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  Effective lead generation

  All startup founders need to focus on revenue efficiency. Otherwise, according to Forbes, you’ll be totally lost. Strategic planning and tracking are the only way that you’ll be able to ensure you’re being as efficient as possible when it comes to revenue and effective lead generation.

  LeadCrunch advises that for every dollar spent on customer acquisition, a company should generate $2.50 in return. But this is not possible if you don’t prioritize top-of-the-funnel sales leads. Too many organizations waste time and money by casting large, and irrelevant nets at the top of the funnel, which results in salespeople wasting their time trying to engage customers who, simply, aren’t interested. LeadCrunch’s CEO, Olin Hyde, believes that the key to successful lead-generation is micro-segmenting, engagement, and nurturing.

  Fueled by their AI-driven platform, LeadCrunch allows companies to pinpoint relevant, high-quality prospects, and cultivate deep relationships with them using information that is specific to their unique needs. As a result of their platform’s laser-sharp focus, LeadCrunch’s top performing customers often see conversion rates spanning 300-1000 percent after leveraging the platform’s technology.

  Strict budgeting

  It’s not enough anymore for a startup to use an Excel sheet to calculate and keep track of all their budgeting needs. Even if they’ve moved onto Google Sheets, which are, after all, free—that’s still not enough. If your startup is growing, it makes sense to invest in a B2B budgeting tool that uses actual objective data, which will help you understand how different actions and decisions affect the money coming in.

  Hive9, a planning, budgeting, and analytics solution created specifically for B2B marketers, is a smart way for you to keep track of every aspect of budgeting. What’s most effective about it? According to Olive & Company, “This comprehensive tool integrates your marketing goals, plan, and budget with your campaigns, so you can measure success and strategically allocate your budget…Hive9 helps you determine where your revenue is coming from, down to a specific touchpoint, and where you can improve your marketing. It also helps determine your cost per marketing lead and sales qualified lead.”

  According to Hive9’s mission, they want to help you create a budgeting plan that you can stick to, one that directly correlates to the complex projects you have going on. They understand how stressful it can be to juggle marketing, which is ever-changing, with budget planning.

  Growing your startup is certainly going to be a challenge—but it’s a challenge worth taking. After all, change and growth are one of the best ways to ensure your startup thrives and succeeds. By using the strategies of collaboration, effective lead generation, and strict budgeting, you’ll be able to improve your startup while also keeping control of all aspects as it grows.

  Have you ever grown your startup from its original size? What challenges did you come across, and what strategies did you use to make the transition easier?

  Product development

  Listen and listen well: Listening is fundamental to a Lean Startup. Listening is what gets you to notice your customers’ needs.

  It includes listening to devotees and skeptics – your fans will fuel your endeavors and reassure you of all your goodness; skeptics will provide you food for thought on angles perhaps obscured.

  Listening will provide you with the “secret to unlock success” and make sense of the noise and valuable feedback that will impact your design iterations, remodeling, and execution.

  Educate yourself on laws, regulations, business etiquettes, and many other considerations in your industry.

  Your first customers: You must be a die-hard fan of your first customers. After all, they are the ones who were the early adopters, the ones who chose to trust you for the product you introduced to them. And keep selling to them again and again.

  Most of the time, startups spend and are more than willing to spend to attract new customers. They forget about their existing customers and do not give importance to re-attracting, reselling, and retaining them.

  As a Lean Startup company, your fastest way to feedback for improving your product is the customer who bought it from you at the very start. They tried out your product and knew what was required to make it better for them and many others. Also, your existing happy customers are most likely to spread the word amongst their acquaintances. And referrals are the most authentic and impactful method to increase sales than many other paid programs you are likely to invest in as a startup.

  Thus, get feedback from your existing customers and introduce your improved products to them to try out and give you more feedback.

  Turn them into loyal customers who will set a precedent of customer value and care for your startup.

  Organic outreach: Get to know your customers and let them know you. This is a timeless and evergreen advice for you to grow your Lean Startup faster.

