ScaleUp Magazine Issue 4 by ScaleUp Magazine

ScaleUp A Magazine for Growth Seeking Entrepreneurs

ISSUE 4

IS YOUR STARTUP BEING SABOTAGED FROM WITHIN?

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HOW TO BE MORE IN CONTROL OF YOUR STRESSORS AND KEEP YOUR COOL?

SCALING SAAS

BUSINESS THROUGH

CUSTOMER SUCCESS Lincoln Murphy

Founder, SixteenVentures 1

ScaleUp ISSUE 4 GROWTH . BUSINESS

PRODUCTIVITY .

MOTIVATION

Contents ■ ISSUE 4

SCALING SAAS BUSINESS THROUGH CUSTOMER SUCCESS by Lincon Murphy ■ COVER STORY

04 A BRIEF GUIDE TO QUITTING A BAD HABIT Learn to quit bad habits easily with Leo Babauta. ■ PERSONAL GROWTH

YOUR COOL Tips to manage your stress.

■ HEALTH

THE BOOTSTART MANIFESTO This manifesto will show you how to act on your big idea. IS YOUR STARTUP ■ LEAN STARTUPS BEING SABOTAGED FROM WITHIN? Learn to keep your business safe and secure. SCALEUP MAG DEALS ■ BUSINESS GROWTH Free software perks worth $500.

■ DEALS

23 HOW TO BE MORE IN CONTROL OF YOUR STRESSORS AND KEEP 2

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THE 22 IMMUTABLE LAWS OF MARKETING Cheat sheet for startup marketing. ■ BOOK NOTES

44 GROWING A COMMUNITY USING DATA Conversation with Moss Pauly of Warrior Forum on growth. ■ BUSINESS GROWTH

REGULARS • ScaleUp Growth Hacks • Ask GrowthMonk • Book Recommendations

A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

MEET OUR TEAM

“Make a customer, not a sale.” ― Katherine Barchetti

Editor-In-Chief Pete Williams

Every product or service in the market is there to solve a customer pain point and if it is not delighting its customers then it has no future. That’s why the Customer Success mantra is so important in today’s business world. You need to understand it deeply and start using it from day 1 of your business.

Contributors Leo Babauta Ash Maurya Lincoln Murphy Jasbinder Singh John Elder Ivan Kreimer Moss Pauly

In this issue of ScaleUp magazine, we talked to Lincoln Murphy who is known worldwide for making Customer Success popular and helping companies of all sizes adopt it as their operating philosophy. He has also written a book on Customer Success and lives and breathes it in his day to day work. You will learn to grow your business using Customer Success mantras and to reduce churn and increasing revenues. We also talked to Moss Pauly of Warrior Forum on his data-driven approach to growing his company and making it one of the top forum on marketing. Apart from this, you will learn to control your stress and quit bad habits easily along with 22 immutable laws of marketing. Ash Maurya, the lean guru will talk about his manifesto on bootstrapping a business. We hope that you will like the content as much as we like it while designing and conceptualizing the issue. We are glad to have you as part of GrowthMonk Tribe and are always there to help you find growth in your life. The Editor Pete Williams

Design Anna Heather Image Credits: Flaticon.com, Unsplash.com, FreePik.com

Scale Up Magazine: www.scaleupmag.com/magazine Letters to The Editor: editor@scaleupmag.com Advertising: advertising@scaleupmag.com Partnerships: partnerships@scaleupmag.com General Inquiries: info@scaleupmag.com

Copyright © 2016 ScaleUp Magazine. The content of the magazine are fully protected by copyright and nothing may be reprinted without permission. The publisher, editor and ScaleUp Magazine accept no responsibility in respect to any products, good or services that may be advertised or referred to in this issue or for any errors, omissions, or mistakes in any such advertisements or references. The mention of any specific companies or products in articles or advertisements does not imply that they are endorsed or recommended by this magazine or its publisher in preference to others of a similar nature which are not mentioned or advertised. Published articles do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of ScaleUp Magazine.

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PERSONAL GROWTH

A Brief Guide to Quitting a Bad Habit by Leo Batauta

here aren’t many of us who don’t have some bad habit we’d like to quit: smoking, sweets, shopping, nailbiting, porn, excessive checking of phones or social media, other distractions. The problem is that we think we don’t have the willpower, faced with past evidence of failure after failure when we’ve tried to quit before. We don’t think we can quit, so we don’t even try. Or if we do try, we give ourselves an “out,” and don’t fully commit ourselves. Let me tell you this: quitting a bad habit takes everything you’ve got. If you’re ready to finally quit something, here’s a short guide to doing just that.

10-Steps — Just as Good as the 12-Step Folk You don’t actually need to follow every single one of these steps to quit a habit, but the more of them you do, the higher your chances. I recommend all of them if you want to be all in.

Have a big motivation. Lots of times people quit things because it sounds nice: “It would be nice to quit caffeine.” But that’s a weak motivation. What you really want is strong motivation: I quit smoking because I knew it was killing me, and I knew my kids would smoke as adults if I didn’t quit. Know your Why, and connect with it throughout your quit. Write it down at the top of a document called your “Quit Plan.”

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Make a big commitment. Now that you know your motivation, be fully committed. A common mistake is say, “I’ll do this today,” but then letting yourself off the hook when the urges get strong. Instead, tell everyone about it. Ask for their help. Give them regular updates and be accountable. Have a support partner you can call on when you need help. Ask people not to let you off the hook. Be all in.

PERSONAL GROWTH

Be aware of your triggers. What events trigger your bad habit? The habit doesn’t just happen, but is triggered by something else: you smoke when other people smoke, or you shop when you’re stressed out, or you eat junk food when you’re bored, or you watch porn when you’re lonely, or you check your social media when you feel the need to fill space in your day. Watch yourself for a few days and notice what triggers your habit, make a list of triggers on your Quit Plan, and then develop an awareness of when those triggers happen.

Know what need the habit is meeting. We have bad habits for a reason — they meet some kind of need. For every trigger you wrote down, look at what need the habit might be meeting in that case. The habit might be helping you cope with stress. For some of the other triggers, it might help you to socialize, or cope with sadness, boredom, loneliness, feeling bad about yourself, being sick, dealing with a crisis, needing a break or treat or comfort. Write these needs down on your Quit Plan, and think of other ways you might cope with them.

Have a replacement habit for each trigger. So what will you do when you face the trigger of stress? You can’t just not do your old bad habit — it will leave an unfilled need, a hole that you will fill with your old bad habit if you don’t meet the need somehow. So have a good habit to do when you get stressed, or when someone gets angry at you, etc. Make a list of all your triggers on your Quit Plan, with a new habit for each one (one new, good habit can serve multiple triggers if you like).

Watch the urges, and delay. You will get urges to do your bad habit, when the triggers happen. These urges are dangerous if you just act on them without thinking. Learn to recognize them as they happen, and just sit there watch the urge rise and get stronger, and then and fall. Delay yourself, if you really want to act on the urge. Breathe. Drink some water. Call someone for help. Go for a walk. Get out of the situation. The urge will go away, if you just delay.

Do the new habit each time the trigger happens. This will take a lot of conscious effort — be very aware of when the trigger happens, and very aware of doing the new habit instead of the old automatic one. If you mess up, forgive yourself, but you need to be very conscious 5

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of being consistent here, so the new habit will start to become automatic. This is one reason it’s difficult to start with bad habits — if there are multiple triggers that happen randomly throughout the day, it means you need to be conscious of your habit change all day, every day, for weeks or more.

Be aware of your thinking. We justify bad habits with thinking. You have to watch your thoughts and realize when you’re making excuses for doing your old bad habit, or when you start feeling like giving up instead of sticking to your change. Don’t believe your rationalizations.

Quit gradually. Until recently, I was a fan of the Quit Cold Turkey philosophy, but I now believe you can quit gradually. That means cut back from 20 cigarettes to 15, then 10, then 5, then zero. If you do this a week at a time, it won’t seem so difficult, and you might have a better chance of succeeding.

