Hank Barnes
Hank Barnes
Hank Barnes provides research and advisory services on go-to-market strategies--particularly around marketing, positioning, and customer experience--for technology providers. Hank has more than 25 years of high-technology sales and marketing experience in both field and corporate roles, both as an individual contributor and the marketing leader for several startups. He is a long-time proponent of customer-centric marketing and the use of customer experience as a key differentiator for business success. His posts here include content from his days with Adobe, SAP, and now Gartner
Have You Benchmarked Your Sales Effectiveness?
In this blog, we spend most of our time exploring topics related to selling more effectively. As our industries continue to evolve,...
Perceptions, Promises, and Positioning
Author Note: This post originally appeared in the Adobe Experience Delivers blog. You can find it here. This version has some updates...
Interruptions and the Customer Buying Cycle
Author Note: This post originally appeared in the Adobe Experience Delivers blog. You can find it here. This version has some updates...
Advertising and Customer Experience
I have been thinking a lot recently about the role of advertising, particularly digital, on customer experience. It started with a negative. I found...
Earning the Right to Up-Sell and Cross-Sell
While Customer Experience (CX) is a topic that everyone is jumping on today, other business pressures and traditions sometimes cause us to over-market and...
The Changing Role of Marketing in the Customer Experience Era
What does marketing mean to you? Some people have a limited view of marketing (e.g. marketing generates leads) others look at it more...
Prioritizing and Measuring Customer Experience Projects
There is quite a bit of information available about the business impact of customer experiences efforts. Some examples include: Forrester estimates that improved experiences...
Big Data is the problem, not the solution
I hate the term Big Data. Everytime I hear it or read it, I cringe. Its a reminder of my early days in the...
Two Questions that Set the User Experience Bar
I have posted often about my support for ideas like Geoffrey Moore's Systems of Engagement and Gartner's endorsement of a Pace Layering approach to...
The New Buying Cycle’s Impact on Sales (A Conversation with Dave Brock)
After listening to the Ziff-Davis B2B Webcast "Beyond SFA: Maximizing Sales Effectiveness" that featured Dave Brock (a frequent contributor here at CustomerThink), I...
The Role of B2B Sales in the Customer Decision Journey
With all of the talk about customer power, much of the discussion has centered on B2C environments. At the same time, studies have...
Your Customers Don’t Know What They Don’t Know
While we are firmly entrenched in the era of customer power, that does not mean that customer's don't need help and guidance. Information is everywhere.…
Sales Executive Council’s Challenger Research Provides Further Validation that CEM is Critical for B2B Sales
We've cited the Sales Executive Council (SEC) a few times already in this blog. That is because their research around sales performance during...