Turbulence in the sales tunnel

And to say it up front: The expectations raised by the title were fulfilled. The organizers, led by the new President of the GfM Dominique von Matt, succeeded in inviting a diverse group of speakers on the topic of the day, who presented stimulating, relevant and topical content, some of which was presented in an unconventional way, such as restaurateur Michel Péclard or serial entrepreneur Rafael Horzon from Berlin. In his introductory speech, Dominique von Matt skillfully illuminated the day's topic and specifically pointed out the following points:- "Learn to love speed"- "Instead of asking ourselves for a long time what the perfect product for our customer could be, we ask the customer the question by learning directly from their feedback for our offer and then adapting it in an agile way."- "In contrast to the vision, the strategy can often change"- "Consumers are talking less and less to companies about their brands, but are instead exchanging information in their community."- "You have to start with the culture and structure. Silos need to be broken down. They are the killer of agility "INSEAD Professor Joerg Niessing explained under the heading of connectivity that sixty percent of website visits are already made via mobile devices. Niessing also expressed the opinion that marketing is a "software-powered" discipline. His observations and research also show that there is increasing turbulence in the sales funnel. The previously linear-sequential processing of the funnel is increasingly giving way to a multidimensional and networked forward movement in the funnel.Michael Schrage from MIT in Boston revisited the importance of the long-known question "What business are we in?" and reaffirmed its relevance. Using Google as an example, he explained that we all work at Google - Google's business model only works thanks to our search queries. Schrage also made it clear that "recommendation engines" are commonplace today and are actually part of every website. The customer expects the company to create value for the customer with the data provided. Professor Wolfgang Jenewein's statement "Everyone wants change - no one wants to change" made it very clear what the central bottleneck on the path to greater agility is.Most of the contributions at the trend conference made it clear that our companies are still very much at the beginning when it comes to speed, error culture, pragmatism and agility. The message was undoubtedly received at the conference - but the proof has to be in the implementation in everyday corporate life.The 28th GfM Marketing Trend Conference will take place on March 21, 2018.