We accept the adage that your team is your most important asset and consider hiring well to be imperative for any founder. The best and most successful jobseekers network well and maintain their professional relationships consistently over time. As frequent counterparts in those professional relationships, the startup organizations that most successfully attract top talent tend to approach hiring in much the same way as the most proactive jobseekers.

What does it mean to hire well? 

Striking a balance between hiring quickly and hiring the right people for the right roles at the right times is a challenge for many founders. Your objective, simplified, is to hire like Goldilocks—not too fast, not too slowly. It’s incumbent upon founders especially to hire well, and clearly your first few hires matter the most for the success of your organization.

Not too fast

Would you right away marry the first person who you romantically meet? Some people do, and live happily ever after, but most prefer to make more deliberate, informed choices. The same basic principle applies to how quickly you make hiring decisions to grow your organization. 

Don’t immediately hire the first person who you interview, no matter how qualified that person seems. Making a hiring decision quickly may save a small amount of time during the hiring process, but can also waste significant time—which equals money—if you choose a poorly qualified person. That you hired incorrectly does not become apparent immediately, meaning that months are likely to pass until you fully recognize your mistake. Even more time then elapses, as you do what it takes to hire for that position all over again. 

Hiring too quickly and then later realizing your mistake, under the best circumstances, results merely in lost money in the form of wages and lost time. In a worst-case scenario, quickly hiring the wrong person can prove much more damaging and costly, and can even be fatal for your business. A wrong hire can seriously compromise your organization’s reputation, negatively impact your team’s culture, create conflicts among your other employees, and lower your team’s productivity.

Not too slow

Hiring too slowly is far less than ideal, too. If you aren’t all that sure about who you are looking for, or have just one “perfect” person or archetype in mind, then you are likely going to be slow at hiring. 

Doing anything too slowly, as the founder of a startup, puts you at a competitive disadvantage.  Another adage applies here—the one about time being your most precious resource. You have objectives to meet and funding to deploy efficiently, which starts with hiring. And if your company is like most, then 40 to 80 percent of your costs are associated with labor.

Just right

What constitutes hiring in a way that is “just right”? The founders who approach hiring both expediently and effectively tend to do all of the following:

• Proactively identify top talent. Stay ahead of your hiring needs by always seeking to identify and connect with high-quality talent, even when you aren’t formally hiring.
• Prioritize networking. You don’t need a formal budget for recruiting to meet great talent, but you do need to put effort into cultivating and expanding your professional network. No shortage of ways to meet qualified candidates:
  • Through your own network: Who do you know? Who do they know? Connect or reconnect with former colleagues and classmates to spread the word that your company is growing.
  • Through your team: Who do the members of your team know? Go ahead and ask them! Your employees are especially well qualified to recommend candidates because they have natural motivation to work with the best people.
  • Via LinkedIn: Join, and participate in, groups that are specialized by industry or function. Or simply conduct a keyword search to find and connect with talented candidates. 
• Clearly define your needs. When you are ready to hire, take the time to write a detailed and accurate job description. Establish a budget. By being clear internally about your hiring needs, you are more likely to hire the right person for the right role and less likely to waste time with irrelevant candidates.
• Hire top talent before you need them. You, of course, would prefer to hire only for the specific positions that you are currently seeking to fill. But for your most important hires, or when you spot top-quality talent, hiring early is clearly preferable to losing that talent to a competitor. For those candidates with the most potential to positively impact your organization, make every effort to hire them while they are available.

• Establish a formal hiring process. After hiring your first few team members, increase your hiring efficiency by formalizing your organization’s hiring process. Establish standardized processes to identify, interview, select, and onboard qualified candidates to enable your organization to appropriately balance hiring speed with candidate quality.

• Follow hiring best practices. As you establish and document your organization’s hiring process, keep these hiring best practices in mind:

• • Conduct multiple interviews with each candidate: Particularly for your most important hires, arrange to meet or speak with a candidate multiple times. Also arrange for several of your team members to interview the candidate. Determine an appropriate number of interviews based on the seniority of position.
  • Administer practical tests: For candidates who you are seriously considering hiring, gain confidence in their skills by administering a relevant practical test. Assign a coding problem to a developer, request that a product manager review your product, or ask a content creator to write something. Just make sure to pay the candidate for taking the test.

