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Anand Shah is cofounder and CEO of Databook, a pioneer and leader in Strategic Relationship Management (SRM).

Guide and nudge have many meanings. In sales, the simplest nuance between showing the way (guide) or prodding someone gently to take it (nudge) could define the future. Because while guided selling shows you the path forward, sometimes you need a gentle nudge to push you onto it. And, as guided selling enters a new AI-driven era, sales leaders have a career-defining opportunity to rethink standard practices in order to push teams forward to be their best.

The Limits Of Guided Selling

Sellers have been prompted or guided to change their behavior in a variety of ways over the years. These prompts have evolved from basic reminders about updating a deal close date to more advanced data science-driven recommendations. Starting about five years ago, companies like Salesforce and others began to use advanced analytics to provide “next best action” recommendations based on past behaviors of similar companies and their interactions.

However, the idea of a recommendation engine like Amazon's "You bought this, so you might like that" generally works well for business-to-consumer (B2C) is more difficult in enterprise B2B sales. Human relationships, not simply transactions, are built over time, and there is no margin for error. Amazon can afford to recommend the wrong socks, but an enterprise seller who inaccurately positions a solution to a buyer without any pain or urgency could be quickly dismissed.

The challenge is to provide guidance that is well respected, uniquely tailored and valued by sellers and buyers. At a minimum, effective guidance needs to be trusted and accurate, and it has to be tied to real-world examples and domain expertise.

AI promises to significantly Excellerate on “next best action” recommendations by combining the scale and automation of predictive technology with sales experience and SME expertise, capturing and using all data sources (voice, SMS) to train the system, and incorporating analysis of the buying company’s business health, competitive position and financial pain points.

The vision of a better future is driving intense interest in AI and data-driven decision making. In their exact Market Guide to Sales Engagement Applications, Gartner predicts 75% of B2B sales organizations will update traditional sales playbooks with AI-guided selling solutions by 2025. As co-founder and CEO of a Strategic Relationship Management platform provider, I see the growth of AI firsthand—and the ways in which real-world insights need to be backed up by action.

New Choice Architectures For Sales

Choice architecture, as coined by distinguished economist Richard Thaler in his book “Nudge,” studies how choices are presented to individuals to influence their decisions. Thaler finds that small changes in the decision-making environment can have a significant impact, leading individuals to make better choices to help them achieve long-term goals. Nudges, then, are designed to gently steer individuals towards desirable outcomes without removing their freedom of choice. A real-world example would be how placing healthier options like fruits and salads at the front of a cafeteria line leads to healthier food choices (because the plate isn’t full by the time you get to the healthy stuff!).

In the corporate world, AI-driven guided selling is intended to deliver these “nudges” to sellers in order to close more deals. However, despite its power and promise, AI on its own will not have the impact that sales leaders want without establishing new processes for everyone. Each member of the revenue team, including the least savvy and confident, need access to the right guidance and must act on it at the precise moment it will have the most impact. This is when the right nudge can turn an engaged seller into a high performer.

Nudging Teams From Insight To Action

To maximize return on guided selling investments, sales leaders must prioritize action alongside real-world insights. Sales intelligence in itself doesn’t lead to the right action. In fact, it can often stall users by requiring more time, resources and brainpower to apply the information.

The best sales leaders today are doing this in a very light-touch manner to create small, subtle changes in decision-making environments to have a significant impact on people's choices and behavior.

For example, suppose Nike is reporting their quarterly earnings today. As soon as the results are released, it would behoove our sales and client success teams to write a short note to the Nike executives we’ve met to congratulate them and also identify opportunities where we could be doing more together to drive even more success. By understanding their corporate performance, priorities and key initiatives for the coming year, we can offer insightful recommendations that will help our clients to achieve their goals.

Typically, this will take several days of work—and often not get done particularly well. But a simple nudge could have an immediate impact. For example, you could implement a recommendation engine that sends an alert and a prepared email with a summary of what's happened that would allow reps to easily follow up with contacts and discuss relevant topics, leading to better sales outcomes. Done right, this is extremely valuable—and brings every rep up to the standard set by your highest performers today.

