CEOs’ Agenda for 2008: ‘Selling’ Joins ‘Innovation’ and ‘Customer Care’ at the Top
Posted by Frank Gens on February 23rd, 2008
Not surprisingly, business IT spending is typically driven by CEOs’ priorities. Accordingly, to understand the drivers of business IT spending for 2008, IDC surveyed business executives about their CEOs’ top agenda items for the coming year.
In both our 2006 and 2007 surveys, Customer Care and Product/Service Innovation ranked #1 and #2, respectively. This year, given widening economic concerns, it is not surprising that Sales Productivity (which ranked #4 last year) has jumped to #1, just marginally ahead of Customer Care, and nudging Product/Service Innovation to #3.
These findings confirm strategic business priorities we’ve identified in prior posts, priorities magnified by the opportunities and pressures of globalization. Globalization offers greatly expanded global sales opportunities, but also expanded global competition, making improved sales productivity a vital priority. Accordingly, optimizing direct and indirect sales capabilities has been among the top four CEO strategic priorities for the past two years. The surge of Sales Productivity to the number one agenda item in 2008 is almost certainly due to CEO concerns about the challenging economic climate this year.
Globalization is also continuing to intensify the importance of both strengthening customer relationships and improving (and accelerating) new product and service development, so we’re not surprised to see these two continuing to be among the big three of CEOs’ priorities.
The other continuing trend we see in the CEO agenda list for 2008 is the strategic importance of developing and maintaining excellent IT capabilities. As we’ve discussed before, a growing number of CEOs understand that the ability to execute their other strategic initiatives depends more than ever on IT, as a critical part of the operational infrastructure. Failure to maintain excellence in IT can hamstring virtually all the CEO’s other initiatives.
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Left by IDC on the CEOs 2008 Agenda « SageCircle Blog on February 24th, 2008