In the world when anyone can complain about any business failure in a public manner, any business is vulnerable. A reputation crisis is always around the corner. And it is even more challenging in a B2B industry where buying journeys are longer and past failures are harder to erase. B2B customers are good at researching their options, comparing businesses and making informed decisions. Any past reputation crisis may be standing in your way to success for years to come.

The B2B Business Sales Challenge

When it comes to B2B, sales demos are often the only way to close a sale. It is the only way to demonstrate how your product is solving your prospects’ pain points and prove that your platform is worth investing in. <ul><li>Product demos are central to any software sales process.</li><li>Product demos can turn a prospect into a customer, a customer into a believer and a brand advocate.</li><li>Professional product demos can rank for your brand name and set positive expectations about your brand. </li><li>Using your product demo on your landing pages makes you look like a serious and reputable company.</li></ul>

The Importance Of A Sales Demo

Using online tools like Walnut, you can create and embed your demos on various landing pages allowing your site visitors and prospects to use interactive features to try some features and get to know your product better.   Demonstrating your product demo on your website/landing pages makes you look like a serious and reputable company. This is especially helpful to smaller businesses, as you enable product-lead-groth (PLG) with your prospects which in turn, makes you appear to be a bigger brand.

Strengthening Your Online Reputation

Using your demos for reputation management means turning them into the top-of-the-funnel content assets. So instead of treating your demos as private assets, start looking at them as your branded digital media and make them searchable by Google. Get your sales team involved in the process as they will likely offer a great deal of insight into your probable decision makers and buyer personas behind each search query. Collaboration is key for success here.

Treat Your Demos as Content Assets

Innovating your sales demos comes with lots of benefits including a happier sales team and more sales. It may come as a surprise but sales demos can also boost your brand and solidify your reputation as a reliable niche solution.

The Bottomline

Looking for ways to solidify your B2B business online reputation? The solution may be in adjusting your sales demonstrations.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

How to Use Sales Demos to Strengthen Your Online Reputation

In B2B, a buyer is nearly always a group of people working together rather than an individual acting alone. Forrester’s 2021 B2B Buying Study revealed that over 60 percent of purchases have more than four people involved–versus just 47 percent in 2017–and they can include different buyer roles and departments. These findings helped in enabling companies to connect individuals to their buying groups, associate them to specific opportunities and then track the progression of opportunities through the revenue generation process. It shows a tighter alignment between marketing and sales.

The Individual Buyer

One of the greatest sources of disagreement between marketing and sales is defining an appropriate lead, whether it’s qualified, and when it can advance through the B2B channels. These disagreements often stem from an inability to qualify leads through personalized engagement. There’s no better way to determine if a lead is sales-ready than to directly ask them, “Are you ready to talk to sales?”

The Sales And Marketing Conflict

Effective, engaging outreach takes considerable time and effort. Imagine trying to manually personalize every email, online chat, or text message to multiple individuals within multiple buying groups and verticals, according to where each account is in the buyer journey–across hundreds or even thousands of accounts. AI Assistants, powered by Conversational AI, are gaining momentum for their ability to touch every lead with personalized engagement at scale.

The Solution

When these leads are given a personal touch earlier in the funnel, they feel more connected and valued by businesses. More importantly, this AI-driven proactive outreach provides leads with the opportunity to raise their hand earlier in the customer journey–which means opportunities accelerate to the notice of the sales team.

How It Works

AI Assistants can also help sales and marketing mitigate challenges that arise from inconsistent and inaccurate data by evaluating the health of each lead through email verification and measuring information against criteria sets to guarantee emails sent have a high delivery rate. When it comes to helping marketing and sales be more effective, Conversational AI offers an ideal solution.

Conversational AI

Misalignment on roles and responsibilities in the B2B channels can be another source of ongoing tension. Without agreed-upon goals, definitions, and defined roles for each team, miscommunications can often result in dropped leads. Conversational AI is helping to bridge the gap between marketing and sales teams by meeting both teams’ needs. AI Assistants can ensure marketing leads meet the agreed-upon criteria of being sales-ready through better traction in the pre-qualification stage.

Defining Roles and Responsibilities

Marketing and sales teams question whether they’re doing a good job or if their AI Assistant is doing its job. Well, you have to inspect what you expect. To define what successful Conversational AI deployment looks like, organizations need to establish key metrics, such as average response time,  the number of sales accepted leads, deal velocity, and pipeline value. Once the metrics are defined, a feedback loop should be introduced to collect data and glean insights. These insights can be used to communicate outcomes with marketing and sales.

