United Rentals' commitment to culture includes town hall meetings, surveys, veterans outreach programs and other initiatives to support and recruit employees. "To understand what's happening, you can't do it from a glass office building -- you have to go out and meet face-to-face," said Craig Pintoff, United's chief administrative and legal officer.
Companies that are planning digital transformations for their supply chains should be aware of the advantages that collaboration networks provide, including benchmarking analytics and better access to third-party data, writes Steve Banker. Connectivity doesn't always have to be handled through networks, as many trading partners prefer direct connections to supply chain control towers.
Ruth Stevens offers 12 tips to help business-to-business marketers establish processes for lead qualification, including linking emails to digital qualification forms and setting a limit for the number of touches before moving on to the next prospect. Nurture promising leads who aren't quite at the qualification stage yet and use chatbots and other tools to facilitate immediate responses, she recommends.
Ty Heath, worldwide lead for the B2B Institute at LinkedIn, talks about why the company has renamed account-based marketing as "marketing and sales orchestration" to recognize the importance of alignment between both teams, and how social marketing plays a vital role in the strategy. "[T]he movement for selling needs to transform towards relationship-building rather than cold-calling," she says, adding, "That's why social selling is so powerful."
When Box CEO Aaron Levie makes a hire, he's always looking for a "high degree of humility" because ego is the last thing businesses need getting in the way of growth. "We're going to deal with a lot of challenges, and if we have people who are going to mask those challenges, or not be able to actually address them because they're just over-confident or have too much ego, we can never succeed as a business," he says.
Executing a plan requires more than approval, as you need to ensure you have the budget, personal commitments and the expertise to complete each step, writes Diana Peterson-More. She cites a proposal to create training videos for incoming employees that failed because "no one on the team was capable of creating the videos, nor did anyone work in the company's library."
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