Walk into just about any coffee shop or other small business and there’s a good chance there’s an iPad or other tablet on the counter. They’ve replaced traditional cash registers in many restaurants, giving business owners flexible and inexpensive options to ring up tickets and process credit cards.

Customers may also get some benefits from the new systems. In addition to emailed receipts that reduce pocket trash, calculating a tip has gotten a lot easier for those too bothered to do the math. Instead of doubling the sales tax or attempting to calculate a fraction on the fly, customers can now simply choose a preselected percentage or dollar tip amount. The tablet then concludes the transaction quickly and neatly.

Compared to traditional cash machines, it’s all really efficient. And it’s costing you money.

The traits that matter the most are quite simple — and I actually learned all of them from my high school English teacher, Mrs. Miller. The lucky among us have had a teacher that played a pivotal role in shaping not only our work habits, but also our character. Mrs. Miller was a stern but caring teacher whose wisdom and high expectations continue to impact my work today. She encouraged me to:

Be dogged

For a long time, every English essay I submitted would come back liberally marked up with comments like, “Poor overall structure,” “insufficient evidence,” or “overly wordy.” After sitting me down and explaining in more detail where I was going wrong, Mrs. Miller would encourage me to implement the changes we had discussed instead of wallowing in defeat.

Any successful business person, from a small-business owner to a seasoned entrepreneur, experiences pitfalls. Picking yourself up and trying again after a defeat or setback is key to long-term success.

But intelligent

Unfortunately, after a round of quick edits, I’d often then receive an even worse grade than I received initially. The point? My English teacher believed that improvement wasn’t easy or an automatic function of repetition. If you wanted a better grade, you had to be willing to use your own mind, as well as work hard and fast.

The most successful business people I know put this in place every day: They are diligent and tenacious but also smart and selective in how they apply their efforts.

Be convincing

There is no greater asset in business than an ability to sell your vision to others. Whether dealing with customers, employees, managers, suppliers, journalists or venture capitalists, a successful outcome almost always depends on the same core competency that I picked up in Mrs. Miller’s English class — an ability to build a logical, well-structured narrative that persuades others of the merits of an argument.

The most impactful business people I’ve had the privilege of working with have the unique ability to think through a problem and only interject when he or she can marshal the relevant facts, statistics, insights, precedents, and comparables in support of a cohesive argument. These persuasive, thoughtful leaders are almost always the ones that actually move things forward, because people around them are convinced and inspired to act.

Be open

I had a lot of strong opinions in high school.  I still do. But Mrs. Miller taught me to appreciate one fundamental fact about English literature, life and business: There is rarely only one right answer.

Business building is a discovery process. Yes, it’s important to have a clear vision — and the drive to see it through — but the best business people are not blinded by their own passions and convictions. They remain open to a changing world and the experience and insight of others and are willing to make changes where necessary.

A successful career in business will call on a wide range of skills and require no small degree of luck — but when I want to remind myself of the basics, I always return to Mrs. Miller.

Experience, the saying goes, is the best teacher.

So for this week’s “CMO Wants to Know,” we asked marketing executives to share the lessons they learned in 2014 and how they’ll apply them in 2015. Read on for their answers. One of the many topics mentioned is sure to hit home.

Trisha Antonsen, Associate Director of Content Creation, Wayfair.com, told CMO.com:
2014 was a big year for content creators and marketers in terms of really growing and excelling in creation and production. For us it was all about producing quality and quantity across our different brands. 2015 brings a lot of opportunity for distribution and innovative integration into other channels and mediums: TV, YouTube, print, podcasts, social. With all this, the responsibility to clearly educate people on the power and benefits of content marketing becomes more important. I think there’s still a lot of mystery around content marketing. As publishers we need to make sure that, at the end of the day, we’re creating content that people want to consume.

Margaret Molloy, Global Chief Marketing Officer, Siegel+Gale, told CMO.com:
My greatest learning in 2014 is the importance of patience and staying the course. The proliferation of new technologies coupled with the popularization of marketing as a topic of conversation means that marketers can easily become the proverbial kid in the candy store, sampling lots of shiny new things without a mature direction. Building a brand and leading the team that delivers it is a long-term initiative.