The nudge, and the resulting connection, don’t necessarily have to be triggered by an earnings call. It could be an executive change, a new stakeholder or some new competitive activity. Or maybe it’s simply responding to a social media post or an article being shared. Every organization and every customer has their own journey, so there's a variety of different ways to engage on an ongoing basis as long as it is insightful to the recipient.

Gentle Intervention With AI

Selling effectively is hard. It requires a mix of real-world examples, domain expertise and solving non-trivial problems. With so many decisions to be made on even the smallest account, sales leaders can shift to guided selling powered by AI to provide real-world insights that drive more strategic relationships. These activities not only make decision making faster and easier, but they also ensure that every engagement is more aligned with buyers’ preferences and long-term goals.

Forbes Business Development Council is an invitation-only community for sales and biz dev executives. Do I qualify?

Dear community,

As your trusted companion along the journey of constant learning and inspiration, we are very excited to share a new format by announcing our first book ever: The ArchDaily Guide to Good Architecture.

In partnership with renowned international publisher gestalten, we have taken a pause to look back on the more than 40,000 projects curated over the past 15 years, to distill their contributions and answer the bold question of what is good architecture. The sheer scale of ArchDaily is a reflection of how important architecture is today, as the deepening complexity of our world places increasing pressure and demands upon our built environment. To deal with issues such as the climate crisis, energy scarcity, population density, social inequality, housing shortages, fast-moving urbanization, diminished local identity, and a lack of diversity, architecture needs to open itself.

To answer this challenging question the book spotlights the most innovative built environments of our age—those paving the way for a better, more sustainable future. Centered around ArchDaily’s 10 principles of good architecture developed by our team, the book showcases a rich variety of projects—both built and planned—from a sunken restaurant with subterranean views to a Mediterranean cave transformed into a remarkable residence. Reflecting a global community of world-shapers, it celebrates the most visionary architects, and introduces bold new talent. It explores the key syllabus and trends redefining the built environment, marking the forefront of architectural thought and practice today, with an eye on tomorrow.

https://www.archdaily.com/987050/the-archdaily-guide-to-good-architecture-book-buy-gestaltenDavid Basulto

New York-based Simon Data, a customer data platform (CDP) provider that mobilizes data assets and helps enterprises personalize end-user experiences, today announced $54 million in a series D round of funding. The company said it will use the capital to further develop its product offering and provide companies with a fully connected, data warehouse-native CDP to work with.

The round, led by Macquarie Capital with participation from several existing investors, comes more than three years after Simon Data’s series C round and takes the total capital raised by the company to well above $100 million. 

With this support, the company plans to help marketers drive ROI and personalize customer experiences while dealing with reduced budgets, new privacy regulations and continuously evolving customer behaviors at the same time.

What makes Simon Data unique?

CDPs have been around for years, enabling marketers to collect and unify data from different sources and power downstream personalization use cases, such as sending a discount coupon just when a customer leaves their cart. Now, the thing is, most of these out-of-the-box solutions are built specifically for martech applications, making them rigid with regard to what information can be accessed. 

At a time when customer behaviors are changing constantly, resulting in complex omnichannel data, marketing teams need ways to work more closely with their organizations’ data teams, rather than with data silos that can’t be integrated into data strategy — and that affect the flow of personalization efforts. 

This is exactly where Simon Data’s CDP comes in. The company provides marketing teams with smart workflows and a no-code user interface to seamlessly integrate with and tap the data they need from their cloud data warehouse, without any ETL or engineering effort.

“Customers who use Simon Data are able to build hyper-targeted audiences, orchestrate experiences (marketing campaigns, automations, etc.) across channels and resolve customer identities — all without their data leaving their cloud data warehouse,” Jason Davis, CEO and cofounder of Simon Data, told VentureBeat. Meanwhile, data teams get a secure way to centralize all the relevant customer information right within the data warehouse.

