The social sales imperative

- - Sales, Social Media

social_sales_funnelMost of us in sales know that one of the keys to success in our profession is to always be selling. This doesn’t mean that we have to come across like the Wolf of Wall Street, constantly pitching the customer what they want to hear whether it’s true or not, but it does mean that we have to have an ongoing dialogue with our customers and prospects.

Social media makes this possible in ways we never imagined. What I find amazing is that so many salespeople still seem reluctant to leverage these new platforms and tools to help them stay relevant in the modern buying process.

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New Year, New Role With SAP Predictive Analytics

- - SAP

th-23It’s a new year and I have a new role, brand new for SAP and for me. As of Jan. 1, I’m the Global Sales Lead for Predictive Analytics and Business Intelligence. But, you can just call me Kurt.

BI is the third single best selling SKU at SAP, second only to ERP and SAP HANA. It’s a very important piece of the business, representing about +60% of Analytics sales globally.

To be clear, Analytics at SAP includes Business Intelligence, Predictive, and also our solutions for the CFO–Enterprise Performance Management, Governance Risk and Compliance solutions and our finance line of business solutions.

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SAP TechEd Bangalore: My incredible India experience

- - SAP

Bangalore-traffic

I’m a little late in posting this but I finally made it to Bangalore, for SAP TechEd in December. I’ve been to other parts of India, but never Bangalore. Everybody told me it would be unlike anything else I’ve experienced in India, and they were right. It was exciting and exhausting.

India’s national tourism slogan is “Incredible India“. Nowhere is that more applicable than Bangalore. To start with, wherever you land, it’s at least two hours to where you want to go, no matter where it is. It just takes that long because the infrastructure isn’t there. One day, I spent 11hours to go to two one-hour meetings.

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The new world of predictive analytics

- - Predictive Analytics, SAP

Business_Speech_Bubble_Communication_ConceptBack in September, SAP announced the acquisition of KXEN, an advanced analytics company that focuses on the predictive space. I recently wrapped up a mini-tour of Asia-Pacific Japan with Shekhar Iyer, our Global Vice President for Business Intelligence, Visualizations, and Predictive to talk to analysts, partners and customers in Singapore, India and Japan about the acquisition and what it means for SAP and more importantly, for our customers. Here’s the story.

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My Wish List for LinkedIn

- - Social Media

 

Kurt Network

Most people I’m connected to on LinkedIn (4,448 to be exact) know that I’m a pretty active user. I was the 54,622nd person to join LinkedIn, so I’ve been around almost since the beginning.  If you want you can find your member number as it is the number embedded in your LinkedIn profile URL (after “id=”).

When I first joined, there wasn’t a lot you could do, but LinkedIn has done an amazing job of innovating while growing to over quarter billion users as of this past June. That’s why it’s still my go-to tool for staying connected and engaged with my network, and increasingly, my main destination for consuming business content.

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