• Be expedient throughout the hiring process: Multiple interviews and a practical test already make for a somewhat lengthy hiring process, so do what you can to expedite the sequence of events. Take responsibility for keeping the hiring process moving. 
• Make prompt hiring decisions: After receiving all of the information necessary to make an informed hiring decision, then—hire someone! An easy, if overlooked, way to garner competitive advantage is to hire decisively and without needless delay. 

• Trust your gut. Not totally sure which candidate is best for the job? If obligated to choose just one among several qualified candidates, then listen to your gut and hire the person who you instinctively think is the best. 

How much can the wrong hire cost? 

Hiring is time consuming, which means that it is expensive. The time that elapses while you work to fill a position often equates to lost sales or productivity. If two or three months pass while you identify and interview qualified candidates, then you are “missing out” on two or three months of output or revenue.

But consider the alternative. You hire the first available person or the person willing to work for the lowest salary. In addition to the time required to hire that person, months—let’s say two or three—are likely to pass before you realize that you have hired poorly. The output or revenue generated by your new hire is likely subpar, and you may have incurred additional direct expenses related to travel or training. Assuming that your underperforming employee does not also materially damage the company, the cost of hiring incorrectly is—at minimum—several months of wasted resources.

You may balk at how much time and effort is associated with hiring correctly, but hiring incorrectly is exceedingly risky and potentially far more costly.

Treat recruiting and hiring as mission critical 

Take the most time with early and critical hires. These hires matter the most because they most strongly influence the strategic direction of your company, help to establish the organization’s culture, and accomplish the most important tasks. Devote the most time to onboarding and integrating these new team members into your company.

As the founder of a growing company, you should devote up to a quarter of your time to hiring. Not only does hiring well increase the quality of the talent within your organization, but also the hiring process itself can catalyze important changes for your company. Defining your organization’s team structure and writing job descriptions in accordance with that structure, along with developing budgets for salaries, can yield many surprising and important insights for the business. Hiring well simultaneously strengthens and transforms growing companies.

Acknowledging that your hiring choices are crucially important, the next time that you get a LinkedIn connection request from a clearly talented person—accept it! If that candidate (Goldilocks?) would be an ideal addition to your team in six months to a year, then make every effort to hire her today. At the very least, meet for coffee or connect over Zoom. 

The post Hire Like Goldilocks appeared first on Scopusventures.

The sales process for almost every software company begins as product-driven and founder-led. Even sales-savvy founders can struggle to meet the needs of and successfully sell to enterprise clients, as moving upmarket increases the complexity of both the product requirements and sales process. The mindset and approach needed to execute on an enterprise sales strategy encompasses a strong understanding that customization is the centerpiece of every enterprise deal. Building a well-structured, enterprise-ready sales organization is an indispensable part of making enterprise sales a sizable portion of your company’s business. 

Here we delve into how to build a successful enterprise sales team, with an emphasis on best practices and some common pitfalls to avoid.

Ensure that your organization really is ready

Mistiming your foray into enterprise sales is deceptively easy. Start too soon and your product isn’t ready, resulting in lost opportunities; start too late and miss out on potentially game-changing partnerships and revenue streams.

Have you nailed product-market fit yet? If you’re not sure, or are still iterating in one of the many cycles typically required to validate PMF, then you might not be ready to pursue enterprise clients yet. Wasting time on prematurely pursuing this type of customer is costly, as is making poor first impressions on your target enterprise clients. Don’t put too many resources into developing enterprise sales before you’ve generated sufficient demand.

But don’t wait too long, either—under-investing in an enterprise sales strategy, especially as a software company, is not “saving” you any money. Startups that don’t ever prioritize building their enterprise sales competencies miss out on the likely lucrative contracts and valuable visibility to be had by providing solutions for Fortune 500 companies.

Regardless of where you are in the product lifecycle journey, your organization is much more likely to succeed at enterprise sales if your product or service is highly customizable and adaptable. The needs and requirements of enterprises are always unique, and from the perspective of an enterprise, your product is the most valuable and useful if it can be changed.