Learn from mistakes. We all mess up sometimes — if you do, be forgiving, and don’t let one mistake derail you. See what happened, accept it, figure out a better plan for next time. Write this on your Quit Plan. Your plan will get better and better as you continually improve it. In this way, mistakes are helping you improve the method. I’m not saying this is an easy method, but many people have failed because they ignored the ideas here. Don’t be one of them. Put yourself all into this effort, find your motivation, and replace your habit with a better habit for each trigger. You got this. Leo Babauta is the author of The Power of Less and the creator and blogger at Zen Habits, a Top 25 blog (according to TIME magazine) with 200,000 subscribers — one of the top productivity and simplicity blogs on the Internet. Babauta is considered by many to be one of the leading experts on productivity and simplicity, and has also written the top-selling productivity e-book in history: Zen To Done: The Ultimate Simple Productivity System. It has sold thousands of copies and has reached tens of thousands of readers.

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Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you’re looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf. Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you’ll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don’t need to be a workaholic. You don’t need to staff up. You don’t need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don’t even need an office. Those are all just excuses. What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You’ll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you. With its straightforward language and easy-isbetter approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of “downsizing,” and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.

Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary.

RECOMMENDED READING

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David Heinemeier Hansson is the creator of Ruby on Rails, founder & CTO at Basecamp (formerly 37signals), bestselling author, Le Mans class-winning racing driver, public speaker, hobbyist photographer, and family man.

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin DOING” Walt Disney

Turn off notifications on your phone and computer for a specific period of time daily. It will help you focus and get more done in less time.

#ScaleUp Hacks 9

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LEAN STARTUPS

The BOOTSTART RECOMMENDED BOOK

Manifesto

There’s never been a better time to act on your “big idea”. And this manifesto will show you how.

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LEAN STARTUPS

Entrepreneurs Are Everywhere While we may look different and speak different languages, the world is flatter than it’s ever been. We are living through a global entrepreneurial renaissance that can be witnessed in the worldwide explosion of university entrepreneurial programs, startup accelerators, and corporate innovation incubators started in just the last 5 years.

“We all want the same things and fear the same things.”

The Persona of the Garage Entrepreneur Has Changed Entrepreneurs are no longer just two guys in a garage. They can be found in all walks of life. The reasons for this sudden spike can be attributed to: • Rising student debt

Student debt in the United States recently crossed the $1 trillion mark. We are still training the next generation to be workers at an ever increasing tuition cost, but good work has gotten harder to come by. More students are instead seeking out entrepreneurial education and experiences while in college (and even high school) — some with aspirations to build the next Facebook, while others simply want to better equip themselves. • No lifelong employment With the security of lifelong employment and pensions gone, more people are looking to get in the driver’s seat and take control of their destiny. Side business startups are on the rise. • The need for large companies to innovate or be disrupted The pace of disruptive innovation has been accelerating over the last decade, with Blockbuster being the latest casualty in the news. Even previous disruptors are starting to get disrupted by newcomers. This has magnified the increasingly important role of intrapreneurs. 11

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LEAN STARTUPS

There is No Better Time to Start What has really accelerated the uptake of entrepreneurship globally is that for the first time in history, we all, more or less, have access to the same tools, knowledge, and resources thanks to the Internet, globalization, and technologies enabled by Open Source and Cloud Computing. It is cheaper and faster than ever before to launch a new business, and there is no better time than the present to start. This represents an incredible opportunity for all of us. But there is a dark cloud in all of this.

Most Products Still Fail While we are building more products than ever before, the sad reality is that the success rate of these products hasn’t changed much. The odds are still heavily stacked against starting a new business and most of these products unfortunately still fail. And that’s a real problem. We pour a lot of our time, money, and effort into these products. Especially for a first-time entrepreneur, these failures can be a real setback both emotionally and also financially.

A Dozen Reasons Why Products Fail

Here are twelve reasons we commonly attribute to failed ideas: • No money • Poor team • Poor product • Bad timing • No customers • Competition • Lack of focus • Lack of passion • Bad location • Not profitable • Burn out • Legal issues

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LEAN STARTUPS

The Number One Reason Why Products Fail At the heart of all these reasons is one core reason: We simply build something nobody wants. All the others are secondary manifestations or rationalizations of this brutal reality. Why does this happen? I attribute the entrepreneur’s singular passion for their solution as the top contributor to this failure. This is the Innovator’s Bias that causes us to fall in love with our solution and makes “bringing our baby to life” our sole mission. But a build-first approach is backwards. It’s backwards because you can’t brute-force a solution without a pre-existing problem.

The Number Two Reason Why Products Fail Failing at something requires starting. The number two reason why products fail is that they never even get started. We spend too much time analyzing, or planning, or making excuses for not starting — we wait to first write a business plan, or find investors, or move to Silicon Valley.

You Don’t Need Permission to Start The world has changed. Going back just a decade, starting up was expensive. Getting software licenses to build your product, or office space to meet with your team, required capital investment. Today, all these things are free.

The question today isn’t:

“Can we build this?” But,

“Should we build this?”

You don’t need lots of money, people, or time to answer this question. Here’s how… 13

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LEAN STARTUPS

Love the Problem, Not Your Solution It starts with a fundamental mind shift. Your customers don’t care about your solution but their goals. Identify the problems or obstacles that get in the way of their goals, and you identify the right solution to build.

“Having more passion for your solution than your customer’s problem, is a problem.”

Don’t Write a Business Plan

Business plans take too long to write and nobody reads the whole thing anyway. Create a 1-page business model instead. It takes 20 minutes versus 20 days. People can’t help but read it and share what they think. That’s a win.

“Spend more time building versus planning your business”

Your Business Model is THE Product There is no business in your business model without revenue. Revenue is like oxygen. While you don’t live for oxygen, you need oxygen to live. Your worldchanging idea is the same. Before rushing to build, make sure that the underlying problems you identified in the previous step represent a monetizable problem worth solving.

“The best evidence of monetizable pain is a check being written.” 14

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12 LEAN STARTUPS

Focus on Time Versus Timing

You can’t control the timing of your idea but you can control how long you spend on your idea. Unlike money or people which can fluctuate up or down, time only moves in one direction.

“Time is your scarcest resource. Spend it wisely.”

Time-box everything. The power of a deadline is that it comes due — provided, of course, that the world doesn’t come to an end first. Set an appointment with your team to share your results and discuss how you move forward from wherever you end up by the deadline. Set another deadline and go. This is the best way to hold yourself accountable.

Not Acceleration, But Deceleration Optimizing for time does not mean going fast on everything, but rather slowing down to focus on the right thing. Pareto’s 80/20 rule applies here. Your biggest results will come from just a few key actions.

“Your job is to prioritize what’s riskiest first and ignore the rest — until it becomes what’s riskiest.”

Not Faux Validation, But Traction The number of features, size of your team, or how much money you have in the bank are not the right measures of progress.

There is only one metric that matters — TRACTION.

“Traction is the rate at which you capture monetizable value from customers.” 15

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15 LEAN STARTUPS

Remove Failure from Your Vocabulary The fail-fast meme is all about embracing failure as par for the course. However, the taboo of failure is so crippling that most people work really hard to avoid, sugar-coat, or run away from failure. This is counterproductive. You need to instead completely remove “failure” from your vocabulary. • Break your big ideas or strategies into small, fast, additive experiments.

• Use staged rollouts to implement your ideas from small to large scale. • Double-down on good ideas, and silently discard your bad ideas. When you do these three things, you aren’t failing, but course-correcting towards a larger goal.

“Be brutal with your ideas but have faith in yourself.” It’s Time to Act on Your Big Idea

There are no shortages of problems in the world. As an entrepreneur, you are wired differently. You are wired to seek out solutions. All you have to do is channel your attention on the right problem. And you’ll leave the world better off than when you entered it. Isn’t that all that really matters? Don’t waste this moment. It’s time to dust off the ideas deep in the recess of your mind and take action.

