Growth Insights for CEOs

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.
Recent Posts

Five Major Indicators that Suggest a Need for Focus
Tue, Mar 3, 2020 — A Common Challenge for B2B technology, SaaS and Professional Services Businesses If market demand was a fixed commodity, attracting new business would require only that you create awareness and build interest around well-known needs. Companies who see their marketplace in this way often subscribe to a “lather, rinse, repeat,” approach to pipeline management – focusing marketing dollars on prospects already well-along their purchasing journey, identifying qualified opportunities, but paying little attention to the world of prospects who do not yet see their needs as urgent.

Four Steps to Creating a Data-Intelligent Strategic Digital Marketing Plan
Wed, Jul 10, 2019 — This eBook presents an approach to the development of a data-intelligent digital marketing strategy to drive business growth.

Demand vs. Lead Generation: A Strategic Approach to Creating Highly-Qualified Leads
Tue, Jul 9, 2019 — Generating leads for B2B companies is one of the most important responsibilities of your marketing team. The concept of demand generation vs. lead generation many times are considered the same, or that one philosophy rather than the other should be adopted. Cracking the code of generating highly-qualified leads to grow your business involves the right focus on both demand and lead generation.
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Product > Market Alignment: The True Sign of a Startup Unicorn?
Tue, Mar 29, 2016 — For those of us knee-deep in the startup world, we’re inundated by Unicorn noise – first their rise and more recently their fall (or, at least their right-sizing). Any number of factors have played into this trajectory: from FOMO venture capital activity that drove unsustainable valuations, to startup growth hacking techniques that indicate initial hyper-scaling, but often run out of steam - exposing the startup’s gap between product and promise.

Digital Demand Generation Marketing: Optimize for the Future
Tue, Dec 16, 2014 — Digital Demand Generation: A New Level of Marketing In my last blog, I talked about the need to have your marketing plans be mindful of the increasing importance of marketing technology infrastructure, data, content, mobile and privacy regulations. Assuming you are ready with your new marketing strategies, it’s time to take a deeper dive into the great level of the marketing playing field – digital demand generation marketing. In a little under a decade, the advent of new social and online tools has dramatically changed demand generation – using tools that are accessible, easy to use and offer the ability to micro-target like never before.