Do things that don’t scale

The core of any great enterprise sales strategy is its people, starting with the company’s founder. To land those early sales with your target enterprise clients, you can and should feature the developer-led focus of your organization to emphasize your team’s ability to customize your product. Maybe, as you adapt your offering to meet your enterprise clients’ specific needs, you can even permanently improve your product or service based on their valuable input. In the early days of selling to enterprises, you can also engage in other high-cost customer acquisition activities—like traveling for meetings (in non-pandemic times), organizing educational seminars, leading focus groups, and providing additional customized documentation. At that beginning stage, you even have time for personalized, thoughtful gestures like sending handwritten holiday cards.

Choose your first hire carefully

If you’re a true evangelist for what you offer, and effective at making the first few enterprise sales, then inevitably you will need to hire an enterprise sales “rockstar” to build upon your initial success. Your average enterprise deal size and rate of enterprise dealflow dictate when it makes financial sense for you to hire the first member of your enterprise sales team. 

The transition to entrusting another person with generating enterprise sales can be fraught, logistically and emotionally, for founders. That first hire, like the founder, should be immensely passionate about the business and also explicitly empowered to challenge the founding team when necessary. Much like the founder, too, the first person on your enterprise sales team is forging a new path with every new outreach to an enterprise client. Much more than just a salesperson, your first hire must be a great communicator, problem-solver, capable of juggling multiple priorities—and willing and able to meet sales quotas. Most important is being able to sort through many low-value leads to identify and stay focused on the most profitable and likely enterprise prospects.

With your team of one on board, you can initially continue to prioritize inbound leads, especially those sourced from partners or your network directly. After gaining traction with inbound inquiries, you and your tiny team can then develop and pursue an active outbound marketing strategy.

“Land and expand” to grow revenues

Start engaging in outbound marketing by testing out a few potentially viable tactics, while keeping a focused “land and expand” mindset. Your initial goal with any potential enterprise client is to land a starting engagement, even just a small pilot project—and then continually and incrementally expand what products or services you provide. The best way to steadily expand your engagement is to consistently “wow” your client with your product’s usefulness and adaptability.

Repeatedly “landing” and “expanding” is the most effective way to steadily grow your revenue, provided that you continue being willing to start small with every new enterprise client. And be prepared to grow your enterprise sales team, because as your client base grows, you will need to hire additional staff. These are important hires, too, who must understand from the outset the value of customization to enterprise clients. The personalities of these sales professionals matter as well; the enterprise sales cycle is notoriously long, making enterprise sales highly relationship-oriented rather than transaction-driven.

Provided that you have the demand, you can begin to scale your enterprise sales team as soon as your initial hires develop and become proficient with the sales process. When scaling the sales team, an organized approach is best because it replicates the most easily as you continue to add team members. From the outset, you can structure the sales team by product, function, or geography, and continue adding divisions as the team expands. 

One pitfall to avoid is hiring dedicated customer service professionals too soon. Customer service is a function that, while important, is often over-invested in by many organizations in the early days. The sales team itself is usually well positioned to provide excellent customer service to the first enterprise clients, and those early resources being spent on dedicated customer service would be better used to pursue new outbound marketing leads. 

Your team will evolve, as will your product and clients, as you and they grow. You can eventually add team members focused only on customer success, and you’ll want to ensure that your organization’s legal counsel can address any enterprise-related issues that may arise. No matter what, as you grow, stay focused on what’s most important to your enterprise clients—adaptability and responsiveness.

Use data to evolve your sales process

Trusting your gut instinct is a key component of hiring and leading your enterprise sales team, but data plays an important role, too. You can and should collect data to perform targeted analyses; doing so will provide valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your enterprise sales process.

Plenty of basic sales metrics—like monthly or quarterly revenue, the rate and cost of acquiring new customers, and your upsell success rate—provide useful information. Consider which metrics are most appropriate for your business, and collect the relevant data accordingly. The collection and analysis of data, alongside the modification of your sales approach based on the data’s findings, should be held up as core values for your enterprise sales team. The quantitative findings may be surprising, unwanted, or inconvenient, but the data (usually) doesn’t lie. Adapting your approach to enterprise sales based on your findings is a necessary—if sometimes challenging—component of achieving enterprise sales success.

Robust data collection and analysis and a commitment to adapting your approach based on the quantitative results should lead to the emergence of best practices for your sales team. These best practices can then be positioned as core tenets of the organization’s selling strategy and shared with all future members of the enterprise sales team.