It’s time to reboot, level up, and start. Ash Maurya is the author of the international bestseller “Running Lean: How to Iterate from Plan A to a plan that works” and the creator of the one-page business modeling tool “Lean Canvas”. Ash is also a leading business blogger and his posts and advice have been featured in Inc. Magazine, Forbes, and Fortune.

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WHETHER YOU

THINK YOU CAN, OR THINK YOU CAN’T.

YOU’RE RIGHT. HENRY FORD

COVER STORY

SCALING SAAS

BUSINESS THROUGH

CUSTOMER SUCCESS

incoln Murphy is the founder of Sixteen Ventures which is a customer success driven growth consulting company. He has previously worked with customer success management software company Gainsight for a couple of years. He likes helping companies grow instead of being a founder of a startup. He had the realization early in his career that he is not willing to do certain things which one has to do as a startup founder. He has been helping companies grow and has helped more than 400 startups so far. He is proud that his contribution has a tiny effect towards adding value to the world with all the startups that he has helped. He has also authored a popular book on customer success called “Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue”. His current focus is to grow his consulting practice.

Lincoln Murphy Founder, SixteenVentures

His consulting company Sixteen Ventures has an interesting story behind its name. People sometimes ask him how did he come up with the name because it does not make any sense as a consulting company. He says that he was doing the consulting practice and for tax and business structure purposes he wanted to have some name. However, he could not think of a name before the deadline and he had to

formalize this company urgently. At that point of time, he thought that this was his sixteenth venture and somehow the name stuck and he called it sixteen ventures. Over time, this name has helped him reach out to places which he would never have gotten into if his business were called some consulting practice. “So that was something I didn’t think about, didn’t do on purpose but you know when people think you have their money in your pocket, they open doors for you. So it is kind of an interesting side effect of calling it sixteen ventures.” At Sixteen Venture, his primary focus is growth irrespective of the size and stage of the business. One of the core areas for which Lincoln is known worldwide is customer success.

“I recognized very early on that a customer will not buy more from you if they have not gotten something from you. So if they are not successful, they are not going to buy from you” 18

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COVER STORY

What is Customer Success? As per Lincoln, Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company. There are two key elements of Customer Success. • Desired Outcome – It essentially describes what the customer needs to achieve (Required Outcome) and how they need to achieve it (Appropriate Experience) • Interactions with your company – Rather than saying “with your product,” the focus is on all of the interactions your customer has with your company; starting at the earliest touch points of marketing and sales, moving through closing and onboarding, and continuing through their entire lifecycle with you. Lincoln further shares that to really understand the desired outcomes of customer means you understand your customer, means that you understand that there are different customer segments that you work with. It also means that each of those customer segments is going to have a different desired outcome, even though they might share a required outcome but the appropriate experience is going to be different. The companies that have customer success as their operating philosophy if not their operating model are the companies that have 120-130% net revenue retention. Some companies have 150% and he has seen some companies with 200-300% net revenue retention. Workday, Slack, Marketo, Salesforce, Box, are some of 19

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the companies that understood customer success from the beginning. The Box is a very interesting story as they understand it very well which resulted in their massive growth over time. They have one of the most advanced customer success practices in the world and if we think about this, they have to because they have everything from an individual unknown Gmail free user, all the way up to massive six-seven-eight figure enterprise customers. That’s a pretty wide type of users and customers, so they had to figure out, how to operationalize it and they have done a great job. One of the thing that they have done was being able to take those anonymous Gmail users and figure out that thousands of those actually all work for the same company. So that probably means they are using their individual accounts for company business so being able to take that and now go back to the company and say let’s put you on enterprise plan. That is incredible from a growth standpoint and tying customer success into that is difficult and they have done a great job of that. He presses the need to adopt customer success by companies of all sizes. Companies like HP, Cisco, and other big companies have recognized that they can’t continue to exist doing things what they were doing so customer success is everyone needs to focus on.

When to start with Customer Success? The most common question Lincoln gets from companies is, when should they start thinking about customer success. And his answer is always the same. Start customer success either before

you start your company or today, whichever is sooner. Customer success happens when your customers achieve their desired outcome through their interactions with your company. He argues why companies do not want to build that in from day 1. That does not require an organization, that does not require custom build software, it just requires you to build your business around this notion of helping your customers achieve their desired outcome. Why would you not build that from beginning? So if you do that if you build that in from beginning that’s called having customer success as your operating philosophy because the only reason you exists in the world from a market standpoint, is because they assume that you will help them achieve the desired outcome. As soon as you forget that, you will be in trouble. In early days when you are working with early adopters and people that are willing to take a chance, the appropriate experience for them may not require lot of high touches, may not require lot of support from you, they may be OK with just a product but you have to understand that, you have to know what’s going on with them and maybe that’s not true. As you start to move beyond those early adopters, even if you are working with the same type of customer, those customers as they become more mature and less willing to take risks, their appropriate experience is going to change, you can start with an API and slack channel for support and you are good to go but as soon as you start moving beyond technology, technologist or other startups as your customers, you

COVER STORY want to move to the fortune 500, you are going to have graphical interface, 24x7 support, sell on contract which is all part of that appropriate experience, so start building with customer success as operating philosophy. Now from there you will start to figure out what you actually need to apply to your customer success operations but don’t mistake the need to have a whole customer success operation and a team from day 1 with just having this as your operating philosophy.

Reducing churn with Customer Success Lincoln recommends that if you acquire customers with success potential and you operationalize and orchestrate their path to achieving their desired outcome, you are going to absolutely reduce the amount of churn and if you really focus on that desired outcome, you get deliberate on customer acquisition part of it, you are not going to attract the wrong fit or bad fit customers. If you do things the right way, the near zero churn is actually possible.

Challenges faced growing his own business Lincoln’s biggest challenge is to find time as his goal is to remain small. He likes to do things his own way. He does not want to grow his consulting practice by hiring more people and asking them to go and work for clients. That’s why he always has to be deliberate about his time, look for leverage points and operationalize what he is doing. “Time is a big problem for me and that’s a good problem to have.” 20

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Productivity Tips In terms of planning, he has a calendar and it tells him what to do like calls, meetings etc. He is productive at different times of the day depending on the day. He never stops working. This is his creative outlet and he really like to do what he do.

Tools he uses Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Buffer for Social Media, LucidChart for charts.

How does he keep himself updated? He studies human behavior more than he studies what the latest tips and tricks and hacks and things like that are or what the latest tools are out there in customer success world. He spends more time studying human behavior because that’s the stuff no matter how big or small your customers are, there are the human being involved, we have to understand how they operate, and also the characteristics of the humans, and the way they behave tend not to change that rapidly. So really understanding those things is a sounds investment. So when he is not actively working with a client or something like that, he consumes that kind of information to try to better understand the way people operate.

About his book on Customer Success It is published officially in February and came out in March. He wrote it with Dan Steinman who is the chief customer officer of Gainsight and Nick Mehta who is the CEO of Gainsight. Wiley the publisher approached and asked them to write a book on customer success. Book was very much written for Wiley and to their specifications and he thinks that it is a fantastic history of customer success and sort of how we got here, why this matters and sort of where we are going.

