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.
Forrester’s sales enablement team is launching a collaborative effort with our clients and other experts to establish standards for competitive battle cards and I invite you to participate...
To accelerate the work of sales enablement professionals in overhauling sales battle cards, Forrester organized a group of experienced practitioners who helped create Forrester’s battle card...

A few years ago, I took the helm of customer & market intelligence (CMI) for a large vendor. Executives wanted analysis that was more relevant — intelligence that was “deeper,”...

A theme that frequently shows up in survey data and during interviews with purchasing executives is that customers care more about how tech vendors sell than what they sell. Tech customers now put...
As part of Forrester’s research into sales enablement, I recently took a journey to “plumb the depths” of sales battle cards. Why? Sales reps at technology companies tell Forrester...
Earlier this week, our Sales Enablement team hosted a teleconference about building battle cards that better line up with sales reps’ needs. If you missed the teleconference, you can download...
Leaders of competitive and market intelligence teams know that something is wrong. They tell Forrester this every day. They describe it as being similar to when your car doesn’t drive quite...
Sales reps use battle cards to anticipate and respond to competitors’ tactics in sales conversations. In our research, we found that, the competitive insights in today’s battle cards are more often...
Effective sales reps display a strong competency �often unconsciously � of establishing mindshare with their customers. The best ones influence customers and beat competitors by focusing on the...
CMI organizations need to engineer sales content so that it aligns with selling activities, especially with ongoing conversations that sales reps have with stakeholders that allow realize selling...
Insights Into Building Battle Cards That Help Sales Reps Win Deals
Sales reps need battle cards to anticipate and counter competitors' claims in sales conversations, but today's battle cards are little more than side-by-side product comparisons. Sales enablement...

Competitive & marketing intelligence (CMI) leaders are currently being torn between two points of view. But, these two views cannot be reconciled, and CMI leaders cannot sit on the fence! I...
Insights Into Building Battle Cards That Help Reps Win Deals
To justify your investment, sales battle cards must help sales outmaneuver competitors and ultimately increase their overall win rate in competitive deals. Given the siloed way competitive insight is...
We recently interviewed dozens of sales enablement professionals within the tech vendor community. These interviews painted a...
Engineering Valuable Content For Sales Enablement Success
Today, business and customer intelligence (BCI) leaders and teams at tech vendors gather information about target companies and key decision-makers, and their deliverables consist of data —...
During my daily conversations with technology vendors about battle cards, I am encountering leaders that are taking a different approach. Sales leaders are taking responsibility for the portfolio of...
Designing And Delivering Competitive Content For Sales Conversations
CMI leaders we speak with are as painfully aware that today's battle cards fall short of expectations and don't line up with sales reps' needs as they are unclear about how to bridge the gap. Sales...
Successful sales enablement reaches beyond just sales. Marketing functions such as customer and market intelligence (CMI) supply materials to your direct sales teams. This content can significantly...
It's a shame to get old! My oldest child recently announced that he and his wife are having a child themselves. On one hand, I am thrilled at the prospects of having a smiling infant in the...
In addition to the sessions mentioned by Brad Holmes and Brian Lambert in their blog entries, we dedicated an entire track to sessions that discussed how the decisions made by portfolio...
During the first week in August, Forrester launched the Battle Card Standards Group to address head on the challenges and opportunities that they face in creating competitive battle cards for sales...