Whether or not you should pursue a catalogue strategy is a question that deserves significant thought. As digital marketing becomes more complex, it may make a lot of sense to send out correctly designed catalogues to the right customers. For e-commerce retailers without physical stores, catalogues can effectively mimic stores’ sensory experiences to enhance customer affinity. Multichannel retailers can add an effective catalogue marketing channel to their store and e-commerce channel strategies.

A Paper Catalogue

The costs of digital advertising are skyrocketing. By some metrics, prices on major platforms such as Meta, Google, and TikTok <a href="https://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2022/04/28/the-price-digital-ads-has-skyrocketed-here-s-how-counteract-it">grew by anywhere from 61–184% year-over-year</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/digital-ad-prices-are-skyrocketing-in-2022-2">in 2021</a>. At the same time, returns are plummeting; recent changes in privacy policies, such as those by Apple, have made it more difficult to target ads to consumers, who are increasingly likely to tune out the advertising that they see anyways. All of these trends are making digital advertising increasingly unprofitable and ineffective, forcing companies to <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/walterloeb/2021/08/04/rising-costs-of-digital-advertising-will-force-spending-shifts/?sh=3f797e415a7c">rethink their marketing strategy and spending</a>.

Digital Marketing Isn't As Lucrative As Before

The audience for catalogues is growing, even as the pandemic subsides. The emerging remote/hybrid work culture and consumers’ increased screen time will make analogue experiences such as catalogues increasingly appealing and effective. Just photos Vs Photos with text: While both designs are effective compared to not receiving the catalogues, designs with photos and textual narratives are 40% more effective in sales and customer engagement than designs with only photos and product names.

The Rise Of Paper Catalogues

Catalogues featuring hedonic products have 120% higher marketing ROI than utilitarian products, consistent with psychological theories. Higher-priced products also achieved 50% higher marketing ROI compared to lower-priced products.The finding that the catalogue’s effectiveness is product-type dependent can help explain why while many hedonic and experiential brands such as Birchbox and Lego are implementing catalogue strategies, many traditional utilitarian brands such as Ikea have discontinued them.

The Lure Of Hedonic Products

As retailers and brands increasingly compete beyond mere performance attributes to win the hearts and minds of consumers, they ought to think carefully about the aesthetic design aspects of their marketing programs. High-quality physical catalogues with stunning imagery combined with compelling narratives can create the sensory awe that would be hard to replicate on a digital screen. These sensory experiences can then lead to long-lasting impressions and stronger relationships with customers, and translate competitive advantage for the company.

The Bottom Line

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

How Paper Catalogs Remain Relevant in a Digital Age

Good strategy has traditionally been seen as the key to business success. More recently, purpose has become an essential element of doing business. But something else is missing: culture, or the essential elements of how an organization and its employees behave, as well as its governing beliefs and principles. And yet, culture often receives less attention than purpose and strategy.

Culture: The Missing Link

What do successful companies like Microsoft, Netflix, Best Buy, and many others have in common? Culture has been the fertile soil that has enabled their purpose and strategy to come to life and drive extraordinary performance at scale.Purpose, strategy, and culture form a triangle: Each angle connects with and shapes the other two, and if one changes, the other two must evolve and adjust to maintain balance and shape, or the triangle breaks and falls apart.

The Triangle

Changing a company’s culture requires more than role modelling.Companies can use three types of levers to profoundly shape an influential culture and allow their strategy to come to fruition:Business levers, management levers, and “human magic” levers.

The Three Levers

<ul><li>Operational progress creates strategic degrees of freedom.</li><li>Improving operations influence strategic choices.</li><li>However, changes in business operation shape company culture, too.</li><li>Companies have to act from the outside in and from the bottom up. </li><li>The company's future depends on listening to customers and improving their lives.</li></ul>

Business Levers

At Netflix, there is only one policy for travel, entertainment, gifts, and other expenses: “<a href="https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr">Act in Netflix’s best interest</a>.” That’s it. Also, there are no company-wide rules on office hours or the number of vacation days employees can take. These reflect the culture of “freedom with responsibility”There are other management levers that shape culture, such as seeking to recruit only “stunning colleagues” and rewarding adequate performance with a generous severance package; and offering frequent, honest, and constructive feedback.

