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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.
Quarterly Business Reviews: A CXO guide to Best Practices
Thu, May 16, 2024 — Most companies run regular QBRs (Quarterly Business Reviews). Getting into QBR practice its benefits, like getting your broader team buy-in on your sales and marketing team issues, creating a sense of urgency on important cross-team action items, building a learning culture within your team, sharing new product initiatives in advance, collect and measure customer feedback (or NPS) regularly. Not to mention you get valuable team face time, undistracted by daily sales activities.
All In On AI? A Practical Approach To Leveraging AI
Fri, May 10, 2024 — How Do You Eat An (AI) Elephant? A long-standing joke is “How do you eat an elephant? Answer: One bite at a time.” I feel the same holds for AI, especially for those organizations and individuals that might feel a little overwhelmed by all of the talk (hype) about AI and that if you are not leveraging all of the latest and greatest AI technology you are already behind and you will never catch up. Your approach may need to be “one bite at a time.”
Growth Gears: The Buyer's Journey
Thu, May 2, 2024 — How Marketing and Sales Work Together Increase Your Brand’s ROI I’ve seen it before–a company’s sales department blaming the marketing department for ineffective marketing and the marketing department blaming sales for not properly incubating leads and getting potential customers to convert.
Analyzing Customer Data to Gain Actionable Insights
Wed, May 1, 2024 — Customer data is crucial when creating a sales and marketing strategy. But humans are not made of data, so when considering the customer, you must acknowledge that the data itself doesn’t reveal the whole story. How marketers gain actionable insights – and drive growth – through data is a more important question to ask and answer.
Earn the Right to be Heard as a Brand
Thu, Apr 25, 2024 — How to Build Trust With Your Sales & Marketing Today’s business’ decision makers are savvy. They can sniff out inauthenticity a mile away. This means marketers have to put in the work to build rapport with a prospect and earn the right to be heard. So many brands jump into conversations and ask for something immediately. While you might get lucky now and then, more times than not, you will actually have to build trust and provide value before a true connection is even a consideration. Great marketing can help you do this!
The Benefits of a Unified Sales and Marketing Strategy
Mon, Apr 22, 2024 — It used to be that companies could achieve growth by simply focusing on sales or having sales and advertising be complementary marketing tactics. But today, macro and micro pressures along with evolving landscapes across industries have resulted in a more competitive landscape. Tools like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) provide a level of sophistication, and these tools can help business leaders bridge strategies and tactics across different business units.
Seven Steps to Shorten Your Sales Cycle
Thu, Apr 11, 2024 — Does your company provide customers with expensive business inputs? Or are you crucial in other ways to your customers’ business success?
Artificial Intelligence in Action: Developing Your Company's AI Strategy
Tue, Apr 9, 2024 — In the rapidly evolving domain of technology, developing a strategy for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming crucial for companies looking to leverage the transformative potential of AI. An AI strategy is essential for defining the integration and application of AI technologies within a company's framework, ensuring that such integration is in harmony with the broader business objectives and results in a seamless fusion with existing operational, product, and service sectors. McKinsey reported that "companies that have leading digital and AI capabilities outperform laggards by two to six times to total shareholder returns across every sector analyzed."
Where Pricing and Marketing Strategies Intersect
Thu, Mar 28, 2024 — Back in the day, pricing was a foundational piece of all marketing strategies. When I went to grad school, for example, the four Ps were in vogue – product, price, place, and promotion. At that time, the intersection of pricing and marketing was seen as a given, almost a tautological concept. But as marketing professionals and professors' desire to innovate and differentiate intensified, the traditional 4Ps evolved into new frameworks like the “4Cs”, emphasizing concepts such as customer, cost, convenience, and communication and the "4Es" of experience, exchange, evangelism, and everywhere into the marketing lexicon. And I admit I lapse into momentary shudders when I think of all the as-yet-untapped letters in the alphabet.