Blog Articles

I don't often feature guest blog posts, but lately, I've been meeting amazingly talented leaders that I've changed my mind. Here is an article that will get you thinking from Valerie Cobb, fractional Chief Revenue Officer and the host of The Revenue Maze Podcast. If you haven't subscribed to it yet, I do recommend you subscribe today. And thanks for the plug Valerie!

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And Valerie Cobb says...

What happens when thought leadership, the former chairman and CEO of Google,…

The goal of this stage is to be ready to scale and build a much bigger business. In this stage, your focus is on building a scalable infrastructure to improve your selling as well as how you deliver the products and services that you offer--customer experience.

You'll be focused on questions like:

• How can I make this more efficient?
• Is there a way that could be easier for me to do this?
• How can I make fewer sacrifices (money, time, or energy) to complete this task?

Efficiency may sound …

The majority of new businesses fail in the market. According to some studies, up to 90% of businesses fail within the first year. Of course, this makes sense since, in order for there to be victors in business, the bulk must lose.

This is also one of the most important reasons why the majority of new firms fail. There could be a variety of elements at work here. Some go above their budget and allow costs to spiral out of control. Others hire the wrong personnel, while many others fail miserably w…

A better name for this stage would be “AHHH THERE’S ANOTHER FIRE”. You don’t know what you don’t know about your product, service, or market, yet.

This stage is all about identifying the actual problem that your product or service is intended to solve as well as the actual audience that is willing to pay for it. This is a reactive stage mainly focused on lead generation. All questions that need to be answered will fall into one of two categories:

• Are you creating a solution that fits the mar…

What does it mean to scale your business?
How is it different from growing your business?
Is scaling the same for all businesses?

These seemingly common questions have very different answers. Growth and scaling are often talked about as if they were one and the same. But they're not and it's important to know the difference.

Scaling is about increasing revenue without incurring significant costs. The intention is that as revenue grows, expenses only increase incrementally. When an organizatio…

The sales funnel is dead—well at least it should be. Yes, many companies love them, but the reality is, that building your brand with a lead funnel approach is a lot like a dog chasing its tail. It requires a lot of energy, for short-term results. The second you stop, the momentum stops, and you’re left feeling unstable and dizzy. If that isn’t enough, according to Forrester, less than one percent of the leads that come out of the bottom of that funnel will be loyal clients. That’s a lot of time…

Go-To-Market ensures that what you’re selling is what you’re delivering and that it always works for you. It focuses on brand experience from prospects through repeat clients and processes between marketing, sales, and client experience. Go-To-Market is about the entire revenue stream and creating high-performance revenue teams or RevOps.

Ok, now that you know what Go-To-Market is about and the results it seeks to achieve, let’s talk about how it accomplishes this. A successful Go-To-Market Str…

A successful Go-to-Market Strategy unifies and streamlines the brand experience between a potential client through a repeat client and the processes between marketing, sales, and customer experience so well together that you can't tell where the one starts and the other stops.

It’s a practical path for creating alignment to go from launch to transform without losing momentum and stalling out somewhere along the way. A Go-to-Market Strategy is a foundation for building high-performing teams to s…

An effective brand positioning strategy is an absolute must for scaling brands to succeed. It’s a strategy that seeks to influence how the market perceives your brand and the value you provide. It’s specific, clear, and distinctive from your competitors. It’s the process of strategically placing your organization, a product, or service that you offer in the market so that your target audience can easily notice and take action.

A successful brand strategy yields benefits such as increased client…

What is a snowflake? More importantly, what do snowflakes have to do with branding and scaling your organization?

A snowflake is when a brand believes that it is unique in its market and that the market should go out of its way to recognize it. It’s mostly ego-driven and is guaranteed to backfire. The moral of the story: don’t be a snowflake. The reality is because you are still reading this, you’re not.

When an organization struggles with fundraising, generating leads, closing sales, or retai…