John Elkington, the Founding partner of Volans, a future-focused business working at the intersection of the sustainability, entrepreneurship and innovation movements wrote a very interesting piece (watch the video below) in Fast company sometime back and I went back to it to pick up some powerful ideas.
I came across an article in Business Mirror (and HBR) by Steve W Martin a teacher of sales strategy at the University of Southern California Marshall School of Business where he outlines 6 major reasons why Salespeople wins or looses sales.
What is it you ask? Well Benjamin Hardy has written a long-read piece on that. He defines the Culture Wall as an intention “to create an environment that continually reminds me one of what I stand for and what I aspire toward……they create a shared vision, set of beliefs, expectations and direction for desired behavior.”
If you are running a SAAS company you are part of the Subscription economy. One killer datapoint we often ignore is ‘Churn’. Normally we are so focused on the customer acquisition part – with marketing initiatives and events and advertising and campaigns we overlook at what rate we are loosing customers. Churn impact both the key numbers – CAC and LTV. The motivation of all SAAS companies is to reduce the first and increase the 2nd. Churn puts a spanner of sorts in that (fly)wheel. So we need to pay attention on day one.
Andy Ruskin likes to cite two presentations – one, the Zuora deck and two, the Elon Musk presentation introducing the Tesla batteries as his example of great business stories told by companies. There is no denying that story telling or a compelling narrative with its build up , a la Freytag’s Pyramid [- Exposition – (The Set Up ) Rising Action ( complications, development ) Climax ( peak tension and turning point ) Falling action ( Resolutions, revelations) and finally denouement (final resolution )] needs to be designed. Or perhaps The Hero’s Journey. What ever the structure, there is no denying of the fact that your organisations story narrative is the key to your ability to communicate and execute on your vision. Andy Ruskin’s presentation The 5 elements of a Great Strategic Narrative has s Prezi version by Igor Lacerdino.
AI is here. And it’s in your pocket.
Turing Award 2018 goes to Hinton, LeCun and Bengio. \
“Honesty is a very expensive gift; just don’t expect it from cheap people.” Warren Buffet on Feedback
Tom Tunguz followed up his article on free trials survey ( presented at Saastr 2019) with another insightful post on assisted and unassisted free trails. They are linked and should be read together. The key points that you need to dig deeper into are :
Mark Suster is Partner, Upfront Ventures and ‘2x entrepreneur (who) sold both companies (last one to Salesforce.com)’. He has written a lucid series on startups and boards. It is a contentious, ambiguous and a topic without clarity. For founders that is. When do you form a board? Who do you offer (or deny) a seat? Who drops off when? Who controls the board at round D? How can I protect my self from getting fired by my board? Is that a real threat
