About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

Ted serves CIOs. He has 24 years of experience in the technology industry, focusing on the effects of disruptive technologies on the workforce and workforce productivity. His research focuses on workforce technologies and the programs that support them, including smartphones, tablets, and their impact on productivity; social business and collaboration tools; cloud email and collaboration tools; and the consumerization of IT.
Ted is the co-author of Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press, September 2010). Social, mobile, video, and cloud Internet services give consumers and business customers more information power than ever before. To win customer trust and business, companies must empower their employees to directly engage with and solve the problems of empowered customers using these same technologies.
It is through this empowered lens that the consumerization of IT makes sense: employees solving customer and business problems using readily available technology that they master first at home — social, mobile, video, and cloud. This management book helps CIOs and IT organizations engage directly with business managers and employees to build an empowered strategy: understanding which employees are workforce "HEROes" — highly empowered and resourceful operatives — implementing empowering collaboration and innovation programs, creating a new empowered security architecture, and supporting HEROes with the right technology platforms.
In 2009, Ted launched Forrester's Workforce Technology Assessment, the industry's first benchmark survey of workforce technology adoption. This quantitative approach helps professionals and the teams they work with have a fact-based conversation about employees' technology adoption and requirements.
Prior to joining Forrester in April 1997, Ted was a cofounder of Phios, an MIT spinoff. Before that, Ted worked for eight years as CTO and director of engineering for a software company serving the healthcare industry. Early in his career, Ted was a singer and bass player for Crash Davenport, a successful Maryland-based rock-and-roll band.
Ted has a master's degree in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also holds an M.S. in computer science from the University of Maryland and a B.A. with honors in physics from Swarthmore College.
This report is designed to give sales enablement professionals an introduction to the sourcing and vendor management (SVM) role, as well as an overview of the general concerns facing people in this...

Executive buyers respond well to clear, personalized, easily scannable emails as a way to raise their interest in taking a meeting. The things that motivate executives to take a meeting fall into two...
As technology vendors seek to gain access to executive buyers and change their relationships status from merely suppliers to trusted advisors, sales enablement professionals are responsible for...

How You Sell Is As Important As What You Sell
Inquiry after reading Forrester's June 15, 2010, "Technology Buyer Insight Study: How Executives Differentiate Among Their Suppliers" report; Forrester's May 17, 2010, "Technology Buyer Insight...
How You Sell Is As Important As What You Sell
Executive decision-makers find that the technology vendors that best differentiate themselves from the pack are the ones that can match a relevant set of capabilities to their specific circumstances....
The gap is striking between the sales messages vendors create, how they prepare salespeople to deliver them, and the value executive buyers perceive from those conversations. Forrester's global...
Results, not products, differentiate vendors in the eyes of executives.Executives assign strategic supplier status to vendors that are willing and able to align in substantial, not superficial, ways....