Success Tip : Making Your Business Look BIGGER to Your CustomersWritten by Bob Decker
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this, you round out your organizational landscape and reap benefits of decades of experience without having to pay a VP’s salary and benefits until you are financially ready to do so. ANALYZE YOUR SALES AND MARKETING INFRASTRUCTURE TO BECOME MORE COMPETITIVE The first step in becoming more competitive is to perform a complete, objective, analysis of your sales and marketing infrastructure. It will be extremely difficult for you to view your business dispassionately and perform an objective assessment. For this reason, you will probably want to look at contracting with outside professionals to perform your assessment. These industry experts have decades of corporate experience in building successful sales and marketing strategies to help them understand your challenges and how to address them. An outside consultant can provide you with a comprehensive analysis that culminates in a gap analysis and steps to address holes in your sales and marketing efforts moving forward. Once you have this assessment and know where gaps are, you can begin to build a sales and marketing plan that will enable your company to effectively win against any and all competitors, big or small. You can either perform steps to execute plan internally, or hire outside expertise to perform those functions that you don’t have knowledge and experience to perform. This straightforward and easy to implement process will get your company on fast track to more sales. GETTING STARTED: DON’T HIRE PERMANENT EMPLOYEES! The catch 22 is this: you need help to compete with big boys, but you can’t afford to hire and maintain type of staff your bigger competitors have. How do you compete? Eventually, as you reach your sales and revenue goals and meet growth expectations you have put into place, you will be able to hire expertise you need for all aspects of your successful business. However, hiring permanent personnel is not usually best option in early stages of your business plan. Permanent employees will cost you much more in form of benefits and taxes and must be paid month after month, even during times when their roles are not needed. By contrast, outside consultants can be engaged on a project by project basis and generally offer you more expertise than you would be able to afford on a permanent basis. In short, hiring an outside resource provides expert sales and marketing knowledge capital that allows a “small business” to look and feel like a big company, without accruing costs that come with being big. By engaging a trained consultant on a project basis, your company gains added freedom to refocus resources in other areas as your needs change. START WINNING IN THE MARKETPLACE Sales and Marketing Pros can guide you through process of giving your company look and feel of a much larger organization. SMP’s Opportunity Maximizer Workshop performs a full-scale assessment of your sales and marketing infrastructure and provides you with a gap analysis and steps to close identified gaps. SMP also offers part or full time Advisory Services, allowing you to just pick up phone and request help as you need it. SMP is ready to work with you and your team to package your business so that it embraces future. Wouldn’t you like to put your competitors in position of having to explain why their offerings aren’t as good as yours. Once you take away their size, all they have left is their products…and you know you have them beat by a mile there. It’s time to let your customers know that too. Contact Bob Decker at 952-955-1200 or visit www.salesandmarketingpros.com for more information.
Mr. Decker is the Principal of Sales and Marketing Pros (SMP), LLC, founded in 2003 to foster venture incubation, market entry, and growth services to technology and services companies. Prior to founding Sales and Marketing Pros, Mr. Decker was a Senior Sales and Marketing Executive with IBM Corporation. He holds a Bachelor in Business Administration Degree with a marketing major from the University of Notre Dame.
| | Google IPO and its effect on the Venture Capital IndustryWritten by Keith Henry
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Joe Rubin, Director, FundingPost: “The majority of VCs told us that it is ‘business as usual’ and there will not be much of an impact. At FundingPost, we believe that impact will be felt at CEO level – where a founder of a startup sees potential for a home run in their exit.” Jack Carsten, Managing Director, Horizon Ventures: ”The firms that invested in this company are going to be ‘rescued’ from poor returns, as it is one of only successes in sector. That might influence LPs to reinvest in Internet centric funds...but I doubt it. Public and private valuations tend to move together sector by sector, even though this often does not make logical sense. So if Google IPO valuation holds up over time, it can become a benchmark for exit valuations. On other hand, if it tanks, it will only reflect badly on sector - greedy VCs cheated public again....” Chris Roser, General Partner, Roser Ventures: “The IPO market always has an impact on venture investing in regards to higher valuations more open IPO window. The question is how much Google will influence IPO market and to extent it is successful, I believe, it will contribute to a good IPO market.” 3) Do you feel that this will heat up M&A space - with Google now having "currency" for acquisitions and Yahoo and Microsoft racing to compete? Joe Rubin, Director, FundingPost: “The majority of investors felt that only a few companies would benefit directly and that M&A space has improved this year independently.” John Shulman, Managing Director, Allied Capital: “There is no doubt that M&A will heat up. It is happening anyway and this will only accelerate velocity of activity.” Jesse Lawrence, Associate, Updata Partners: “The IPO may heat up M&A activity within search and related sectors, but should not have a significant effect on other software sectors.”
For over three years FundingPost has worked with thousands of Angel and Venture Capital Investors and Entrepreneurs. Information: Keith Henry FundingPost (203) 659-6649 info@FundingPost.com http://www.FundingPost.com
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