Speaking Abstracts and Presentations

Don Peppers or Martha Rogers can provide a visionary keynote, facilitate an executive work session, host a panel of experts, and much more. Following are just a few of the presentations and abstracts that have been presented in the past. We'll happily customize each presentation depending on the needs of the organization whether it's motivating a small, strategic group or inspiring a larger audience.

Competing for Trust:
Post-Crisis Strategies in a Twitter Economy

Blowback from the financial meltdown, combined with new, consumer-empowering interactive technologies, have permanently altered the landscape of business competition, particularly in the financial services industry.

In this keynote presentation, Don Peppers or Martha Rogers will mix humor and intellectual stimulation to provide a 50,000-foot view of this new competitive landscape, and then drill down to specific strategies. Key points will include:

The "Goldfish Principle" – why companies with poor insight on their customers often behave in an adversarial fashion toward them;
Acting in a client's interest – how short-term profits foregone are often dwarfed by long-term value created;
Why interactive technologies, and particularly social media, are ushering in a new model for businesses, based on customer trust; and
How to recover and keep the trust of customers, after it has been undermined or lost.

Seven Habits of a Trustable Company

As the social media revolution gains traction, a company's "trustability" will soon be the single most valuable asset it has. In this presentation, Don Peppers will outline seven activities – or habits – that any company must undertake if it wants to maintain its reputation for trustability.

Balancing short-term and long-term value creation by customers
Continuously improving its information systems and maintaining an up-to-date customer analytics capability
Providing "stewardship" for its customer relationships
Maintaining robust voice-of-customer feedback mechanisms
Ensuring a quality product or service, delivered on time, well executed, and reasonably priced
Encouraging a corporate culture based on "trustability"
Engaging and enabling its employees, ensuring that they are capable of self-organized actions

Return on Customer^SM:
Breaking the Rules to Create Maximum Value

In this provocative session, best-selling author, global business strategist and renowned thought leader [Don Peppers / Martha Rogers, PhD] will explore what innovation, trust, networked employees, empowered customers and culture mean for the future of your enterprise. You'll learn why defining and valuing customer relationships is not only the first step on the journey to growing Return On Customer, it's also a great way to evaluate your competitors and the best way to build shareholder value.

Return on Customer^SM (ROC^SM) is a financial metric designed to help companies balance these three laws of modern competition.

What is "Return on Customer," and how is it calculated?
How should ROC be used with ROI as a useful metric of success than ROI?
Understanding customer equity, enterprise value, and total shareholder return
Is your company a value creator or a value harvester?
Managing customers individually to create the most value from each
Why maximizing ROC requires you to earn your customers' trust
How to turn customer trust into an impregnable competitive advantage
What you should focus on A) now, and B) next

Merging With Our Machines
Why Personal Mobile Technology Changes Human Society Forever

With the personal mobile technology (PMT) available today and even richer connectivity tomorrow, word-of-mouth will soon not only dominate how market knowledge is disseminated among people; it will dominate how ALL knowledge is disseminated, from news reporting to scientific discoveries.

In this keynote presentation, best-selling business author and global thought leader [Don Peppers / Martha Rogers] mixes humor, inspiration and analysis to paint an irresistibly compelling picture of business competition in the 21^st Century. The era of 1to1 has evolved into the age of 1to1to1to1to1… as we humans begin to merge (seriously) with our machines.

What happens when PMT connects your customers to each other, 24/7?
How will customers use PMT to coordinate their physical locations, and how will this change the dynamics of retailing, for instance, or event planning?
Can a business harness "decision markets" to stay ahead of customer demand?
What strategies must a business follow to survive and prosper, once customers finally begin to take the upper hand?

Tweet, Google, Bing, POP ~ Ride the Bubble, Avoid the Drop!
Doing Business in an Increasingly Chaotic Economic System

Our economic system is cycling faster and faster as technology accelerates the velocity of human interactions. A few years ago, the feedback loops driving our economy operated at the speed of the daily news cycle, but today they operate at Blackberry speed. And as economic news – both good and bad – gets circulated and acted on more quickly, booms and busts accelerate in their speed, and perhaps their intensity.

So how can any business prosper when it can't see even two quarters into the future, much less plan ahead? Join Don Peppers or Martha Rogers and explore these issues in a keynote presentation that is both entertaining and amazing:

What things can be reasonably predicted by a business, and how?
What strategies are best for dealing with unpredictable economic events?
When technology connects your customers to each other, 24/7, what will that mean for your pricing, distribution, and competitive positioning?
How should a business use "prediction markets" to deal with economic volatility and stay ahead of customer demand?