The Culture At Netflix: 'No Rules' Rule!

Key management processes directly impact culture as well. What kind of people do you appoint to positions of power? What kind of people does your company recruit? Does performance trump bad behaviour? How are decisions made and by whom? What are key business rhythms? How are meetings conducted? What kind of controls and compliance are in place? All these structures, processes, and rules can shape culture.

Management Levers

These are the essential and interconnected ingredients that, together, create an environment in which people are eager and able to fully give their energy and talent to serve the company's purpose.Articulating the company’s culture as a singular, simple, and yet powerful idea makes it easier to answer all these questions and use all three levers with that in mind.

Human Magic Levers

The triangle of Strategy, Purpose, and Culture.

Good strategy has traditionally been seen as the key to business success. More recently, purpose has become an essential element of doing business. But something else is missing: culture, or the essential elements of how an organization and its employees behave, as well as its governing beliefs and principles. And yet, culture often receives less attention than purpose and strategy. The author thinks of purpose, strategy, and culture as a triangle: Each angle connects with and shapes the other two, and if one changes, the other two must evolve and adjust to maintain balance and shape, or the triangle breaks and falls apart. He presents three types of levers companies can use to profoundly shape an effective culture and allow their strategy to come to fruition.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

strategy

Strategy

Does Your Company’s Culture Reinforce Its Strategy and Purpose?

Small businesses can compete with large corporate companies by offering a superior service or product at the right price. Entering a saturated market means the company must innovate to set itself apart from the competition.

Competing with large companies

Name recognition can allow a company to automatically be viewed legitimately by most industries. A well-known name like Elon Musk backing a company or product can help it succeed.

Industry leaders can help

<ul><li>Content will always allow a company entering a competitive market to thrive.</li><li>Podcasting is another great way to generate in-depth content at a low price.</li><li>Social media keeps content in front of the eyes of potential customers.</li><li>Search engine rankings help drive daily leads for businesses.</li></ul>

Digital marketing is imperative

<ul><li>Offer additional services when compared to other competitors. Consumers are willing to pay more for all-inclusive services that provide convenience.</li><li>New products should be high-quality. A test run of products before a full launch can be helpful.</li><li>Investing in market research is vital when releasing a new product.</li></ul>

Offering varied services/products

Remote work is a very attractive form of work for most professionals. Perks attract top talent, and the ability to work from anywhere in the world from home is the ultimate perk.

Finding top talent in the industry

Entering a saturated market can be challenging, but specific tactics allow for success. 

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

Entering Into a Saturated Market? You Can Still Succeed!

More and more companies, government agencies, educational institutions and philanthropic organisations are today in the grip of a new phenomenon: metric fixation. The key components of metric fixation are the belief that it is possible – and desirable – to replace professional judgment (acquired through personal experience and talent) with numerical indicators of comparative performance based upon standardised data (metrics); and that the best way to motivate people within these organisations is by attaching rewards and penalties to their measured performance.

Data Isn't Everything: The Plague Of Metric Fixation

The rewards can be monetary, in the form of pay for performance, say, or reputational, in the form of college rankings, hospital ratings, surgical report cards and so on. But the most dramatic negative effect of metric fixation is its propensity to incentivise gaming: that is, encouraging professionals to maximise the metrics in ways that are at odds with the larger purpose of the organisation.

Metric Fixation Starts With School

When reward is tied to measured performance, metric fixation invites just this sort of gaming. But metric fixation also leads to a variety of more subtle unintended negative consequences. These include goal displacement, which comes in many varieties: when performance is judged by a few measures, and the stakes are high (keeping one’s job, getting a pay rise or raising the stock price at the time that stock options are vested), people focus on satisfying those measures – often at the expense of other, more important organisational goals that are not measured.

