Angel, VC, or Strategic Partner—Funding Your Venture

0 | October 27th, 2011 | Posted in business strategy, technology

I just hung up the phone from talking with an entrepreneur-founder who had unsuccessfully gone out seeking investment funding before her venture was ready for prime time. The truth is, getting outside funding is a tough sledding even when a venture has its product or service in the market, has paying customers and revenue to show, and is rapidly growing. For a startup in an earlier phase, it’s darn near impossible unless some very specific conditions are present.

Our conversation settled on how she could regain the momentum of winning a major early-venture contest, and I suggested the value of exploring customer partnerships as an alternative to venture funding.

Proposing strategic investments with one’s top customers or customer prospects isn’t everyone’s cup of tea nor is it very sexy, but it has the advantage of having all of the cards on the table face up for both sides. That’s rarely the case for other early investment options.

As a veteran of business development and joint ventures between numerous Fortune 500 companies, I pointed out that the benefits a strategic partner/customer expects go well beyond amount invested and ROI expectations. Partners are usually seeking long-term solutions and innovative competitive opportunities outside of their areas of expertise, along with long-term preferences and a side bet of potential upside, all while keeping their balance sheets clean. The investment of money is not completely incidental—and they certainly weigh the downside potential as well—but there are often mitigating reasons to partner up with a young, emerging player that has the power to disrupt their industry.

Is strategic partnership an avenue your venture should explore to fund and accelerate your growth?

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Are Your Strategies So Yesterday?

0 | October 26th, 2011 | Posted in business strategy

You’ve got vision. You’ve got goals. You’ve got a strategy that’s working for you…or do you?

It’s always time to reevaluate your strategies—markets quickly factor in disruptive behavior and performance returns to the mean—fancy talk for “strategies stop working over time.”

McKinsey and Company points out that continual testing of your strategies is an important part of market leadership. The financial crisis, regulation, or a score of other outside factors—as well as those inside your own venture—may be working to make your strategies obsolete.

One key test is, “Will my strategy beat the market in my space?” Your answer yesterday may not be the same as tomorrow. Have new competitors emerged? Have old customers adopted new approaches? Has technology advanced? All are questions to consider.

For more ways to test your venture’s strategies against some tough questions everyone should ask themselves, see http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/home.aspx, a valuable resource, or contact Consultiq’s strategic consultants for a free introductory conversation.

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Don’t Forget to Track SEO Keywords to Revenue

0 | October 26th, 2011 | Posted in marketing

Google’s switch to SSL for search queries for visitors logged-in to Google raises interesting questions – aside from whether the decision was motivated by profits or privacy concerns – for marketers about their understanding of the relationship between organic search and lead generation.

Countless hours and dollars are spent with SEO and PPC firms to optimize pay-per-click programs and website content for organic search results. And because PPC programs involve direct advertising spend, there tends to be a lot of focus on tracking keywords all the way from the “buy” to the lead and the ultimate revenue generated, to determine per-keyword ROI.

But marketers need to look at per-keyword ROI for the organic terms they optimize for as well. A proper SEO analysis begins with a review of organic keywords against leads and revenue generated – this becomes input to any optimization effort. And after optimization, and new content is created, or old content is re-written, it’s not enough to track results page ranks for the target keywords (although this of course needs to be done,) marketers need to track the keywords all the way to revenue, the true end game, to make sure the optimization paid off.

Of course, 10% of the time – roughly the number of people who search on Google while logged in – this will be harder, thanks to Google’s announced changes.

 

 

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Keep Your Eye on the Prize

1 | October 25th, 2011 | Posted in venture capital

The “thrill of the chase” when trying to raise money to get your venture off the ground can be so engaging that an entrepreneur can easily lose track of the prize. Your real goal is to turn your vision into a successful, profitable, enterprise; raising money is a means to that end, not an end unto itself.

Any Silicon Valley insider will tell an entrepreneur to self-fund or otherwise resist taking outside capital for as long as possible – that translates into a better valuation and a greater retained share of ownership for the entrepreneur. In the Consultiq model, that means pushing hard to the “minimum viable product” milestone, and trying to turn early traction into real revenue. Wouldn’t it be great if the only outside money you needed to raise was a mezzanine round before the IPO?

This Business Insider article astutely  points out how many in the industry have let their eyes off the ball.

 

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Using WordPress for Content Management

0 | October 24th, 2011 | Posted in technology

When people think of WordPress, they tend to think of blogging. But WordPress is really a powerful and flexible lightweight content management system with special capabilities for blogging. WordPress is well suited to managing engaging websites, and you don’t have to blog.

WordPress even provides detailed instructions on how to disable the default display of blog posts on the home page – set the home page to a static page instead, and disable the blog page for a more typical website look.

The vast number of plugins available for WordPress is part of its power – you can find plugins for everything from SEO and analytics to integrating your website with your social media presences. (But read the fine print carefully – consider making a donation to the plugin author if they request it, to help further development and maintenance.) Even without SEO plugins, WordPress let’s you set permalinks for your pages to help guide the search engines – make sure to enable permalinks, and be thoughtful about page titles you create, as they drive the link names.

A plethora of ready-built themes for WordPress simplifies the design development of your site, and, depending on the theme, allows you a fine degree of control over the look and feel of your site – without doing any programming. Do some testing though to be sure your theme will support the static home page model.

Once your website is up and running, you’ll find the WordPress visual editor vastly simplifies updating and adding content. Ironically enough, you can thank the development hours that have gone into enabling WordPress for blogging for this.

 

 

 

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Tunnel Vision with PPC Lead Generation

0 | October 21st, 2011 | Posted in marketing

With the wealth of data available from Google AdWords, analytics tools, Salesforce, marketing automation tools and other applications, it’s easy to get bogged down at ground-level when using pay-per-click for lead generation. But don’t get too wrapped up in the micro-view and forget about the macro.

Marketing executives and online marketing managers need to remember to “zoom-out” from time to time and look at the big picture. A good analogy is technical analysis of the stock market – you need to look at day-to-day tick data, but also the weekly, monthly and longer-term trends. Reacting to day-to-day fluctuations in lead volume needs to be balanced by looking at the broader economic view of what’s happening in your market – when was the last time you updated your top-level market size growth forecast? Are national trends, like fears of the return to recession, or even international events, like the euro debt crisis, translating to skepticism in your customer base, resulting in slow lead growth?

Focus on meeting your lead gen quotas, of course, but don’t forget to bring your head up from the ground and survey your market from the 100,000 foot level from time-to-time. Use your field teams for qualitative data as well, to provide glimmers of insight into how your customers are viewing the big picture as well. Feed this data back into your programs and tactics.

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