Death by Word of Mouth:
Choose Now Whether to Get on the Train or Stay on the Track

90 minutes presentation and discussion

The social media revolution may be even more disruptive to business models than the Internet itself has been, requiring nothing short of a complete re-wiring of most corporate marketing strategies and even mission statements. In the opening segment of the workshop, Peppers & Rogers Group Founding Partner Don Peppers or Martha Rogers will set the tone for the day with an overview of some best-practice recommendations as to how your company can deliver superior customer experiences and build strong customer relationships when your brand's first impression will likely be conveyed by Twitter and Google. Topics will include:

The inherently random "cascading effects" caused by network structure
How "network analysis" can be used to define influencers and the influenced
Using "sentiment analysis" to make sense of unstructured voice-of-the-customer data generated in social media channels
Listening, monitoring, and responding – how your business can participate in the e-social revolution

Hot-button topic and exercise

Pluto is Not Really a Planet and Social Media Are Not Really Media:
Why the Survival of Your Business Will Depend on Trustability

60 minutes presentation and discussion, plus 45 minutes exercise

When you experience a problem or service fiasco, are your attorneys and PR people the first to the scene of the accident?
Can your customers post their honest opinions about your products and services on your Web site for other customers and prospects to view?

How you answer these questions says a lot about whether you think of social media as just another kind of marketing channel (wrong!) or instead as a platform for a completely different kind of relationship with customers. At the end of this segment, workshop participants will break into small groups to handle an exercise designed to test their understanding of the issues involved in creating a "trustable" business philosophy, suitable for participating in social media activities. Each small group will then present its findings to the broader group.

"How to" presentation, discussion, and working session

Putting Social Media Tools to Work
60 minutes presentation and discussion, 45 minutes working session

Listening, monitoring, and responding are critical issues for any business participating in the e-social revolution. In this session, we will outline six different types of benefits a business can enjoy from a well-architected e-social strategy, and we'll review a number of online tools and techniques for gaining these benefits. Then workshop participants will divide again into small groups to discuss innovative approaches – either ones they're using today or new ideas to be brainstormed during each small-group session. By sharing these ideas, colleagues will learn fresh approaches for using e-social tools at their organization. The session will close with each group sharing the best ideas with the full audience. Some of the topics to be considered in this segment include:

Best practices for using social media channels to serve customers on their own terms
Insight as to how to structure your contact center to incorporate social media
An understanding of how KPIs and other metrics should be adjusted to account for this new approach
Tips and tactics for building a customer-focused organization that engages customers as well as employees, and creates brand advocates
The importance of "trustability" when engaging in e-social interactions, and how to become more trustable, as a business

The Compelling Economics of Enterprise Engagement

In today's volatile economic marketplace and in tomorrow's future, the competitive edge goes to companies that not only create a community of excellence, but those who deliver a superior customer experience around their brands, forging the loyalty of both employees and customers.

In this keynote presentation, acclaimed author, global strategist and acknowledged thought leader (Don Peppers / Martha Rogers) will address:

Why taking the "long view" of your business can often mean giving up current profits, while still delivering better economics, over all
How to see technology "through the right end of the telescope"
Where Web 2.0 applications have undermined your corporate hierarchy, making it virtually impossible to rely on past rules and SOP to manage your brand
How to break down hardened silos by engaging and enabling your employees to become a "self organizing" force for your brand, and
How technology can help you engage, motivate, and empower your organization, producing economic gain for all constituents.

Hey – There's a Person in There!
Why Corporate Culture Makes All the Difference in Your Competitive Stance

What do you need to do to be sure your employees and distribution partners walk, talk, think, live, dream and breathe your brand, working to create great customer value and to build your business for the long term, as well as for the short term?

In this keynote presentation, acclaimed author, global strategist and acknowledged thought leader [Don Peppers / Martha Rogers] will show you:

Why taking the "long view" of your business can often mean giving up current profits, while still delivering better economics, over all
How to see technology "through the right end of the telescope"
Why technology has undermined your corporate hierarchy, making it virtually impossible to rely on past rules and presumed procedures to manage your brand
How to break down hardened silos by engaging and enabling your employees to become a "self organizing" force for your brand, and
How technology can help you engage, motivate, and empower your organization.

For further information on the topics listed above, please contact Michael Dandrea.