The Impact of Cloud on the Future of Business #SMACtalk Episode 29

On this week’s episode of SMACTalk, I was live from IBM Amplify 2015 in beautiful San Diego California. It was my first solo episode as my co-host was amazing the crowd on Buffer Chat, but the topic no less was a fun and exciting one as I had the opportunity to interview the Chief Revenue Officer of Exchange Solutions, Bob Jewell about the impact cloud has had on their business, their clients’ business and I even managed to throw a couple of curveballs at him where we talked about employee advocacy, cloud adoption in the enterprise and then the emerging role of the Chief Revenue Officer.

For those less familiar, Exchange Solutions has built a cloud based on demand platform that allows companies to design, implement and measure loyalty programs that drive increased sales for companies around the globe. With their flexible platform they have recently migrated from a company who offered this as an end to end service, to an organization that is allowing their customers the flexibility of leveraging their platform to build their own solutions or partnering with Exchange Solutions to do the work in harmony.

Early on in the conversation I asked Mr. Jewell about how cloud has impacted their business and it was really interesting to find out that their company has been leveraging some iteration of the cloud to do their work for nearly 18 years. What made this so profound is that most consumers have no idea that cloud has been around for so long. Surprise, it has!

As we dug deeper into the conversation, it was really interesting to find out that a lot of the growth of the company has come from being able to build on the cloud giving them much more agility in their product development.

As the company moved from almost a design/build partner to a more “Self-Service” model the cloud has continued to play a key role. The Exchange Solutions platform has become something that the partners can utilize on demand to build, test, deploy and measure their programs. This is key not only to growth for them, but also their partners, which is key to sustaining their growth in the space.

As we turned off of the topic of cloud design and impact on the business, I asked Bob about his title and the role of the Chief Revenue Officer. Over the past few years we have seen Chief Data, Digital, Customer and other “C” officers emerge and the revenue officer is one of many. My question really came down to where the CRO fit in with the CMO and how they were dividing and conquering. His response was that it’s a partnership with the CRO really leading the Sales and Business Development functions and the CMO tying in the digital, social and traditional marketing roles to drive more visibility to the company. Of course, these driving forces can almost happen in either order, but in any case, I found the discussion quite interesting.

With “Customer at the Center” really at the core of the IBM Amplify event, this episode of SMACTalk was a lot of fun and other than missing the energy of Brian, we had a ton of fun discussing customer loyalty, the cloud and what the future of the customer journey may look like.

Now, tune in here to listen to the entire episode!

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business (Now PivotPoint) and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit Pivot Point. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.