An outcomes driven approach to business strategy.

Aggregating customer transaction and behavioral data and standardizing offerings to understand our most valuable customers and what they're most likely to purchase. Leverage existing customer data to create assumptions around who your target market is, as well as the segments & personas those markets are composed of.

Gather valuable audience data by interviewing current, lost and potential customers, organized by customer lifetime value (CLTV) and behavioral history to either validate or invalidate our current assumptions around who we serve and what value we provide.

Understand how to document, analyze, and extract meaningful data from interview responses to then re-evaluate the organization & quality of your market, segment & persona profiles using the newly synthesized data you've gathered.

Develop and maintain systems & processes to regularly extract meaningful customer insights either through additional live Customer Discovery Interviews, or from automated, low-touch engagements. The goal is to stay attuned to the ever-changing needs, goals, and behaviors of your audience to strategically position your brand to not only remain solvent, but to also continuously grow and stay profitable.

Setting aside time to take newly extracted customer data and methodically apply those learnings & trends to your comprehensive audience profiles. Taking these consistently maintained profiles we can then develop a comprehensive lead management strategy that yields high ROI long-term for our brand.

Focuses on developing two key assets that help define your brand's lead management process long-term. The Buyer's Journey divides up the buyer's experience into distinct "chunks" or "touch-points" that allow us to define and develop overarching activities to move them to the next stage, ultimately resulting in a conversion, followed by retention. Throughout the journey, buyers are identifying and eventually solving for a problem/need or fulfilling an opportunity. Every touch point contributes to a buyer's perception of the brand and to effectively manage that experience, you must first know what they are.

Whereas the Customer Lifecycle involves segmenting potential customers into a variety of stages, these stages are used to adjust marketing and sales techniques to maximize conversion. All together, these lifecycle stages create the marketing and sales funnel. As customers move through the stages, fewer and fewer people complete each subsequent stage. This creates a "funnel" effect: Many subscribers result in a few quality customers.

It's important for each marketing and sales team to set a clear definition for each stage. This is really unique to each company, although there are some best practices for defining a marketing qualified lead, moving a "Marketing Qualified Lead" into "Sales Qualified Lead" territory, and scoring leads throughout your funnel.

Each lifecycle stage should evoke particular responses from you as a marketer. These might include email nurturing, premium content, special offers, and even sales follow-ups. Marketing and sales messages are presented incrementally as a customer moves through the funnel. This way, the customer doesn't get turned off by a sales message that comes too soon or too late. "Buy now!" would scare off somebody just perusing your blog, right? Think of Goldilocks: Not too hot, not too cold. Just right.

The main difference is this: The journey involves actions that the buyer takes, while the lifecycle involves actions that the marketer takes. The lifecycle is a segment of the journey in which you, as a marketer, actively appeal to the buyer's needs.

Defining and optimizing a management document that dictates how you handle any tangible media & assets that your brand creates and owns: written, visual, downloadable — you name it. Content strategy is the piece of your marketing plan that continuously demonstrates who you are and the expertise you bring to your industry.

Develop and maintain the systems around the full list of assets you will produce and processes you'll follow for the purpose of generating new leads for your brand, and how you'll leverage them to extract valuable audience data to be used for efficient targeting throughout the lead nurturing & retention process.

Develop and maintain the systems around the full list of assets you will produce and processes you'll follow for the purpose of moving newly acquired leads to the point of conversion, onboarding and retention.

Manage the process of making content for the web that attracts visitors to your brand’s site. Ideally, the content you release will be informative, engaging, and enjoyable, so that visitors subscribe, share, stick around, and even try out your organization’s product or service themselves.

Determine the frequency & schedule of when you'll check on your financials, and define the experts, process and systems necessary to assess the financial health and runway of the brand.

In this first step of the financial planning process, you will determine your current financial situation with regard to current cash balance, burn, runway, growth rate and whether your organization is Default Dead or Default Alive. You can't understand what isn't working if you don't understand what's wrong.

If, upon determining your financial position you determine there are issues, this action plan focuses on discovering what those issues are and what are all the possible courses of action to remedy them. Considering all of the possible alternatives will help you make more effective and satisfying decisions. Although many factors will influence the available alternatives, possible courses of action usually fall into these categories:

- Continue the same course of action.
- Expand the current situation.
- Change the current situation.
- Take a new course of action.