  Understand what an SEO audit is and invest in one for your website and social media platforms. An SEO audit will help you create and understand your startup’s penetration in the market. Leverage organic outreach and give something of great value to your customers.

  A simple combination of great content creation, customer feedback, and input will create a measurable impact on your organic outreach

  Content marketing: We are avid fans of content marketing and know that content is here to stay—but only “great” content.

  A great content marketing strategy and strategist will make you think of creating resources that are useful to your consumers. Great content will introduce your business properly, talk about its uniqueness, products, and how people think it is doing.

  Your social media and website should have sufficient content, updated timely, and posted regularly to keep things fresh and relevant. Therefore, ensure that you create interesting content making use of the many simple tools available in the market.

  A strong online presence with an effective SEO strategy and great content will not only help your startup to attract new customers but will also retain existing ones.

  Ask your customers to chip in: A great strategy to grow fast is to involve your customers to build a prototype with you.

  The lean methodology begins with a true hypothesis – a fairly accurate guesstimate to solve a problem with a product. Introduce the model to your customers and ask them to give you feedback on the usability of the product.

  Feedback: Since Lean Startup companies are closely attached to their customers, you will relatively have more convenient time developing content and resources for your customers and prospective audience. Your business model facilitates a fluid and comfortable relationship with your market. And this close relationship can spark a valuable and insightful market research.

  Ask your customers for feedback on what they think you are doing regarding selling your products, providing support, quality management, and areas for improvement. Listen carefully and make sure you create a list of their feedback and ideas.

  Customer onboarding and satisfaction

  As a startup, know your customers personally. Create opportunities to meet them. Many small business brands send handwritten notes with their products to customers to make them feel welcome and part of the family. Send birthday cards, season greetings, etc. to engage your customers.

  Share stories of growth, challenges, and outcomes: Your content marketing strategy must include the changes you make, big or small, for example, a new and improved design or a slight color variation, or updating a new phone number to manage queries to the addition of new members in your sales team, etc.

  Tell your customers when you make changes to your products based on their feedback, as it will create a circle of trust and reliability which will ultimately affect your bottom line.

  Sharing information this way will establish a culture code in your startup and communicate your value proposition via meaningful actions to both your customers and prospective customers.

  Accept mistakes: There will be mistakes m
ade on the way. Own them and seek to clarify and apologize appropriately.

  Paid outreach

  At times, paid marketing and outreach can work brilliantly for a startup. However, you will need to think through before executing this strategy.

  The sure sign of a well-paid outreach is profit. You should be making more money with paid outreach per customer than you would in acquiring one. Even if the ratio is 2:1, paid outreach is working.

  By the end of the day, your goal is to make customers happy. When your customers are happy with your product, they will refer you to their friends and family, and you will continue to succeed in your endeavors.

  And this leads us to our suggestion of looking into influencer marketing. Influencer marketing will involve your happy customers to become your brand ambassadors and talk about your product in their social circles to co-build your brand.

  It is a win-win for you, your existing customers, and your potential customers who will have been influenced by their friends or influencers. This way, your startup’s value proposition travels smoothly into the market.

  Build a great team

  Keep good people around you. Keep people who know what they are doing. Keep people who thrive on feedback and know how to use that feedback for growth and improvement; this is key to the interactive model of improving your product and keeping it relevant to your customers’ needs.

  Learn from examples: These are some examples of well-known companies who did not want to waste their time, their customers’ time, or that of their investors. They got down to developing the product that would fulfill the needs of their customers.

  When Dropbox came across the lean methodology, the company began thinking about their product which at the time of its inception was competing with many other similar products.

  They learned how to test new products with their customers and incorporated their feedback. From 100,000 registered users, Dropbox went over 4,000,000 in only 15 months with the Lean Startup principles.

  The giant General Eclectic also went into the Lean methodology to develop faster solutions with FastWorks - a complete mindset changing program to how things usually worked at GE. A very popular example was the development of a gas turbine two years faster with 40% less cost. The lean methodology is not only for startups after all!

