Which is the bigger priority? Ranking at the top of your prospects’ search results or mapping content that helps them move forward in their buyer journey?
Many marketers find themselves grappling with priorities when it comes to getting a content strategy off the ground. Luckily, as online marketing expert Lee Odden explains, when it comes to SEO and content marketing, it doesn’t have to be either/or.
SaaS customer acquisition and success strategist Lincoln Murphy explains why answering this one simple but powerful question is the key to rapid and sustainable growth.
So far in 2013 I’ve helped 21 software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers from around the world boost customer acquisition and lower their SaaS churn rates. And in just about every instance I have found myself asking them the same questions.
The fact that these questions were not easily answered or — if they were — that the answers were ignored, often shed light on the underlying cause of several different problems my SaaS provider clients faced.
From stagnating growth, to unacceptable churn, to a less-than-acceptable ROI on AdWords and other paid traffic spend, it became clear to me that we have a problem. And this problem isn’t small or to be ignored.
Having lived through an acquisition, CEO of Spredfast Rod Favaron offers some valuable entrepreneur advice on handling the transition.
An acquisition is a huge undertaking. There are plenty of nooks and crannies that can go overlooked as you begin to merge with your new parent company, many of which can go unnoticed until it’s too late. Rod Favaron, President and CEO of Spredfast (an OpenView portfolio company), offers a bit of entrepreneur advice on the things he’d do differently if he had the chance.
Social media isn’t the black hole that many business leaders seem to think it is. Discover how to become a social rock star in as little as a few hours a week.
While social media adoption is certainly widespread by now, many business professionals still claim to be too busy to commit to personal social media branding activities.
Personal branding consultant Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future, says that for the most part, the excuse is just that — an excuse. The truth, Clark says, is that making time for social media and branding takes a lot less time than you might think.
Sure, the right training can work wonders, but the best way to build a top sales team is by hiring the best sales reps to begin with. Inside sales expert Mike Brooks shares three tips for sorting the best performers from the bunch.
How do you separate the top potential performers from the rest?
Ask any manager, VP, or business owner what one of the biggest challenges they face in making their revenue numbers and they’ll tell you it’s in identifying, hiring and retaining good sales reps. If you are familiar with my management philosophy, then you’ve heard me talk about the 80/20 rule in sales, and all you have to do is look at your own company or industry to know it’s still true — 80% of the sales and revenue are made by the Top 20%.
So how do you identify who the Top 20% are BEFORE you spend all that time and money on hiring, training, and then hoping they perform?
Innovation and intrapreneurship strategist Philippe De Ridder, co-founder of Board of Innovation, shares six personal innovation habits that will have a profound impact on your performance, happiness, and success as an entrepreneur.
I’ve recently discovered the power of forming daily habits to reach my goals, and I’m keen to share my experience and thoughts to get some discussion going. As a person active in innovation — as an innovation manager, consultant, R&D manager, business developer, product manager, or C-level leader — you’ve most likely set yourself personal goals around being more inspiring, up-to-date, convincing or creative. Have you also considered which daily habits you could form to reach those goals?
One of the most powerful entrepreneur lessons you can learn is discovering it’s the driving force behind your vision — not the vision itself — that’s truly important.
You might be surprised to find out that becoming recognized as a visionary has very little to do with actually coming up with a vision. Offering another one of their valuable entrepreneur lessons, Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits, co-authors of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Entrepreneur, point out that ideas alone don’t make great innovators.
The breathless mentality that fuels startups is ideal for a company’s early days, but it doesn’t age well. SEOmoz co-founder and CEO Rand Fishkin explains that as companies mature into the growth stage, that fast-paced approach can sometimes do more harm than good.
A Better Motto for Scalable Company Growth
As your company grows, so should your approach to leading it. In a recent interview with OpenView, Fishkin explained that changing his mindset around speed was the first major shift he had to make.
If you’re starting a company with an end game in mind, you’re probably doing yourself a disservice focusing on becoming a target for acquisition.
More often than not, a startup is founded with dreams of eventually becoming acquired. It’s a natural thought — most entrepreneurs fall asleep dreaming of a big payday. But according to Rod Favaron, President and CEO of enterprise social media software company Spredfast (an OpenView portfolio company), setting out specifically to make yourself a target for acquisition not only has a tendency of not leading to that result — it can also be a critical mistake.
Whether bootstrapping your way to hiring help, or navigating toward profitability under investors’ eyes, an entrepreneur’s path is often a long and lonely one. Dino Dogan, founder of blog amplification platform Triberr, talks about the lessons he’s learned firsthand while carving out a new space in social media for his company.
The story behind Triberr will sound familiar to many entrepreneurs: founder Dino Dogan saw a common problem without an easy solution. “I was doing SEO for a long time,” he says, but optimizing content “didn’t work for what I was trying to do.” Dogan wanted to build a community around his blog to include more than immediate friends who would comment on and share his posts, but that required “a lot of heavy lifting.”
Enter Triberr. Dogan’s social network “allows you to set up a blogging tribe” of like-minded writers who share each other’s work in a “streamlined, frictionless, no-heavy-lifting kind of way.” He recently spoke with OpenView to share how he’s learning from criticism, educating customers, and bootstrapping “a Facebook for bloggers.”