The offering, built on Snowflake’s architecture, currently supports integration with multiple databases, including Google BigQuery, Amazon RedShift and Postgres. It also supports CRMs and helpdesk platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk and Hubspot. 

Plan ahead

Simon Data has launched a native connected application for Snowflake’s data cloud called IdentityQA. With this round, the company plans to continue this effort and launch connected applications with other cloud data warehouses, turning its offering into a fully connected customer data platform. 

While it has not shared specifics of the plan, platforms like BigQuery and Redshift could be obvious candidates. The company, which achieved over 50% revenue growth last year, continues to work with enterprises such as JetBlue, BARK, TripAdvisor, WeWork, SeatGeek, Venmo, ASOS and Equinox.

 “Simon Data enables us to deeply connect with our users in more profound ways,” Scott Grove, vice president of marketing operations at Vimeo, said. “We’ve experienced a 300% increase in free-trial conversions over the last several years, which is a testament to Simon Data’s ability to individualize and elevate our customer communications.

“Solutions like [Simon Data’s customer segmentation engine] Connected Segmentation empower the marketing team to quickly build segments and deliver personalized messages that consistently resonate,” he added.

Other players targeting the same space are Twilio, Bloomreach, Catalyst and Klaviyo.

Perimeter 81 is a cloud-based network security solution designed to help organizations protect their resources using software-defined edge networking, authentication and access control capabilities.

Unlike the typical virtual private network approach to network security, which assumes the user is “safe” once connected to the network, Perimeter 81 adopts the zero-trust network access strategy that combines identity-based access rules, multi-factor authentication, traffic encryption and monitoring to ensure authentication and authorization for each user and device before granting them access to resources. Here is a deep-dive look into Perimeter 81.

Jump to:

Perimeter 81 fast facts

Pricing:

Starts at $8 per user, per month.

Key features

• Device posture check.
• DNS filtering.
• Identity management capability.
• Multi-factor authentication.
• Integrates with other security solutions.

SEE ALSO: Best VPNs for small business in 2023

Perimeter 81: Pricing

Perimeter 81 offers a tiered pricing model with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Essentials

The Essential plan costs $8 per user, per month when billed annually or $10 per user, per month when billed monthly. To buy this plan, you need a minimum of 10 users, making it suitable for startups. This plan supports two agentless application access and offers up to 14 days log retention.

Premium

Like the Essential plan, you need a minimum of 10 users to buy this plan. It costs $12 per user, per month when billed annually or $15 per user, per month when billed monthly. The Premium plan offers up to 10 cloud firewall policies, 10 agentless application access and up to 30 days’ log retention. It also features single sign-on, always-on VPN and allows up to three user configuration profiles.

SEE ALSO: The top 6 enterprise VPN solutions to use in 2023

Premium Plus

The Premium Plus has more advanced network security capabilities, making it ideal for large businesses. This plan costs $16 per user, per month when billed annually or $20 per user, per month when billed monthly. It supports up to 100 cloud firewall policies, 100 agentless application access, and 10 user configuration profiles.

Enterprise

The Enterprise plan is for businesses with over 50 employees. Contact the vendor for a quote.

Key features

Summarized below are key features you may find interesting in Perimeter 81.

Malware protection

Perimeter 81 offers protection against various types of malware, including trojans, rootkits, viruses, and zero-day exploits. The tool scans web traffic for abnormal behavior and blocks malicious files on your network. It also features a multi-layered detection system, including a database of malware signatures, emulation, heuristics – an algorithmic analysis to detect unusual patterns and behaviors of malware (both hidden and unknown), and machine learning, which is used to detect complex threats such as APTs (advanced persistent threats), ransomware and zero-day attacks.

