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Paul Sparrow
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Recent Posts
Winning the Fraud and Cybersecurity Race: A Go-to-Market Blueprint for Competitive Edge
Fraud and cybercrime have become a systemic, trillion-dollar drag on the global economy—but the fight to turn the curve is more than a market opportunity.
Over the past few years, I have worked alongside cybersecurity and fraud-management teams in government, banking, and payments, and nothing is more satisfying than seeing a new solution stop a romance scam or prevent a pensioner from losing their life savings.
Can Your Business Thrive Despite Changes in the Economy?
Wed, Jan 29, 2020 — Part 1: How Good are your Insights: Are you Guilty of Confirmation Bias? How do most business owners make decisions? If you answered, a) by reading the tea leaves; b) by the seat of their pants; c) through instinct and innuendo; or d) by flipping a coin, you may want to make an appointment with a good psychiatrist – and perhaps consider another line of work. In all seriousness, when I ask business owners about the foundation for their optimism about the economy, the answers often include sources such as cable news, blogs, websites, the Wall Street Journal, and sometimes even Google searches about the “state of the economy.”
Being Ferdinand Magellan: Four Key Predictive Indicators for Forecasting Your Growth Trajectory
Tue, Nov 27, 2018 — If you know the real story of the first man to successfully circumnavigate the earth, you know that Ferdinand Magellan died 16 months before his mission was completed. Despite his devastating death while in battle in the Philippines, his crew fearlessly sailed on without him – and completed his quest. They succeeded because Captain Magellan took the time to put the right KPIs in place – and his leadership team was deeply involved in the management, course predictions, and execution of the mission. Since they knew the predictable trajectory and the foreseeable obstacles before them, they were confident in carrying on to the finish line without their leader. As a CMO, I consider it my duty to provide navigable guidelines for those who are wondering what the best business growth metrics are for tracking, measurement, and forecasting. While Magellan’s guys didn’t exactly employ the same metrics as the ones I’m about to show you, it will be a good start in confidently sailing the challenging seas of your business marketplace.
What You Measure (And What You See) Is What You Get
Fri, Nov 16, 2018 — Are You Using Your KPIs Appropriately: Report Card or Predictive Data? After reading my first article in this series about using KPIs to properly predict the growth of your business, you likely began to understand why you should be wary of a simplistic view of KPIs in reporting company performance. Moreover, you may now fully realize the distinction between performance indicators and predictive indicators, which will help you uncover critical forecasts within your company data. As McKinsey explained in a recent article, “What gets measured, gets done.” That may be true, however, performance management begins to fail in any enterprise when executives use and act upon poor metrics, the wrong targets, or irrelevant information. How about an illustration? Let’s take a glance at a fictitious company example: New 3Q product sales at SparrowCo are up by 21 percent – and existing products sales are performing at the same steady level as last quarter, which was up 12 percent over 1Q. Business is clearly growing, would you agree? Everyone is happy, and the sales reps are counting commission dollars. Yay! Party time! But wait…there’s more! Let’s take a deeper look.
Are You Using Your KPIs Appropriately: Report Card or Predictive Data?
Fri, Oct 19, 2018 — Just a few weeks ago, I enjoyed yet another screening of the 1976 movie The Gumball Rally. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a slapstick satire about a wild and crazy cross-country race. The competition starts in New York City, with a goal to finish in the shortest amount of time. During the trek, a driver named Franco rips the review mirror off his windshield and dramatically announces the first rule of Italian driving: “What’s behind me is not important!” Even though I’ve heard this line plenty of times, I couldn’t help but chuckle. This belief is not only applicable to the business world – but appropriate when creating and measuring your company’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). According to Investopedia, a KPI is a set of measurable data that a company uses to gauge its performance over time. Examples include return on marketing investment, customer lifetime value (LTV), and customer acquisition cost (CAC). There are endless performance indicators you can use to measure your business goals.
Supercharging Your SWOT, Step One: Consolidating Your SWOT
Wed, Jan 10, 2018 — Conducting your SWOT analysis was fun, wasn’t it? It allowed you to take a break from working in your business, and allowed you to work on your business — a valuable step back during which you were able to take a breather from the day-to-day grind, and view the big picture of your business with clarity. No matter how long your SWOT process lasted, undoubtedly, once you got rolling, the information flowed — resulting in a growing cavalcade of lists that characterized your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Do I Need a Chief Growth Officer? Five Questions to Ask Your Top Marketer in 2018
Wed, Jan 3, 2018 — Back when my hair was long, and my taste in music was more eclectic, I was a huge fan of the musician Neil Young. Among the great albums he issued was one called “Rust Never Sleeps” – introduced at a time when newer artists threatened his relevance.
Supercharging Your SWOT, Step Two: Activating Your SWOT
Tue, Oct 3, 2017 — Congratulations! If you’re reading this blog, you’ve mastered the art of collecting the data for your SWOT (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats) analysis, and have grouped similar concepts into manageable chunks of information. At many enterprises, this is where the SWOT work dies — leaving company executives with a keen understanding of the state of their business, but lacking a clear path to rendering the findings actionable in an effort to foster real change. Think of the Starship Enterprise never returning from years of space exploration — all that knowledge and data stored in the ship’s memory banks and officer logs, yet nobody ever does anything with it.
Supercharging Your SWOT: Three Steps to Turning Yours into Actionable Business Impact
Mon, Sep 25, 2017 — I’d like to start this blog by offering my hearty congratulations. Having recently completed your SWOT Analysis — that fundamental exploration of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats related to your business — and declared it a masterpiece, you now have entered a warm and fuzzy zone known as “After the SWOT.”
Keeping it Real: The Next Four of 10 Reasons Why Your SWOT is Really a SWAG
Mon, Oct 17, 2016 — Let’s keep it real: While myriad technology-driven changes have garnered much of our strategy-related attention and interest over the last several years, the need to evaluate an organization’s fundamental strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is more important than ever.