Mindful of this truth, in 2015 I will set our marketing vision and guide our team to prioritize the essentials to realizing it. Taking this approach will not preclude innovation, however; it will require simplifying and declining some good opportunities to focus on doubling down on the programs that have the greatest impact.

Jeff Fagel, CMO, G/O Digital (Gannett’s digital marketing services arm), told CMO.com:
Visuals matter more than ever before. We buy with our eyes, whether it’s in line at McDonald’s or through in-stream native digital executions. We now have far better technologies, devices, and precise marketing capabilities available to us. And our shopping experiences are now faster, easier, and more engaging–all thanks to technology.

But to be successful in delivering online-to-offline sales, marketers and retailers first have to be willing to shed their old-school labels of visuals as creative or media assets, and instead place them squarely into the commerce category. 2015 will be the year where we break free from A/B testing and push creative to limitless executions.

For example, marketers can take the creative assets of a single TV ad and localize it into hundreds of thousands of digital video ad units with hyperlocal precision down to the individual price, store, and quantity available for featured products. Ultimately, this is a win-win. On one hand, shoppers benefit from locally relevant, personalized experiences, and on the other hand, marketers see higher returns on their investment.

Jen Gray, VP of Marketing and Creative Services, HelloWorld, told CMO.com:
Everyone these days is in the content marketing business. With both B2B and B2C communications to navigate, marketers are creating mass quantities of materials for their audiences to consume, to rank higher in search engines, etc.–it’s hard to stand out. Our “information superhighway” pretty much has gridlock.

What we continue to learn in marketing our own as well as our clients’ businesses is getting the mix of content right for your audience. Think about the right mix of quality, quantity, complexity, and distribution. Just creating mass amounts of content on the subjects you think your audience wants to hear can quickly become noise and, frankly, a waste of your valuable time and dollars. Is anyone finding your content and reading it? Are they identifying with it? Is it causing your cash register to ring? First, be sure you can answer these questions. Then, invite your audience to experience your content through earned, owned, paid, and syndication strategies. This will help you pass by all the traffic and reach your destination faster.

Amanda Chin, Vice President of Marketing, ShopKeep, told CMO.com:
I’ve always been inspired by Seth Godin’s framework, the circles of marketing. In 2014, I found this framework applies to community building as well. If you expect to build a community of your customers, you have to start with your own community of internal team members. If there is misalignment at home about the company mission and purpose, and there is no passion for your product, you have no right to expect that from your customers. I was fortunate in 2014 to join a company with a team that has a genuine desire to champion our customers, and it’s key for our marketing team to look to them as the heart and soul of our community as we plan our outreach programs.

It’s amazing to me that our team members already visit customers on their own time on weekends and evenings, both locally and when they are traveling out of town. I’d hate to formalize this process as it’s happening organically. But I’d love to make it easier for our team to know where our customers are, through easier visualization of their locations, so when they are taking a day trip somewhere, they know they can just head down the street to the local coffee shop that’s using ShopKeep and share a smile.

Joe Stanhope, SVP Marketing of Signal, told CMO.com:
Marketers know that the future is cross-channel. But despite their significant investments in technology across the digital ecosystem, in 2014 marketers felt like they were stuck in first gear, stymied by organizational silos, fragmentation of data and touch points, and lack of interoperability.

In 2015, marketers will try to close the cross-channel maturity gap. They’ll be experimenting like crazy. Cross-channel data collection will be a key focus as the launching pad for more relevant and cohesive interactions with consumers. Working toward a single view of the customer, marketers will be wiring up mobile, Web, CRM, and point-of-sale channels in order to harness and deploy more data. Brands and agencies will be building big data feeds to enable cross-channel modeling and distribution to a wide variety of endpoints, such as data warehouses, analytics or attribution platforms, reporting systems, and more. Measuring customer behavior across devices and merging cross-channel data will be the precursors to the next, necessary step of activating data.

Achieving a unified, actionable view of the customer’s cross-channel journey is still a ways off. But in the coming year, it will be very exciting to watch the results of cutting-edge campaigns that will be utilizing the latest cross-channel capabilities.