COVER STORY

Your business success is now forever linked to the success of your customers Customer Success is the groundbreaking guide to the exciting new model of customer management. Business relationships are fundamentally changing. In the world B.C. (Before Cloud), companies could focus totally on sales and marketing because customers were often ′stuck′ after purchasing. Therefore, all of the ′post–sale′ experience was a cost center in most companies. In the world A.B. (After Benioff), with granular per–year, per–month or per–use pricing models, cloud deployments and many competitive options, customers now have the power. As such, B2B vendors must deliver success for their clients to achieve success for their own businesses. Customer success teams are being created in companies to quarterback the customer lifecycle and drive adoption, renewals, up–sell and advocacy. The Customer Success philosophy is invading the boardroom and impacting the way CEOs think about their business. Today, Customer Success is the hottest B2B movement since the advent of the subscription business model, and this book is the one–of–a–kind guide that shows you how to make it work in your company. From the initial planning stages through execution, you′ll have expert guidance to help you: • Understand the context that led to the start of the Customer Success movement • Build a Customer Success strategy proven by the most competitive companies in the world • Implement an action plan for structuring the Customer Success organization, tiering your customers, and developing the right cross– functional playbooks Customers want products that help them achieve their own business outcomes. By enabling your customers to realize value in your products, you′re protecting recurring revenue and creating a customer for life. Customer Success shows you how to kick start your customer–centric revolution, and make it stick for the long term. 21

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■ HEALTH

How To Be More In Control Of Your Stressors And Keep Your Cool by Jasbindar Singh

Can you recall the last time you got “triggered?” Perhaps it was a throwaway line by a colleague, the sudden changed reaction of someone you were in a conversation with or the family member who appears to be forever taking a swipe? From being your calm even self, within seconds your physiology had been activated almost as if there was a sabre-tooth tiger in the room! The neutrality of the conversation gone, thinking powers subdued and red lights flashing, a full throttle fight or flight had now taken over command. And this you did with great flair, style and aplomb! The only thing was that there was NO tiger present and you realized afterwards that you had overreacted. Needless to say, that particular conversation took a dive and the relationship now needs tending to. Well – the good news is that you are not alone here. We have all done this, haven’t we and realized afterwards that our interpretation of what happened was quite off-mark. Simply put – we got triggered.

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■ HEALTH

Triggers are Our Ammunition Here’s the thing though – whenever we get triggered and hijacked by our strong, unexpected reaction – it is a giveaway sign that there is a hidden barrier waiting for us to breakthrough with! Our triggers are our ammunition for where we need to move beyond any earlier conditioning or beliefs about how we view certain things. Unless we become more conscious of our triggers, we are more likely to do this:

Be on Automatic Pilot We immediately become reactive when our ‘triggers’ get activated. Carl Jung – the gifted grandfather of psychology referred to these as our ‘complexes.’ Typically, our reactions will be way beyond proportion to any intended message.

Combat Zone

conversation has veered off where neither of you started. You are both in a combative mode with blows flying willy-nilly.

Emotional Eruption We then get upset, angry, accusatory of the other person of how they have done “x,y,z”. Even if the other party’s intent was not one to provoke you, being at the receiving end of your eruption, they may also get provoked.

Now you are both in the boxing ring and the But it no longer needs to be this way! Here are seven things you can do. The following actions will not only help you recognize, and understand your trigger but it will help you to keep your cool when you do get triggered. It will give you a breather to respond in a better way and even save your relationship!

Know what and who your triggers are We all have some things or certain people who trigger us more often than others. Be mindful of these before you enter a situation with them. For example, it could that family member who has a certain way of saying things, which just gets under your skin. Or it could be when a staff member or colleague continues to do something that you have already had a discussion about. Knowing this enables you to be forearmed and not being surprised each time, every time.

Become aware when you get triggered This step is not too hard to miss, as you will notice changes in your body, mind and mood. For example, 24

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you will notice the heart starts beating faster, you are sweating, you feel tension in the mind or body and

■ HEALTH suddenly your mood has changed from neutral to anger, flatness, or hurt. Being self aware in this way then enables you to self manage better both of which are important skills of emotional intelligence.

is to remove ourselves and take time out. Likewise, in situations we get triggered, it is not always easy to control our feelings and the best thing you can do is to say that you need some time out and take leave.

Name your thoughts, feelings and reaction You can re-engage once you have gathered yourself. without making the other person the cause Too often we go straight for the jugular and hold the other person responsible along the lines of, “Look what you have done now/or made me feel.” Getting angry, shouting, screaming, calling names, snarling, make biting comments or other passive aggressive behaviours Notice and own your feelings as your reaction. Take ownership – it gives you more power and options to come out on top. Self-control is another dimension of being emotionally intelligent.

Breathe A good way of keeping your cool is to become aware of your breath. Focusing on your breath for the next few seconds will help your calm yourself and regain your composure. It is a good way of buying time so you will be able to better respond, not react. As Steven Covey has said, it is creating that gap between stimulus and response, which enables us to not be reactive.

Remember, our triggers may be a conditioned response to an earlier beliefs or situation which may no longer be appropriate or relevant. Be prepared to challenge yourself on this as growth is just on the other side!

Reflect afterwards noting what you might do differently Whatever you have done, review afterwards and identify what went well, what didn’t go so well and what you might do differently next time. And remember to congratulate yourself for taking a step back, managing an old trigger and coming out on top! Bringing it all together As neuroscience has found, our neuronal pathways respond in known ways. The brain loves to take short cuts with the least amount of expenditure of energy. Changing behavior patterns require a whole lot of intention, attention and repetition. But this can be done.

Look at the context/bigger picture you are in

New neuronal pathways can be created. As has been said, “neurons that wire together, fire together”

Remind yourself of the bigger picture of whatever situation you are in.

So over to you now!

For example, in a project team, the inappropriate response of another colleague could perhaps be forgiven considering they are normally pretty on to it but are super stretched this time or a family member who has perhaps lost a job recently. This allows us to have a bit more compassion and be kinder than our own ‘triggered’ first response taking precedence.

Take time out In conflict situations, one thing we don’t do enough of 25

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Jasbindar Singh loves helping people progress in the careers, leadership and lives. She works as a business psychologist, leadership coach and conference facilitator. Grab her special offer. This article was first published in Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life

RECOMMENDED BOOK

The School of Greatness: A Real-World Guide to Living Bigger, Loving Deeper, and Leaving a Legacy In The School of Greatness, Lewis Howes shares the essential tips and habits he gathered in interviewing “the greats” on his wildly popular podcast of the same name. In discussion with people like Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson and Pencils of Promise CEO Adam Braun, Howes figured out that greatness is unearthed and cultivated from within. The masters of greatness are not successful because they got lucky or are innately more talented, but because they applied specific habits and tools to embrace and overcome adversity in their lives. A framework for personal development, The School of Greatness gives you the tools, knowledge, and actionable resources you need to reach your potential. Howes anchors each chapter with a specific lesson he culled from his greatness “professors” and his own experiences to teach you how to create a vision, develop hustle, and use dedication, mindfulness, joy, and love to reach goals. His lessons and practical exercises prove that anyone is capable of achieving success and that we can all strive for greatness in our everyday lives. Lewis Howes is an American author, entrepreneur, and former professional Arena League football player. He hosts The School of Greatness, a talk show distributed as a podcast. He is on the advisory board of the non-profit Pencils of Promise. 26

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IT ALWAYS SEEMS

IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL ITâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S DONE. NELSON MANDELA

IF YOU LIKE WHAT YOU READ FOLLOW US

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#ScaleUp Hacks 29

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BUSINESS GROWTH

Is Your STARTUP

Being SABOTAGED From WITHIN?

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BUSINESS GROWTH

No. 3”) and the CIA just declassified it. It was written in 1944 and you can actually download it for free right here.

Unfortunately, getting the right mix of people isn’t easy, especially if you don’t have any experience with hiring and team building.

Destroying businesses in hostile countries was something the CIA (or OSS as it was called back then) was definitely interested in; so they created this field manual to teach people how to do it the right way.

The good news is that in the beginning, you’ll be able to handle things directly. Any team you build will be small to start with… probably just a handful of people. With less than a dozen employees, it’s fairly easy to oversee everyone and take a direct hands-on approach to managing your people.

It teaches anyone how to sabotage a company from the inside, step by step. It was written for citizens of foreign countries back in the 1940’s who might be fed up with their country enough to want to do something about it…but oddly enough, the techniques it describes seem eerily familiar even today.

You’ll be able to get to know your employees, learn their strengths and weaknesses, and head off any problems before they spin out of control and destroy your business.

