All posts in June 2019

Building Social Media Business Strategy

By blogger on

This is one of the effective social media strategies that elicits visitors to your page and encourages them to know more about you. Social media networking sites have always nudged online users with attractive updates and fascinating functionalities. Planning about allocating the resources thus becomes a challenging job for them. Social Media OptimizationSocial Media Optimization or SMO services form one of the most vital part of social media marketing. Strategies related to online promotional campaign, SEO or SMO services are all framed by this department Marketing department is the key to the agency’s success.

SMO services include social bookmarking, uploading photos and videos, PPT submission, directory listing, articles and press release submission, classified advertisements and other related activities. Internet Browsers have lot of control over what they consider now and whatever they do than ever before, and they as well have lot more interaction with several other Browsers as well. Set guidelines for both, employees as well as visitors, by setting parameters for social media use. This element is the valuing arm of the Company in terms of accomplished set efficiency and goals in productivity. There should be a definite plan for approaching the targeted audience’s network and herein, a professional guidance is must.st.

One of the most popular and easiest ways to connect to your customers and attract them in your business is questions-answers pattern. Frequently undetected by customers, this is amenable in keeping the Online Website running and up. These companies offer the most comprehensive social media services by implementing the righteous strategies and promotional activities. With the most innovative techniques and strategies, the SMM agencies expose the channels of prospects and guide the business houses to reach them. A professional social media marketing agency uses blogs in the very best way.

Having a free and healthy flowing communication amongst the elements results to a competitive and healthy Social Media Marketing Agency. With the popularity of the social networking forum escalating to great heights, the business houses have discovered the most effective way of reaching out to their prospective customers. This article has covered all the essential part of social media marketing to enhance your performance organically in SERP results. Targeting the right network is the primary thing as targeting a specific niche in the online domain more effectively gives impetus to your online promotions and ad campaigns.
Social Media Marketing Agency
LGD Com

AT Kearney Training Business Strategy Development in an Competitive Landscape

By blogger on

Any great consulting firm has a suite of classic and emerging business strategy development frameworks. Firms and consultants use these business strategy development approaches to look at, analyze, and solve a number of different types of business problems, which occur in different business situations. Many such business strategy concepts hinge on the foundational thought leadership of Michael Porter, the originator of contemporary business strategy. Through the years, top consultancies, such as McKinsey and Bain, have come up with frameworks that are widely used in the corporate world today.

>

Structured business communication is oftentimes framed under a business framework. Crawl Walk Run is a popular way of thinking for representing the progression of organizational change, from an initial crawl stage eventually to walk activities and eventually tothe run phase of automated processes. The Pyramid Principle is ingrained into the presentation storyboarding process. Well known ones include Pinto?s Pyramid Principle, which is commonly used by management consultants and management executives in developing ppt presentations.

A common business strategy problem many methodologies aim to solve is the challenge of achieving sustainable sales growth. In particular, enterprise companies struggle to grow. Companies that have greater than 20% sales growth almost always dwindle down to 8% within 5 years. Between the 1960s and 2010, Fortune 500 companies experience an average growth rate of in less than 6% in real terms (and under 10% in nominal terms). Only about a third of the Fortune 500 companies are able to sustain revenue growth above the national GDP and generate returns above the Standard & Poors 500. Furthermore, real revenue growth is much less stable than ROIC ranging from 1% to 11%. Also, 90% of them are focused across the 4 sectors of Financial Services, Life Sciences, Technology, and Retail. For those companies that do achieve high growth rates, these growth rates also decay quickly. The fact is that most organizations have difficulty achieving significant growth, YoY.

For traditional growth strategy thinking, many people rely on the time-tested business strategy framework Porter?s Five Forces, developed by Porter. In Porter?s Five Forces, we look into various forces that affect any sector, which include internal rivalry, threat of new entrants, customer power, supplier negotiation power, and threat of substitution products. By evaluating these industry forces, an organization can decide on its competitive strategy, which falls into either one of four focus areas: cost leadership, differentiation strategy, cost focus, or differentiation focus.

There are a number of paths to growth, which can be categorized into the two areas of increasing existing business scope and growing the value from current business. To maximize the value from the existing business, a company can better its value proposition, strengthen customer relationships, optimize pricing, penetrate new markets with their existing offerings, and improve its product mix. To expand the business scope, an organization can branch off into emerging segments, expand into new categories, develop new services, innovate new brands, develop new formats and distribution channels, and expand geographically.