Measurement and Creating a Feedback Loop

artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence

How Conversational AI Enhances the Buyer Experience

As pressure is added by consumers seeking to make more responsible choices and by the constraints of ever-dwindling natural resources, more companies are incorporating sustainable strategies and adopting more socially responsible practices. <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corp-social-responsibility.asp">Corporate social responsibility</a>, or CSR, is the business practice of pursuing social and environmental gains, alongside financial gains. As the push for companies that do good increases, corporations of all sizes are looking for ways to incorporate sustainable business practices into their everyday.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Demands for disclosure for companies to reveal what's under the hood of their businesses have become commonplace among consumers.  It is also partly a result of the ever-increasing availability of almost instantaneous information, and consumer and shareholder demands of once behind-the-scenes information. As part of a business model that embraces corporate social responsibility, companies are sharing more environmental, social, and governance disclosures

CSR Trend: Increased Transparency

Gone are the days of rampant resource usage without any accountability or thought toward replenishment. Climate change continues to drive many conversations in the corporate world, and multiple trends in CSR intersect at this topic.
As available natural resources are rapidly depleted and our world reaches a tipping point of a 2-degree rise in average temperature, socially responsible companies are investing in green technologies, reducing their reliance on nonrenewable resources, and looking to more sustainable inputs to do business.

CSR Trend: Green Technology

Localization is in. Even companies that operate on a global level are recognizing the value of local markets and supply chains. This is not only to reduce carbon emissions that might be associated with transportation or supply chain costs (as creating "greener" businesses is also a rising CSR trend mentioned above) but to tap into local talent and solutions. 
Many companies that also have charitable arms are also prioritizing nonprofit partners that work with local leaders and local talent, rather than "shipping in" cookie-cutter solutions.

CSR Trend: Global Companies Acting Locally

As the issue of economic inequality rises to the forefront of many political debates, so does the issue increasingly press upon corporations. 
Recognition of inequalities in pay and economic burdens of employees is an emerging trend in corporate social responsibility. Pay equity between males and females, measuring the difference in income between the highest-paid and the lowest-paid worker at a company, and making sure that there is a diverse staff base have become key priorities of the best companies in the world.

CSR Trend: Diversity and Inclusion

Companies are increasing transparency, innovating, investing locally, and addressing inequalities in an effort to boost corporate social responsibility.

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

What Are the Top Trends in Corporate Social Responsibility?

Values drive corporate performance. My research concludes that a specific set of values drives sustained success. As I wrote in Value Leadership, these values are embodied in seven principles such as fulfilling your commitments, valuing human relationships, fostering teamwork, winning through multiple means and fighting complacency.
The Drucker Institute has its own ideas of what makes for a successful organization and it has concluded that 2021's best-managed company is Microsoft.

Microsoft Is Doing It Best

Microsoft -- whose stock price has soared 681 percent since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in June, 2014 -- has increased its overall score more than any other company tracked by the Drucker Institute since it began publishing this ranking in 2017.Here are three things that contributed to Nadella's success and how business leaders can use them to benefit their organizations.

Leadership Lessons

Most new leaders change the culture as the first order of business. Nadella changed Microsoft from a company that pushed its products on customers -- without regard for whether they were best for the customer -- to one that put customers first.Follow Nadella's approach to cultural change so your company can attract and motivate the best employees -- and they will help you win and keep more customers.

Create a culture of customer value creation

Nadella fostered innovation by encouraging people to adopt a new approach to product development. "We had to introduce and to promote new products and business models ([software as a service] vs. perpetual [licenses]). We had to drive our employees to interact with new corporate decision-makers - business vs. the original technical ones. We had to scale our employees to master new advanced products," Tenzer told me.

Innovate by fostering employee learning

When you change your company's culture and approach to innovation, your top executives will complain because you are forcing them to adjust how they think and act.Nadella issues an ultimatum to his 150 top executives: "Once you become a vice president, a partner in this endeavour, the whining is over. You can't say the coffee around here is bad, or there aren't enough good people, or I didn't get the bonus. To be a leader in this company, your job is to find the rose petals in a pile of shit. You are the champions of overcoming constraints."

