Tag Archives: Source

What are Effective Website Features and Metrics? Five Options

Situation: A CEO wants to revise his company’s website to be a more effective source of leads. What has worked well for others gaining leads from their companies’ websites? What has intrigued potential clients and prompted them to contact the company about its products and services? What are effective website features and metrics?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Have as much usable content as possible – useable by those who visit the site. This will drive traffic to the site. Traffic will produce leads from a certain percent of users who are impressed by the company’s capabilities.
  • Does the site meet the company’s target customers’ needs? If so, are the search terms optimized to attract them to the site when they perform searches?
  • Create an interactive demo on the site that will be of interest to the company’s current customers and potential customers.
  • Use the company’s customer extranet to create a “wow” experience that will create buzz within client companies and help to attract additional business from those companies.
    • An extranet is an intranet that can be partially accessed by authorized outside users, enabling businesses to exchange information over the internet securely.
  • Put a freebie tool on the public site and extranet that helps clients to solve a frequent problem. This helps to segue customers and potential customers from personal use to product or service choice.
  • Whatever tools are used, include a unique link to each approach or tool and offer the customer a modest discount for using the link.
    • Counting the frequency of links used is a simple way to determine which tools or features are most effective with customers.

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How Do You Position the Company for Growth? Four Key Points

Situation: A company is completing the design of a new line of equipment which is expected to drive future growth. An important distributor for a company’s principal product – a consumable – also distributes equipment. The CEO is concerned that this distributor may perceive his new line of equipment as competing with their existing line. How should the CEO handle this? How do you position the company for growth?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Meet with the CEO of the distributor and ask two questions:
    • Can they sell the company’s new line of equipment, as well?
    • Do they have any other source for the company’s consumable product?
    • If the distributor must rely on the company for the consumable, whether they decide to distribute the new equipment line or not, there should not be any risk.
  • The company has a wonderful opportunity to start doing business in a new way.
    • The company has a proprietary consumable and chemistry/formulation knowledge that will be difficult for others to copy.
    • The company now has knowledge of how to design equipment that utilizes the consumable.
    • Proprietary trade secrets may be more valuable than patents, presuming that the company can keep a lid on these secrets. Coca Cola and 3M have never sought patents on their key products. In a well-managed environment, trade secrets have a much longer life than patents.
  • Think about the sales mix in a new way, one that would address concerns about the annuity vs. capital equipment mix as well as improve overall profitability.
    • Focus on turn-key solutions. Use Hewlett Packard as a model. HP makes the most money selling paper and ink cartridges – annuity products; not from selling printers which sell less frequently than the cartridges. A busy office will spend far more on ink cartridges and paper per year than they spend on printers – and at a better margin for HP.
  • Combine the two prior points to leverage the new model.
    • Lease or provide the equipment at just above cost, in exchange for a contract commitment to purchase the consumable for a defined period.
    • Triple the cost of the consumable over time!
    • This should provide a more profitable and sustainable model. Adjust the cost of the ink upwards so that it pays. On a per-piece basis, the consumable at 3x or 4x current cost will still be a miniscule part of overall product cost. Further, the buyer won’t have to amortize the cost of the equipment over their production, making this an attractive option.
    • Concentrate on equipment design and outsource the manufacturing on a modular basis while keeping control of the one or two most critical components.

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How Do You Change Suppliers for a Key Product? Four Thoughts

Situation: A company buys several important components from a single US supplier. They are considering an offshore source for one of these components which makes up a large portion of what they purchase from the supplier. Does off-shoring make sense in this case, and how do they mitigate the risk? How do you change suppliers for a key product?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The key consideration is the off-shore partner’s ability to reliably make the component at the price promised. If they can, why not outsource offshore?
  • The decision depends upon two additional factors: the amount that you stand to save by off-shoring your source, and the potential cost to you of inconsistent or unreliable components from the off-shore supplier.
    • If the cost of failure is high, a modest savings is less valuable. You may want to wait until you have higher volume and higher potential savings before looking at off-shore sources.
    • In the US, we assume – with some security – that a pilot run predicts a large run. Historically this has not been shown to consistently apply to offshore suppliers.
  • Can you afford to invest and potentially lose the amount that it would cost you to secure your first production order from the off-shore source?
    • If the answer is yes, invest the time and effort to visit the supplier, and secure resources to monitor their production – your own or a trusted partner’s. Your presence and interest are very important.
    • The principal challenge will be quality and consistency of raw materials, and varying age of production equipment used to produce your components.
  • Are you concerned that your current supplier might cut you off?
    • The CEO is not sure, but has identified this as a risk.
    • If this is the case, start now identifying second sources for other components made by this supplier – if only to keep them honest in price, quality and delivery.