To develop a robust business strategy, organizations all must perform business strategy development beginning with a collective set of beliefs around its business positioning and identified strategic barriers to growth. Proper strategy development involves more than a focus on maximizing profitability. Strategy is about value innovation, strategy is about competitive selection, and strategy is about business agility. To properly gauge and analyze your strategic challenges, you must begin with a comprehensive current state understanding of your situation. The next steps include defining what the future state vision of the organization is and then delving into the details of strategically planning how to achieve that state.

A newer business strategy development idea addressing the growth strategy challenge is called Blue Ocean Strategy. Blue Ocean Strategy represents a shift in thinking to make competition irrelevant, thus creating a blue ocean; whereas, in the traditional competitive environment, business play in a crowded, red ocean business environment. With value identification, a company truly understands what the customer values and prioritizes its resources and business initiatives per such customer-centric beliefs. Effective business execution relies on both concept execution and creating a sustainable organization culture. Value Innovation Strategy thinking focuses on enabling innovation, value creation, and effective execution. With value creation, a business selects and develops the optimal growth option by finding the best tradeoff between costs and value.
business strategy

Saas Pricing Model

By blogger on

In many industries the pricing models are as old as the industries itself, and the rules of the game were set a long time go and are well known by everyone. This is not the case of SaaS. Being a young software delivery model, the key factors of a good pricing strategy are not that clear.

It seems, just by taking a look at the pricing models of many SaaS offerings, that traditional licensing model of the on-premise software is not the best idea for OnDemand software.

Also, the traditional services (like consulting) model “I charge for the time you are using my resources (professionals) and their value (junior, senior, etc…)” doesn’t seem to be the best way to approach the SaaS pricing problem (probably fits better when talking about cloud computing). We are not talking about traditional services, we are talking about pricing a subscription business.

In SaaS, the change from offering “products” to “services”, from “acquire” to “subscribe” implies the need of defining the best way for charging for the solution offered.

So, any SaaS provider faces the problem of fixing the right price to its solution / services. There are many alternatives and factors that should be considered when dealing with this.

Most of the proposals out there use some (or all) of this ideas:

* Pay periodically: This means charging the customers on a regular basis (usually monthly).

* Pay for each user: Very widely used, from Salesforce to that new SaaS start-up that two college students just started.

* Pay for the resources: This usually means computing resources: CPU/hour, GB, Bandwith, etc… it is used very often in IaaS or PaaS.

* Pay for the features: So the customers pays just for the features in our solution they really need. Maybe new functionality or maybe simple using ‘more’ of the tool (for example more applications in a PaaS offering).

Each of this ‘ideas’ have its own pros and cons. For example, ‘paying for each user’ has the problem of generating fear in the customer about adopting the solutions widely, or ‘pay for the resources’ has the problem of the customers not knowing what they will pay the next month…

In one word, usually SaaS pricing models are more flexible than in the traditional license-based on-premise software, and mean less risk and a wiser spending. This can, though, lead to a problem of complexity that should be taken care of.

Let’s take a look about something one should always keep in mind, the goals that any pricing strategy for SaaS should pursue in order to sustain a profitable business model.

* Make it interesting for a new customer to start using the product. Having a free version, a trial version, or simply a ‘pay-as-you-go’ strategy starting low, usually solves this.

* Make the costs for the customer predictable. Everyone likes to know what to expect when talking about paying… some SaaS offering have this problem (specially those that have cost based pricing models). One should let the customer know, and decide what they want to spend. Though we should keep in mind the next goal.

* Try to increase the customer share once the customer is using the tool. This can be achieved in many different ways, most of them related to the ‘pay-as-you-go’ model (features, users, resources, etc…). The customer should feel that spending more really means extracting more value from the tool.

* Don’t make the pricing model too complex. This is a problem very often found in SaaS offerings, and that can make the adoption of the tool by the market slower and harder. Let’s keep in mind that many companies are not used to SaaS yet.

* Make sure that the customer does not abuse in the use of the solution. This can happen quite easily in solutions where lots of data are involved, like those that use video, business intelligence tools, etc… the provider should be protected against this.

So, how would this goals and the main ideas explained in the first post be applied when defining a SaaS pricing strategy?

Let’s take a look at a real world example: coghead

Coghead is a very good, and quite veteran PaaS offering that distinguishes itself by giving the chance of developing an application on their platform mostly by visual “drag and drop” operations. They are well funded and should be considered as a strong competitor to companies like Intuit with quickbase or Salesforce’s force platform.

So, let’s analyze their pricing model without talking about money, we are interested in the model:

* They charge basicaly on three different concepts: users, records and file storage.

* They offer a free account with: 1 user, 2000 rows and 100MB of space.

* From there you have two options to scale: the workgroup bundles (with discounts) or the ‘pay-as-you-go’ more flexible depending on your needs.