Web Filtering

Another noteworthy security component of Perimeter 81 is its secure web gateway web filtering capability which allows users to track employees’ web activity, control internet access and block exposure to suspicious sites. This feature allows users to create a web filtering rule that only allows URLs from specific sites – users can determine which sites are “Blocked,” “Warned,” or “Allowed” for different employees and employee roles. Perimeter 81 also provides exportable reports of employees’ web activities for analysis and auditing (Figure A).

Software-defined perimeter

Perimeter 81 uses its software-defined perimeter capability to make an invincible network for a user or device. This method minimizes threats by giving only authorized users access to data or certain information. SDP gateway can be automatically deployed anywhere, enabling simplified, secure, low-latency connections to resources. It also enables encrypted traffic tunnels, which create one-to-one network connections between users.

Monitoring dashboard

The monitoring dashboard allows users to see and track everything on their network. The dashboard consolidates network usage data into a single view, allowing users to see current active sessions, gateways, apps and licenses in use (Figure B).

Figure B: Monitoring dashboard

Zero-trust security

Perimeter 81 operates on a zero-trust framework, meaning that it doesn’t automatically grant access to any user or device, even if they are within the corporate network. Every user and device gets authenticated and authorized before being granted access to resources.

SEE ALSO: 5 Best Chrome VPN Extensions for 2023

– Visit: Perimeter 81 

Pros and cons

Pros

• Easy to learn and use.
• Integration with various third-party services, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Heroku, Salesforce and Splunk.
• Unified network management capability.
• It offers secure cloud and network access.
• Supports multiple operating systems.

Cons

• Lacks free trial – they only offer a money-back guarantee.
• The advanced features are in higher pricing tiers.
• The Essential plan only has limited support.

– Visit: Perimeter 81 

Who is Perimeter 81 best for?

Perimeter 81 is best for businesses shopping for a security solution to protect their remote employees from potentially dangerous connections that can expose the company’s resources to malicious attacks. From the list of capabilities attached to each plan, Perimeter 81 can be considered more suitable for medium to large-scale businesses looking for secure remote networks based on the zero-trust architecture. It is also an ideal choice for companies moving away from the traditional VPN and firewall method of ensuring network security.

Alternatives to Perimeter 81

Although Perimeter 81 is a robust security tool, it may not serve your unique needs. We also analyzed some noteworthy Perimeter 81 alternatives and competitors to help you determine the best solution for your business needs.

SEE ALSO: VPN: Picking a provider and troubleshooting tips

Twingate

Built on zero trust network access architecture, Twingate is a cloud-based security solution designed to help organizations implement granular access controls, allowing administrators to define specific permissions for users and devices. Twingate integrates with other major MDM, EDRs and SIEM providers like CrowdStrike, Azure AD, Next DNS, Jump Cloud and more. Individuals or small teams looking for a free alternative to Perimeter 81 may find Twingate’s free plan beneficial. It is available to up to five users and one admin and also supports up to 10 remote networks. The paid plan also starts at $5 per user per month, making it more affordable than Perimeter 81’s Essential plan.

Visit Twingate

NordLayer

Formerly known as NordVPN, NordLayer is a network security solution that provides internet access security and control access to your organization’s resources. With NordLayer, you can securely access geo-specific content, mask your IP address, and control access to selected content categories and specific apps. NordLayer stands out for its 24/7 support which allows users to get help anytime they encounter issues while using the platform. Pricing for this tool starts at $7/user per month when billed annually or $9/user per month when billed monthly.

Visit NordLayer

Zscaler

Zscaler is a cyber security platform offering secure internet access solutions. The platform operates through a global data center that allows users and applications to securely access organizational resources regardless of location. Zscaler supports multiple platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS and browser extension. Unlike the other alternatives on our list, Zscaler doesn’t advertise its pricing on its website.

Visit Zscaler

Review methodology

We analyzed Perimeter 81 based on five key parameters: affordability, features, ease of use, integrations and support. We collected primary data from the vendors’ websites, data sheets and documentation to learn about the platform’s capabilities. We also reviewed current and past users’ feedback on reputable review sites to learn about the platform’s usability, user experience and ability to meet users’ needs.