Not all of these categories will apply to every decision you'll need to make at the end of this; however, they do represent the most likely possible courses of action.

Determine if leveraging affiliates & influencers is right for your brand and how you'll structure the program to achieve maximum ROI.

Covers the processes of:
- Analyzing Competitor Affiliate Programs
- Determining Approach to Affiliates & Influencers
- Evaluating Impact of Affiliate Commission on Cashflow
- Determining Option Ranges for Affiliate Commission & Payout Plan
- Creating Affiliate OKR's

Enabling you to setup the necessary infrastructure, recruit the right affiliates, and mange the performance of the program as a whole.

Develop the systems architecture necessary to run & maintain your affiliate program, covering everything from:

- Managing Affiliate Content Pillars, Keywords & Guiding Assets
- Managing Affiliate Communication Plan & Infrastructure
- Managing Affiliate Link Infrastructure
- Managing Affiliate Offering Landing Page(s) & Analytics

Enabling you to communicate with and manage affiliates efficiently.

Of course, just launching that program is not enough. If you want it to be successful, you still need to recruit quality affiliates. That is what we are going to cover in this post: program promotion and affiliate recruitment strategies to employ in order to onboard affiliate partners into your newly-launched affiliate program.

Manage your affiliate program and your active affiliates to ensure there are no violations, no inconsistencies, no red flags, affiliates are being activated in the most streamlined manner, looking for ways to optimize affiliate engagements, and updating existing systems and processes overall.

Define the key metric, mission and vision to align all your brand’s activities around building a long-lasting and profitable brand.

Develop a strategic set of product objectives that align with your brands long-term goals, as well as the key results necessary to measure the effectiveness of tour initiatives & projects to make your objectives a reality.

Develop a strategic set of Sales objectives that align with your brand’s long-term goals, as well as the key results necessary to measure the effectiveness of tour initiatives & projects to make your objectives a reality.

Develop a strategic set of Marketing objectives that align with your brand’s long-term goals, as well as the key results necessary to measure the effectiveness of tour initiatives & projects to make your objectives a reality.

Develop a strategic set of Finance & Accounting objectives that align with your brand’s long-term goals, as well as the key results necessary to measure the effectiveness of tour initiatives & projects to make your objectives a reality.

Develop a strategic set of Human Resource objectives that align with your brand’s long-term goals, as well as the key results necessary to measure the effectiveness of tour initiatives & projects to make your objectives a reality.

Develop a strategic set of Customer Service & Support objectives that align with your brand’s long-term goals, as well as the key results necessary to measure the effectiveness of tour initiatives & projects to make your objectives a reality.

A theme-based roadmap outlines the product’s themes or goals within a specific timeframe. Themes or goals are based on market problems you plan to solve. These themes tell your stakeholders, whether they're your board members or teammates, which problems you will solve in what timeframe. A theme-based roadmap tends to have fewer releases and more overall goals that will be met as opposed to a technological roadmap that focuses on the functionality you'll produce.

The essential goal of a product plan should be to ensure that a product is built that delivers some business value to a specific set of customers in order to meet certain financial goals based upon a defined brand strategy. These plans should increase that product’s effectiveness in doing so. A product plan describes the market opportunity, profiles the target customers, specifies pricing, identifies the financial goals, indicates the key priorities for development and enhancement, and provides a roadmap for delivery for at least the next four quarters.

Product release planning is the process of deciding which features will be offered and, if so, in which of the future product releases will they be incorporated. It also covers the release period, or the interval until the time that the product is released.

Put simply, the Product Release Plan tells us:
- Who our customers, as well as all the other stakeholders are.
- What are they trying to achieve
- Based on their needs and our capabilities, what features should be released next?
- Why should these features be selected instead of the others?
- When will it be released?

Product release planning aims to answer all these questions while transforming the theme based roadmap into a defined list of deliverables a brand needs to produce.

A test plan is a detailed document that outlines the test strategy, objectives, resources needed, schedule, and success criteria for testing a specific new feature or piece of software. The main goal, of course, is to discover defects, errors, and any other gap that might cause the software to not act as intended or provide a bad experience for your users.

An effective testing plan ensures your offering:
- Meets the requirements that guided its design and development (In other words, does it do what it’s supposed to do when it’s supposed to do it?)
- Responds correctly to all kinds of inputs
- Lives up to the performance standards you’ve outlined and can be used as intended
- Can be installed and run in all intended environments
- Achieves the results you and your stakeholders are after

These standards change based on the type of offering you're producing. The ones detailed above align more with Software driven offerings, whereas brands developing a physical/digital good or service may have different requirements for their offering passing the testing phase.