Signs Your Startup Is Being Sabotaged From Within

uilding out a team is one of the trickiest hurdles for new Startup founders. You start out with just yourself and maybe a co-founder, but sooner or later you’ll need to start hiring people.

But over time, your business will (hopefully) grow and you’ll be forced to hire more and more people. Slowly but surely you’ll have to delegate the management of your employees to…well… managers who will be responsible for their own teams. Before long you might find yourself in the strange situation of not really knowing most of the people who work for you. And that’s when you have to really start worrying about sabotage! What’s a Startup founder to do? Luckily, we have a recently declassified top-secret government guide to business sabotage that shows you definite things to look for. It’s called the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” (also referred to as “Strategic Services Field Manual 31

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The first half of the field guide is all about physically destroying things. We’re talking burning down buildings, destroying machinery, and crazy stuff like that. Obviously (hopefully!) that section doesn’t really apply to us. The second half of the guide is all about taking a company down from within as an employee. It’s almost like an employee handbook on how to do your job badly. That’s what we want to focus on. So what does the guide suggest? Let’s take a look and see! Do any of these things sound familiar to you?

“Insist on doing

everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”

One of the great benefits of being the founder of a scrappy Startup is that you can have your hands on everything and you can make decisions quickly. If one of your engineers has a cool idea about the website, they can duck into your office and pitch it to you. If it sounds good, you can give the thumbs up and that new feature might roll out live later that same day. Big companies, on the other hand, can take forever to make decisions. Ideas have to get approved by several department heads and pass through a couple different committees; then get sent past the legal department before they’re actually implemented. Many big companies suffer from analysis paralysis. Make sure your Startup doesn’t!

“Make ‘speeches.’

Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate ‘patriotic’ comments.” Again, one of the great benefits of a Startup is agility. The ability to move quickly and get things done is your greatest weapon. If you have employees who spend more time talking about things and less times doing things, you may have a potential saboteur. Meetings - on top of meetings is the worst thing you can do in a Startup. All that time sitting around in conference rooms isn’t getting your product to market any faster!

BUSINESS GROWTH And that brings up our next sabotage method… Committees or meetings seem to be a staple in modern Corporate America. Don’t let your Startup fall into that trap! Sure, your team probably needs to get together regularly so that everyone is on track and aware of what everyone else is working on. But this can be a quick ten to fifteen minute “all hands on deck” meeting first thing in the morning.

“When possible,

refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration.’ Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.” If at all possible, keep meetings so short that people don’t even need to sit down. “Standing” meetings work great, because no one wants to stand around all day. Get in, say what needs to be said, touch base with the team, and then send them on their way so they can get real work done. I once consulted for a company that loved “brainstorming” sessions. They’d tie up key employees for hours to “brainstorm” things. It drove me crazy! I’ve never been involved in a regular “corporate” type meeting that wasn’t a complete waste of time. They’re usually done just to make whoever’s running the meeting feel important. Nothing ever gets done. Don’t let your Startup be sabotaged by endless meetings!

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“Refer back to matters

decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.”

This one dovetails nicely with meetings. If you have an employee that constantly refers to matters that have previously been settled, then you have two problems. First, the employee is sabotaging your Startup. Second, you’re having too many meetings and making the meetings too complicated. Either way, this sort of behavior should set off warning signals to you!

“When possible,

refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration.’ Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.” This is one of my favorite techniques! We all know someone who fixates on nonsensical things. “I know we decided on 12 point font size for that web page but I really want to see it in 11.5 point”; or “I know we agreed to use blue here but shouldn’t we run a focus group on the exact shade of blue?” You get the idea. Nonsense can be debilitating to a Startup. Your Startup should be lean and agile. Don’t get bogged down in minor things that don’t really make much of a difference anyway. As a Startup founder, the only important thing is getting your initial

product to market. After you get it out there, you can go back and tweak it to your heart’s content. I can’t tell you how many Startups I’ve seen over the years that focused on getting every little thing “right” with their product before they launched…only to burn through their entire pile of seed money and never actually launch their product.

“Give lengthy and

incomprehensible explanations when questioned.”

I see this a lot, especially in tech Startups. If an employee doesn’t know how to do something, or simply doesn’t want to do it, they can give long technical sounding answers with lots of buzzwords and jargon that sounds very impressive but really doesn’t mean much of anything. If an employee, even a software engineer, can’t explain something to you in simple English, they’re trying to pull the wool over your eyes or outright trying to sabotage your Startup. We have the tendency to believe technical sounding things if we don’t understand them because we don’t want to look stupid in front of the person who’s giving the explanation. As a Startup founder you need a thick skin, and you need to be able to say “Hold up, go back, I don’t understand anything you’re saying – start over and explain it like you would to a child”. Finally, the guide sums up potential sabotage like this:

BUSINESS GROWTH

“A…type of simple sabotage requires no destructive

tools whatsoever and produces physical damage, if any, by highly indirect means. It is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a noncooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit. Making a faulty decision may be simply a matter of placing tools in one spot instead of another. A noncooperative attitude may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one’s fellow workers, engaging in bickerings, or displaying surliness and stupidity.” And that really sums it up. If your Startup has these types of employees, even if they aren’t overtly trying to sabotage the company, you can have big problems. Dragging their feet, making poor decisions, not getting along with others on the team to the point of distraction; these are all warning signs that you shouldn’t overlook. It’s a little scary that all of these CIA sanctioned sabotage methods are basically normal operating procedure for Corporate life these days. Endless meetings, conferences, speeches, working through proper channels and buzzword corporate speak like “synergy” and “workflow optimization” are common in every business in America these days. So check out the manual yourself, it’s a fascinating

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read…and keep an eye out for this type of behavior and squash it before it squashes your Startup! John Elder is one of the original pioneers of Internet Marketing. He created one of the earliest Internet advertising networks back in 1997 and sold it to a publicly traded company at the height of the first dot com boom and then went on to create the best-selling Submission-Spider search engine submission software that’s been used by over 3 million individuals and small businesses in over 45 countries. John recently founded Codemy.com an online interactive school that teaches people to code using a unique blend of video courses and hands-on help. His latest book “Living The Dot Com Lifestyle” is available at Amazon.com

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Remove clutter from your mind by writing thoughts and ideas in a notebook.

#ScaleUp Hacks 35

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THE 22 IMMUTABLE LAWS OF MARKETING BOOK NOTES

Ivan Kreimer

■ BOOK NOTES

f you ever wanted to know the basic “laws” of marketing, this book is for you. Although this marketing book is corporate-oriented, it’s still recommended to anyone who’s trying to learn marketing.

The Law of Leadership It’s better to be first than it is to be better The basic issue in marketing is creating a category you can be first in. It’s the law of leadership: It’s better to be first than it is to be better. It’s much easier to get into the mind first than to try to convince someone you have a better product than the one that did get there first. You can demonstrate the law of leadership by asking yourself two questions: • What’s the name of the first person to fly the Atlantic Ocean solo? Charles Lindbergh, right? • What’s the name of the second person to fly the Atlantic Ocean solo? Not so easy to answer, is it?

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The Law of the Category If you can’t be first in a category, set up a new category you can be first in If you didn’t get into the prospect’s mind first, don’t give up hope. Find a new category you can be first in. It’s not as difficult as you might think. When you launch a new product, the first question to ask yourself is not “How is this new product better than the competition?” but “First what?” In other words, what category is this new product first in? This is counter to classic marketing thinking, which is brand oriented: How do I get people to prefer my brand? Forget the brand. Think categories. Prospects are on the defensive when it comes to brands. Everyone talks about why their brand is better. But prospects have an open mind when it comes to categories. Everyone is interested in what’s new. Few people are interested in what’s better. When you’re the first in a new category, promote the category. In essence, you have no competition.

