Every CEO is trying to figure out what to do in an environment of fiscal tightening—getting deals done to execute the company's growth strategy used to be easy because we were in an era of free money. However, with interest rates nearly tripling in 2022 and 2023, looking even more uncertain, CEO's cannot be certain of anything. Clients that would have been sure things at the beginning of the year are now suspect. CEOs cannot afford any misses in bringing on the wrong customer, creating a waterfall of challenges that will be hard to overcome.
Let us begin,
Healthy growth requires identifying the right fit customers and improving acquisition efficiency, implementation, and customer success efficiency. Why? The challenge for these businesses is the growth itself, i.e., too much and too little to ensure that with scale, the company retains traction on onboarding and on-time and on-budget implementations. If you don't get the post-sale part of the business right, then you have a high degree of likely hood that the business will experience an early death.
Poor growth requires an emphasis on the right-fit customer business analysis and execution because the business can only afford to spend a single dollar of invested capital. Once you have the right fit, customer focus, Product, sales, marketing, and customer success will achieve operational and financial achievement with efficient capital utilization.
Author Call Out: Outcomes from the process in less than 90-days
- Marketing and Sales Professionals will have a much easier time honing your value proposition and will only focus on the right prospects. Measured by: Improved CAC and Sales Velocity
- Product UX teams will stop splitting hairs over what features to develop next and instead focus on delighting the right customer. Measured by: Improved Sales and Marketing KPIs and Reduced Churn
- Your Customer Success team members will know exactly how to help customers find value in the product and achieve their goals. Measured by: Reduced Churn and Upsell
- Your Customer Success team can focus on serving high-value customers who present as a potential churn risk.
As a CEO, the most significant challenge we all face is that our teams focus on their role-specific accountabilities rather than the enterprise agenda. It's just human nature, i.e., marketing relies on marketing data, which waterfalls the entire company. The prescription outlined establishes a central point of truth based on actionable quantitative data that will create lean models where fatal blind spots are mitigated. The action plan will create a collective sigh of relief in your next Board meeting as all stakeholders are working as a single unit rooted in fact. The age of free money may not be gone forever, but, as CEO, for the next two to three years, you, and the board deploying a lean organizational strategy is a necessity.
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