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Having a set of metrics that you watch & that you feel are the key drivers of your success helps keep clarity. And the more public you can make your goals for these key metrics the better. You will likely have multiple sets of metrics you keep depending on the company’s stage, one’s function in the company and level.
This is part of a series on sales & marketing. I previously covered how early phase sales teams should be “evangelical&# and consultative in nature. The first post on scaling sales dealt with “aiming&# your sales teams – making sure they were focused on the right opportunities.
In case you hadn’t noticed, the key elements of a competitive advantage for your business have changed as businesses move online, and your domain is instantly global. As a business advisor, I have to recommend even to established companies that they review and revamp their competitive strategy now, even if it appears to be working today.
Most of us are driven by the competitive spirit, the desire or need to win. It provides a short competitive experience with a measurable outcome in which the players know who won and by how much. Create small but meaningful competitions between groups or individuals for which recognition or small rewards are published in advance.
Company grew by more than “400% each year” for past few years [assume growth metric = revenues]. Competition: Chegg (has raised $144 in debt and equity)—estimated by Steven Carpenter ( TechCrunch ) to be 10x more unique visitors than BookRenter (during peak book renting seasons) with nearly $140mm in revenues for 2010.
The most obvious way to explain this is with sales people. If you hire 6 sales reps in January at $120,000 / year salary then you’ve taken on an extra $60,000 per month in costs yet these sales people might not close new business for 4-6 months. “COGS” represents the amount that each sale costs you.
Put simply – you need enough users in a segment who care about what you’re doing to dictate investing further in the product or in sales & marketing resources. One of the things I have observed over the years is that a hard charging sales oriented founder/CEO can often hide the defects in a product. The money quote.
Summary: Send the Deck Pitch decks are sales & marketing decks and like in any sales activity, any great sales person assumes his or her competition will eventually get their deck. Competition isn’t won or lost by your marketing decks?—?it’s it’s won by how you innovate and by how you execute.
It starts with a vision, but benefits quickly from a structured process of idea generation, evaluation, prototyping, customer feedback, and success metrics. Creating intellectual property, including patents, is the kay to long-term value and a sustainable competitive advantage. Innovation is not a random walk into the unknown.
It starts with a vision, but benefits quickly from a structured process of idea generation, evaluation, prototyping, customer feedback, and success metrics. Creating intellectual property, including patents, is the kay to long-term value and a sustainable competitive advantage. Innovation is not a random walk into the unknown.
Most of us are driven by the competitive spirit, the desire or need to win. It provides a short competitive experience with a measurable outcome in which the players know who won and by how much. Create small but meaningful competitions between groups or individuals for which recognition or small rewards are published in advance.
While you all recognize that reacting to weak market signals is critical to staying in business and staying competitive, I find that many don’t have the skills and focus to trigger change decisions on a timely basis. When sales fall off, you need to dig deep for the “why,” rather than just assuming the price needs to go down.
Then you can do a little bit of research and find out that very few companies ever achieve this valuation in a trade sale so you’re clearly gunning for an IPO. while acknowledging that San Fran deals are often higher valuations due to increased competition amongst investors. Use competition to make sure you get a fair price.
We also spoke about technology systems in the perspective of global competition. He believes that one of the financial metrics taught at business schools and reinforced by Wall Street has accelerated offshoring of industries. The numerator (return) encourages more sales, which is fine.
We have a very sophisticated, analytics and software platform that over half the Fortune 50 are now using, to help guide how they invest in marketing and sales activities and investments. Its primary goal is to focus on identifying what is truly driving demand, analytically, so that our customers can optimize their activities.
They are tasked with “getting deals done” so they race around talking to tons of potential partners inking anything from channel sale deals , product integration, international distribution agreements, co-marketing arrangements, M&A discussions, etc. Here’s how it goes: You have a business development group with two people.
I remember just a decade ago in 2003 when we all laughed at how dumb people in the 90′s were talking about the race to “capture as many eyeballs as possible” before your competition. The minute you try to monetize now they have metrics with which to beat you up and say you’re business has limitations.”
For example, I commonly see metrics to keep track of revenue per employee, overtime, and absenteeism, but I don’t often see measures of overall customer satisfaction with individual employees. Incentives should be a combination of metrics and recognition to highlight results. Incent and reward employees who delight customers.
Your focus for momentum could be sales, profitability, or number of customers, but trying to keep all possible parameters growing is simply not practical. It’s important to define your growth strategy, document it, communicate it to your team, and align metrics and employee rewards to target goals.
TechCrunch Europe ran an article in November of last year that European startups need to work as hard as those in Silicon Valley and I echoed the sentiment in my post about the need for entrepreneurs to be maniacal about their businesses if one wants to work in the hyper competitive tech world. Our first big institutional round was $16.5
In fact, a business plan is needed more by you than investors, as the blueprint for your company, team communication, and progress metrics. It always amazes me how an entrepreneur can define his market opportunity so broadly, and then assess his competition so narrowly in the next breath. Competition and sustainable advantage.
Entrepreneurs need to document a process of responding to a market need, sizing opportunity, assigning a specific business model, and planning for marketing, sales, and customer satisfaction. For progress and success assessment, each of these needs some metrics defined, a training plan, and responsibility assignments within your team.
