Latest from the OpenView Team
Guess What…Customers Don’t Care About Your Cloud-based Company’s Fancy Technology
Installing a CRM system 20 years ago took months and required significant time, resources, and commitment. But that’s all changed with the evolution of the cloud, and customers’ expectations have changed with it. Today, customers care about the service cloud-based companies provide, not the technology that drives them. And, as Firas Raouf writes in this post, unless you adapt alongside that evolution by focusing on a few key things, you might be left behind.
How to Avoid the Classic Chicken and Egg Funding Quandary
Your business is flat, but a $10 million VC investment would allow you to drive 350 percent growth in 2012. Unfortunately, you can’t find an investor willing to take that bet, creating a classic chicken-before-the-egg scenario. Thankfully, Ricky Pelletier writes in this post, there are some things you can do to navigate around that issue and make your business much more desirable in the eyes of VCs.
Channeling Ahab: 4 Strategies for Spearing Your Market’s Moby Dick
Some smaller software companies are afraid to sell to the biggest companies in their respective markets. Landing those “whales,” after all, can be high maintenance, unpredictable, distracting, and expensive. But it’s not an impossible task. In this post, Nick Petri offers four specific strategies that could help you reel in your Moby Dick, without suffering Ahab’s awful fate.
5 Steps to Creating the Killer Case Studies Your Company Needs
Great case studies paint a picture with words. They’re narratives that demonstrate your experience solving a specific problem, and create a framework for analyzing and resolving it. And, like any great dramatic work, they should include a protagonist, a conflict, a few plot twists and turns, and, ultimately, a memorable resolution. In this post, Kevin Cain lays out five elements that will help you capture your customers’ attention by creating more compelling case studies.
Top Ideas from the Industry
Do Not Resuscitate: Why Throwing Good Money at Dying Revenue Streams Is a Bad Idea
When some companies experience revenue woes, their solution is to throw gobs of good cash at bad solutions that they hope may come back to life. That’s a losing strategy according to this article from the Inbound Sales Network. Instead, the best path to revenue resuscitation is to focus on the customer buying process, lead generation management, and solutions that work.
4 Qualities of People that Thrive in the Startup Environment
So, you’ve identified and successfully recruited a batch of new hires that you think will take your startup business to the next level. They’ve got sparking resumes and dazzling qualifications. But will they really fit into the startup world? Not everyone is cut out for it, which is why SCVNGR founder Seth Priebatsch suggests in this post that it’s critical to make sure your new employees have four specific qualities.
Tired of Being Bullied by Bigger Competition? 5 Tips to Take Down Your Goliath
No one likes to be pushed around, especially if you’re a smaller startup trying to stake claim in a market full of lumbering monsters and agile predators. So, how can you fight back? In this post, Fast Company’s Kaihan Krippendorff suggests five simple tactics that will help you go head-to-head with established competitors and beat them at their own game.
You’re the Founder Today, but What Will Your Job Be Tomorrow?
When someone starts a business, “founder” is a nice, all-encompassing title that seems to sum up their jack-of-all-trades responsibility pretty well. But as a company grows and hires new employees, one of the best things a founder can do is transition into a new, more specific role. In this article for Inc.com, Avondale strategic advisors Karl Stark and Bill Stewart suggest seven specific titles those founders can choose from.
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