Nail it, then scale it

A common ethos among tech startups is that “failing fast” is preferable, because it preserves your ability to pivot unscathed and try again. While that attitude may prove useful when you are just rolling out your go-to-market strategy, such an approach could be too risky when pursuing enterprise clients. 

“Nail it, then scale it” is an expression that imparts the importance of establishing an effective enterprise sales strategy before attempting to scale your efforts. High-paying contracts with large enterprise clients will always be in short supply, which is what makes those first impressions so important.

Staying small while you learn what your enterprise clients value most makes it easier to try something, test it, analyze it, iterate on your approach, and try again. Keep improving until your enterprise sales process is both structured and flexible enough to meet all of your enterprise clients’ needs. Then—and only then—aggressively seek to expand your enterprise sales efforts.

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A promising service or product. Investor backing. A sharp and motivated team. Your company has everything that it needs—except customers! Your next step, urgently, is to develop a comprehensive go-to-market strategy, one that ensures that you target the right customers, position your product in the best possible way, outmatch the competition, and approach marketing and sales efforts in an efficient and competent way. You can do this! Read on for the steps that you’ll need to take to construct a functional and useful go-to-market plan.

Define the Target Markets

Your product or service is probably not well-suited for literally everyone, and that’s okay. Determining the target market or markets for your offering helps you to focus on only serving the markets or groups of people for which your product is the best fit. You may decide to target one or more groups based on the group’s size, the revenue or profit potential, the degree of existing competition, the ease of geographic access, or other factors. You may also choose to define the target market by who can most benefit from your product or service. The primary defining characteristics of the target market may encompass factors like age, gender, ethnicity, geographic location, or income, and may incorporate just one or a combination of these factors.

Steps to identify the most attractive target markets:

• Develop a list of markets that are potentially promising;
• Research, for each possible market, its size, revenue and profit potential, growth potential, ferocity of competition, relative proximity or ease of access, barriers to entry, and other key characteristics; and
• Apply this research to create a prioritized list of the most attractive and viable target markets.

Profile the Ideal Customers 

Developing detailed, thoughtful profiles of the ideal customers is the next step after refining and validating the target markets. You have already defined the essential characteristics of the target customer; now you need to deeply understand who the target customer is on a more comprehensive level. What does the customer need or want? What do they prefer? What are the key attributes of their behaviors? What challenges do they face? What are their passions or goals? What makes them successful? How would they describe their philosophies or attitudes? Developing detailed customer personas—to the point of understanding what the customer reads and how they like their coffee in the mornings— for each of your target markets helps you to understand how your target customers are likely to experience your product or service.

Steps to profile your target customers:

• Conduct research in the form of personal interviews, focus groups, online and/or in-person surveys, and other relevant methods to gather as much data and information as possible about each target customer group;
• Seek to understand specifically how each customer persona becomes aware of your offering and how they interact with it, and the qualitative nature of their experiences with your product; and
• Compile this information to develop one or more personas that are richly detailed and highly specific.

Not sure how best to profile your target customers with COVID-19 eliminating all in-person options? Fuel Cycle, a Scopus Ventures portfolio company, fills that gap with FC Live, an innovative solution for conducting in-depth customer interviews via video calls.

Articulate the Value Proposition

With your target markets refined and validated and customer personas defined, now you can articulate the specific value proposition of your product or service. What are the key features of your product or service? What benefits does your product or service provide to the target customer? What problem or problems does the product solve, or how does it solve those problems cheaper, faster, or better? What distinguishes your product or service from that of your competitors—i.e., what is the defensible economic moat that is proprietary to your offering? What would compel your target customer to start buying your product, or choose your product over a competitor’s offering? You or other members of your team are probably already deeply familiar with your company’s product or service, so the objective here is simply to specify how the specific attributes of the product or service align with the preferences and behaviors of your target customers.

Steps to articulate the value proposition of your product or service:

• Define the key features or attributes of the product;
• Articulate the product’s benefits and/or the problem that it solves;
• Describe specifically how the product confers its benefits or solves the identified problem;
• Distinguish how the product or service differs from the offerings of competitors;
• Describe specifically why the product or service is superior to competitors’ offerings; and
• Articulate what will compel the target customer to reliably choose your product in place of the existing offerings.