Matt Rosenberg, SVP of Marketing, 140 Proof, told CMO.com: 
Last year, 140 Proof studied the way people use different social platforms and found that they are very conscious of the different ways to connect, the content available to share, and privacy of each option. Users are customizing their social experience, cultivating different personalities across platforms, and avoiding the brand intrusions they don’t want to see. This all means marketers are going to have to start working smarter, and stop trying to be their consumers’ friends on social. It’s more crucial than ever for marketers and advertisers to manage targeting, messaging, and frequency to keep their audiences informed, without driving them crazy. At 140 Proof, we plan to leverage these learnings to do what we do even better: make ads works for real humans.

Laney Lewis, Senior Director of Marketing, Clearleap, told CMO.com:
Today’s great marketers know where their consumers are and do their best to predict where they’re headed. Their secret? Moving fast. Whether it’s getting in on the latest popular platform, like video or mobile, or jumping in the conversation on topical cultural or industry moments, like the World Cup or Sochi Olympics, in 2014 we learned that staying on your toes is the key to staying relevant and successful. In 2015, we’re focusing on staying flexible and taking advantage of great opportunities for engagement whenever they come.”

Brad Mattick, VP Product and Marketing, BrighEdge, told CMO.com:
2014 was the year of content creation, but looking back, I think we all could have spent more time focusing on performance, both of our own content, as well as our competitors’. Even though we saw vast amounts of money being poured into content, most of us still struggle to measure the return of our investments and digest the sea of unstructured data that we’re currently swimming in.

In 2015, we’ll be doubling down to better use the data we have, which will ultimately improve our ability to make real-time recommendations for targeting and optimizing our content marketing. With the content marketing competition as fierce as it is, I think that the key to marketers’ success will be contingent on the fusion of human creativity, technology adoption, and machine learning. In other words, rather than being “creation-driven,” like we were in 2014, we’ll be data-driven in 2015.

Christine Warner, Senior Content Strategist, Skyword, told CMO.com:
Based on my content marketing and brand strategy work in 2014, I plan to champion multichannel personalization in 2015. A single engagement with personal relevance isn’t enough. All marketing efforts must work together to deliver an experience that addresses personal needs and interests. To achieve integrated personalization, you need to uncover insights about the people you’re targeting that can be leveraged in each touch point. Don’t market to the masses–market to the individual.

Jay Acunzo, Director of Platform, NextView Ventures and Co-founder, Boston Content, told CMO.com
I learned that all content marketing truly should be is the act of solving the same problem that your product solves. That’s the only definition we should ever need, but it unfortunately gets shrouded in noise and hype. Yes, content solves customer problems through a different form than product, and even less well (hence, our ability to funnel people to our products), but both departments are tasked with providing solutions for customers by building assets the company owns. When they work in harmony, great content helps customers before they’re ready to buy, while great products help customers after. But both address the same core problem for which the customer seeks solutions.

This may seem simple, but it’s amazing how many organizations still don’t think this way. So, in 2015, don’t just get closer to sales–get closer to product. They are in the business of understanding customers and developing solutions to their problems or fulfillments of their desires. As marketers, we’re now in that exact same business.

Mark Gambill, CMO, MicroStrategy, told CMO.com:
The biggest thing I learned in 2014 is something we all learned back in school but sometimes forget or put to the side because we are mesmerized by all of the bright and shiny digital and social tools and objects–and that is, always place a primary emphasis on understanding your customers and what they truly want. It doesn’t pay to generalize, especially in the age of personalization.

Making the investment in our relationships and in knowing what helps our customers succeed will help us make appropriate investment decisions related to our marketing spend in 2015. Ultimately, all marketing investments need to play a role in addressing customer needs, whether it’s direct path to purchase or part of the mosaic that is your brand and messaging.

