Experience
If the products and the services are the same, than experience is the only direction to gain sympathy is by making an emotional connection with prospects and customers. For a brand like T-Mobile, part of multinational Deutsche Telekom, I can imagine that this is a huge challenge.
B2B versus B2C
Hearing all discussions I asked all delegates to reflect the story on our business. Software for small companies in a subscription model, completely acquired and provisioned online. With Exact Online being a true software as a service player where we act, live and think online we might tend to do too much online. Although it is not necessary since based on features and functions we accomplish annual growth rates of around 45%, we spend very much time and effort in bringing an experience in the interaction with our Exact brand. Business software and experience, doesn’t that sound a bit weird? Passion is emotion, and this you would like to share with your friends and family.Well, with small companies and entrepreneurs being active 24×7 most of them with passion about the things they sell its all about experience. Passion is emotion, and this you would like to share with your friends and family. The insight provided by Raymond about the digital channel missing the wow factor confirms my thoughts about offline and online. It needs to be in good balance. The success we have with our Exact Live event where thousands of people line up in a cue to click through our demo software is amazing to see.
Customer journey
If it was that simple than everybody would buy the best products and that is simply not the case.
Within Exact I think we are preparing ourselves for the next wave on different levels. From a product perspective we have major opportunities to add experience to the customer journey. With over 130.000 companies working with Exact Online we know quite some stuff about them, who they are, how they behave. If done in a proper way we can give new insights in return for exposing themselves to the users of our software. New insights that makes them smarter, nicer, better and more competitive. On a more emotional level I think we have a good foundation and some great ideas to bring this really to the prospects and customers themselves. I mean, most decisions are made not rationally but emotionally whether you are a consumer or a representative of a company. If it was that simple than everybody would buy the best products and that is simply not the case. So it’s all about emotions. So how will we bring this emotion into the Exact brand? How will we Spark the people that we serve? Hang on tight, we have some need things to come and this roundtable just confirmed the direction we are going into.
Mark Appel