Metric Based Incentives Invite Gaming

Contrary to common sense belief, attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics discourage initiative, innovation and risk-taking. The source of the trouble is that when people are judged by performance metrics they are incentivised to do what the metrics measure, and what the metrics measure will be some established goal. But that impedes innovation, which means doing something not yet established, indeed that hasn’t even been tried out. Innovation involves experimentation. And experimentation includes the possibility, perhaps probability, of failure.

Discouraging Innovation And Initiative

Compelling people in an organisation to focus their efforts on a narrow range of measurable features degrades the experience of work. Subject to performance metrics, people are forced to focus on limited goals, imposed by others who might not understand the work that they do. Mental stimulation is dulled when people don’t decide the problems to be solved or how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measurable.

Dumbing Down Work

Large-scale organisations of our society are the poorer for driving out staff most likely to innovate and initiate. The more that work becomes a matter of filling in the boxes by which performance is to be measured and rewarded, the more it will repel those who think outside the box.

Repelling Quality And Creativity

A company culture built on metrics of success promotes short-termism, loses staff, and contributes to economic stagnation

startup

Startups

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires | Aeon Ideas

Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

Good ideas without proper execution are useless. To see ideas come to life and drive value for your organization, you need a systematic approach to prioritizing and executing the best ideas.Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is a powerful goal-setting framework for organizations. This system has been used by countless successful companies to direct efforts and grow over the long term.

Focus on Execution

It is a management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization. This goal-setting framework is used by Google, Airbnb, LinkedIn, and many other successful companies.Objective: a short, inspirational, and achievable statement that describes WHAT you want to achieve. Objectives are a “vaccine against fuzzy thinking and fuzzy execution.”Key Results: succinct, specific, and measurable actions that map out HOW you will achieve your Objectives. KRs are aggressive but realistic.

The Meaning Of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

OKRs surface your primary goals. They channel efforts and coordination. They link diverse operations, lending purpose and unity to the entire organization.OKRs help your organization prioritize the highest impact initiatives. They also align people across your entire organization, which creates unity despite people working on very different parts of the business.

Goal Setting

Goals may cause systematic problems in organizations due to narrowed focus, unethical behaviour, increased risk-taking, decreased cooperation and decreased motivation.The wrong goals can be detrimental to an organization. The OKR process helps you set the right goals, but it must be used carefully. Sending people in the wrong direction or incentivizing the wrong behaviour through goals can be wildly harmful to an organization.

The Danger Of Goals

OKRs are a shared language for execution. They clarify expectations: What do we need to get done (and fast), and who’s working on it? They keep employees aligned, vertically and horizontally.OKRs unify the organization with a shared language and clarity about expectations.

A Shared Language for Execution

Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission. And the process can’t stop with unveiling top-line OKRs at a quarterly all-hands meeting. People want to find meaning in their work. They want to know how their hours contribute directly to the mission of the organization. It’s the responsibility of the leader to explain why certain goals have been set, and how individuals working on their goals are contributing to the overall vision.

Communicating the 'Why'

When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.’

People who choose their destination will own a deeper awareness of what it takes to get there.Giving people a chance to contribute to setting OKRs within their functions can help increase buy-in, give a sense of ownership, and help them understand what it takes to achieve the goals. Leaders need to find the right balance between bottom-up and top-down goal-setting when using OKRs.

Involve Your People in Setting OKRs

A manager’s first role is the personal one. It’s the relationship with people, the development of mutual confidence, and the creation of a community. Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.Outside of setting the right goals and getting buy-in from their teams, managers need to focus on relationships. They need to make sure their people are developing and happy with their path.

How to Stop Being Embarrassed

OKRs need to include a healthy and continuous performance management system. This can be done with the CFR framework.Conversations: an authentic, richly textured exchange between manager and contributor, aimed at driving performance.Feedback: bidirectional or networked communication among peers to evaluate progress and guide future improvement.Recognition: expressions of appreciation to deserving individuals for contributions of allCFRs help promote transparency, accountability, empowerment, and teamwork.

Conversations, Feedback, and Recognition (CFRs)

Feedback helps people understand how others perceive them and their work. It’s naturally opinion-based but is often grounded in the experiences we have with colleagues. Managers need to learn how to give constructive feedback to their employees in a way that they can absorb and action that feedback.