Hold people accountable for results

Make customers better off, encourage learning, and hold people accountable

creativity

Creativity

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

3 Leadership Lessons From Microsoft, the Drucker Institute's Best-Managed Company

For some time, private investors and Wall Street have been betting on unprofitable startups who spend heavily on growth to scale, that is Growth at all costs.
A strategy gaining in popularity to achieve responsible scale is product-led growth (PLG)—think Slack, Calendly, Expensify, and Dropbox—companies that have shifted power from the buyer to the end-user. If you want to rise to meet the demands of today’s market while growing sustainably, PLG is the secret.

Growth At All Costs

Minimizing the amount of time between developing a product and providing it to customers while maximizing the number of customers that come in contact with the product allows for fast and sustainable growth. When products solve a real problem for end-users, freemiums can lead to SaaS growth with an average of 7% free to paid conversion rate.
Zoom, a leader in video conferencing, is a household name today. But it started small, launching in a crowded space with bigger names like Cisco Webex and GoToMeeting. It did this by centring on customer needs and offering its key features for free.

The Key To Long-Term Profitability

If the first step to building a business that’s worth a billion dollars is to develop a product that solves a meaningful problem for the customer, step two is telling the world. To do that, you need people who will advance the mission. As a company scales, articulating the company culture and vision becomes more important. When other people begin hiring instead of founders, the foundation of the company can get lost. Avoid this by hiring with intentionality around core company values. Your team members should all know and be able to list the company values at any moment.

Build On Culture And Vision

The most successful, high-growth companies listen to their customers and value their opinions. Prioritizing customer relationships start by building and launching products that solve their problems; but also includes continued listening. Having the trust and loyalty of your customers continues to benefit an organization as it grows.In a PLG model, users are close to the products, and that helps dictate company direction. Some people interpret the “p” in PLG to mean that the product organization is in charge. In reality, it means that the customer is in charge.

Listen To The Customer

A partner at VC investor OpenView shares the secret of what it takes to succeed and rise to meet the demands of today’s market while growing sustainably.


personaldevelopment

Personal Development

startup

Startups

Growth secrets from unicorn companies any leader can use

I study the forces that shape work and our attitudes toward it. There are three forces that have been in play since before the pandemic began that help explain why we’re seeing so much turbulence in the workforce now.
<ol>
<li>People are living longer.</li>
<li>They have two or three income families.</li>
<li>There is a shift in the employee's perception towards personal urgency, pushed by the pandemic.</li>
</ol>

Retaining And Recruiting Employees

The combined impact of these three forces is swinging the power pendulum toward employees — who don’t want to just work and then retire, who may start to reject really bad jobs, and who will be paying close attention to what other companies are beginning to offer their workforces.

The Impact

In the short term, many people are still deeply anxious about the health implications of going back to certain types of work. This extends to low-wage workers, who say their concerns about their mental and physical health are nearly as high as their concerns about covering monthly expenses.It seems to be as hard to predict the future today as it has been since the start of the pandemic. Still, there are three points that every executive should be considering now, as they think about recruiting and retaining employees:

The Employer Fights Back

Companies and leaders must soon realize that when people want more autonomy to live a multistage life, the organizational variable they most treasure is flexibility— flexibility about both where they work and when they work, flexibility to take time off to explore, flexibility to launch a small company or work for a not-for-profit.

Employees Want a Healthy, Future-Oriented Way of Working

By bad jobs are the jobs with long hours, low pay, no training, tough bosses, and poor prospects. When unemployment is high, many people have to take such jobs. 
But as the labor market tightens, people pay more attention to their ideas about what could be, alternative ways of working, and better jobs they could seek out.

Bad Jobs Are on Their Way Out

Right now, there is a huge swell of experimentation going on. 
Companies are designing talent practices that, for example, enable people to work from anywhere three months a year, or to seldom come into the office, or to bundle their working hours into just three days or string them out over seven.

Other Companies Will Change the Playing Field

Forces that have been in play since before the pandemic began can help explain today’s turbulence in the workforce.

career

Career

Why It’s So Hard to Keep and Recruit Employees Right Now | Lynda Gratton

<ul>
<li>We write to share a message. To sell a product. A service. An idea.</li>
<li>Unclear messages mean you lose the opportunity to connect</li>
<li>It means you exclude people. You piss them off. And you lose out. It could mean a lost follower. A lost sale. A lost event participant.</li>
<li>Research shows that readers only grasp about 20 percent of words on average.</li>
<li>Words are often not a priority within design and development.</li>
</ul>

Write to be read, not ignored

<ul>
<li>US federal agencies must write plainly according to the Plain Writing Act of 2010 — so the public can easily understand and use the information.</li>
<li>England’s Parliament passed a Clearer Timeshare Act in 1993 to encourage plain language for the legal profession.</li>
</ul>
Plain language isn’t a trend. Plain language isn’t just for the government. It’s for businesses who want to sell. It’s for not-for-profits who want to raise funds. It’s for bloggers who want to be found on Google.
Plain language is for everyone. In every language.

