Enterprise Communications Talks with Bruno Teuber of Lithium on Social CRM
Bruno Teuber - VP & GM EMEA, Lithium International
As the Vice President & GM EMEA, Bruno is responsible for driving and managing the growth of Lithium’s business in rapidly expanding international markets.
He joins Lithium with a 17 year track record of successfully creating and scaling high performing EMEA sales organizations for many different US companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Tivoli Systems, IBM, and Motive Communications. Most recently, Bruno was VP of Worldwide Sales at ON Networks, a new media company in the video content and advertising space.
Prior to ON Networks, Bruno was responsible for building Motive’s business in Europe from zero to a 90 person organization contributing to more than half of the company’s global revenue. Before Motive, Bruno was Vice President of EMEA sales for Tivoli Systems, before and after IBM’s acquisition, managing a staff of over 400 people and business of over $1 billion in revenue. For Sun Microsystems, he managed a Swiss bank cooperation globally, at that time one of Sun’s largest and most important world-wide customers. Bruno started his business career at Digital Equipment Corporation as an engineer, installing and project managing large and complex computer networks, before moving to Digital’s marketing and sales departments.
Bruno was born and raised in Switzerland where he graduated from the School of Business Administration Zürich and also holds an engineering degree.
www.lithium.com
In this interview Bruno Teuber, VP and GM of Lithium International, discusses the role of social CRM for the enterprise and talks to Mark Dye about a technology which, although in the infancy stage of its lifecycle, marks a fundamental shift in how brands, companies and businesses are defining processes.
Mark Dye: Today I am here with Bruno Teuber ,VP and GM of Lithium International and we are going to be talking about social CRM for the enterprise. So Bruno, I just wanted to talk to you briefly about the background of this. How do you define social CRM as you see it today?
Bruno Teuber: Well social CRM is a term that has not been really around for a very long time. It was maybe been invented about 12 to 18 months ago and it is basically defining the connection of a traditional business together with new ways with how to engage with customers and consumers and how consumers actually engage with each other and help a brand or any business basically to interact and embrace in a different way.
Mark Dye: And in terms of the social customer, why do enterprises actually need to embrace them now?
Bruno Teuber: I think this is definitely since the invention of the internet, when the internet actually became a commercially used platform or network, the appetite for consumers or customers, and people to basically interact in a different way with a brand but also learn and share things with other people is just increasing, increasing and increasing. And I think the brands of today and the businesses of today have to take advantage of that and have to understand that the communication and the strings of communication between customers and the brand is fundamentally changing and social CRM is basically a way to do that.
Mark Dye: So I’m guessing by that you are kind of suggesting that social CRM is a shift in the way that enterprises do business today?
Bruno Teuber: Absolutely. I think it is a fundamental shift in how brands or companies and businesses are basically defining all processes. I think at the end of the day it is becoming an activity where you want to have your own customers becoming almost part of your processes. We have a lot of existing customers on our side who actually have stopped developing new technologies or even have stopped defining new packaged products because they are saying our own customers are faster in helping us anyway. Basically you are outsourcing pieces or whole processes of your business to your own customers and they like to do that and they also are totally keen to spend a lot of time helping you.
Read the full interview here, or watch the video of the interview above.