Define the Market Position

Whereas the emphasis of articulating value proposition is primarily on the characteristics of the product or service itself, defining the market position focuses on how to best situate your product or service in relation to its competitors. How do you want your target customers to view your product or service in comparison to competitors’ offerings? Do you want your product to stand out based on its quality, price, or other feature? How does the branding or image of your company support or detract from the product’s intended market positioning? How can your company emphasize its strengths and downplay its weaknesses to achieve the target market position? Your target position in the competitive marketplace should closely correlate with both the priorities and values of your target customer and the value proposition of your product or service.

Steps to define the target market positioning of your product or service:

• Identify the key characteristics of your product that positively differentiate it from competitors’ offerings;
• Develop a pricing strategy for the product that functions as a key strategic tool to secure the product’s intended position in the competitive marketplace;
• Ensure that the product is branded in a way that effectively communicates its competitive strengths; and
• Develop the company’s image in close alignment with the product’s branding.

To further articulate and define the target market position of your product or service, ask yourself and your team these thirteen questions.

Develop a Marketing & Sales Plan

Here’s where the rubber meets the road. Now that you’ve defined your target markets and closely articulated your target positioning, you need a comprehensive marketing and sales plan that is both conceptual and tactical in nature.

Depending on the nature of your product or service, your marketing and sales plan may need to be most heavily focused on marketing or most heavily focused on sales. Understanding which component to prioritize is an essential first step to developing a useful, coherent marketing and sales plan. Determine whether marketing or sales efforts are most vital to your strategy by considering the following:

• Target market: Is your target market large and diverse or small and specialized? Targeting a large market necessitates broad-based marketing efforts and generally precludes the possibility of direct sales, whereas a small or specialized target market may require sales-based efforts that are direct and highly personalized.
• Complexity of offering: Is the product or service simple or complex to understand and use? Offerings that are complex in nature require more sales outreach than those that are relatively simple.
• Product or service cost: How expensive is your product or service? Much like an offering’s complexity, products and services that are costly require greater sales efforts than those that are inexpensive.

Most products and services require some combination of both marketing and sales. Marketing efforts typically focus on reaching large numbers of people, whereas sales efforts are more process-driven and typically focus on connecting directly with customers on an individualized basis.

Steps to develop a comprehensive marketing plan:

• Identify the potential marketing channels—such as paid advertising, website content, newsletters, social media, podcasts, videos, white papers, and conferences or other in-person events—by which to reach your target customers;
• Determine which marketing channels are likely most effective, based on the nature of your offering and the characteristics of your target customers; and
• Prioritize and develop marketing materials and outreach efforts accordingly.

Steps to develop a comprehensive sales plan:

• Define the composition of the sales team, which may be some mix of in-house sales representatives, external partners, and resellers;
• Identify and develop the information and resources that the sales team needs to receive sufficient training;
• Determine how the sales team is going to find the target customers, which may include both fielding inbound inquiries and conducting outbound efforts;
• Establish how the sales team will initiate contact and engage with the target customers, including whether that engagement will encompass demonstrating the product or offering complimentary trial services; and
• Specify how sales will be transacted or otherwise completed.

A sale may formally end at the point of transaction, but the sales team must also be equipped with tools and resources to ensure customer satisfaction following the sale. In addition, whether the product or service requires more marketing or more sales, a comprehensive go-to-market strategy must also specify how the product will be distributed. Physical products may be sold in stores or via e-commerce, while software products may be downloaded directly. A robust, thoroughly-considered distribution strategy is an important, if often overlooked, component of going to market.

Put It All Together

Your company is not in the business of producing paperwork for paperwork’s sake, but your final step now is to prepare a concise, coherent Go-to-Market Strategy document in written form. This document should incorporate each of the elements above, plus define the time, expense, and resources—human and otherwise—required to accomplish each step. In addition, the document should specify the metric or metrics by which the go-to-market strategy’s success will be determined or evaluated. And the “final” draft of this strategy document should be treated like a working document or interim first draft, one that is both actually used by your team and periodically updated. As your product or service evolves, the competitive landscape changes, or your team otherwise gathers new and important information, the go-to-market strategy can and should be modified accordingly. Going to market is above all an iterative process, one that continues to evolve until a fit between the marketing strategy and marketplace is achieved.