Feedback

#1 New York Times Bestseller Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered. Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

books

Books

#1 New York Times Bestseller Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered. Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

John Doerr

Measure What Matters

When we think of tech, we often think of cities. When we think of the countryside,  it's a place that's lacking tech and digital media literacy. <ul><li>Yet there are places like the pearl-producing towns of Zhejiang and places in rural Indiana, where online pearl parties flourish.</li><li>Rural families manufacture for online lifestyle brands in the US.</li><li>Influencers in rural China make live stream videos of themselves eating chilli peppers, picking tea or hunting bamboo rats.</li><li>There are pockets of e-commerce that are sourced from rural manufacturers in China, made by families. </li></ul>

We see the rural as backward

On a larger scale, rural areas are connected through global market forces. For example, soybeans grown in Brazil are shipped to industrial hog farms in southern China. Alibaba, the internet giant, is partnering with farms to use AI and computer vision to create highly optimized pigs to scale up pork production.

Larger scale innovation

Large farms see their work as inputs, outputs, land value and land ownership. Small farmers frame their work as one of ecology and stewardship. Their land is a place of relations. The tech that we imagine to be solutions, such as online coding classes for farmers or factory work in cities, are framed as one-way relationships, with tech supposedly benefiting rural areas. But when we see things like AI farming pigs at scale or small farmers turning their land into pearl ponds, it is not because tech found a solution. It is because small farmers can't compete on a global scale.

What happens when tech and the countryside intersect

Much of the technology revolves around our consumption and entertainment in the cities. But the most thoughtful innovation is happening in places outside of Silicon Valley or San Francisco.  Tech alone is not always the solution. In Yangguang, a rice-farming village, the local agricultural bureau encouraged farmers to implement chemical fertilisers, pesticides, and industrial farm machinery. The modern protocols led to a decline in soil quality. The villagers turned this around with organic farming. While tech did help the village steward their land, the people, not tech, steered the decisions.

The people, not tech, should steer decisions

The approach that is without boundaries and ambitions to scale reminds us of the humility and innovation, the ability to change political and social structures. Tech should be seen as affecting a set of relations, ecologies and environments. In the village, innovation is an ecosystem that doesn't scale across thousands of users but across the spectrum of time, regenerating the soil and community ties from season to season.

Scaling across time

Some of the most thoughtful innovation is happening in the world's rural communities.  This talk advocates for a new view of the countryside. It is not places lacking in tech but centres of humble innovation that emphasize community and sustainability.

"To see and understand the countryside is a crucial part of moving towards a more livable future for everyone," says coder, artist and organizer Xiaowei R. Wang. They've observed that some of the most careful, thoughtful innovation is happening in the world's rural communities, like Chinese chicken farmers using biometrics tracking and blockchain to improve supply chain transparency. In this talk, they advocate for a new perspective on the countryside: not as places lacking in tech or digital media literacy but as centers of humble innovation that emphasize community and sustainability.

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

creativity

Creativity

Why entrepreneurship flourishes in the countryside

Email marketing is a form of digital marketing used to communicate to leads with emails. Marketers commonly use newsletters, event invitations, and informational emails to communicate with their audience. Email marketing is a type of direct line that can be used to educate a lead about your products and convince your lead to purchase a product. Email marketing has the highest ROI on investment than other marketing tactics.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is the best marketing channel there is. Reasons you should pick email:<ul><li>You don’t have to worry about algorithm changes like SEO and social media.</li><li>You can use your emails to drive traffic to your website.</li><li>With email marketing, your lists are yours.</li></ul>

Why Email marketing is important

Six steps to help you get started<ol><li>Identify your target audience. These are the people that will be willing to buy your products.</li><li>Obtain the right tools to create, send, manage and track the metrics of your email campaigns. An Email Service Provider (ESP) can be excellent.</li><li>Create attainable goals. Emails are, on average, 21,5% effective.</li><li>Build your email list based on those who have permitted you to send them emails.</li><li>Segment your list based on age, sex, location, etc.</li><li>Measure your results. EXP has made this task easily accessible. Make small changes to your email and watch the effects.</li></ol>

Create a marketing strategy

A squeeze page is a web page made to capture potential customers. It’s used to squeeze information out of a visitor by limiting access to content.Your main purpose for using a squeeze page is to capture leads and turn them into your customer.You can also give your visitors other options, such as a link to browse other pages on your website, or products.