The importance of plain language

Writing in simple, clear language helps us whether we’re sighted, blind, or have a cognitive disability. When we:
<ul>
<li>Need to book a vaccination online.</li>
<li>Shop online late at night after a long day.</li>
<li>Want to buy a property and need to understand the conditions.</li>
<li>Walk around the streets looking for a new restaurant on our phones.</li>
<li>Read a video transcript or captions because the kids have the tv volume up loud.</li>
</ul>

How plain language helps everyone

<ul><li>We’ve been conditioned to write with complex words and walls of text in school.</li><li>We were encouraged to learn bigger, harder words at school. Snazzy words and long paragraphs made our essays and exam answers sound impressive.</li><li>Perhaps we’ve scored interviews with swanky applications.</li><li>We think our reports, websites, and media releases sound better with flowy, 10 line sentences.</li></ul>

Why do we find it hard to write in plain language?

You might be reading this on an iPhone. Apple products are so damn easy to use, aren’t they? But you might not realize the effort behind them.It takes more effort and time to write simply.
Yet we can all create a better experience for our readers by using plain language.

Plain language is harder to craft than most people think

The Myth most of us believe in:‘My target readers are professionals with higher education.’The Truth:<ul><li>Writing simply isn’t about education or ego.</li><li>Our readers are bombarded with content from all directions, every day. They choose to spend mental energy on some tasks.</li><li>They can’t put 100% of their energies into everything that calls for their attention every day.</li><li>Complex writing slows them.</li><li>Usability experts, Nielsen Norman Group discovered even experts prefer plain language.</li></ul>

A myth that holds us back from writing in plain language

<ul><li>It is possible to express legal concepts in plain language</li><li>Plain language saves money</li><li>Judges prefer plain language</li><li>The public prefers plain language</li></ul> Key takeaway: College-educated professionals and experts appreciate plain language.

4 great reasons to write in plain language from a lawyer

<ul><li>In Lower Literacy Users: Writing for a Broad Consumer Audience, Nielsen Norman Group recommends we write at a grade 6 level on homepages. And a grade 8 level on other web pages.</li><li>This is consistent with the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) recommendation:</li><li>Write text for a lower secondary education level</li><li>A lower secondary level is defined by the W3C as more than 9 years of school. If the content isn’t at that level, then extra content needs to be shared at a lower reading level.</li></ul>

Tips For Writing In Plainspeak: Write at a lower secondary reading level

Have you ever read a website’s terms and conditions? A privacy policy? Or a legal document? These documents are known for being ridiculously tedious and so damn hard to understand.Don’t make me think!Usability expert Norman Nielson Group ran research on how users read on the web. Participants complained about writing that was hard to understand.

Tips For Writing In Plainspeak: Use conversational language

A great way to start writing plainly is to use simple words instead of complex words.Example of simple word replacementsInstead of:<ul><li>Prohibit: use ‘ban’</li><li>Communicate: use ‘tell us’, ‘let us know’</li><li>Demonstrate: use ‘show’</li><li>Diversity: use ‘range’</li><li>Facilitate: use ‘help’</li><li>Amendment: use ‘change’</li></ul>

Tips For Writing In Plainspeak: Choose simple words over complex words

Cutting long sentences is a simple way to improve readability. It’s easier to digest it on mobile too. Yet many people don’t bother.

Tips For Writing In Plainspeak: Cut your sentences and paragraphs

Usability expert Nielson Norman Group recommends we:<ul><li>Spell out abbreviations, initialisms, and acronyms.</li><li>Immediately include their abbreviation in the first instance.</li></ul>This is helpful for all users including people who use a screen reader.Exceptions:<ul><li>It’s ok to use abbreviations for widely used words, such as DVD</li><li>Avoid using unexplained abbreviations in navigation links</li><li>Don’t confuse your reader. Don’t make your prospect think.</li></ul>Key takeaway: Clarify acronyms that aren’t widely known.