Dan Kimball, CMO, Thismoment, told CMO.com:
While 2014 saw many social media milestones and improvements, it also brought with it some consumer privacy blunders on the part of corporations as they looked to engage on social. This year, we can expect consumers to become even more protective of their personal brands, while also engaging consumers through user-generated content (UGC). CMOs looking to leverage UGC in their marketing campaigns will need to understand these sensitivities as well as the legal rights consumers have around the content they produce. In 2015, we’ll see CMOs approach UGC as they do other third-party content. Before they use it for marketing purposes, they will first seek proper rights and permissions or risk losing brand ambassadors.

Gary Survis, CMO, Syncsort, told CMO.com:
Last year we experimented on many different digital marketing tools. This year, we are going to make decisions: Stop doing the marginal performers, double down on what is working, and keep experimenting with what is new. There is rapid change in the tactics we can utilize to connect with our target audience. Successful marketers in 2015 will be those who test new ideas and act on the ones that work best.

Julie Ginches, CMO, eXelate, told CMO.com:
The average lifespan of the CMO used to be a pretty dismal number, with sources quoting as low as 12 months. But lately we’ve seen that number steadily rising, now averaging around 45 months, according to research firm Spencer Stuart. The reason? CMOs have been waking up to the power of data–and the technology that enables them to glean all-important customer insights from that data. In 2015, the opportunities to learn and grow businesses from technologies that inform customer intelligence are better and easier to implement than ever. So, at eXelate, our strategy for the year is to do everything we can to help educate and empower the CMO to leverage data in new ways: to be more relevant to individual customers no matter what channel or device they are on, to find more prospects likely to convert to a sale, and to measure what’s working in faster ways. We will practice what we preach by launching an effort designed to customize information and programs tailored to the needs of the marketer and their organization.

Christopher Penn, VP of Marketing Technology, SHIFT Communications, told CMO.com:
The biggest marketing learning in 2014 for us and our clients was leveraging big data tools much more effectively to uncover hidden opportunities. For example, we fed our digital marketing data into big data tools like IBM Watson and found all kinds of hidden associations that have radically changed how we formulate strategy. These associations and correlations aren’t intuitive, and they’re not visible to the naked eye or even simple analysis tools like a spreadsheet. Going forward, these tools will become part and parcel of every data-driven marketer’s toolkit if they want to remain competitive. The good news for marketers everywhere is that all of these tools are coming down in price; many are becoming accessible even to small businesses. It’s now a question of training and education, rather than access.

Nelson Rodriguez, VP of Global Marketing, Aquent, told CMO.com:
Our marketing department has, traditionally, been very tactically focused. Our goals have likewise been very tactical: order and lead generation. While it’s a given that marketing should have measurable goals closely tied to business goals, without an agreed-on strategic framework, discussion of specific tactics happens in a void. In 2014, we made a shift toward articulating our strategic vision, and it has gone a long way toward helping us evaluate our tactical priorities, focus our efforts, and, more importantly, say “no” when a proposed initiative doesn’t fit our strategic goals. As a result, our 2015 plan is both results-oriented and strategically informed.

Kim Riedell, SVP Product and Marketing, Digilant, told CMO.com:
My biggest takeaway from 2014 is that consumers’ multidevice browsing habits and constantly shifting interests make traditional segmentation models insufficient for synthesizing the wealth of data currently available to marketers. We have moved well beyond identifying consumers with broad segments like “soccer moms” or “car enthusiasts.” In 2015 we should move toward far more dynamic models that can ingest the volume, velocity, and variety of behavioral data and develop consumer personas based on real-time information. Targeting an individual based on multiple identifiable characteristics, rather than a collection of consumers based on a single shared attribute, may result in campaigns that reach fewer consumers but pay off in the form of vastly increased engagement and conversion.

Chuck Cordray, CEO, Inlet, told CMO.com:
One of the biggest lessons we learned last year is that marketers need to meet customers where they want to be–it’s not just about your Web site or your mobile app. The question to ask in 2015 will be, “Where and how do my consumers want to engage with my brand?” The plan for savvy marketers this year will be to put consumer experience first and communicate where it is most convenient for them. Brands that can’t do that will be left out in the cold.

