John Balla is Global Industry Marketing Principal for the Public Sector at SAS. His long experience with government entities around the world ranges from his work at Fortune 100 companies to co-founding two start-ups. He is multi-cultural and multi-lingual and has lived and worked on 3 continents. He earned a degree in economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as an MBA from Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
The idea of customer centricity in marketing is as "old as dirt" - it's probably been around as long as people have been interested in buying or selling things to each other. So why are we still talking about it, and why is it so seemingly elusive for some organizations? The
Being named to the Top 100 of the Fortune Best Places to Work list is a highly coveted honor that SAS has enjoyed for 16 years in a row. In order to be considered for this annual ranking, candidate companies have to answer a comprehensive set of questions that really
It's remarkable how the women my life really like shopping at the different Chico's FAS stores. I think a big reason is that somehow they manage to deliver a boutique experience for every customer at all their stores. That's not an easy feat when you run over 1,000 stores nationwide under 4 different brands: Chico's, White
The Economist Intelligence Unit recently published a report that highlights some C-suite dynamics that remind me of that childrens' game "monkey in the middle." The report details multiple ways in which surveyed CMOs believe one thing about the role of marketing in the company, and then their other functional peers (CIO,
A colossal man-made storm known as “the fiscal cliff” looms on the horizon of the United States economy. Much attention has been paid to the political wrangling behind this situation in Washington, while Congress seems oblivious to unanimity among economists that large-scale abrupt austerity measures like this “fiscal cliff” generate more harm
Apparently the “big” in “big data” is only going to get bigger. And it turns out that organizations have not prioritized big data as much as they perhaps should because too many of them aren’t effectively leveraging customer data across channels. Both of those are positions held by the Altimeter
This is the cross-post of a funny and informative post written for an internal SAS blog by my colleague and blogger extraordinare Chris Hemedinger. For those of you not familiar with "spam," it's a scourge of electronic media that shows up in blog comments among other places - placed with the intention of gaining better
As previously mentioned, I attended this year's DMA Annual Conference as a sponsor and found many ways that it was a wonderful experience as both a sponsor and an attendee. That said, there actually was one part of my DMA experience that gave me pause enough to want to share it
"Awesome" is possibly the most over-used word in the English language, and its over-usage is driven by its versatility. Generally, something awesome is impressive in a way that warrants talking about it - so it's something remarkable. Knowing that, it's easy to understand how in our social-savvy, interconnected online world, awesomeness matters.
Standing in my own crosshairs as my own target market means that almost all work that I do can be a learning opportunity, and going to DMA2012 was certainly a biggie. What I saw and experienced at the show reaffirmed the idea that it’s never been more exciting to be