IT spending by South Africa’s major banks – Absa, Capitec, FirstRand, Nedbank and Standard Bank – is in the billions of rand each annually, and growing fast.

Competition in the sector has driven increased investment in IT as the banks seek to Excellerate customer experience, build better security systems, smooth operational efficiencies, and see off fintech start-ups and mobile network operators that are increasingly muscling into their turf in financial services.

But just how much are South Africa’s big banks directing into their technology budgets each year? The numbers might surprise you.

Starting with Capitec, the Stellenbosch-headquartered bank doesn’t spend as much as its rivals – the traditional “big four” banks – but may not need to.

Capitec spent just over R1-billion on IT in the 2023 financial year, excluding staff costs, a slight increase from the R955-million spent the previous year. But these amounts pale in comparison next to what the big four spend annually. That’s partly due to Capitec’s more modern IT architecture, which is largely unencumbered by expensive-to-maintain legacy systems.

“The availability of best-in-class technology is integral to our objective of providing our clients with an ecosystem of products and services that address their financial needs,” said Capitec board chair Santie Botha in the group’s integrated annual report for the year ending 28 February 2023.

Read: Standard Bank spent R11.2-billion on IT in six months

“To Excellerate client engagement, we have entered into partnerships with leading global technology firms such as Salesforce, Airship and nCino. These partnerships will play a vital role in the execution of the group’s objective of being the best in class for the future.”

Big banks, big spend

As new as Capitec’s technology stack is relative to its competitors, the bank saw an opportunity recently to modernise its IT function further by moving it to the cloud.

“Our migration to Amazon Web Services is nearing completion. We have migrated systems and enhanced our disaster recovery plans, and our banking app is also utilising this platform,” said Botha.

Aside from scale, the more complex the integration between a bank’s core systems to legacy platforms like mainframes is, the higher the cost of its modernisation efforts. Nedbank has been in a technological overhaul it calls “managed evolution” for years.

Read: MTN fintech business valued at R99-billion as Mastercard eyes stake

“The group’s technology strategy and managed evolution transformation programme is focused on building a modern, modular and digital IT stack. At the end of 2022, we reached 91% build completion, and the programme is aiming for full completion by the end of 2024, with the refactoring and modernisation of our core banking systems as one of the final components,” group chairman Mpho Makwana said in the group’s 2022 annual report.

Nedbank expects to spend R1.6-billion/year on the project until its completion. Nedbank’s total IT budget, including staff costs, was R9.5-billion for the 2022 financial year (R6.6-billion excluding staff costs). The largest increase in IT-related costs for Nedbank was in staffing, which grew by R650-million from the previous year.

FNB and Rand Merchant Bank parent FirstRand, meanwhile, spent R12.4-billion on IT (before staff costs) for the year ended June 2022. FirstRand’s IT spending has risen by 9.3% on a compounded annual basis for the past five years.

For the year ended 31 December 2022, Absa spent R5.8-billion on IT, or R12.6-billion if staffing costs are included. That’s an increase of 8% compared to 2021.

Standard Bank, meanwhile, spent R11-billion on IT in 2022, although the report does not segment IT spending, so it is difficult to tell if staff costs are included in this total. Interim results for the first half of 2023 showed R11.2-billion in total IT spending, including staffing costs at R2.8-billion.

Read: Standard Bank unveils plan to become a digital ‘platform’ company

Staff, software, cloud and technology costs were the biggest contributors to Standard Bank’s technology spending in 2022. In the bank’s 2022 annual report, group CEO Sim Tshabalala explained the high spending on technology.

“We experienced a series of prolonged and highly disruptive system outages in April and May 2022. As well as seriously inconveniencing our clients, long outages do immense damage to our brand and reputation, and cause distress to our people,” he said. “It was necessary to restructure the IT function and change its leadership.”  — © 2023 NewsCentral Media

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