HP Innovation Journal Issue 03: Summer 2016 | Page 17

enough for the ultra-informed, new school customer. They rely less on direct marketing messages, and more on crowdsourced opinion: reviews, recommendations, and thought leader- ship. If you are not present and active in the social space, you’ll be outsold. The good news is that by building an active digital presence now, HP and partners are forging connections with highly engaged customers, pre-, during, and post-sale. This will help customers and partners accelerate their growth today—and in the AI and bot-driven world of tomorrow. HP has launched the Social Media Center— our commitment to ensuring that partners and customers connect in this vibrant marketplace. It’s an offering unmatched elsewhere in the industry: a rich resource to help partners increase their visibility and reputation online. In the initial U.S. pilot program for HP Social Media Center, one partner reported a 400 percent increase in customer impressions (from 4,000 to 16,000), and more than 2000 new profile views in less than a month. This is a great result for the partner—but also for customers, who can more easily find trusted partners and solutions to their biggest challenges. channels. It spans four key areas of focus: mobility, security, education, and healthcare. There is both industry and HP specific content, in materials that include white papers, business cases, customer stories, infographics and articles that partners can use to showcase their expertise and the power of HP solutions. Training modules are provided to equip the partner with advice on how to build a community of followers, and what kinds of content are most effective. Using the training, a partner can go from baseline social media know-how to being self-sufficient after a quarter, with additional assistance available from HP as needed. Partners access the HP Social Media Center through the HP Sales Central portal. Social media interaction offers a new way for customers to engage with HP through the partner community. We’ve entered a new era of selling that is far less product focused, and more about the solution and business outcome that best serves the customer. By driving this more engaged and collaborative business environment, HP believes the future of business will benefit partners and customers alike.  Vincent Brissot as Global Head of Channel Marketing, drives the planning, development and execution of HP’s marketing initiatives with HP’s channel partners community. This includes channel marketing programs, Market Development Funds (MDF), campaigns and metrics. Valuable content for social media novices and pros HP Social Media Center is a reservoir of curated content that partners can publish to their own Face-to-face Dawn of time 1.3 – 1.8M yrs. ago Homo Sapiens Phone-to-phone th Early 20 century 1876 Alexander Graham Bell’s first successful experiment with the telephone Screen-to-screen Robot-to-robot th st Mid 20 century 1972 ARPANET’s successful demonstration at the International Computer Communication Conference 21 century 1991 Negotiation planning: an AI approach — ScienceDirect 62,500,000 Potential daily digital engagement activated by the Channel 1 Post/Tweet a day 5 Customers 50 Sales/Marketing Reps. 250,000 Partners Until the 20th century, the nature of trade didn’t evolve dramatically. Sales was face-to-face and real time, from seal skins to encyclopedias. Transportation accelerated the process, and telephones allowed live conversations to compliment face-to-face. The internet ushered in our current era of screen-to-screen business interaction, the first true disruption of face-to-face selling. And we’re well on our way to automating sales and negotiation processes through the use of bots and AI. Issue 3 · Summer 2016 · Innovation Journal 17