Every job has its "customers." Some customers are traditional buyers and some are less traditional, but all are equally important. As a marketer at Bluewolf, I have multiple customers: traditional consulting clients, partners, and in the role of Public Relations/Analyst Relations (PR/AR), industry analysts and press. When I think about customer obsession and how I play a role in it at Bluewolf, I think about how to best bring Bluewolf's client stories to market and to life for these industry advocates.

When I first started at Bluwolf almost two years ago, I stepped into a new industry and a new role. I didn’t have a tech background, so I quickly had to immerse myself in the salesforce.com ecosystem, and learn a new language of “cloud jargon.” An important component of this new dialect included learning how to talk about our clients, and the journeys that they take to transform their technologies, processes, and people, to become better companies. 

I’ve learned that it’s important to know your audience when telling a story: If I was talking to a group of people at Dreamforce who work in the industry, I would be more technical; If I was speaking with my Mom (who thinks the cloud is literally in the sky), I would use everyday-language that would convey the business transformation; But, if I was having a conversation with an industry analyst from a leading firm like Forrester, Gartner, Ovum, or IDC, I would use an entirely different approach to tell a story. They want to hear about the cutting-edge solutions from customer-obsessed organizations.

These analysts are savvy thought leaders who have deep knowledge and expertise in the space. They often know the big news before it’s made public. They write in-depth books and reports about customer experience, cloud governance, collaboration platforms, and mobile apps. They have dinner with some of the most successful business leaders in the world. The point is, industry analysts are smart and powerful individuals whose opinions and thorough research have a tremendous impact on the decision making and buying patterns of our customers.

The fun part of briefing analysts is highlighting the innovative work our consultants do with customers across the globe. However, analysts ask the hard questions and cut through the fluff. They get to the heart of the matter, they tell it like it is, and they fact check. Over the past couple of years, Bluewolf has held some fantastic briefings with some of the most influential analysts in this space, which has resulted in praise in Forrester’s Wave report and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report, both published earlier this year.

It is because of the due diligence and honesty of these analyst reports, that I am really proud to share IDC’s latest MarketScape report, which names Bluewolf a worldwide leader in the salesforce.com ecosystem—putting us in a leadership quadrant that is unprecedented for a company of our size.

According to IDC's 2013 Global Salesforce.com Implementation Services Buyer Perception Survey, clients highlighted Bluewolf to be most strong in the following areas: 

• The ability to integrate own team with that of the client's on a project 
• The ability to meet the project timeline 
• The ability to handle changes in project scope 

While my personal journey to becoming customer-obsessed is always evolving, the validation from IDC shows that Bluewolf is on the right path. I am excited to share more of our customer stories that will be on display at Dreamforce next week, and cannot wait to show other companies examples of how they, too, can become customer-obsessed.

Download your free copy of the 2013 IDC MarketScape Report.