Build your email list with squeeze pages


Lead magnets attract visitors and prospects that are added to your email list. Lead magnets are free things you give in exchange for their email, such as:<ul><li>Ebooks</li><li>Video</li><li>A Course</li><li>Webinar</li><li>Template</li><li>Whitepaper</li><li>Coupons</li><li>Discount on a product</li></ul> <ol><li>Your lead magnet must be free.</li><li>It should be easily consumed, such as a quick course, a short video, etc.</li><li>Actionable. You should offer them something that they can apply immediately.</li><li>Relevant. Know your target audience and their personas to offer something relevant to them.</li></ol>

Capture leads with a Lead Magnet

An opt-in is the next step after your lead magnet. It is a way to get your prospects' information, thereby adding them to your list. Steps to a great opt-in form:<ul><li>Create an attention-grabbing headline that clearly defines the offer.</li><li>Use a great description that is brief and to the point.</li><li>Make it simple. Don't use a complex form.</li><li>Ensure it is attractive. Include the mock-up image of what you are offering.</li><li>Have a captivating Call-To-Action (CTA): Your CTA is your subscribe button. It doesn't need to have the word subscribe on it, "Get your free Ebook" looks more natural.</li></ul>

Creating an effective Opt-in form

We are not talking about pop-ups that attack you once you land on a webpage. An exit-intent popup only appears immediately you want to leave a website. If the visitors found your content helpful, they are more likely to subscribe.

Exit-Intent Popups

There are many factors involved with open rates:<ul><li>Avoid the spam filter</li></ul><ol><li>Get their permission first before sending an email.</li><li>Use an Email Service Provider, to avoid ending up on the spam list.</li><li>Send your email through a verified domain.</li><li>Send your emails from a good IP address.</li><li>Include your location.</li><li>Don’t use click-bait headlines.</li><li>Include an unsubscribe button.</li></ol> <ul><li>Time your emails effectively</li></ul>The A/B testing tool of the ESP can test the best time to send out emails.<ul><li>Delete your inactive members after 4 to 6 months.</li><li>Use a catchy headline.</li></ul>

How to improve your email open rates

<ul><li>Use humour; they work great.</li><li>Ensure to optimize your email for mobile; 67% of email opens are mobile.</li><li>Storytelling always works.</li><li>Always write great content so that they will await your email.</li><li>Use headlines that will make them curious.</li></ul>

Other open rate tips

The email service provider handles all the technical stuff and makes creating and sending out bulk emails easy. examples include: <ul><li>Mailchimp is a free email service provider that offers a free plan for the first 2000 subscribers. It's easy to set up and has easy-to-use features.</li><li>Convertkit is free for up to 1000 subscribers. It is great for creators like professional bloggers, authors, musicians, etc.</li><li>Constant Contact is used in the e-commerce sector. They allow their users to create email designs with killer templates.</li><li>Hubspot is a CRM platform and one of the best Email Service providers.</li></ul>

Choosing an Email Service Provider (ESP)

Email is an old communication medium for sending and receiving messages. Ray Tomlinson sent the first email in 1971. As of 2020, there were 4 billion email users around the world and over 300 billion…

A Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing.

Companies are shifting their internal jargon, changing the title of their human resources department to people operations. A practice early adopted by progressive tech companies, people operations puts empathy (not policy) at the heart of human resources. Policy and a holistic suite of benefits are table stakes. A people operations team, for example, might value the experiences and insights provided by different employee resource groups (or ERGs) to build an inclusive workplace culture.Is the shift for real, or is it just lip service?