Tips For Writing In Plainspeak: Clarify acronyms

Your readers — your prospects — are busy. They read in a range of situations. On a range of devices.They don’t have time for big words, walls of text, and acronyms they have to rack their brains to figure out.You respect their time when you use plain language. You make it easy for them to quickly digest your message. To follow you. To download your trial product. To buy from you.

Writing In Plainspeak: The Bottomline

He didn’t understand a few sentences I’d written. It was tempting to ignore that feedback and put it down to him being a plumber who’s “not great with words”. My client speaks to his customers every…

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

communication

Communication

How to win business and influence people: write in plain language

Over time, departments develop their own languages. While sales, marketing, and finance all talk about “customers,” they likely don’t mean the same thing. 
For companies embarking on a digital transformation, these language barriers that grow up between departments are a problem — one tightly bound to technical debt, which includes disparate systems, added software to accommodate them, and added effort to work around them.

The Language Inconsistency

technical debt is the result of shortcuts — choosing quick fixes over a long-term investment — it causes plenty of problems in the here and now. It adds enormous friction any time people need to coordinate work together across silos.Technical debt grows as departments adopt increasingly disparate business language and embed that language in their systems. To reduce it, companies must establish and rigorously adhere to a small, well-thought-out common language.

Technical Debt

The seeds of technical debt are sown as businesses grow, change, and innovate, naturally leading teams and departments to develop and adopt new, increasingly specialized business language to help them do their work efficiently. 
This may not have presented much of an issue when the company was small — or when communication between departments was a person-to-person affair — but over time, a language barrier grew, making data sharing between departments extremely difficult.

An Insidious Dynamic

To automate their work, departments use databases, computer systems, and applications, which employ data models and databases to capture and lock in the business language of their users. 
While automation can help each department boost efficiency, it can also mean that the company winds up with multiple, disparate, department-level databases that don’t speak to each other very well.

Data Models

People do a lot of work to accommodate the disparate systems: Business departments develop work-arounds and IT crafts custom interfaces to connect these systems. These measures add complexity; though without them, systems simply would not work.The totality of this technical debt — the disparate systems, added software to accommodate them, and added work performed to work around them — will continue to grow until companies erect some guardrails to prevent the unfettered growth of disparate language.

The Three Factors Combined

The only proven way to fix this problem is to intervene at step one, via common language. This may seem like a daunting task — after all companies have thousands of terms in their vocabularies. The good news is that focusing first on a small subset of terms that align with the key concepts that bind the company together makes the task manageable. Our experience shows that no more than 150 such concepts are sufficient to transform the entire company. A smaller transformation project, such as adding a customer-facing app, may require as few as half a dozen.

The Resolution Lies in Common Language

The secret to resolving the conflict lies in recognizing and clarifying the underlying concepts:<ul><li>First, treat “prospects,” “signers” and “responsible payers” not as tangible things, but as roles played by one or more persons or groups of persons (e.g., organizations).</li><li>Abstract a bit further, defining a “party” as “a person or organization of interest to the enterprise.”</li><li>Take advantage of the flexibility this permits, assigning as many roles to parties as befits the business.</li></ul>

Designing Key Terms

Common language and data models provide an architecture that guides further technological development. Developing these underlying concepts, gaining agreement on them, and using them going forward is hard work. It requires committed leadership and a powerful coalition of people with diverse skills. In particular, a very senior business manager — one with the authority, gravitas, and level to call out the need for common language, sell the business case, set direction, provide resources, align others and enlist them to contribute — is essential.

Don’t Underestimate the Effort Required

A senior leader must assemble and manage a diverse team to get the work done, including:<ul><li>Conceptual thinkers who can uncover the key concepts cited above.</li><li>Skilled, business-savvy writers who can put those concepts into easily-understood, precise language.</li><li>Negotiators who can resolve differences among various groups.</li><li>Agents of change who convince others to adopt the common language.</li><li>Architects and technicians who can instantiate the resulting language into systems.</li></ul>

Developing The Common Language

For example, the word “customer” can mean different things to different departments.

