Ten Rebranding Do’s And Don’ts - Do re-imagine your business beyond the logo.
- Do gain support from the C-suite.
- Do get internal as well as external insights.
- Do keep it real.
Do bring in all key stakeholders.
- Do leverage the opportunity to drive broader change.
- Do over communicate.
- Do keep it aligned.
- Do make sure your people can deliver.
- Do find the right partner.
Close to two-thirds (64%) of all the marketers surveyed are currently using artificial intelligence (AI). A full 60% say they have a fully defined AI strategy. This year, the leading use case for those marketers using AI is to drive next best actions, followed by personalizing the overall customer journey and automating customer interactions.
How to Win over a Team of Experts
Try these three strategies:
1. Look inward to the team. Your success will depend on your ability to build interdependence and cooperation among team members. Focus on the team itself and see whether you can find ways to improve communication, interaction, and debate. Aim to create a group whose members learn to rely on each other and are less dependent on you to be involved in every decision.
Exercise: Identify a decision you believe the team can make (it should not be a decision regarding a crisis situation). Use team meetings to work on the decision. Solicit input from everyone without allowing debate on the ideas. Summarize what you have heard from the team. Redirect the team to focus on the core areas, then encourage debate.
2. Look outward to the organization. Seek ways to resolve the team’s problems with the broader organization. Examples include things as simple as securing a budget, getting top-management backing for a project, or winning the cooperation of another department.
Exercise: For a current team challenge, list the people you know in the organization who could provide any of the following: additional information or perspective that could help the team or shift its perspective; access to individuals who could support the team by doing small tasks, or people who would like to be involved in solving the problem; and bridges to other groups or stakeholders. Then use your network to tap those resources.
3. Look to build team members’ reputations. Although this strategy doesn’t specifically address a pain point, it still shows employees that you have their backs and are interested in their career development. Help team members expand their networks and their perspectives. With a broader network, a team member can more easily address his or her pain point and bring new perspectives to the team’s challenges.
Exercise: For each team member, list two to three people who would value knowing of that individual’s experience, perspective, and capabilities. Use your connections to set up one meeting for each employee. Coach the individual on how to best manage that meeting. Check on the impact the team member had.
The goal,
according to a recent PCW report, is to get beyond titles and delve into attitudes and behaviours. That’s the approach that leads to more relevant communication, rewards, performance and development, the report reads.
SAAS Companies Growth Valuation
“Not all software is created equal. Software businesses that don’t have a short term path to FCF (call it <2 years) have gotten wacked in the public markets. But, just like pre-2015 when the market assumed software wouldn’t turn profitable, the same thing is happening now. With a longer term horizon we’ll see many software companies turn profitable. The important task is finding the businesses that can turn profitable, while maintaining attractive top line growth. That “holy grail” combo will be a smaller percentage of software businesses – ones growing >20-30%, with FCF (free cash flow) margins >20-30%, with annual revenue >$1B.
Final thought - what gets me so excited currently is that we’re seeing companies still in hyper growth mode, at a scale of ~$1B ARR+, hit mature FCF margins. Crowdstrike (>60% growth, ~30% FCF margins), Datadog (>80% growth, ~30% FCF margins), Snowflake (>80% growth, ~20% FCF margins), ZScaler (>60% growth, ~20% FCF margins), and ZoomInfo (~60% growth and >30% FCF margins) all have incredibly impressive profiles.
Top 10 EV / NTM Revenue Multiples