* There are four different workgroup bundles: plus, pro, premium, business, each one with a fixed price for a certain number of users/records/space. Of course a bundle is cheaper than having the same amount of usage via ‘pay-as-you-go’.

* The ‘pay-as-you-go’ model basically charges you for each user/10000 rows/1 GB you use.

You can take a deeper look at Coghead’s pricing model here.

Let’s talk now about how does this pricing model relates to the “model ideas” and goals we talked about:

* They, obviously have a periodic (monthly) payment. Something that makes perfect sense for a PaaS offering.
* They charge both for the users and for the resources used. This is very often used in PaaS offering, that can be very easily overused. Charging for number of rows or space is a way for Coghead to make sure nobody abuses the platform.
* They have some feature pricing also: Limited users and acces point for applications that wish to be public.
* They have both ‘pay-as-you-go’ and a ‘package’ alternatives.

So, they seem to use all of the ideas we talk about, this, of course brings a problem of complexity but gives the users a lot of flexibility.

And now the final question, does this pricing models achieve the goals we wrote about in this post?

* It is certainly atractive for a new customer/developer to start knowing/using the platform via the free basic account.
* About making the costs for the customer predictable: They offer this through their bundled-workgroup choices. You know what you pay for. This is not true in the ‘pay-as-you-go’ option, which is also more expensive, so their pricing model tends to bring customers to the ‘workgroup’choices.
* Increase the customer share: This true for the ‘pay-as-you-go’ , but not so true for the ‘workgroup’ option, where de customer could hesitate before buying the next and more expensive bundle.
* Don’t make the pricing too complex: We really think Coghead fails at this one, their pricing model is quite complex for the average user. We didn’t even talked here about their partner offerings or the concepts behing the different kind of users. We asume that, for a PaaS offering whose customers are both business and technically skilled, complexity is not such a big problem.
* Avoid customer abuse: This is quite covered there is no easy way that a customer could make a very extensive use of the platform without paying for it. Maybe they could have a problem with bandwidth, something they don’t charge for (they actually have limits at least for public/web users of an app).

We consider that the usual behaviour of a customer would be to:

1. Try the free account.
2. Go for the first bundle.
3. Then the second, third, and finally the ‘business’ option.
4. If the customer has further needs they wouldn’t have any option but going for the quite unpredictable ‘pay-as-you-go’ model.

So, in the end, increasing the complexity of their pricing model by using most of the usuall ideas in SaaS pricing, (they made some changes recently) Coghead has been able to cover most of the goals. We think they have an strong pricing model (complexity is not such a big trouble for this kind of PaaS tool) that supporting their excelent flex-based tool, should help them in becoming a big player in the PaaS area.

Key Areas To Aligning Performance To Corporate Strategy And Goals

By blogger on

It used to be that performance management was managed in one department. Today, performance management has spread throughout the entire organization, where almost every division must focus on performance management to some degree in order to be successful. Despite this wider range of performance management, enterprise-wide performance initiatives are not widely practiced. And without an enterprise approach, it is extremely difficult to align your performance to organizational goals and objectives.

According to software vendor SAS, a recent survey of 1100 businesses revealed that performance alignment was the PRIMARY benefit companies hoped to receive from their performance management efforts. Aligning performance to your organization’s goals and objectives is critical to your organization’s success. On the other side, lack of alignment increases inefficiencies and risks and prevents optimal execution of the organizational strategy.

Think of this scenario as a model for linking corporate strategy to business objectives:

The executive board collaborates high-level strategic planning and identifies goals for the CEO and organization. The CEO then meets with his/her senior executives who in turn develop objectives derived from the CEOs goals and integrates those goals into the strategic plan. In turn, those executives meet with their managers who develop objectives derived from the strategic plan, and so on. Then, each subordinate goal is tied to one or more goals of their manager. Ideally, the final result is that every tracked goal in the entire company can map back to a corporate objective developed by the board.

Chances of organizational success are greatly increased by translating each high-level objective into a cascading series of focused performance measures. Using our previous example, the CEO may focus on net cash flow while the CFO looks at debt-to-equity ratio. The controller may focus on liquidity ratio, while the accounts receivable manager looks at days sales outstanding, and the accounts receivable clerk worries about percent of collections over 30/60/90 days.

This article discusses aligning corporate strategy to four key areas: departments/ divisions, workforce, finance, and systems.

Departmental Performance Alignment

Departmental performance alignment can be difficult when business processes within an organization span across multiple business units and functional support groups. To avoid bottlenecks, finger-pointing, and redundancy of work, shared performance measures that align people across organizational boundaries must be identified and responsibilities accounted for. For instance, a performance measure that includes percent of collections over 30/60/90 days might be applied both to accounts receivables clerks and sales representatives, thus sharing and integrating performance measures, encouraging collaboration and boosting overall performance.

