Today’s enterprise-grade contact centers are sophisticated and highly customized to create differentiating customer experiences (CX) and nurture customer loyalty, maximize employee performance, and keep the costs manageable. Usually, CX organizations have gradually built their solutions over the years or gone through the pain of changing their existing solution altogether. As we mentioned in Mike’s blog, he addresses the ways of incrementally adding capabilities to upgrade existing solutions. For many companies, it has been a challenging journey over many generations of technologies, organizational transformations, and brand evolution.

At True North Advisory, we have a number of clients that are either early venture backed or still privately funded. Each is facing the same challenge of making their first hire for a VP/GM of sales, and find it daunting. At True North, part of our advisory offering is to help in the process of recruiting the right person, and assuring the highest level of success of this all important hire.

It's clear that the battle to improve the customer experience is a popular discussion, and much of the debate recently focuses on migrating from on-premises to cloud solutions. While this migration brings great benefits, migrating a contact center is not easy given the complexity of the solution, the number of integrations and the embedded business logic. We have highlighted in a previous blog how poor existing experiences are and how these impact brand perception.

In our advisory, we have decided to focus on technologies that can improve the customer experience. We believe that this will continue to be a key competitive advantage for brands and therefore will drive innovation and growth.

In the early days of the COVID pandemic, many companies were in a "wait and see" mode with a timeframe of "returning to normal". As we now find ourselves two years into the pandemic, many of our clients are asking, "How do I create a FY22 sales plan when our outlook is still unknown?”

The True North Advisory team was away in Phoenix for our quarterly offsite this past week. As Jim mentioned in his last blog, even the best Unified Communications functionality in the world cannot make up for an in person meeting. There was time for some fun, a few good glasses of wine, and a seemingly impossible hike where Jim made it to the summit at Camelback Mountain.

Last week, we shared our views on the office of the future. As highlighted, one of the big concerns leaders have is how to create and maintain a dynamic and positive company culture if people are mostly working from home and/or at client locations. Even before the pandemic, there was a trend for people to work from home part of the time and companies to find talented people wherever they reside. Nowadays, most teams don’t reside in one office. They’re composed of members who are in different offices, client locations or at home offices.

This week we want to blog about where we see offices going as we slowly and awkwardly (hopefully) start returning to our new post pandemic normal. I was speaking with a very good buddy of mine who is a senior partner at one of the very large professional services firms about this topic - offices as both work environments and as platforms to help evolve company cultures.

Let me start off by saying that sales commissions plans have their place in larger more established organizations that are striving to build a repeatable and predictable sales machine. Many smaller companies try to adopt a similar approach and from my experience I have found most of these plans are very complicated and not aligned with the goals of the company. At True North, we work with a wide range of companies from small to very large, so we have an interesting perspective.

At True North Advisory, our mission is to help entrepreneurs and enterprises scale their businesses. This usually involves helping them with the following 5 journeys

As we discussed in last week's blog, at True North, one of our areas of expertise is developing and expanding our clients overall Go to Market Strategy. Our focus is to create a framework that becomes a living document with our clients go to market strategy, whether it is an early stage start-up just evolving its strategy all the way to Fortune 500 looking to expand the current framework to new geographies, verticals and alliance/strategic partners.

At True North, one of our areas of expertise is developing and expanding our clients overall go-to-market strategy. Our focus is to create a framework that becomes a living document with our clients go-to-market strategy, whether it is an early stage start-up just evolving its strategy all the way to Fortune 500 looking to expand the current framework to new geographies, verticals and alliance/strategic partners.

The True North team recently concluded its offsite in Austin, Texas to discuss the firm’s key focus areas, and where we envision the world of CX headed. When you analyze the business-to-business market, you quickly realize how many different solution categories exist, and the complexity it creates for the customer. It’s hard to be an expert on everything in the technology space, and at True North our focus is to be the de facto and best in class strategy boutique in the industry around the CX space.

Last week True North achieved an exciting milestone. We met at a team offsite….face to face! It is interesting how totally pre pandemic normal activities have become fraught, and as we (slowly) emerge from the pandemic, become exciting but occasionally scary new adventures.

Over the past ten years, there has been a seismic push away from physical infrastructure and purpose-built hardware to cloud-based computing. This push paved the way for a new type of software licensing and delivery model known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Today, SaaS offerings have become a standard delivery model for many business applications, making it easy for workers to access their favorite business tools from a web browser or mobile app. Common SaaS offerings include collaboration tools, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, accounting, invoicing, and more. The advent of SaaS offerings has revolutionized business models, customer journey dynamics, and investor interest and valuation.

In our previous blog, we talked about the importance of being with your customers to truly understand them. In the early days of Acme Packet, the overwhelming opinion of the engineering experts was that the world was transitioning to SIP and that H.323 & MGCP were quickly becoming protocols of the past. This version of the world was being presented over and over again at the then-popular VONs (Voice on the Net) shows. The Acme Packet team took this message to our customers.

In our previous blog titled Entrepreneurs in the New COVID Normal, we wanted to start a conversation about COVID and to think about the world we see post the pandemic.

I decided to take a detour from the normal blog entries. For those of you who know me, most would not characterize me as sentimental but here is my attempt.

By 2001, BroadSoft had grown into a thought leader for VoIP applications. We had secured funding, had a working product, and won a few smaller service providers. Things were going well and we were happy with our progress, but we hadn’t made any headway with a big name service provider. Around this time, Verizon put out an RFI/RFP for a set of VoIP solutions. We were very excited to receive it, but it included solutions for just about all of their voice products - a massive undertaking for any size company.

As you may have seen in True North Advisory’s press release, we joined Mike, Jim, and Scott to help our clients grow and scale their businesses. We wanted to share our moments and learnings that enable us to assist clients in their growth strategy and initiatives. We both come with extensive CxO experience and deep industry knowledge. Let’s start from the beginning.