The process of taking the predefined offering your brand will produce and actually building, testing, launching & optimizing it over time. While this is under product, this typically involves almost all functions of your team towards the later stages of each cycle as your team should come up with a comprehensive approach to reducing audience friction as they engage with your brand offerings.

The process of assessing best practices for Customer Service & Support within brands with similar offerings or with similar market positioning to yours via a competitive analysis. By taking the data from this Cross-Industry Customer Service Benchmark Analysis, your brand can craft both a Customer Care Vision and a Customer Service & Support Standards & Values that positions your brand to be hyper attentive to your customers needs.

Arms your brand with practical guidance on building and sustaining a culture of outstanding customer service with all stakeholders—your employees, governing board members, etc. It defines good customer service and who is responsible for its delivery. It discusses how to measure customer interests and satisfaction and looks at how new technologies are improving customer interactions. Real-world case studies and scenarios show how you can build effective customer communication programs.

A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a detailed document companies compile to help their employees effectively handle processes and respond appropriately in a variety of possible scenarios. Their goal is to increase employee productivity and performance, reduce miscommunication and eliminate errors, improve compliance with industry guidelines, and safeguard the quality of customer support. SOPs are what smart businesses use to scale, and create consistency in how processes and tasks are performed.

Enables your brand to tap into the benefits of good performance management in creating better service to the customer. Walks you through the key elements of defining key results areas and setting meaningful objectives. Discusses a framework of linking motivation and performance and raises some points to consider in reward and incentive methods to Service staff. Provides an outline for successfully conducting performance reviews.

Model and analyze your existing labor supply to assess and prepare to fill current/future human resource demands. All of this to run a labor gap analysis to see labor shortfalls and produce a comprehensive hiring solution.

Recruitment plans are often used during budget cycles to help plan and allocate costs effectively to recruit, onboard, enable & retain high value employees. A strategic recruitment plan is not only important for filling job vacancies, but also because poor recruitment decisions can be costly.

By taking a proactive approach and building out a plan for your recruiting in advance, you can save time and money and make sure your team doesn’t find themselves short-handed down the road.

The Recruitment Plan helps determine:
- How can you develop a recruitment plan that reflects the dynamic nature of the contemporary job market?
- In a market that’s constantly changing, how can you anticipate future staffing needs and proactively plan ahead?

Sets of processes that enable you to increase employee engagement & performance, while reducing key man risks for the organization.

Managing for employee retention involves strategic actions to keep employees motivated and focused so they elect to remain employed and fully productive for the benefit of the organization. A comprehensive employee retention program can play a vital role in both attracting and retaining key employees, as well as in reducing turnover and its related costs. All of these contribute to an organization's productivity and overall business performance.

Of course, effective performance management is more than just creating a work environment that works. Effective performance management is about leadership, interpersonal relationships, constructive feedback, and teamwork.

Even when it comes to the difficult HR tasks of managing a process your employees don’t care for or find value in, managing a paper process, aggregating data, and keeping other managers motivated to provide employees with useful feedback, there are strategies available that make these tasks more doable.

Focuses on determining whether or not your brand is ready for any type of funding or financing. In terms of steps, it's similar to that of "Assessing Your Current Financial Position". Your brand will determine your current financial situation with regard to current cash balance, burn, runway, growth rate, and how in-demand your offering(s) and operations are. Using the results from this assessment, your team can then determine the next steps on your fundraising/financing journey.

For those taking the equity fundraising route, this Action Plan walks you through the process of developing the infrastructure and managing the process of reaching out to, communicating with, and closing equity investors.

For those taking the debt financing route, this Action Plan walks you through the process of developing the infrastructure and managing the process of reaching out to, communicating with, and closing debt lenders, whether they're institutional or individuals.

Finding new investors for your business depends on the effective management of Investor Relations. Just about any company you’ve ever heard of has taken on investors at some point. Had they lost (or never found) those investors, they’d have had no money to fund their aspirations. That said, investor relations isn’t just important because you need money. In addition, it’s important because what your investors are interested in is the success of your business. Since you’re interested in that too, there’s plenty of reasons to understand their perspective.