Technology markets, like AI or IoT, and those involving digital transformation initiatives, are complex and constantly evolving. Maintaining a deep understanding of those markets via ongoing customer feedback is critical to organizations, yet increasingly challenging to do. Customers, which would have been able to provide the ultimate insider information, often aren’t interested in offering rich market insights. Third-party sources pulling data from customers and markets are helpful, but such data is static; its value is diminishing as contexts rapidly change. The capacity of data to offer robust insights into customers’ changing ultimately requires ‘boots on the ground’ i.e., human analysis and interpretation. An alternative rich – and often untapped – source of market intelligence exists in the form of an organization’s salespeople. Technical marketing teams seeking to gather ongoing feedback from markets should convert tacit sales ‘story’ data into organizational knowledge. This report describes the central importance of using this knowledge-to-value creation process to extract valuable insights from a company’s internal sales force in order to make sense (‘sensemaking’) of complex markets. It also offers the practical steps and tools for doing so.
Technology markets, like AI or IoT, and those involving digital transformation initiatives, are complex and constantly evolving. Maintaining a deep understanding of those markets via ongoing customer feedback is critical to organizations, yet increasingly challenging to do. Customers, which would have been able to provide the ultimate insider information, often aren’t interested in offering rich market insights. Third-party sources pulling data from customers and markets are helpful, but such data is static; its value is diminishing as contexts rapidly change. The capacity of data to offer robust insights into customers’ changing ultimately requires ‘boots on the ground’ i.e., human analysis and interpretation. An alternative rich – and often untapped – source of market intelligence exists in the form of an organization’s salespeople. Technical marketing teams seeking to gather ongoing feedback from markets should convert tacit sales ‘story’ data into organizational knowledge.
This report describes the central importance of using this knowledge-to-value creation process to extract valuable insights from a company’s internal sales force in order to make sense (‘sensemaking’) of complex markets. It also offers the practical steps and tools for doing so.