Not only do your investors want to see that you’ve developed a robust go-to-market strategy, but also the strategy development process itself can be immensely beneficial for your company. Articulating a startup company’s visions and goals simultaneously refines and improves them, and ensures that all members of your team are aligned behind a cohesive, sustained effort. Remember too that once you’ve developed your “foolproof” go-to-market strategy, you likely will need to refine or dramatically change it based on the marketplace results that you actually achieve.

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San Francisco, California, USA, April 8, 2019 – An open blockchain application platform for the aerospace industry has been developed through a collaboration of Daher’s Silicon Valley-based innovation program, named Armstrong by Daher; and Authenticiti, a start-up that offers enterprise-grade, blockchain infrastructure through a simple cloud-based service.

In optimizing Authenticiti’s blockchain technology for the aerospace sector, this application platform was deployed within three months for one of Daher’s largest customers – enabling full supply chain visibility in the manufacture of key aircraft components, called aerostructures. It allows all parties to perform tracking down to the component level, from the beginning of production through the transport, delivery and warehousing of completed aerostructures.

A key aspect to this blockchain application platform is its open structure, built on open-source Ethereum with designed-in data privacy, which differs from the private blockchain approach proposed in another solution for the aerospace sector.

“The aerospace supply chain has yet to benefit from disruptive breakthroughs; despite significant efforts and investments, the actors of our supply chain are not connected today,” explained Florent François, the Head of Digital Strategy at Daher, and one of two company executives overseeing the Armstrong innovation program in San Francisco. “In considering the steps that can bring true transformation, we’re convinced that an open blockchain approach is the way to derive real improvement of visibility and productivity.”

Cédric Eloy, Daher’s Head of Innovation Strategy, added: “Establishing end-to-end supply chain visibility in the short period of three months would have been unthinkable in the past, and is a testament to Daher’s maturity in logistics, as well as the promise that comes with Authenticiti’s blockchain technology.”

For the next steps, Authenticiti has the objectives of validating and deploying the blockchain application within the entire Daher ecosystem, working with preferred suppliers and customers, as well as collaborating in deploying new features such as smart contract modules to improve efficiency and decrease working capital.

“Through the Armstrong innovation program, we’ve joined with Daher – a major aerospace manufacturer – in building a blockchain-leveraged application that delivers a collaborative solution for the entire supply chain,” said Andrew Yang, the Co-founder and CEO of Authenticiti. “This is a great opportunity to deploy open source technology that provides standards for sharing information across the aerospace industry.”

About Daher – www.daher.com

Daher is an aircraft manufacturer and an industry and service equipment supplier. Daher asserts its leadership in three main businesses: aircraft manufacturing, aerospace equipment and systems, logistics and supply chain services; and achieved a turnover of 1.2 billion euros in 2018. With the stability provided by its family ownership,

Daher has been committed to innovation since its creation in 1863. Today, present in 12 countries, Daher is a leader in Industry 4.0, designing and developing value-added solutions for its industrial partners.

Authenticiti provides an enterprise blockchain application platform focused on the secure, rapid deployment of distributed applications. The Authenticiti platform provides deployment automation, data security, and middleware services as well as configurable templates to track asset provenance and reconcile financial data across industrial business networks. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and Toronto, Canada.

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Within ten years, Amazon has succeeded in leading several industries. In 2017 it had 28% share of e-commerce revenue. However, acquisitions like Whole Food, PillPAck, and Zappos, are just as significant. Amazon is dominating the sales of books, toys, consumer electronics and many others, and with these acquisitions it is threating to do the same in grocery, dugs, and shoes. We should note that Amazon has been much quieter on dozens of failed projects, like the Fire Phone and Destinations.

Now we have Amazon Advertising, an ambitious venture into online advertising. But, how does this align with their real long-term strategy?

We at Scopus ventures put this question to our portfolio companies to determine the value of this service, while being wary of potential exposure. Here is why Amazon wants to be your next one-stop for advertising campaigns – and where you should be careful.

Amazon Advertising Promises More Visibility

Launched in January 2018, Amazon’s advertising business has been showing exponential growth with over 139% on a year-over-year basis, reaching two billion U.S dollars.

The most popular feature is an integrated search bar ad that shows up as “Amazon’s Choice”. But, is “Amazon’s Choice” really what users are looking for?

