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When the Founder Is the Rainmaker: How to Scale Without Losing the Spark
In many founder-led businesses, the founder isn’t just the leader—they’re also the best (and often only) rainmaker. They land the big deals. They have the trusted relationships. They know the pitch inside and out because they are the pitch.
It works—until it doesn’t.
As the business grows, this model creates a bottleneck. Every new opportunity depends on one and only person. And it’s the same person every time. But there’s a downside. When that person is also responsible for running the business, mentoring the team, and shaping the vision, something eventually gives.
How to Achieve Double-Digit Annual Growth
Tue, May 24, 2022 — For CEOs everywhere, the pressure is on. With an overheated economy creating outsized results – and enhanced expectations, “thrive” has replaced “survive” as the mantra in boardrooms across the country. As a result of the “go-go” market conditions, a new benchmark has been established: If your company can't show a minimum Compound Annual Growth Rate of 10 percent, you are putting yourself and your company at risk. As never before, the key to a business's health, high corporate valuations – and CEO job security -- is revenue growth.
Stemming the Tide: How Conscious Leadership Can Stop the C-Suite Revolving Door
Wed, May 18, 2022 — Co-Authored by: Dana Prestigiacomo, CMO, Chief Outsiders Jim Fallon, Consultant, Conscious Leadership Group Gone are the days of the CEO for life. Today, when a well-intentioned, freshly-recruited CEO enters the doors of the highest executive office at the company, those doors typically are left propped slightly open. In fact, over the past several years, the average tenure of a corporate CEO has plummeted to just under seven years – a worrying notion for companies with consistency on their minds. In reality, the notion of leadership has changed -- and the change has accelerated over the past few years, starting at the very top.
Unique Value Propositions and Their Necessity for Success
Thu, Apr 28, 2022 — Wikipedia defines a value proposition as “the promise that the business will give customers to assure best possible value. The value proposition is a creative statement that depicts the unique selling point. Without this statement marketers lose an opportunity to tell customers why they should pick you over the competition.” In other words, the value proposition is the fundamental reason a customer buys what your company offers.
Tuning Your Growth Engine: How Insights Power Market Success
Wed, Apr 20, 2022 — “There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.” ― Peter Drucker Why is it that the best run companies often have the hardest time growing? I recently had the pleasure of exploring this issue while speaking at the Intelligence Leadership Forum (ILF), led by Liam Fahey — who literally wrote the book (well, actually, eight books) on the subject of insights. What we realized is this: Operational excellence – no matter how good it is – can never be sufficient to win in the long term.
Driving Revenue, Part 2: Death of the MQL
Tue, Apr 5, 2022 — Thank you for joining me today for the eulogy of the marketing qualified lead, or MQL. Once hailed as the best way to affix a value to a prospective sale in the digital age, we are here to toll the bell to its early demise. What led to the hastened death of the MQL? A series of innocent crimes, perpetrated by humans who have become too smart and savvy – or simply too absent-minded -- to play the MQL game. Since these leads are typically derived from “mechanical” interactions between human and machine, humans have unintentionally thwarted the system – for example, blindly tapping away on the TouchPad, or leaving a finger or cursor atop an open email, can accidentally score you as a hot lead.
Driving Revenue with Marketing: How to Reap the Rewards of a Mutually Beneficial Plan
Wed, Feb 16, 2022 — (Blog 1) Step Zero: The Dark Funnel If your sales funnel is lurking in the shadows, it may be because it’s filled with people who are trying to avoid the spotlight. Sure, if you’re like most companies, you have the digital tools you need to generate marketing-qualified leads, or MQLs, by the scads and buckets – casting a broad net through newsletters, promotional emails, social media mentions, website interactions – you know, the entire digital gamut. They make your metrics charts look happy but your sales teams – not so much.
Does the 80/20 Rule Apply to Executives?
Fri, Feb 11, 2022 — The Pareto Principle It was business management consultant Joseph Juran who suggested the 80/20 principle and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto – citing that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. It was 1906 when Pareto observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. He then noted that 80% of the peas in his garden came from 20% of the pea pods. Today, in business, many have observed this “Pareto Principle” across various company operations:
What Does it Take to Innovate? Part 6: The Product Launch
Tue, Feb 8, 2022 — By Ahmet Abaci and Beth Somplatsky-Martori Ready for ignition? If you’ve stuck with us for this entire blog series, it’s all come to this moment: Butterflies be damned and dreams and hopes aside – it’s time to launch our new product into the public consciousness. We’ve been on quite a journey through our previous blogs. At the outset, we started off with a discussion about fostering a culture of innovation within a company. And then we introduced what we called our “Stage Gate Lite” approach to fostering and accelerating new product and service ideas, leading you through the four gates in the process: Concept development, the business case, product development, and testing methodology.
An Inward Focus: How One Company Redefined Itself for Success
Mon, Feb 7, 2022 — It’s always interesting to me when the proverbial emperor is in search of new clothes. Like the time-honored fable, Cask – an innovative company that lives and works in the ServiceNow ecosystem – had done an outstanding job of enabling digital transformation for its clients. But when it came to telling their story and harnessing digital marketing tools to promote itself, it wasn’t quite as masterful. The story of how Cask evolved its brand and turned digital marketing into a dominant force in the ServiceNow space – leading to 40 percent year-over-year growth for four consecutive years – is an object lesson that is worth studying for any B2B leader.