In our previous blog, Scott covered how to make sure your demos showcase your solutions. There are several aspects to make it easier for your customers to understand, evaluate and purchase your products. One of the most effective and not well-known tools is a Marketecture. So, what is a Marketecture and how do you build one?

At any time, it’s critical to align your team, but during these challenging times it is even more important.

Okay. That title might be a little harsh. Maybe your demo doesn’t suck. But a lot of them do. Demo’s are hard. They require time, investment, measurement and updating. However, many people check the box on a so-so demo, leaving prospects with something that, well, sucks.

This week I’d like to take some time to discuss personal development. During these challenging times, many people have asked me what they can do to progress their careers. Unfortunately, switching jobs is difficult right now. Therefore, I recommend focusing your time on personal growth.

In my last blog about self-service, I discussed how B2B companies need to make it easier for customers to engage with their solutions. However, before you can enable customers to help themselves, you need to make them aware of your company and how your technology can help them solve problems. Surprisingly, this is a task many organizations struggle to articulate.

In previous blogs, we discussed scaling the customer lifecycle and product development. Today, we’re going to discuss the challenges of scaling your team. As a leader, scaling your team means helping them grow to become more productive. It also means formalizing your organization, so that:

At True North, we’ve been having conversations with investors, colleagues, trusted advisors, and clients about the state of raising capital and M&A during the pandemic.

In today’s society, we have become very familiar with self-service business models. Amazon has crept into our daily lives, and more people use services like Instacart for groceries than ever before (myself included). It’s clear self-service will become a significant part of how we support customers moving forward, especially considering the push to touchless customer service.

In my last blog, we discussed the difference between growing and scaling. To recap, growing is increasing revenue at the same rate as your costs while scaling increases revenue faster than your expenses. Scaling comes down to doing more with less. While my last blog focused heavily on the customer lifecycle, this one is on scaling product development.

With the sudden shift to remote work, professionals around the world are grappling with the best way to connect with colleagues, engage with prospects and communicate with customers. From messaging and voice to text and social, there are endless options for connection. As a workforce, we need to challenge communication overload by using the right tools for the right audience. I’d like to share a few observations and best practices based on the people you’re engaging with and the channel you’re using to connect.

Traditionally, entrepreneurs identify opportunities or problems in a market that need solving. Sometimes the problem is simply a disruption to the norm or an old routine way of performing tasks. The global pandemic is an excellent example of this kind of disruption and dislocation. We’ve seen our fair share of it over the last few months.

Ask any entrepreneur what fuels their drive, and most will reply they’re passionate about the solution they’ve built because they believe it can solve real-world problems. To turn their product into a business, however, they need customers.

At True North Advisory, we sometimes work with technology startups and smaller companies. They all want to grow their business and take it to the next level. But what they really mean is that they want to scale.

Big ideas are exciting. They drive innovation, revolutionize products, and build startups. Yet, how often has your team debated an idea at length merely trying to decide if it was good or bad? So much time is devoted to trying to fit ideas into the two absolute categories of “good” or “bad.”

We CFO’s have to focus on lots of demands and priorities — balancing executive leadership and strategy with financial reporting, capital and fundraising, budgets and performance, compliance, human resources, business systems, and more. Each day, week and month are different based on varying priorities — and that was before a global pandemic.

In early March, Scott Hoffpauir, Jim Tholen, and I founded True North Advisory — a firm hyper-focused on helping entrepreneurs scale and grow their business. By mid-March, the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic and the world began to shut down. Talk about timing.