■ BOOK NOTES

The Law of the Mind

The Law of Perception

It’s better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace

Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions

Is something wrong with the law of leadership? No, but the law of the mind modifies it. It’s better to be first in the prospect’s mind than first in the marketplace. Which, if anything, understates the importance of being first in the mind. Being first in the mind is everything in marketing. Being first in the marketplace is important only to the extent that it allows you to get in the mind first.

Many people think marketing is a battle of products. In the long run, they figure, the best product will win.

The law of the mind follows from the law of perception. If marketing is a battle of perception, not product, then the mind takes precedence over the marketplace. Thousands of would-be entrepreneurs are tripped up every year by this law. Someone has an idea or concept he or she believes will revolutionize an industry, as well it may. The problem is getting the idea or concept into the prospect’s mind. You can’t change a mind once a mind is made up. If you want to make a big impression on another person, you cannot worm your way into their mind and then slowly build up a favorable opinion over a period of time. The mind doesn’t work that way. You have to blast your way into the mind. The reason you blast instead of worm is that people don’t like to change their minds. Once they perceive you one way, that’s it. They kind of file you away in their minds as a certain kind of person. You cannot become a different person in their minds.

Marketing people are preoccupied with doing research and “getting the facts.” They analyze the situation to make sure that truth is on their side. Then they sail confidently into the marketing arena, secure in the knowledge that they have the best product and that ultimately the best product will win. It’s an illusion. There is no objective reality. There are no facts. There are no best products. All that exists in the world of marketing are perceptions in the minds of the customer or prospect. The perception is the reality. Everything else is an illusion. Only by studying how perceptions are formed in the mind and focusing your marketing programs on those perceptions can you overcome your basically incorrect marketing instincts. Minds of customers or prospects are very difficult to change. With a modicum of experience in a product category, a consumer assumes that he or she is right. A perception that exists in the mind is often interpreted as a universal truth. People are seldom, if ever, wrong. At least in their own minds. What makes the battle even more difficult is that customers frequently make buying decisions based on second-hand perceptions. Instead of using their own perceptions, they base their buying decisions on someone else’s perception of reality. This is the “everybody knows” principle. Everybody knows that the Japanese make higherquality cars than the Americans do. So people make buying decisions based on the fact that everybody knows the Japanese make higher-quality cars.

The Law of Focus The most powerful concept in marketing is owning a word in the prospect’s mind A company can become incredibly successful if it can find a way to own a word in the mind of the prospect. Not a complicated word. Not an invented one. The simple words are best, words taken right out of the 37

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■ BOOK NOTES dictionary. This is the law of focus. You “burn” your way into the mind by narrowing the focus to a single word or concept. It’s the ultimate marketing sacrifice. The leader owns the word that stands for the category. If you’re not a leader, then your word has to have a narrow focus. Even more important, however, your word has to be “available” in your category. No one else can have a lock on it. The most effective words are simple and benefit oriented. No matter how complicated the product, no matter how complicated the needs of the market, it’s always better to focus on one word or benefit rather than two or three or four. Also, there’s the halo effect. If you strongly establish one benefit, the prospect is likely to give you a lot of other benefits, too. A “thicker” spaghetti sauce implies quality, nourishing ingredients, value, and so on. A “safer” car implies better design and engineering. Whether the result of a deliberate program or not, most successful companies (or brands) are the ones that “own a word” in the mind of the prospect. The essence of marketing is narrowing the focus. You become stronger when you reduce the scope of your operations. You can’t stand for something if you chase after everything.

The Law of Exclusivity Two companies cannot own the same word in the prospect’s mind Volvo owns safety. Many other automobile companies, including Mercedes-Benz and General Motors, have tried to run marketing campaigns based on safety. Yet no one except Volvo has succeeded in getting into the prospect’s mind with a safety message. Despite the disaster stories, many companies continue to violate the law of exclusivity. You can’t change people’s minds once they are made up. In fact, what you often do is reinforce your competitor’s position by making its concept more important.

The Law of the Ladder The strategy to use depends on which rung you occupy on the ladder 38

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While being first into the prospect’s mind ought to be your primary marketing objective, the battle isn’t lost if you fail in this endeavor. There are strategies to use for No. 2 and No. 3 brands. All products are not created equal. There’s a hierarchy in the mind that prospects use in making decisions. For each category, there is a product ladder in the mind. On each rung is a brand name. Your marketing strategy should depend on how soon you got into the mind and consequently which rung of the ladder you occupy. The higher the better, of course. The mind is selective. Prospects use their ladders in deciding which information to accept and which information to reject. In general, a mind accepts only new data that is consistent with its product ladder in that category. Everything else is ignored. What about your product’s ladder in the prospect’s mind? How many rungs are there on your ladder? It depends on whether your product is a high-interest or a low-interest product. Products you use every day (cigarettes, cola, beer, toothpaste, cereal) tend to be high-interest products with many rungs on their ladders. Products that are purchased infrequently (furniture,lawn mowers, luggage) usually have few rungs on their ladders. Products that involve a great deal of personal pride (automobiles, watches, cameras) are also high-interest products with many rungs on their ladders even though they are purchased infrequently. Products that are purchased infrequently and involve an unpleasant experience usually have very few rungs on their ladders. Automobile batteries, tires, and life insurance are three examples. The, ultimate product that involves the least amount of pleasure and is purchased once in a lifetime has no rungs on its ladder.

■ BOOK NOTES

The Law of Duality

or more categories

In the long run, every market becomes a twohorse race

A category starts off as a single entity. Computers, for example. But over time, the category breaks up into other segments. Mainframes, minicomputers, workstations, personal computers, laptops, notebooks, pen computers.

Early on, a new category is a ladder of many rungs. When you take the long view of marketing, you find the battle usually winds up as a titanic struggle between two major players—usually the old reliable brand and the upstart.

The Law of the Opposite

Each segment is a separate, distinct entity. Each segment has its own reason for existence. And each segment has its own leader, which is rarely the same as the leader of the original category.

The way for the leader to maintain its dominance is to If you are shooting for second place, your strategy address each emerging category with a different brand is determined by the leader name. Wherever the leader is strong, there is an opportunity for a would-be No. 2 to turn the tables. Much like a wrestler uses his opponent’s strength against him, a company should leverage the leader’s strength into a weakness. If you want to establish a firm foothold on the second rung of the ladder, study the firm above you. Where is it strong? And how do you turn that strength into a weakness? You must discover the essence of the leader and then present the prospect with the opposite. (In other words, don’t try to be better, try to be different.) It’s often the upstart versus old reliable. When you look at customers in a given product category, there seem to be two kinds of people. There are those who want to buy from the leader and there are those who don’t want to buy from the leader. A potential No. 2 has to appeal to the latter group. By positioning yourself against the leader, you take business away from all the other alternatives to No. 1.

Companies make a mistake when they try to take a well-known brand name in one category and use the same brand name in another category.

The Law of Perspective Marketing effects take place over an extended period of time Does a sale increase a company’s business or decrease it? Obviously, in the short term, a sale increases business. But there’s more and more evidence to show that sales decrease business in the long term by educating customers not to buy at “regular” prices.

Aside from the fact that you can buy something for less, what does a sale say to a prospect? It says that your regular prices are too high. After the sale is over, customers tend to avoid a store with a “sale” reputation.

Marketing is often a battle for legitimacy. The firstbrand that captures the concept is often able to portray its competitors as illegitimate pretenders.

To maintain volume, retail outlets find they have to run almost continuous sales.

A good No. 2 can’t afford to be timid. When you give up focusing on No. 1, you make yourself vulnerable not only to the leader but to the rest of the pack.

Any sort of couponing, discounts, or sales tends to educate consumers to buy only when they can get a deal. What if a company never started couponing in the first place?

The Law of Division Over time, a category will divide and become two 39

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Why then is it so hard to comprehend that marketing effects take place over an extended period of time?

