Featured Tactical & Operational Services
Our tactical services are focused on improving results, fixing problems and scaling the business in the immediate 3-6-9 month horizon. These services are targeted at the most frequent pain points for SaaS, digital media and online businesses. Many of the services are interdependent and related at the execution level.
Go-To-Market Strategy & Marketing
The evolution from installed software to SAAS and online product and service offerings puts more pressure on companies to provide a seamless offers and experiences for their customers. Today the Marketing, Sales, Product Management and Customer Service & Support functions must work together, toward the same set of shared goals and metrics. No longer can there be disconnected hand-offs from one organization to the next. Fixing an operational or performance issue in one area is likely to require input from all organizations. Reducing customer acquisition cost, or churn, or lifetime value are good examples
A Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy creates an end to end view of the customer, the experience you want to have with them, and how you will acquire, support and grow those customers over time. Our GTM approach starts with analyzing your product, market, target customer (including "buyer types" and "users"), value proposition, offers, etc.. We also consider the various stages in your customer lifecycle (for example Land, Adopt, Expand, Renew) and which parts of the organization have customer touch points and what their roles are at each stage in the lifecycle. We will identify gaps, disconnects and problems in your GTM process. We will then recommend potential solutions to test and implement and help with the implementation where needed.
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A great GTM strategy will
Customer Acquisition
Filling the top of funnel and converting customers cost effectively can have a material impact on revenue and profit. Small variances in metrics can have a big impact on performance.
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There are often many internal actors that have direct or indirect role in the customer acquisition cycle. We map the customer flow, touch points, handoffs and conversion points and the associated metrics.
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From a product perspective we evaluate offers, value proposition, messaging and the PQL funnel (if there is one). With marketing we evaluate customer profiling, segmentation, targeting, acquisition channels and the MQL to SQL conversion funnel. Finally we will consider Sale's role in taking an SQL and converting it to a customer by looking at the process and core metrics.
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Across these process we will identify broken processes, gaps and opportunities for improvement and make recommendations.
Revenue Growth, Including Sales
In B2B SaaS and online markets revenue frequently means much more than just sales performance. Product, Marketing and frequently Customer Services/Success play important roles in growing revenue, and customer lifetime value (LTV). That said, sales will frequently play a critical role in winning the customer initially and having the right sales model, channels, infrastructure and processes are critical.
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Having spent the early part of our career in Sales and Sales Leadership and run direct and telesales organizations we can help you identify challenges and opportunities to improve your sales operation or stand up new channels.
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That said, we start with a holistic approach and consider the total revenue generation lifecycle starting with you product, through marketing to sales and on to fulfillment, retention and upsell. The end to end view is critical because as often as not, core revenue problems are a result of product problems, marketing problems or other issues beyond sales. Also, you do not want to invest in scaling sales (incredibly expensive) unless you confident that product market fit, acquisition cost and LTV ensure profitable revenue.
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We can help you identify both the opportunities and problems you will encounter scaling revenue and implement growth solutions that work.
Business Development & Strategic Partnerships
Business Development (BD) and Strategic Partnerships are great potential sources of new revenue. However, these functions can be very different from Sales in material ways. Often these deals have a higher risk/reward ration in that they can take linger to yield results and may take more resources.
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To implement effective BD and Partnership programs you need different processes and frequently different fulfillment, service and support structures. You may even need to make product changes to support a specific BD deal or a Partner channel.
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If you want to start a BD or Partnership team and channel, we can help you by performing a readiness assessment, and helping you create a strategy, plan, process model and resource model. If you have an existing BD or Partner function, we can help you identify the levers of growth, implement current best practices and grow this revenue stream.
Product Market Fit, Product Performance and Product-Led Growth
If you are a venture backed early stage company you cannot get funding if you cannot achieve and prove Product Market Fit (PM/F) traction and metrics. If you are a mid-sized software or online business who is self funding new product investments, your Product Market Fit challenges are actually more significant. You are betting with your own limited funds and your bets have to pay off. Our PM/F service can help you quickly decide which product ideas are worthy on investment and will generate the revenue and profit you expect.
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We use a 3 Phase Process for helping clients make great product bets and find Product Market Fit. Our modeling approach will help your leadership and product teams define the acquisition, adoption, financial and performance metrics, with their underlying assumptions for new products. These metrics and assumptions can be quickly validated and tested to predict product success BEFORE a line of code is written.
Customer Success
Customer Support and Customer Service have evolved into Customer Success. Today, the most successful online SAAS and digital business are ensuring that a prospect or customer has a consistent and seamless journey within the company from the first marketing touch points, through sales, and including all the additional critical steps of onboarding, product adoption to up-sell and retention.
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Most companies experience disconnects and poor handoffs across these internal processes which result in lost revenue and lost profit, lower LTC and at worse high churn. Getting these handoffs right, however, can accelerate growth in all areas, especially profitability.
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Our Customer Success services first map the "as-is" end to end process, evaluate key touch points, and analyze key process. We will create and economic model that supports an improved customer experience and customer success delivery model. We identify key problems and the high priority items to fix first.
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We will shape a project that engages your key teams, and outside user experience resources if required, to create and execute a dramatically improved and profitable Customer Success program.
M&A Deal Support & Integration
We will always recommend the creation of a M&A Strategic Plan (see Strategic Things section) as the first step. That said, you may also need very specific M&A support services to execute the strategic plan, or to support ad-hoc buy-side or sell-side transactions.
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There are 3 critical aspects of our M&A Deal Support services:
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1. Opportunity Development - filling up the buy-side funnel, or screening or qualifying inbound selling opportunities is real work, but rarely a full time effort. We can manage this effort on a part time, as-needed basis . We can conduct direct, targeted outreach, or activate the channel of bankers, brokers and investors to generate opportunities for you. We will qualify and screen opportunities per criteria we develop with you.
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2. Transaction Process Management and support - Without a defined, rigorous and resourced process you can waste a huge amount of time, resources and money without any guaranteed outcome. We will help you establish and manage a tailored, efficient and effective transaction process that de-risks an improves the transaction outcome.
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3. Integration & Transition Planning and Execution - most M&A transactions do NOT deliver the financial outcomes that were projected. The root cause is usually a poorly planned and executed integration and transition cycle. We have developed a unique process that manages this cycle through distinct, "Value Preservation", "Value Realization", and "Value Creation" phases, which we tightly align with the transaction's agreed operating, financial model and assumptions. Our process will increase the probability your M&S deal will deliver the results your promised your BOD and investors.