This post originally appeared on PhilipLay.com. To read the post from the original source click here.
One Problem to Avoid at All Costs: Premature Scaling
Today there is an abundance of incubators, accelerators, angel investors, and VC firms to help founding teams avoid the many risks of failure and take full advantage of their opportunities as they seek to get their startup business successfully off the ground.
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This post originally appeared on PhilipLay.com. To read the post from the original source click here.
Picture the following customer success story. In parallel, note the various dimensions in which the relationship between vendor and customer expands.
Further down, I summarize the six possible dimensions in which you may be able to expand each of your major customer relationships and, accordingly, the annual contract value of each relationship.
This specific story is about adoption of e-signature services by a prominent global organization, adapted from the vendor’s customer success page on its web site. From earlier field research, I have seen how proactive this vendor has been in deploying customer success resources in service to their major corporate customers. If only most Saas vendors were half as proactive in this pursuit!
This post originally appeared on PhilipLay.com. To read the post from the original source click here.
One story of visionary buying behavior that I think still sums up the difference between how visionaries behave when responding to disruptive innovations is the tale of how Dell Computer changed the competitive dynamics in the ultra-competitive PC market in the mid-90s (*), and more specifically how Dell’s competitors failed to adapt or emulate their move despite all rational evidence that it was the only way to stay competitive.
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This post originally appeared on PhilipLay.com. To read the post from the original source click here.
Altogether now: Applications come first, platform comes second. Not the other way around!
In your marketing, on your website, or in front of customers, “platform” is practically a suicidal term until customers have shown that they care about what your product or service and the architecture behind it can do to help them solve at least one important, preferably urgent, business problem.
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This post originally appeared on PhilipLay.com. To read the post from the original source click here.
Ever since the advent of cheap and plentiful capital following the global financial crisis, a new business model has gradually muscled its way to the forefront, in many cases supplanting the conventional B2C — business to consumer — model and co-existing alongside the B2B — business to business — business model.
This is venture capital to consumer model which has become commonplace, particularly in consumer markets. Virtually every venture firm has one or more intentional or unintentionalVC2C’s in its portfolio.
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This post originally appeared on PhilipLay.com. To read the post from the original source click here.
At this point early in the new year, chances are that you’re either (still) celebrating after closing some of the large enterprise sales deals that you had in your Q4 pipeline, or lamenting one or more deals that slipped into the new fiscal year or – perish the thought – just fell out of your funnel.
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This post originally appeared on PhilipLay.com. To read the post from the original source click here.
An awful lot has been written about Elon Musk and Tesla in recent months from the now-notorious Q2 earnings call to the just-ended “going private” fiasco. Even more remains to be written about the daunting production and business challenges confronting Tesla and its mercurial CEO, Elon Musk, as the company seeks a way of rebuilding trust with investors.
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By Paul Wiefels, Managing Director, Chasm Group LLC
During the past 10 years, Marketing technology (“Martech”) applications have become numerous; so numerous that the “Martech 5000” now comprises 7000+ entrants. Dr. Philip Kotler of Northwestern University defines marketing as “the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at profit.” Are marketers at risk of focusing so much on the mechanization of the process such that the actual art of the discipline – the craft – is lost along the way?
This post originally appeared on PhilipLay.com. To read the post from the original source click here.
Overview
Despite considerable fanfare around the concept of customer success, in most tech companies CS is still in its infancy as a strategy and an organizing principle. During five years or so of field research and experience with Saas companies, I’ve identified at least three critical gaps which today inhibit the effectiveness of most companies to align with their customers’ target outcomes and thus maximize their growth.
This post originally appeared on PhilipLay.com. To read the post from the original source click here.
Yes, another of those “keys to success” articles. I’m even using the magic number 7, as so many how-to books and articles have done in the past in emulation of Stephen Covey, whose wildly successful Seven Habits books have influenced millions of readers including myself. I hope Covey wouldn’t have minded the implied tribute here, along with so many others over the years.