concepts of marketing and sales is the funnel — through which companies are supposed to systematically move prospects from awareness through consideration to purchase.

But consumers are now more informed, connected, and empowered than ever. Does the funnel still work in a digital, social, mobile age?

We asked some of the leading marketers in the world — from companies like Google, Intuit, Sephora, SAP, Twitter, and Visa — to assess the relevance of the marketing funnel.  What we found says as much about the future of business as it does about the future of marketing.

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One popular alternative to the funnel is the Customer Decision Journey popularized by McKinsey. A key advantage of this model is that it’s circular, rather than linear. Prospects don’t come in the top and out the bottom, but move through an ongoing set of touchpoints before, during, and after a purchase.

The Customer Decision Journey is an improvement over the traditional funnel, but some marketers see it as incomplete. The problem is in the name itself. Brands may put the decision at the center of the journey, but customers don’t. Jonathan Becher, CMO at SAP, believes that for customers, “the pivot is the experience, not the purchase.” The Customer Decision Journey might be circular, but if the focus is still on the transaction, it is just a funnel eating its own tail.

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Published May 5, 2014 by Influence Marketing

Once the domain of B2C companies, influence marketing is quickly being adopted by B2B firms.  SAP’s Chief Marketing Officer, Jonathan Becher, reiterates the importance of digital influence as “a significant mechanism to identify and engage potential customers for his business.”

Specifically, SAP is looking at the potential to shorten the B2B sales cycle using  influence marketing strategies because individuals exchanging experiences across social media has essentially redistributed “purchasing influence.”  It’s less about amplification of brand messages and more about identifying decision-makers in the purchase cycle in order to prep them for the sales call.

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Published April 18, 2014 by NBC Bay Area

SAP’s app helps the San Jose Sharks with the team’s hockey strategy. Scott Budman reports.

Click here to watch the report

Published April 10, 2014 by InsideView

We‘ve done our research, and results are in for the inaugural “Top 25 Marketing Influencers” list. This authoritative list recognizes contributions and achievements of the brightest minds in the marketing industry. These are the folks who are leading the charge – they develop marketing automation solutions, continually challenge the status quo, and always share best practices or amazing revelations about the field. These marketing leaders are the ones who are setting the bar and moving the field forward.

And what better time to set the precedent for honoring marketing influencers than at the start of Marketo’s Marketing Summit Nation event. So without further ado, scan our infographic to see who made the cut (+25 watchlist marketers)!

Click here to read the full info-graphic and article.

Published March 26, 2014 by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Translation of original article by Martin Gropp

Not too long ago, most software providers sold their programs on CD; only a few were selling products over the Internet. Even the U.S.-based company Adobe, developer of the PDF file format and the accompanying Reader software, was still doing well with these old ways. And so things remained, even though the basic version of the Reader had long been available as a free software on the Internet. It was not until 2009 that the Adobe board of directors mentioned the concept of ‘software-as-a-service’ in their annual letter to shareholders, and even then it was only with the remark that demand for software services on the Internet was still a “budding market.”

Now, these delicate blossoms have bloomed into a billion-dollar business. The Boston Consulting Group estimated the value of software-as-a-service (SaaS) at $15 billion last year, and predicted that this market would grow three times as fast as the market for traditional software. Phenomena such as cloud computing (the decentralized use of computing power over the Internet) and big data (the process of analyzing massive quantities of data) put the software industry under a lot of pressure to adapt and innovate. Software providers must adapt their programs to the needs of different companies. The software must be able to operate on desktop computers in an office as well as on smartphones and tablets on the go. Ideally, employees should be able to access important data from anywhere.

And it is in this context that Adobe began the new collaboration that it announced on Tuesday. The company will soon be working together with German software provider SAP to distribute its digital marketing solution. As part of this partnership, SAP will be offering companies the Marketing Cloud together with its database solution, Hana, enabling these companies to analyze large quantities of their data at fast speeds. According to a statement, the goal of combining these two solutions is to empower business clients to be able to “analyze data from different marketing channels and interact with customers in real-time.” The company’s new business partner promises that this will help companies improve their business.

According to Senior VP Brad Rencher, who heads up Adobe’s Digital Marketing Business Unit, the Hana solution will provide retailers with “data-driven insights” that will allow them to increase their revenue, both online and in physical stores. The in-memory technology utilized in the Hana database system is particularly well-suited to the challenge of consolidating and analyzing data from different sources, for example, from social networks or the company’s own customer service databases.

According to Jonathan Becher, who oversees marketing at SAP, companies will be expected to make more and more decisions in real-time in the future. Becher refers to an example involving a chain of British toy retailers. Even otherwise loyal customers now take out their smartphones to check the competitors’ prices while still in the store. The key is to reach these customers using individualized offers sent via digital channels.

The SAP manager sees this cooperation with Adobe as a sign of things to come in the industry. “These types of collaborations are going to become more popular,” explains Becher. Becher doesn’t see it as competing against oneself and potentially losing business, even though his own company also produces solutions for digital marketing. “This way we all get a piece of the pie.” And at the moment, that piece seems to be getting larger rather than smaller.

Link to original German translation