It is crucial to better understand the average shopper’s journey online, as he/she will switch from passive to active from a platform to another.

Facebook And Google Come First

The mindset of a Facebook user is to socialize, therefore, the user is not here to buy, however people are often interested in what their friends buy. Although the right ad on Facebook can inform the user and may be able to drive spontaneous buying,
the intent to buy is generally not there and as a result the return on investment is relatively low, and so is the ad price.

While Facebook is comparable to socializing in a restaurant, Google is like doing window shopping in a mall. On Google, someone is looking for something in particular.

As Google is built on search keyword structure, the keyword ads are sharper, too.
Therefore, Google ads are more expensive because shoppers know what they want and are unsure on where to get it. Their intent is to find the best bargain – which is why Google has been – so far – the best place to reach a new clientele.

Who Benefits From Amazon Advertising

The key question is where the average Amazon user is on his/her shopping journey.
If the user is trying to find an item they know something about, then the ad could help them find the right item and therefore this will compete directly with Google’s. In this case the ad will drive incremental revenue for the advertiser.

If the user is there to buy the wanted item, then it has a high risk of disrupting the user’s purpose. The question becomes who would benefit most from advertising on Amazon, as this shopper has already made up her/his mind? Clearly these types of Ads will be disrupting someone’s else opportunity to sell and could risk annoying the consumer. You don’t want your brand to look like that!

There is one exception to these which occurs when Amazon is Advertising their own products indicating that Amazon’s long term goal is more than just selling advertising.

Amazon’s Double Play

It is not the first time that Amazon has been showing a proactive type of business. As it owns all the data of users and vendors, Amazon knows when a vendor sells well and will not hesitate to start competing or offer to acquire them – just like it did with PillPack.

Is Amazon going to promote its own products to take away business from competitors? Is it going to allow vendors to compete on a level field?

Is Amazon trying to increase revenue by forcing vendors to compete harder with each other… Or is Amazon going to advertise its own products to take competitors’ business away?

Options are all open – and vendors have to keep an eye on their way or advertising on Amazon. While it might cause a business disruption, it might just give more data money to the powerhouse.

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Much like customer service, healthcare, and even education, artificial intelligence, or AI, is on pace to make a considerable impact in the workplace and revolutionize human resources as we have come to know it. Human resource managers have a great responsibility of identifying and vetting potential talent for their respective companies and also ensuring that they are delivering, supporting and managing communications regarding benefits offerings and company policies. With the addition of AI, HR managers are empowered to further streamline standard processes, leverage data in decision-making, and optimize the efficiency that goes into researching and retaining the best candidates.

There are many important factors that go into attracting the right talent. Not only do HR managers have to ensure that each candidate meets the standard requirements on paper, but they must also properly manage the pipeline of talent for future opportunities within a company. AI now has the ability to allow companies to “attract and repurpose talent,” as referenced in The Economist, which can prove to be invaluable when looking to scale a team in the workplace.

Taking this one step further, once a strong candidate has been added to a team, AI has proven useful for helping HR teams to manage employees through performance and functional data. Companies are increasingly looking to advanced AI tools to suggest candidates for new roles by taking a look at different variables such as employee data and job requirements that fall in line with an employee’s core strengths. As employees mature in their roles and the needs of the business continue to expand, AI has been seen as a great resource for HR managers tasked with needing to keep a pulse on new growth opportunities.

A lack of strategic management in HR operations will likely result in costly challenges that can be hard to overcome. One of the most costly areas of human resource management to-date lies within employee retention. According to Business.com, “Businesses with a high turnover rate end up spending thousands of dollars on employees that don’t end up staying with the company, which is a costly waste of resources.” The article also states, “With big data, HR representatives can get a more accurate picture of who is leaving and if there are any patterns among those seeking employment elsewhere. At the same time, big data can be analyzed to identify patterns for people choosing to stay with the company, eventually coming up with a model for employee retention.”

Although human resources will likely remain a ‘people-focused’ role, managers should not be afraid to use technology to their advantage. Targeted data can lead to many insights that may have otherwise gone undiscovered and evolve into new strategies that can be implemented for long-term success. Access to tools like analytics, machine learning, and big data, among others, will help to increase the value and efficiency of the HR manager role and lay the foundation for more high-level assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of the company.