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How Do You Deal with Cut-throat Competition? Seven Thoughts

Situation:  A company serves a market with a lot of new small entrants. Clients purchase from these other companies as well as the CEO’s company. They are continuing to call and network with their client base to retain clients and build new customers. What else should they be doing? How do you deal with cut-throat competition?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Make a list of those clients who are no longer purchasing from you or referring new clients. Go talk to them. Ask why they are no longer purchasing from you or referring new clients. This may open new options. You may find something new or unexpected that you can offer.
  • Work with an outside service to follow up with on clients lost and won. The key question for them to ask clients is why. Learn from the responses what is most important about the clients’ purchase and referral decisions.
  • Consider a new service. A health/happiness outcome would be a nice value-add: a quarterly report back to referral sources on how happy the clients that they referred are. The last question on the survey should be – Would you work with our firm again? Why or why not?
  • Consider using an outside source to gather the data for these surveys. To get more valuable responses, don’t just ask about your company, but also several of your top competitors; this will produce a richer set of responses.
  • There are two ways to compete: either you are low cost or have established a unique value proposition. Whatever this is, sustainability of your critical point of differentiation is essential.
  • Health care legislation is now in flux. Whatever the outcome, it will have an impact on your market. Become an expert resource on the implications of various outcomes.
  • Look at social media resources – feed valuable information to your audience via blog.

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How Do You Develop a Revenue Model? Six Recommendations

Situation:  A company has a crowd sourcing solution which is co-creational. You ask a question and get multiple answers. The company then uses technology to select the best answers. The challenge is developing a business model. What parameters are predictable and dependable? How do you develop a revenue model?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Revenue is always, in the end, a matter of value received – both potential and actual.
  • High dollar per click comes from delivering better responses, particularly if you can demonstrate higher sales conversion rates.
  • High value responses are valuable. If you can deliver these consistently, consider charging a subscription instead of pay-per-click. Pay per click is fine for attracting first-time users, but move to subscription for ongoing access.
  • Limit your initial audience to crowd source participants who have knowledge and experience – like CXOs on LinkedIn. Create relevant communities.
  • In addition to best practice answers, provide an opportunity for participants to share failures – experiences from which they learned. Simply Hired created an early, and lasting audience by creating a companion site called Simply Fired when they started. Based on the responses to this site, they created a Top Five Reasons for getting fired, with inappropriate behavior and sexual harassment at the top. This exercise helped them to create a lasting presence.
  • Make your site clean and show clear steps to a revenue model for users. This will take time and you won’t see results immediately. Over time it will pay off for you.

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What’s the Next Version of Our Business Solution? Four Ideas

Situation: A company that provides personnel services wants to adjust their business model to make it more appealing to employers. They are unique in that they focus on social issues, rather than purely on business services. From the perspective of a hiring Manager, what would you want to see? What’s the next version of our business solution?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The idea of a social issues-based brand is unique. To some employers this may have appeal.
  • Your obvious differentiator is the tie between existing communities and social networking. Emphasize this.
  • As an employer, the focus is on finding quality employees for the right price. This will always take precedence over other factors for most businesses. In fact, over-emphasis on social issue-based hiring could subject an employer to discrimination issues. It also will not appeal to everyone. How can you address quality employee for the right price through your service? Here are some things to consider:
    • The employers’ challenge is finding good candidates. How do you solve this problem?
    • Employers have specific needs to fill. Help them by identifying and screening candidates so that it makes their job easier.
    • The question for the employer is whether your helper audience can crowd source the screening function. Screening is the challenge of the employer. Solve this and I as an employer want to talk to you!
    • Within your model, instead of asking for monetary contributions from your helper audience ask them to donate time to screen candidates. Not being a recruiter is a plus.
  • Pitch your new ideas to your company insiders – see what they say.

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How Do You Fund a Start-Up? Four Suggestions

Situation: Early stage companies often find it difficult to raise funds from traditional sources. An experienced CEO wants to help certain new companies of which she is aware in two ways – assisting them in receiving funding, and then helping to assure that they reach key milestones.  What is the best way to profitably address this ambition? How do you fund a start-up?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Build relationships with a few select sets of local investors – venture capitalists, angels, and private investors – with whom you have strong credibility. For a retainer or fee, agree to bring them a number of new pre-vetted companies in the next year, and post-finding, help the companies to succeed and hit milestones. From the companies that you bring to funders, ask for equity in return for securing funding and providing guidance.
  • Put yourself in the shoes of the person who will pay you – what do they want and how do you deliver this for them? Develop statistics from your past successes that highlight your capabilities. Don’t be shy about your accomplishments.
  • What are you passionate about? If the answer is development – linking technology entrepreneurs to strategic partners and then being an accountability partner to assure that milestones are met – this will be your focus and your pitch to both funders and tech companies.
  • Your value is linking the entrepreneur to the funding source and being an accountability partner.

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How Do You Ask for Consideration? Four Suggestions

Situation: A company played matchmaker between another company in the concept stage and a funding source. Having performed this service, the company would like to get something in return. There is no agreement in place regarding consideration for this service. How do you ask for consideration?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • A way to introduce the conversation is to say – We’ve been happy to help you identify funding for your company. What kind of role and contribution do you see for us as you move forward? This prompts the other company to confirm the inequity, instead of you, and makes it more likely that they will offer you something.
  • This is really a relationship challenge. You’ve done a great favor for the other company – obtaining funding for an early stage company is a major accomplishment. If there is a good relationship between the two of you it is reasonable to hope that they will recognize this. A minimal way to ask for this is to say – If you get funded we want to be your service provider.
  • In business, many leads are referrals. When we get a good lead, we try to assure that the referral source gets some business from the resulting project. This encourages them to continue to provide us with leads. It also reflects common courtesy. Providing this example may help your case.
  • On option may be to ask for an equity interest. For an early stage company, this is inexpensive as they have not yet established significant value.

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