Workforce Performance Alignment

When workforce performance is aligned with corporate objectives individuals in an organization develop a stake in that organization’s performance. Employees at every level are measured by something they understand and control, and that same measure is clearly linked to the goals of their direct supervisor and the organization as a whole.

Financial Performance Alignment

In an economy where results need to be achieved fast and investor confidence is low, CFOs and finance organizations are implementing integrated performance management to improve information quality and visibility. One challenge organizations face aligning performance is finding financial measures that are meaningful to those responsible for carrying out the work. Using the previous example net cash flow is a critical performance measure for executives, but it probably means very little to the accounts receivable clerk who has no idea of how their contribution improves net cash flow performance. Stick with simple financial metrics that employees can understand and control.

System Performance Alignment

The IT/IS department’s role is to provide technical support for the entire organization. While we know that this alone is a complex task, today’s business model requires systems to not only support users, but to align technology to meet the business needs of the organization. Understanding business unit objectives and translating them quickly and accurately into IT priorities is essential today. So how does an organization measure how well their systems are aligned to organizational objectives? By implementing vehicles for aligning and measuring IT performance, such as service level agreements, performance-based contracts, and products and services catalogs to generate reports that illustrate how well they are measuring up to business objectives.

If you can move closer to aligning performance in these areas your organization will be well on it’s way to surpassing all of it’s goals and objectives. While the goal of a performance initiative is to align performance to organizational strategy, it is most important to maintain flexibility and adapt to organizational changes quickly.

About Victor Holman

Victor Holman is a business performance and growth strategy coach, consultant, international speaker, entrepreneur and creator of the Business Performance Portal. He has provided his expertise to over 50 government agencies worldwide and hundreds of corporations of all sizes. His goal is to help small businesses outperform their competition by applying business growth strategies and assessment tools that work for large, successful businesses.

He provides business consulting for small and large size organizations, business coaching, team performance workshops, and in-depth on-site business assessments for business owners trying to take their business to the next level. His highly acclaimed Insider’s Secrets Club delivers fast, simple, easy to implement strategies for growing your business fast!

You can access his FREE business assessment tools, business management kits, business training programs, videos, templates, and more at http://www.lifecycle-performance-pros.com

The Systematic Approach To Formulating Your Business Strategy

By blogger on

If you find the prospect of crafting a Business strategy over aweing – you are not the only one. The truth is that many Business entrepreneurs don’t really see the need. Nevertheless the is that most successful businesses have well defined business strategies.

A robust business strategy can mean the difference between a lucrative business and you working 60 to 80 hours a week all year long – and not making enough to make ends meet

On the other hand, many high performing entrepreneurs who have a business strategy are not married to their business and make piles of money – and they usually attribute their fortune to having a strategic plan which guides their business.

Your Business Strategy determines the focus, vision and aims for your whole company. A written business strategy will help guide, but not dictate, your day-to-day operations. Defining, sharing and communicating your business strategy influences and guides operational decisions.

So what is the process for preparing your business strategy?

1. Define your business vision. In your perfect world, just what your business look like What markets would you seek to dominate?

2. Decide your company’s core operating values? You are looking for the core beliefs and values that you wish your company to be known for. Once your key values are clear they form your guiding principles. In other words, why are you in business and how do you do business?

3. Strategy concerns long-term plans. Your strategic is based on the over arching objectives that will help you get from where you are now, to where you want to be.

4. Medium Term Planning. Strategy is about the large scale – long time scale. You need to include elements to guide your day to day, short-term performance. Remember to be “SMART” when setting your annual goals SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. As with any plan you need to define the tasks, who by and when. Figure out what resources you’ve already got, and what resources you need to get you past any barriers. And then create an action plan that clearly lays out how you will achieve your goals. Consulting with your staff will deliver much richer solutions.

5. It is important that you carefully monitor progress on your strategy and plans. Develop a set of milestones. Don’t underestimate the importance of this step. Being able to communicate progress to all stakeholders: investors, shareholders, partners, staff, customers and your local community is immensely powerful.

6. Communicate your strategy and plan. The short-term plan from your strategy creates the momentum and direction for your day to day activities.

7. Walk the Talk. Now that you have the roadmap, it’s time to begin the journey.

8. Make sure you know exactly how you are doing on a day by day basis. Create a dashboard to report on your key performance indicators.Prompt corrective action is often more important that the plan itself.

9. Follow the same cycle next year. (Dream, Plan, Act, Check).

Building a robust, realistic and achievable business strategy is not easy. It requires commitment, effort and discipline. Yet the rewards are obvious. Juat about every successful business has an active, documented business strategy.