Often board members themselves don’t do the work to say “what metrics would we like to see.” Any great board member should tell you, “please don’t create any performance metrics or materials that analyze the business that you’re not already creating for your own management’s use.” Sometimes they don’t even know.
Yes, it’s true that FOMO (fear of missing out) is driving some irrational behavior and valuations amongst uber competitive deals and well-financed VCs. Mobile devices deliver “bottom of funnel” sales opportunities that deliver real & immediate economic results. Bottom of the sales funnel. Morning in VC.
In fact, a business plan is needed more by you than investors, as the blueprint for your company, team communication, and progress metrics. It always amazes me how an entrepreneur can define his market opportunity so broadly, and then assess his competition so narrowly in the next breath. Competition and sustainable advantage.
It starts with a vision, but benefits quickly from a structured process of idea generation, evaluation, prototyping, customer feedback, and success metrics. Creating intellectual property, including patents, is the key to long-term value and a sustainable competitive advantage. Innovation is not a random walk into the unknown.
The basic alignment framework of strategy, customers, people, and processes hasn’t changed, but the pace of technological, competitive, and social change has increased at an amazing rate. If you have had to pivot from the consumer market to enterprise customers, that requires new pricing models and new sales channels.
Have you projected sales and marketing costs, cash flow, and capital requirements? Develop metrics with which to measure yourself and use these to incrementally expand and improve your offering as fast as the market and capital will allow. Show return on investment, growth rates, and market penetration. Don’t stand still.
Entrepreneurs need to document a process of responding to a market need, sizing opportunity, assigning a specific business model, and planning for marketing, sales, and customer satisfaction. For progress and success assessment, each of these needs some metrics defined, a training plan, and responsibility assignments within your team.
In my experience, competition is the biggest challenge here. This work requires market feedback, managing trials, and working with the sales team as well as developers. Some people are very good as defining metrics, roll-out programs, and reward systems for marketing and sales programs.
Every business owner and entrepreneur like you I work with wishes they could better predict product demand and sales, for managing inventory and long-term business planning. We all have our favorite metric and our passion, but keeping up with real-world changes and trends seems to be always just out of reach.
From time to time, include customers and sales members in ideation sessions. Once a new product is launched, a key metric is the ratio of new product sales to overall sales. Sustainable innovation is really the only sustainable competitive advantage. Idea management. Build and manage a pipeline of ideas.
In the case of MakeSpace we had huge initial successes in New York City as Rahul led the scaling of our drivers, our trucks and our warehouses and we figured out the right price points to beat the local competition. We have been able to build deep customer insights on product, pricing, service, geography, competition, etc.
In this period (less than 2 years) he has brought on incredibly talented senior execs is sales, marketing, product management, client services, finance, vp engineering and more. In Rob’s spare time he always seems to be going to a boxing class or some other competitive, physical activity. He fights hard for what he believes in.
That’s because a company’s value is a composite of all of the quantitative and qualitative factors that comprise a company: revenues, expenses, risks, growth prospects, quality of the management team, competitive advantages, strength of the intellectual property, and so forth.
In today’s highly competitive ad environment, both content and data are kings. It’s different than working with a group like us that’s trying to optimize every small piece of the funnel, and being accountable for the entire funnel to drive as much sales or revenue. The key takeaway?
To keep you on a positive track with potential investors, I recommend the following logic principles, to balance your passion in presenting your vision of a new business: Make sure your plan includes some business metrics. Postulate competitive reactions and your responses. Present a viable exit strategy for investors to cash out.
From time to time, include customers and sales members in ideation sessions. Once a new product is launched, a key metric is the ratio of new product sales to overall sales. Sustainable innovation is really the only sustainable competitive advantage. Idea management. Build and manage a pipeline of ideas.
Your competitive advantage. Identify your sustainable competitive advantage, like unique benefits, cost savings, or industry ties. Don’t kill your credibility by saying you have no competition. Outline your sales and marketing strategy (direct marketing, sales channel, viral marketing, and lead generation).
Without taking a dime of outside capital, the company has achieved impressive success in a competitive, SaaS market segment, landing companies such as Nike, Intuit, NASA, AutoDesk and PBS. The problem is that stakeholders, like marketing and sales, don’t know what the latest version of the roadmap is.
Entrepreneurs need to document a process of responding to a market need, sizing opportunity, assigning a specific business model, and planning for marketing, sales, and customer satisfaction. For progress and success assessment, each of these needs some metrics defined, a training plan, and responsibility assignments within your team.
Funding is depleted before customer sales ramp up. Your customers and competition make unexpected moves. Smarter entrepreneurs don’t wait for a crisis to drive change, by defining key milestones and metrics for tracking progress. Marketing and sales take more time and effort than anticipated.
These show a focus on the business elements required for success, and metrics for ensuring accountability, management control, and feedback along the way. You need to show that you have a powerful team, and can attract and lead people with strong skills complimentary to yours for marketing, finance, sales, and operations.
Your competitive advantage. Identify your sustainable competitive advantage, like unique benefits, cost savings, or industry ties. Don’t kill your credibility by saying you have no competition. Outline your sales and marketing strategy (direct marketing, sales channel, viral marketing, and lead generation).
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