Yasmeen Coning, VP of Marketing, Genesis Media, told CMO.com:
In 2014, marketing became an integrated part of every layer of business for Genesis Media. Marketing was a true collaborative effort across all sectors of the company, from sales to product to operations. When marketing is involved in every aspect of the organization, it helps bolster visibility and brand equity across the board–helping ensure ROI and, ultimately, bottom line. As we kick off 2015, it’s imperative that each sector of the business continues to join forces in order to increase growth and profitability. As the saying goes, there is no “I” in team, and that is something all companies should live by.

Louise Doorn, CMO, Dstillery, told CMO.com: 
Data and technology dominated the marketing discourse in 2014 and will remain top of mind for marketers in 2015.

It’s not an easy task to deliver marketing automation, quality data science, and meaningful analytics across paid, earned, and owned media. The mandate for every marketer is to establish a scalable framework with reliable technology partners in 2015. This framework should be flexible with open APIs to evolve based on customer data and campaign effectiveness analytics.

But the framework alone is not enough. Marketing science and technology is one part of the equation. Consumer and public opinions determine brand reputation. Building a likable brand based on quality products with high integrity and solid service has to be a central tenet. Marketing will continue to spill over into customer experience–an important focus for 2015. There continues to be a huge opportunity for brands to surprise and delight consumers and inspire them to share remarkable experiences through their social graphs.

Welcome to the monthly mPOS Tracker, a PYMNTS Special Report sponsored by ROAM. In this report, we rank the players that we track, and score these players based on numbers and types of devices used, geographies where solutions are implemented, the number of payment types accepted, and more.

This month’s report highlights the fact that mPOS – as ATMs, inventory management tools, loyalty programs and more – took off in 2014, which quickly became the year mPOS went mainstream. Apple Pay’s launch stirred things up, and existing POS platforms reached a whole new level of functionality. Existing players expanded upon their product offerings while new players continued to crowd the space and up the competition. 2015’s first ROAM mPOS Tracker examines and tracks these changes in the last 12 months — the year that truly proved mPOS was more than just a dongle and a phone.

Over the course of 2014, 16 players saw a score change as a result of additional functionality built into their platforms. Several key themes that emerged surrounded power ecosystems, emerging country use cases, omnichannel, enhanced functionality, security, vertical focus, ROI, tablets, and partnerships lost and found.

As the market for mPOS has matured, there has been an increasing emphasis on creating platforms that power ecosystems and incent developers to create new applications that serve the customers of that platform. In addition, the rise of mPOS opportunities and platforms in countries in the Middle East and Asia that previously lacked westernized POS infrastructure led to higher card acceptance in these areas.

Merchants also saw an increasing need in leveraging mPOS to enable a seamless and end-to-end offering between online and physical stores; mPOS tablets became more functional – and all the while, in the era of data breaches, mPOS security became more of a concern. All layers of security, including the enablement of EMV for mPOS devices, are thus being revisited.

The move from dongles and phones to tablets also took hold as part of mPOS’ coming of age and market. A number of new players entered the market with tablet solutions that replaced POS terminals, helping merchants better run their business with easy access to apps.

To close out the year, in December, we added four new players to the mPOS Tracker: Bitstraat, Porta POS, Swiftch, and Swiftch. We also updated the scores of ten players: Bindo, CreditCall, Cardflight, iZettle, NCR Silver, PayPal Here, Revel Systems, ShopKeep, Square and Verifone. Details on these entrants and updates can be found in the report below.

Three key takeaways from December include:

1) Line Busting Goes Universal. Just as merchants feared losing customers in the holiday shopping madness due to long checkout lines, restaurants and QSRs have an increasing focus on using mPOS for line busting as well.

2) Integration Is Essential: Using a third-party app is often appealing because it doesn’t require a merchant to develop, build and implement it. Yet, if it isn’t integrated with company’s existing POS system, it may not be PCI compliant or have a mismatched loyalty program or branding. mPOS systems that offer a seamless loyalty experience and program have the opportunity to take the lead.

3) Is P2P The mPOS On Ramp? Many speculate that Venmo, with its growing customer base and Bluetooth LE functionality, could make for an interesting addition to an existing mPOS platform. Not only could people pay merchants with Venmo, but merchants could also target and communicate with potential customers via the app.