■ BOOK NOTES

The Law of Line Extension There’s an irresistible pressure to extend the equity of the brand When you try to be all things to all people, you inevitably wind up in trouble. “I’d rather be strong somewhere,” said one manager, “than weak everywhere.” In a narrow sense, line extension involves taking the brand name of a successful product (e.g., A-1 steak sauce) and putting it on a new product you plan to introduce (e.g., A-1 poultry sauce). It sounds so logical. “We make A-1, a great sauce that gets the dominant share of the steak business. But people are switching from beef to chicken, so let’s introduce a poultry product. And what better name to use than A-1. That way people will know the poultry

sauce comes from the makers of that great steak sauce, A-1.” But marketing is a battle of perception, not product. In the mind, A-1 is not the brand name, but the steak sauce itself. “Would you pass me the A-1?” asks the diner. Nobody replies: “A-1 what?” Why does top management believe that line extension works, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary? One reason is that while line extension is a loser in the long term, it can be a winner in the short term. More is less. The more products, the more markets, the more alliances a company makes, the less money it makes. Less is more. If you want to be successful today, you have to narrow the focus in order to build a position in the prospect’s mind.

The Law of Sacrifice

• The Limited. Upscale clothing for working women.

You have to give up something in order to get something

• The Gap. Casual clothing for the young at heart.

The law of sacrifice is the opposite of the law of line extension. If you want to be successful today, you should give something up.

• Victoria’s Secret. Sexy undergarments.

• Benetton. Wool and cotton clothing for young swingers. • Foot Locker. Athletic shoes.

There are three things to sacrifice: product line, target market, and constant change. First, the product line. Where is it written that the more you have to sell, the more you sell?

• Banana Republic. Safari wear.

The full line is a luxury for a loser. If you want to be successful, you have to reduce your product line, not expand it.

The target is not the market. That is, the apparent target of your marketing is not the same as the people who will actually buy your product. Even though Pepsi-Cola’s target was the teenager, the market was everybody. The 50-year-old guy who wants to think he’s 29 will drink the Pepsi.

Marketing is a game of mental warfare. It’s a battle of perceptions, not products or services. The world of business is populated by big, highly diversified generalists and small, narrowly focused specialists. If line extension and diversification were effective marketing strategies, you’d expect to see the generalists riding high. But they’re not. Most of them are in trouble. The generalist is weak. In the retail field generally, the big successes are the specialists:

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Let’s discuss the second sacrifice, target market. Where is it written that you have to appeal to everybody?

Finally, the third sacrifice: constant change. Where is it written that you have to change your strategy every year at budget review time? If you try to follow the twists and turns of the market, you are bound to wind up off the road. The best way to maintain a consistent position is not to change it in the first place.

■ BOOK NOTES

The Law of Attributes For every attribute, there is an opposite, effective attribute Too often a company attempts to emulate the leader. “They must know what works,” goes the rationale, “so let’s do something similar.” Not good thinking. It’s much better to search for an opposite attribute that will allow you to play off against the leader. The key word here is opposite — similar won’t do. Marketing is a battle of ideas. So if you are to succeed, you must have an idea or attribute of your own to focus your efforts around. Without one, you had better have a low price. A very low price. Some say all attributes are not created equal. Some attributes are more important to customers than others. You must try and own the most important attribute. Cavity prevention is the most important attribute in toothpaste. It’s the one to own. But the law of exclusivity points to the simple truth that once an attribute is successfully taken by your competition, it’s gone. You must move on to a lesser attribute and live with a smaller share of the category. Your job is to seize a different attribute, dramatize the value of your attribute, and thus increase your share.

The Law of Candor When you admit a negative, the prospect will give you a positive Marketing is often a search for the obvious. Since you can’t change a mind once it’s made up, your marketing efforts have to be devoted to using ideas and concepts already installed in the brain. You have to use your marketing programs to “rub it in.” Positive thinking has been highly overrated. The explosive growth of communications in our society has made people defensive and cautious about companies trying to sell them anything. Admitting a problem is something that very few companies do. When a company starts a message by admitting a problem, people tend to, almost instinctively, open their minds.

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Think about the times that someone came to you with a problem and how quickly you got involved and wanted to help. Now think about people starting off a conversation about some wonderful things they are doing. You probably were a lot less interested. Now with that mind open, you’re in a position to drive in the positive, which is your selling idea. One final note: The law of candor must be used carefully and with great skill. First, your “negative” must be widely perceived as a negative. It has to trigger an instant agreement with your prospect’s mind. If the negative doesn’t register quickly, your prospect will be confused and will wonder, “What’s this all about?” Next, you have to shift quickly to the positive. The purpose of candor isn’t to apologize. The purpose of candor is to set up a benefit that will convince your prospect. This law only proves the old maxim: Honesty is the best policy.

The Law of Singularity In each situation, only one move will produce substantial results Many marketing people see success as the sum total of a lot of small efforts beautifully executed. They think they can pick and choose from a number of different strategies and still be successful as long as they put enough effort into the program. If they work for the leader in the category, they fritter away their resources on a number of different programs. They seem to think that the best way to grow is the puppy approach—get into everything. If they’re not with the leader, they often end up trying to do the same as the leader, but a little better. Trying harder is not the secret of marketing success. Whether you try hard or try easy, the differences are marginal. Furthermore, the bigger the company, the more the law of averages wipes out any real advantage of a trying- harder approach. History teaches that the only thing that works in marketing is the single, bold stroke.

■ BOOK NOTES

The Law of Unpredictability Unless you write your competitor’s plans, you can’t predict the future Implicit in most marketing plans is an assumption about the future. Yet marketing plans based on what will happen in the future are usually wrong. Failure to forecast competitive reaction is a major reason for marketing failures. Good short-term planning is coming up with that angle or word that differentiates your product or company. Then you set up a coherent long-term marketing direction that builds a program to maximize that idea or angle. It’s not a long-term plan, it’s a longterm direction. How can you best cope with unpredictability? While you can’t predict the future, you can get a handle on trends, which is a way to take advantage of change.

The danger in working with trends is extrapolation. Many companies jump to conclusions about how far a trend will go. If you believed the prognosticators of a few years ago, everyone today is eating broiled fish or mesquite-barbecued chicken. Equally as bad as extrapolating a trend is the common practice of assuming the future will be a replay of the present. When you assume that nothing will change, you are predicting the future just as surely as when you assume that something will change. Remember Peter’s Law: The unexpected always happens. While tracking trends can be a useful tool in dealing with the unpredictable future, market research can be more of a problem than a help. Research does best at measuring the past. New ideas and concepts are almost impossible to measure. No one has a frame of reference. People don’t know what they will do until they face an actual decision. No one can predict the future with any degree of certainty. Nor should marketing plans try to.

The Law of Success

extension trap.

Success often leads to arrogance and arrogance to failure

Actually, ego is helpful. It can be an effective driving force in building a business. What hurts is injecting your ego in the marketing process. Brilliant marketers have the ability to think like a prospect thinks. They put themselves in the shoes of their customers. They don’t impose their own view of the world on the situation. (Keep in mind that the world is all perception anyway, and the only thing that counts in marketing is the customer’s perception.)

Ego is the enemy of successful marketing. Objectivity is what’s needed. When people become successful, they tend to become less objective. They often substitute their own judgment for what the market wants. Success is often the fatal element behind the rash of line extensions. When a brand is successful, the company assumes the name is the primary reason for the brand’s success. So they promptly look for other products to plaster the name on. Actually it’s the opposite. The name didn’t make the brand famous (although a bad name might keep the brand from becoming famous). The brand got famous because you made the right marketing moves. In other words, the steps you took were in tune with the fundamental laws of marketing. You got into the mind first. You narrowed the focus. You preempted a powerful attribute. The more you identify with your brand or corporate name, the more likely you are to fall into the line 42

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The bigger the company, the more likely it is that the chief executive has lost touch with the front lines. This might be the single most important factor limiting the growth of a corporation. All other factors favor size. Marketing is war, and the first principle of warfare is the principle of force. The larger army, the larger company, has the advantage. But the larger company gives up some of that advantage if it cannot keep itself focused on the marketing battle that takes place in the mind of the customer. Small companies are mentally closer to the front than big companies. That might be one reason they grew more rapidly in the last decade. They haven’t been tainted by the law of success.

