Funny question, until you think about it a bit more.  With all the focus on the changed buyer who finds online or from peers much of what she needs to make a decision, on just about everything, including what to buy, why do we still have sales people on the payroll?

Because your customers require them.  

Funny answer, until you think about it a bit more.

Work with me here.  If your company is in the business of converting assets, like a patent, or skilled crafts people, or molten metal, or a process you understand well, into something of potential value to others, that is step one.  Next, you have to communicate that value to other people so they can decide to get some, or not.  To do that, you have people crafting all sorts of messages about your value, some of those messages you send out to the world online, some in traditional ads, others on blogs, some into communities, maybe a book, and those messages are the simpler ones. Simpler because these are messages the target recipient must be able to decode, absorb, and assimilate unaided into his or her personal value equation.  Does the value I perceive exceed the cost and is the risk to realizing that value manageable and acceptable? "I like what I hear and read about this iPhone well enough, the cost seems worth it, and I think I can figure out how to make it work."  Like that.  

Then there are more complex messages, to go with more involved decisions, for stuff, the value of which you created in order to solve more involved problems than retrieving and sending texts or booking a table for dinner.

Walmart's Global Head of Mobile, Gibu Thomas just got off stage here at CTIA in Las Vegas. He offered an overview of Walmart's approach to mobile which based on our research is dead on. It's solid. (I dropped in a partial/paraphrased transcript below - read the details if you'd like, but summary/analysis up top here). At times I felt like he was following our research stream b/c the language was so similar - he even quoted James McQuivey from 1999 "When consumers adopt new technologies, they do old things in new ways. When they internalize technology, they begin to do new things." 

(And I'll sound like a bit of a broken record here as I've said so much of this before. Difference now is retailers like Walmart are implementing and talking about the results). 

- Mobile opportunity ($) > eCommerce opportunity. The opportunity in mobile is not primarily mCommerce - a number Sucharita Mulpuru and Forrester Research put at 8% of eCommerce sales in 2016. In 2016, eCommerce will be about 10% of retail sales. The mobile-influenced number at more than $700B (forecast) in the US makes mobile-influenced sales the bigger number. The opportunity in mobile is a combination of a) influencing sales ($$$) and b) giving consumers the ability to buy anywhere/anytime ($). You can't just shrink/squeeze an experience onto a small device - this is too mini-eCommerce centric and misses the bigger opportunity. 

- Consumers who use mobile devices are more engaged and spend more. Ok - there is a bit of a chicken or egg here. Do more loyal, frequent shoppers download your app? Or do consumers become more loyal once they download your app? The answer is both. At Walmart, mobile app users spend 40% more each month and make 2 more trips/month. Our highly engaged spend 77% more each month and make 4 more trips per month than the non-mobile user.

Too many marketing leaders still lump tablets and smartphones into the same mobile bucket. That’s a mistake. Why? Because tablets are not primarily mobile devices. Instead, they are mostly used within the home. Marketing leaders must create a differentiated tablet experience or risk dissatisfying their best customers and missing opportunities to engage when customers discover and explore their products.

Here are the key takeaways from new research I conducted in the past few months:

• Tablet marketing matters. Tablet marketing enables marketers to engage with influential customers who spend less time on PCs and print media. People use tablets differently from smartphones, requiring marketers to adapt their approach.
• Marketers should use tablets to enhance discovery and depth in the digital home. Marketers will see the benefits of designing immersive tablet experiences for people discovering and researching their brands and products. They should use search marketing to drive better conversion rates and tablet commerce. And they should maximize TV ads by creating tablet extensions for multitaskers as well as creating new marketing experiences in the digital home.
• Shift to contextual marketing. Most of us have only had mobile phones for, at most, 12 years. I have already explained here why we’re all mobile teens, figuring out our relationships with others and with brands. Unsurprisingly, marketers face challenges integrating mobile and tablet in the mix. It’s time to stop thinking about devices and instead shift to thinking about contextual marketing.

VMware pulled back the curtain on its vCloud Hybrid Service today. The concept of a hybrid cloud isn't new, but there are as many definitions of it as there are for cloud itself. Indeed, the beauty of cloud really is in the eye of the beholder, and it's important to align beauty with its beholders. Forrester defines hybrid cloud as a cloud service connected to any other corporate resource. That means most enterprises are hybrid today - if you have at least one SaaS app connected to anything in your data center, you're hybrid.

Today, VMware set out its definition of hybrid: An extension of the virtualized corporate data center. The beholders here are the infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams who've spent years virtualizing and optimizing a range of corporate apps. These pros haven't been the main drivers of public cloud in the enterprise so far; business-unit-aligned developers have. And the tension between the two is growing. Developers want to build faster, deploy quickly, and forget about infrastructure management, so they start with public cloud: cheap, fast, and easy. But I&O teams want to drive more value and efficiency from existing infrastructure by selectively moving apps (or the scalable parts of apps) off premises to take advantage of cloud’s elasticity and pay-per-use economics. They look at cloud as an extension of the corporate data center, and the vCloud Hybrid Service is designed for them first. Both perspectives make sense and both approaches to cloud can drive value.

My first report on marketing innovation cultures published last week. It includes four case studies from Nestlé, Chick-fil-A, Skinnygirl Cocktails, and 7-Eleven. The report also introduces four categories of marketing innovation cultures: risk-averse, pragmatic, experimenter, and customer-obsessed. 

The follow-on report will focus on how to assess your organization’s current marketing innovation culture and what it takes to migrate from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow. Whether you have a risk-averse, pragmatic, experimenter, or customer-obsessed marketing innovation culture, your insights are critical to this research. 

I have developed a short (5 to 10 minute), anonymous survey on assessing your marketing innovation culture. The more responses I receive, the more insightful and valuable the report will be for you. Everyone who takes the survey will receive a summary of the results if they choose to provide their email address at the end of the survey (optional).

Please take the survey today, and forward it to any of your colleagues or peers you feel could add insight into this topic.