Effective Digital Transformation Depends on a Shared Language

<ul><li>There are always underlining assumptions and biases behind every decision or recommendation.</li><li>Get to know the political landscape, the key stakeholders, shakers and movers.</li><li>Don’t rely too heavily on analytical tools or frameworks when assessing complex problems.</li><li>You will never have perfect information.</li><li>Communicate so that there are no surprises. Keep key people informed of progress.</li></ul>

Five Key Takeaways

<ul>
<li>Different assumptions lead to different outcomes. The real question is, where do those differences come from in the first place?</li>
<li>Know who the critical stakeholders are. Know who can implement the recommendations, and even more important, who can stop them from being implemented.</li>
<li>Have a good sense of the political landscape long before you make your final presentation.</li>
<li>Use both analysis and change management to transform those likely to resist your recommendations into supporters.</li>
<li>Even sophisticated financial analysis can be easily swayed by individual biases or corporate politics.</li>
</ul>

How Strategy Works: Important Points

The five forces framework does a great job of helping to identify the competitive threats in an industry. But using this tool to estimate the overall attractiveness of an industry is usually not that helpful.The five forces are kind of like the wind, the direction that competition within an industry is moving. Strategy is about positioning the firm relative to the prevailing winds and a way to make sure that the firm gets to where wants to go, no matter what direction the wind is blowing

The Five Forces Framework

The Five Forces model is widely used to analyze the industry structure of a company as well as its corporate strategy. Porter identified five undeniable forces that play a part in shaping every market and industry in the world, with some caveats. The five forces are frequently used to measure the competition intensity, attractiveness, and profitability of an industry or market.Porter's five forces are:1. Competition in the industry2. Potential of new entrants into the industry3. Power of suppliers4. Power of customers5. Threat of substitute products

In Brief: The Five Forces Model

<ul><li>Keep in mind whenever you see someone apply one of these analytical tools, whether it’s the five forces framework or net present value analysis or whatever, they are just tools. It’s the skills, interests, and motives of the person using the tool that determine whether the outcome of the analysis is reasonable.</li><li>When managers present a point of view, assume their point of view reflects some combination of how things actually are and how they want things to be.</li><li>Many managers do an analysis to reaffirm what they already believe.</li></ul>

What The Manager Already Believes

Three things to think about when considering cooperating with other businesses within a firm to gain synergies:<ul><li>Will it be good for business? Will it increase revenue or cut costs?</li><li>Could we achieve cost or quality advantages on our own without cooperation?</li><li>Could we realize these advantages by working with an outside provider?</li></ul>

Gaining Synergies

<ul>
<li>Value: Is the strategy valuable? Does it increase a firm’s revenues or reduce its cost compared to not pursuing the strategy?</li>
<li>Rarity: Does a firm possess unusual skills or other assets that the strategy would utilize?</li>
<li>Imitate: How long will it take other firms to imitate your strategy? Strategies that are hard to imitate – assuming they are also valuable and rare – are more likely to be a source of long-lasting competitive advantages.</li>
<li>Organization: Is a firm organized to execute and protect its sources of advantage?</li>
</ul>

The VRIO framework To Test A Strategy

<ul><li>Have a list of questions prepared before you enter your interview.</li><li>Make it clear that you need to work through your protocol (list of questions) and then just keep going back to it. I usually send mine ahead of the interviewee, along with a summary report of what we know and what we need to know.</li><li>A brief bio and engagement summary prepared in advance will help interviews go better.</li><li>Always ask for names of other people that you should follow up with after the interview is over.</li><li>Always ask for more information sources when you send a thank you note to the people you interview.</li></ul>

Taking An Interview: Strategy Points

Core competencies are activities in the value chain that create economic value, that are rare among a firm’s competitors, and that competitors find difficult to imitate.Technologies by themselves are not core competencies. But actions firms take to exploit these technologies can be core competencies. And they can sometimes be a source of sustained advantage.

Core Competencies

There are a number of reasons why it may be difficult for one firm to imitate the strategy of another, such as…<ul><li>Team-based skills</li><li>Legal restrictions on imitation</li><li>Reputation or brand</li><li>Switching costs</li><li>Search costs</li><li>Application experience</li></ul>

Imitating A Strategy

<ul><li>Ability to evaluate business alternatives independently and subjectively</li><li>Working with a team of extremely smart people who can get access to a great deal of good information</li><li>The time to focus on the future of the company rather than being caught up in the day to day responsibilities of running it</li><li>Be well rounded but figure out where your unique area of strength is. Every successful consultant I know has a world-class spike of experience in some area.</li></ul>