People Operations: The New Name for HR

The U.S. Bureau of Labor cites that women earn 82.3% of that earned by White men, with the gap being even wider for many women of colour. Aside from being paid less, other key challenges hinder women in the workplace, including a 4% motherhood wage penalty average (per child) and less exposure to financial literacy throughout the course of their careers.

The Facts

DE&I has become lip service at best- a tactic used to leverage a companies’ workforce, differentiate the business, or appeal to more customers.  Conversely, people operations departments could right the human resources wrongs of yesteryear. Using the same pressure test, perhaps people operations will bring the evolution of company culture, encouraging safe spaces to discuss finances as a woman in the workplace.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I)

The HR could anticipate the needs of these primary caregivers at work, and make career planning, investing, and fintech offerings a part of the benefits strategy. Maybe the department will spearhead financial education, training, and development, recognizing financial health is no longer just the burden of individual team members. After all, a lack of financial understanding or inequity manifests itself across the entire organization, from employee irritability and sleeplessness to tardiness or even resignation.

What HR Needs To Do

humanresources

Human Resources

Human Resources is dead. People Operations is here.

Determine your "change champions" - That same IT manager may see the advantages of certification programs for things like <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/training/">cloud management, Azure, or AWS</a>, and you can incentivize them by offering these to their staff for free.your "best practice": spend time doing your research and building the persona of your change champions to ensure that your teams hit all of the pain points, incentives, keywords they use, and how they determine success

Know Your Change Champions

<ul><li>Target customers are likely to adopt XaaS quickly and start with a small-to-medium-sized customer.</li><li>Be Flexible and Stay Ahead of Customer Expectations</li><li>Respond to customer feedback swiftly and be open to adopting requests</li><li>Package Your Offering Based on Customer Need</li><li>Tailor your product/services so that your offering is not bloated with features the customer does not need or won’t use</li></ul>

Choose Your First Customers to Migrate Carefully

<ul><li>Create a comprehensive roadmap with clear goals, milestones, use cases, and plans for your internal team to become transformation champions</li><li>Focus on Long-Term Solutions Instead of Short-Term Tradeoffs</li><li>Utilize your change agents to train your teams on demonstrating the benefits of the transformation to your partners and customers</li><li>Redesign Your Teams for Success</li></ul>

Provide an Infrastructure That Ensures Your Team's Long-term Success

How to Grow Customers While Transitioning to XaaS

They are the relational connections between people in society. In some ways, they work like the synapses that connect neurons in the brain. As neurons fire in connection with one another, they develop and strengthen the neural pathways between them. Similarly, formal and organic touchpoints between colleagues can help create strong relationship networks in organizations, which naturally evolve and change as the business changes. These relationships support organizational structure; fuel innovation, culture, and the spread of information; enable strategy, and often help make change “work.”

Socio-emotional ties

Apprenticeship happens more easily, naturally, and organically in a fully “in-person” work environment; it can be harder, and require more intentionality and planning, in a virtual or hybrid world. Teams become more diverse and geographically distributed as remote work increases, and team members’ roles and needs quickly evolve.Leaders must focus on connecting the dots in the teams around them and identify informal leaders to do the same. Practicing intentional apprenticeship helps nurture and reinforce the relational ties that bind, thus creating a virtuous cycle.

Inject more apprenticeship

Unique approaches for specific groups will be key to rebuilding organic connections, as the pandemic has influenced us in different ways. Younger workers, new employees, and introverts have reported more difficulty in contributing to the team, and in feeling engaged, due to the loss of spontaneous connections and interactions.To increase the emphasis on human centricity, one technology corporation is leveraging real-time data to iterate approaches that work for specific groups around office re-entry, facilities management, workplace safety, and contact tracing and care management.

Develop “inclusive” tailored solutions

Do not forget how much has been achieved virtually. People have built the muscle to reconnect previously lapsed connections with long-distance family and friends online during the pandemic; virtual hangouts and other creative ways have emerged to meet social connection needs.While many employers may be ready to return to significant in-person presence, nearly three-quarters of employees would like to work from home two or more days per week. Organizations should expect and prepare for a mix of virtual and in-person teams.