Private Equity investors, as a rule, have a propensity for looking before they leap. Known for their discipline and attention to detail, PE investors rarely reach for a dime without conducting a fair amount of due diligence. Most potential PE investment activity has within its foundation a document known as the investment thesis – essentially, the private investors’ “white paper,” outlining in detail how value will be created and a return made on the investment within the target exit timing.

Often the primary drivers of this thesis are restructuring costs – fixed overhead, asset deployment and operating expense. Another driver relates to the sales force – in particular, whether an addition of headcount or selling tools would drive more sales, and increase effectiveness.

In my last post I shared a process for companies to consider using when evaluating new products for new markets.  The core idea is to test “customer readiness” before making significant investments in Marketing and Sales. And the vehicle for testing is to use a cross-functional Customer Development team to reach out to prospects to create and expedite learning moments. Uncover the facts, test your assumptions, and iterate on the product, if absolutely required, before executing the big launch. In this post, I’ll share an experience I’ve had when using this approach.

If you buy into the old corollary that the “future is now,” be prepared to be blown away by what tomorrow’s future holds.

If you thought that today’s wave of marketing analytics tools represented a bold new frontier in how enterprises can track and nurture consumers through the buying cycle, well, in the words of Bachmann Turner Overdrive – “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

And, if you believed that the kind of brain-reading technology that served up personalized advertisements to Tom Cruise in the movie “Minority Report” was the stuff of fiction, it may be closer to reality than you ever thought.

As a CEO, you want results. To support your lofty goals, you’ve run a good strategy session; and you have a solid plan of attack. But, do you really understand the journey from your strategic plan to your desired outcome? Are you ready to use the single best tool you’ll ever have, the little understood key performance indicator, or KPI?

Like it or not, two big changes are coming to search that will impact the ranking of every web site – voice search and Google mobile-first indexing. One is fueled by the way we search and the other is what Google will search in the near future.