The Value Of A Consultant

<ul><li>Be aware of the politics of the situation and work them into your strategy.</li><li>Preview leaders ahead of time. No surprises.</li><li>Try to anticipate questions members of the top management team might have about your process or your recommendations.</li><li>Keep key players and clients informed of progress.</li><li>Always address the group, not the screen when giving presentations.</li></ul>

Tips For Your Career

All of the theories, frameworks, and tactics you learn in business school have their limitations. This is a book about how strategic decisions are made in the real world

What I Didn't Learn in Business School is a compelling read---whether you're a recent business school grad struggling to apply your new knowledge or an experienced leader who already knows that no strategy is created in a vacuum. --Book Jacket.

strategy

Strategy

books

Books

Meet Justin Campbell. He's a new MBA graduate who's landed a job with a strategy consultancy. His engagement team is on a mission: help HGS Inc., a specialty chemicals firm, define and execute a strategy for exploiting a textile technology the company developed. Justin and his team deploy state-of-the-art strategy tools to analyze the attractiveness of potential markets for the technology. But they soon realize the tools don't help them grapple with the human side of strategy--including political forces swirling within HGS. Everyone involved in the engagement is biased and insecure, brilliant and hardworking, selfish and lazy, loyal and dedicated. Justin and his cohorts aren't "real"--What I Didn't Learn in Business School is a business novel. But they're realistic: they're just like us. Their story reveals the limitations of strategy tools and demonstrates tactics for navigating the messy, human dynamics that can make or break a company's strategy efforts. This engaging book uses the power of story to present potent lessons for anyone seeking to excel at strategy management. It's a compelling read--whether you're an MBA grad struggling to apply what you learned or in the fray and eager to see what MBAs get wrong when they land in the real world.

Jay Barney

Trish Gorman Clifford

What I Didn't Learn in Business School

<ul><li>Successful people find value in the most unexpected places. They think in terms of principles, not formulas.</li><li>Refining an existing idea moves the world from 1 to n, but to move from 0 to 1, we must create something new.</li><li>Progress comes from Monopoly, not competition. </li></ul>

Every moment in business happens only once

A start-up is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. <ul><li>Big organisations are risk adverse</li><li>A brilliant loner does not have the means to create a new industry</li></ul>It takes multiple people to create new technology, but also smallness for momentum and flexibility.

Why Start-ups?

The first and most crucial decision is whom to start it with.<ul><li>Ownership: who will run the company's equity</li><li>Possession: who will run the company's routine</li><li>Control: who will govern the company</li></ul>

Building a Strong Foundation

<ol><li>Proprietary Technology: 10x Better than next best alternative.</li><li>Network Effects: Provide immediate value to early adopters.</li><li>Economies of Scale: Cost per unit declines as production increases.</li><li>Branding: A reputation that differentiates itself from competitors and guarantees quality.</li></ol>

Monopoly Characteristics

<ol><li>It's better to be bold than inconsequential</li><li>A Bad Plan is better than none</li><li>Don't Compete: competition destroys profits</li><li>Sales Strategy matters as much as product</li></ol>

Lessons of the Dot-Com Bubble

Small changes have disproportionate results."The secret in venture funding is that the top investment equals or exceeds the rest of the fund combined." <ul><li>One market will bring the greatest success</li><li>One distribution strategy will outperform all others</li><li>Some moments will count more than others</li><li>What's more important probably is not obvious</li></ul>

The Power Law

The best place to find secrets is to ask questions no one is asking and look where no one else is looking. <ul><li>"What important truth do few people agree with you on?"</li><li>"What valuable company is nobody building?"</li></ul>The best entrepreneurs know this: every successful business is built around a secret that's hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator. <a href="https://www.justologist.com/newsletter/">Subscribe to my Newsletter to Learn More!</a>

Finding Secrets

'Zero to One' is one of my all-time favorite books. Peter Thiel discusses how successful companies are built around a strong foundation, secrets, and monopolies. This book is for aspiring entrepreneurs and investors who want to build a valuable business that creates new things, rather than develop on existing ideas. 

WHAT VALUABLE COMPANY IS NOBODY BUILDING? The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin wonâe(tm)t make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you arenâe(tm)t learning from them. Itâe(tm)s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there. âe~Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.âe(tm) ELON MUSK, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla âe~This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.âe(tm) MARK ZUCKERBERG, CEO of Facebook âe~When a risk taker writes a book, read it. In the case of Peter Thiel, read it twice. Or, to be safe, three times. This is a classic.âe(tm) NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, author of The Black Swan

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