■ BOOK NOTES

The Law of Failure Failure is to be expected and accepted Admitting a mistake and not doing anything about it is bad for your career. A better strategy is to recognize failure early and cut your losses. If a company is going to operate in an ideal way, it will take teamwork, esprit de corps, and a self-sacrificing leader.

The Law of Hype The situation is often the opposite of the way it appears in the press When things are going well, a company doesn’t need the hype. When you need the hype, it usually means you’re in trouble. Forget the front page. If you’re looking for clues to the future, look in the back of the paper for those innocuous little stories.

Here’s the paradox. If you were faced with a rapidly rising business, with all the characteristics of a fad, the best thing you could do would be to dampen the fad. By dampening the fad, you stretch the fad out and it becomes more like a trend. Forget fads. And when they appear, try to dampen them. One way to maintain a long-term demand for your product is to never totally satisfy the demand. But the best, most profitable thing to ride in marketing is a long-term trend.

The Law of Resources Without adequate funding an idea won’t get off the ground Even the best idea in the world won’t go very far without the money to get it off the ground. Inventors, entrepreneurs, and assorted idea generators seem to think that all their good ideas need is professional marketing help.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Marketing is a game fought in the mind of the prospect. You need For the most part, hype is hype. Real revolutions money to get into a mind. And you need money to don’t arrive at high noon with marching bands and coverage on the 6:00 P.M. news. Real revolutions arrive stay in the mind once you get there. unannounced in the middle of the night and kind of You’ll get further with a mediocre idea and a million sneak up on you. dollars than with a great idea alone.

The Law of Acceleration Successful programs are not built on fads, they’re built on trends A fad is a wave in the ocean, and a trend is the tide. A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little.

Ideas without money are worthless. Well. . . not quite. But you have to use your idea to find the money, not the marketing help. The marketing can come later. Remember: An idea without money is worthless. Be prepared to give away a lot for the funding.

Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it’s very powerful over the long term. A fad is a short-term phenomenon that might be profitable, but a fad doesn’t last long enough to do a company much good. Furthermore, a company often tends to gear up as if a fad were a trend. As a result, the company is often stuck with a lot of staff, expensive manufacturing facilities, and distribution networks. When the fad disappears, a company often goes into a deep financial shock. 43

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Ivan Kreimer is a SEO freelancer, Growth Hacker, e-commerce store owner that like writing for other people. He writes about growth hacking on his blog ivankreimer.com

BUSINESS GROWTH

Moss Pauly is the Head of Warrior Forum, the world’s largest internet marketing forum. Established in 1997 Warrior Forum is an international community comprised of over 1 million warriors from over 178 countries. Having a strong background in web oriented data science and applied mathematics, Moss is responsible for overseeing the direction of the forum. As the new head of Warrior Forum, Moss will bring a scientific, data-driven and quantitative approach to making Warrior Forum a cutting edge internet marketing platform. A place where warriors can share their knowledge, question the status quo, and continue to push the bounds of what’s possible in internet marketing.

Growing a Community Using Data Q. Moss, tell us about yourself and work you have been doing at Freelancer and Warrior Forum? MP: Initially, I started out as a data scientist focusing on CRO constructing and analyzing tests as well as a lot of the day to day investigations of fluctuations in data. I’ve got a lot of fond memories from the early days of being in the office until the early hours of the morning trying to answer a hypothesis or explain a change in the data. After that, I moved into product management and then running the entirety of Warrior Forum. Q. Tell us more about Warrior Forum, user base and competition. MP: Warrior Forum is the world’s 44

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largest internet marketing forum and community. It was established back in 1997, so we’re coming up to the two-decade mark. It’s got a community of over 1.1M users with millions of hits a month. At its core Warrior has three main pillars; a discussion forum, a marketplace and a product payment platform. The discussion forum is a traffic generator, and the other two components are the monetization of that traffic. Competitor-wise the community is unique due to its age and size. There are competitors for different elements of the site like “Discussions on SEO” or “Warrior Special Offer Marketplace,” there isn’t anyone that does everything comprehensively like us. Q. How can a business use Warrior Forum for growth? MP: There are many different ways you can leverage Warrior Forum

to help grow your business. If you have a specific goal in mind, you can ask for assistance and advice around that on the forum. You can also look into what other people are having success at any given time and use that to find ways to grow your business. With any business, there’s always ways to improve and optimize what you’re doing at any point in time. At its core, Warrior Forum provides a platform to find and discuss these. You can use our Warrior Payments platform to leverage our network of affiliates to boost sales directly utilizing affiliate marketing. Q. What challenges Warrior Forum has faced in its growth and scalability? How those challenges were resolved? MP: One of the unique components of Warrior Forum is the age of the community. On the

BUSINESS GROWTH one hand, this means that there’s a lot of knowledge in the community, on the other hand, the community is very used to things being done or looking a certain way. Most people would remember when Facebook first rolled out The Newsfeed there was a substantial uproar in reaction. In hindsight, it’s clear that this was a change for the better. One of out challenges is balancing this knee-jerk response to change with a fundamental improvement in UX and accessibility. One of the ways to do this is being very stringent on segmentation when looking at data surrounding user’s behavior, especially when analyzing tests. There’s no strict solution for this but paying attention to it and always keeping an eye on many segments in test performance helps in making more informed decisions. Q. What growth marketing techniques your team uses to grow forum’s reach and attract users? MP: Due to the size and the amount of content on Warrior Forum, a lot of our traffic is organic. We run a lot of tests surrounding page and site structure that affects organic traffic. We are also always focusing on what can we do to get a new user further down the acquisition funnel. One part of this is understanding what they’re looking for and how we can better help provide that to them. Q. Tell us about your work in data science and analytics and how you are using it to grow Warrior Forum? Give some example of how data is used for forum’s growth? MP: The first step is tracking 45

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everything as thoroughly as possible and being able to attribute everything adequately. You’ve always got to make sure it’s up to date and working properly. You always want to ask yourself “Why is this down?” or “Why is this up?” and be able to answer that question. Given any action on the site can I track the attribution accurately enough to be able to capitalize on wins and identify and fix negative changes? You also want to be able to split test correctly and drill down enough to ensure that you understand what’s happening in each segment. We also use data in a proactive way as well as a reactive. Rather than just using data to analyze tests and answer “What happened?” we also use it to find correlation and patterns which might produce a hypothesis to test. Q. What tools does your team use to build and grow Warrior Forum? MP: We roll a lot of our own inhouse analytics tools. We also use Google Analytics as well as Search Console for other analytics. SEO wise Ahrefs, Semrush, and Moz are fantastic. We also use Buffer for content queuing.

Q. Tell us about your routine and how you plan your day and work? Any productivity tools and hacks you employ? MP: Probably not well enough haha! I like to get exercise done before work as it gives me time to plan my day before it starts. Once I get into the office, it’s checking emails and analytics. I then triage anything that needs attention and proceeds to get as much done as I can, based on priorities. As a general rule, I like to save ad-hoc data investigations for the evening as it’s easy to go down rabbit holes with them and I hate looking back on a day and feeling like I haven’t got much done. As far as personal productivity tools FantastiCal, Omni Focus, and Omni Plan are the main ones I use. Q. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs looking for growth?

MP: Track everything and always ensure your tracking is working as intended. Always make sure you can answer those questions of “Why is this up/down?”. Try and focus your efforts on one metric at a time, put it up on a TV so that everyone in the team knows what the focus is and “Track everything and just relentlessly always ensure your tracking try and push that through the roof. is working as intended. Try It’s amazing what happens when and focus your efforts on a team is 100% one metric at a time.” focused on one metric.

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THE WAY I WORK