As conversations around salary and equal pay continue to resonate in the media and the wider professional community, it has been discovered by company leaders that AI can be leveraged to assess pay data for their teams, in order to make more informed salary decisions. For starters, this information can include market-relevant pay ranges by role and geographic location. Providing managers with such capabilities can help determine pay decisions for employees and avoid grievances regarding salary and compensation with employees in the future.

Despite the noise and concerns around AI ‘stealing’ jobs and replacing human talent, we like to look this technology as an added resource that complements human intelligence and supports strategic decision-making. For as far as we can see, HR will remain a critical element to managing a healthy workplace, so why not explore the tools that have the potential to take your processes to the next level and add to the strengths of your workforce? To sum this up, we side with Forbes in saying that, “with intelligent, data-driven people management, the top priority is to add value to the organization in the smartest way possible, using all the tools at the HR team’s disposal.”

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With the venture capitalist space continuing to grow and evolve at a rapid pace, it is no surprise that startups are in need of funding, and quickly. While many seasoned founders have specific approaches to raising capital, there is technically no clear set of guidelines defining best practices, things to avoid, or even the critical components that should always be taken into consideration when pitching an investor. Though there may not be an official guide in place, there are some clear tactics that have earned the most positive track record for startup executives and the investors they are looking to appeal to. To make sure you are adequately prepared to make the best impression once you’ve made contact with a potential investor, here are a few recommendations that help our clients to stand out from the pack.

First and foremost, don’t forget the basics – and be strategic about which investor(s) will ultimately serve as the most valuable resource for your company. Take the time to do the legwork and necessary research. One tip at the starting point of the process is to identify the investors that either specialize or have significant experience in your industry sector (i.e. software, digital media mobile, cyber security etc.) Once identified, you want to be sure that your investor partners are able to help you navigate industry challenges and that you may also be able to leverage additional resources they have established through years of industry experience and networking. Regardless of your headquarters, we also recommend exploring investors in your target demographic locations. If you are based in Los Angeles, but see a significant need or market gap for your product or service in Charlotte, NC, you may want to consider looking into investors that have developed a significant footprint in that region.

Although it may sound obvious, there are times that we have encountered executives or founders that do not have a practical understanding of the venture capital market. There is enough money to go around, but it is your job to figure out the best ways to secure it. Research shows that from 2014 to 2017, the average VC fund has doubled in size as investors become more aggressive and competitive with the companies they choose to fund. Circling back on our point mentioned above regarding being strategic about the geographic location of your investors, and because there are so many more micro VCs and funds outside of traditional startup hubs (i.e. SF, NYC), the chances that you are able to find an investor in an ideal market for your company is more likely now than ever before. Be flexible with the way you choose your money, whether it be through crowdfunding efforts, equity crowdfunding, convertible notes, etc. True to its definition, ‘tradition’ is more a thing of the past, so be nimble and explore alternative options that could be just as beneficial.

Along with understanding the venture capital market also comes understanding the standard VC structure. Familiarize yourself with industry jargon as well as the various debt and equity options. You’ll want to at least have a general grasp of these concepts for scenarios that require quick decision-making or when interacting with investors that may want to test your knowledge. You also want to have a full understanding of the type of agreement you are committing both yourself and your company to. Here are a few terms that might be helpful to add to your research list:

• Priced equity rounds
• Convertible debt
• SAFEs
• KISSes

Lastly, if you want to hit a ‘home run’ with investors and give yourself the best shot at securing the money you need to continue scaling your business – create a strong pitch deck. This will be the tool that highlights your company’s most attractive accomplishments and outlines the ambitious vision you have to ensure your company’s long-term success. Every detail should be calculated and tie back to a bigger theme that will help convince an investor of the legitimacy of your business and why they should ultimately trust you with their money. Don’t be afraid to include potential issues or challenges your business may face. Use this as an opportunity to display your knack for strategizing, problem-solving and team leadership. Sell your solution and make sure you have hard evidence or support to back it up! A strong pitch deck should always include – a solid company overview, breakdown of the mission/vision, background and strengths of the leadership team, industry challenges, your unique approach to solving them, the market opportunity and any other support that will help your company stand out against competitors.

Good luck!

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