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  • Connecting customer advocates to drive product strategy and customer success

    I’ve written a lot about ways to scale success efforts but the best is always face to face. Events like customer meetups are a perfect way to bring customers together. I’m running these in EMEA for the company I work for currently. The context is enterprise technology. This is what I’ve learned so far and…

  • Customer Success from the customer and vendor’s point of view

    Just a quick doodle to capture this thought I had and a note to accompany it. Customer Success is the business I’m in. That is, the task of ensuring the customer of my technology platform (mostly this is what it concerns) is successful in the use of the platform. We both have an interest in…

  • The feature / function trap of enterprise technology adoption

    Features and functions are easy to obsess over. They are tangible. You can click a button and it does something. Or not, at least not what you expect. And you can obsess about why not and what it should be doing. I’ve been included in countless enterprise technology adoption programs and find this the most…

  • Lean startup methodology applied to successful enterprise technology adoption

    The Lean Startup isn’t just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business. It’s about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do. I imagine Lean Startup principles applied to government programs, to healthcare, and to solving the world’s great problems. It’s ultimately an answer to the question ‘How…

  • Enterprise technology adoption – Use cases are the currency of success

    I work in customer success in the enterprise technology space and have written several posts on the activities required for the role – find them under the customer-success tag. This one is about the use case which I see as the currency of customer success management. A use case is a set of interactions between a…

  • When corporate/startup innovation programs fail

    A great article describing the closure of Coca-Cola’s Founders startup incubator over on TechCrunch. It details some of the challenges with this approach that I thought were worth sharing here. I especially love the quoted thought below: You need a translator to help them understand what’s going on. That’s why a lot of platforms inside…

  • The state of startup / corporate collaboration 2016

    Cracking report from Imaginatik and MassChallenge. Its available to download from either site if you can find the page (registration required) but I’ve added the the-state-of-startupcorporate-collaboration-2016 (pdf). Key findings below: 1. INTERACTIONS MOVING EARLY STAGE While most startup/corporate interactions used to begin at the negotiation table, corporations and startups increasingly recognize the benefits of earlier…

  • Launch like a boss – bringing consumer startup practice to your enterprise technology platform

    The users of a technology platform inside an organisation are a peculiar, collective beast. They are very different to the masses of end users that are customers of a consumer product or service. They are also subject to very different forces than the free, open market subject’s consumers to. However, we can draw parallels and bring in comparisons and best practices from…

  • Creators win in digital age

    I discovered this new way of evaluating a company’s standing amongst competitors in this video over on HBR (and there is a follow-on link to a more detailed article worth reading): In the Digital Age, Physical Assets Are a Burden. It’s especially relevant to the digital age we are currently in. It places a premium…

  • After robots and AI – intellectual capitalism where creativity and imagination thrive

    I loved this video by Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist, futurist, and popularizer of science. Probably because it supports my hypotheses that creativity, imagination and innovation will be the high ground of organisational actualisation as work modernises. Check out my post on that here: The Modern Organisation’s Hierarchy of Needs. I also believe like he…

  • Round up of latest innerventures trends

    Lots going on recently so this is a big update with an excellent selection of articles and activities. You can see other updates like this by checking out posts with the research tag and the trend report that is a result of the curation of many of these posts: Startup Innovation

  • Round up of latest #innerventures trends

    Lots going on recently so this is a big update with an excellent selection of articles and activities. The Barriers Big Companies Face When They Try to Act Like Lean Startups Corporate accelerators A growing number of innovation-hungry companies are taking inspiration from Silicon Valley: They are setting up accelerators that nurture start-ups. From Deloitte…

  • Scaling your customer success efforts online – a guide

    I mentor startups that go through Microsoft Accelerator’s London program. Because of recent experience I focus on customer success management practices and enterprise software startups, but not exclusively. I recently joined a startup (again) and here too I’m helping with building out a customer success practice. In all cases what often comes up is the…

  • Can you outsource success?

    3 minute read. I’m in the success business. I work at Percolate, a marketing technology startup. I help drive the successful use of our technology by customers. I’ve done the same in roles before this at Yammer and then Microsoft. Customer Success Management (CSM) is a pretty new role and function. It started with enterprise technology startups. It’s now applied…