Finance is the calculus of growth. Engineers, product managers, and CEOs are all guided by financial metrics to lead the business to fulfill its purpose: sustainable, profitable growth. Meanwhile, the outside world uses finance to estimate firm value and potential. Perhaps due to the breadth of stakeholders, it’s easy for a company to slip into ... Read More
What is Smarketing? “Smarketing” is when marketing is only executed with a short-term, sales mentality. It’s the unholy melding of sales and marketing. Why is this bad? With Smarketing, the longer-term, less urgent, strategic marketing activities are pushed aside. It’s what remains when strategic marketing is absent. Strategy begins with segmentation. Click here to read ... Read More
If a stock’s P/E ratio is 20-to-1, then only 5 percent of a firm’s value is driven by this year’s earnings. Put another way, 95 percent of shareholder value is driven by investors’ expectations of the future. Executives with rich stock options have “motive and opportunity” to manipulate these expectations… in ways that often damage the firm’s long-term health.
More in 2-minute video, 5. Shareholder wealth is a poor goal
Warren Buffet once observed, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” If you’re a business leader worried about your “exposure” in troubled times, consider three tools to put in your economic survival kit: 1) cut the waste, 2) invest in B2B training, and 3) increase customer engagement. 1. Cut ... Read More
Do you think your competitors also plan to exceed market growth? So, all the competing suppliers plan to grow faster than the market they serve, year… after year… after year. As Dr. Phil would say, “How’s that been working for you?” Maybe it’s time for a different plan. A plan built on innovation, not hope… on well-grounded skills, not blue-sky spreadsheets.
More in 2-minute video at 2. Superior B2B growth is challenging
A large, unexpected revenue upturn this quarter is good news, right? It certainly feels good, but the satisfaction is fleeting. What you really need is growth that is unrelenting, earned and reliable. When business executives don’t understand the nature of “good” B2B organic growth, they risk three pitfalls. B2B Organic Growth Pitfalls Pitfall 1. “Let’s ... Read More
Unless you deal with two growth problems, you'd better get used to mediocre organic growth: 1) You only “earned” a small part of your growth today; the rest is “inherited” and “market” growth. 2) If you and your competitors are all planning to growth faster than the market you serve, someone will be disappointed. ... Read More
A market segment is a “cluster of customers with similar needs.” You should focus your innovation on individual market segments for optimal effectiveness and efficiency. Follow these four market segmentation “rules” for success. ... Read More
Unless your company has smarter employees, some inherent unassailable advantage, or a markedly different approach to satisfying customers… pesky competitors will always limit your growth. What if you and your competitors were all committing the same innovation errors… but you corrected them first? Good news: There is much to correct.
More in research report, www.whatdrivesb2borganicgrowth.com
Avoid these 7 mistakes in developing new products: 1) Imagining customer needs. 2) Relying on sales reps to capture customer needs. 3) Counting on just a few VOC experts. 4) Using hand-me-down consumer-goods methods. 5) Gathering only qualitative customer feedback. 6) Listening only to immediate customers. 7) Ignoring competitors when you design your product. ... Read More
No one likes to be average—another word for mediocre—in something as important as growing their business. Of course, half of all businesses are below average in any given year. And few in the above-average ranks for B2B growth are confident they can stay there year after year. This can change for your business. You can ... Read More
New Product Success is a metric for current projects. Learning Success—which measures skill-building progress—is a metric for future projects. Most companies just consider New Product Success. Worse, they only look at ultimate metrics, e.g., sales. If they also used intermediate metrics, they’d have enough time to apply what they learned from these metrics.
More in white paper, www.newinnovationmetrics.com
Modern “Jobs-to-be-Done” (JTBD) thinking began with the most popular HBR article ever written: Ted Levitt’s “Marketing Myopia.” It begins this way: “Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are not riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others, which are thought of as seasoned ... Read More
Unlike innovation, quality and productivity apply to current operations and yield diminishing returns. What do you do after you reach zero defects… or your factory is being run by the proverbial “man and a dog”? (The man feeds the dog; the dog bites the man if he touches the controls.) Customer-facing innovation is different. There is no limit. Just look at Apple Computer.
More in white paper, www.catchtheinnovationwave.com (page 2)