  After approaching local shoe stores and grabbing photos of their shoes with consent, the owner of Zappos tested his hypothesis of whether an online shoe-selling site would work. And it did! Zappos is the largest online shoe store with over 1000 brands featured.

  The ideas above are fairly consistent with the ideas you hear every day. You learned these at business schools, through books and blogs, and friends and colleagues. Simple as they may sound, it is always the simpler ideas that are key to great outcomes.

  Chapter 4: Six Sigma Basics

  Six Sigma is the name of a lean system for measuring quality with the ultimate goal of getting as close to perfection as feasibly possible. Ideally, a company that is running at Six Sigma maximum efficiency would generate, at most only 3.4 defects per million attempts at a particular process. Zshift is the name given to these deviations which show the difference between a poorly completed process and a perfectly completed one. The baseline Zshift is 4.5 while the ideal value is 6. Processes that have not yet been analyzed via the Six Sigma process typically score somewhere between 1 and 2.

  Levels of Zshift: If the Six Sigma analysis of a process is at 1, then this means you can expect customers to get exactly what they want somewhere around 30 percent of the time. If this is increased to a Zshift 2, then you can expect the process to give the customers exactly what they are looking for about 70 percent of the time. If the process reaches a 3, then it will be accurate about 93 percent of the time, a 4 will be 99 percent accurate, and a 5 and 6 reach even smaller divisions towards the goal of 100 percent accuracy and customer satisfaction.

  Six Sigma cert: Within Six Sigma, there are a variety of different certification levels that can be achieved, each with its own tasks and responsibilities as it relates to the whole. Six Sigma is all about decreasing the risk of production errors by reducing waste and improving efficiency. The first two levels of certification, White and Yellow Belts, are crucial to this part of the process as, while working under higher level Sigmas, they do things like ensure the data that is coming in is on the right track and carry out specific functions that are designed to add overall value to the process. These certificates are also a great way to be exposed to the overall Six Sigma methodology.

  The next level of certification is the Green Belt which allows holders to work more directly on Six Sigma projects being helped by those above them while also allowing them to oversee projects being handled by Yellow and White Belts. Black Belts then lead high-level projects while also supporting and monitoring those at other tiers. Finally, Master Black Belts are those who are often brought in specifically to start Six Sigma at a company and are knowledgeable to mentor everyone at every level.

  Six Sigma is the tool for you if…

  While almost any company and any team can benefit from the Six Sigma in some shape or form, this doesn’t mean it is always going to be the right choice, especially for a startup company. In fact, deciding if it is the right choice or not actually depend on a wide variety of different specifics, including how committed the team is to implementing the system in the first place and what the company’s developing culture is like.

  Leadership involvement is key: When discussing the idea of transitioning to Six Sigma, it is important to not look at it as another type of flash in the pan management style that is going to go out of fashion as quickly as it appeared. Instead, it is far more likely to find purchase if it is pitched as an enhancement of an existing system. Likewise, you can always find opposition to something new from someone in the company which is why it is important to start with buy-in from the top and work your way down the list from there. It is extremely important to have the full management team on board from the start as if it doesn’t look like there is a consensus regarding the new system, then it is going to be dead in the water before it even gets off the ground.

  This doesn’t mean that the entire team needs to be committed to the idea of Six Sigma from the start, but it does mean that it is vital that the change that is on the horizon that needs to be institutional which means the leadership needs to put forth a united front. Don’t forget, the human brain is a creature of habit which means that it will recoil from new systems that seem too complicated if the system is, at all, perceived as optional. As such, if there is an opposition to the new system, stress the idea that it is important it be expressed in private.

  Consider the infrastructure: Six Sigma is all about leaders mentoring those on their teams in order to make Six Sigma work as effectively as possible. As such, if you hope to transition to a Six Sigma system successfully, then this needs to be a full-time job for at least one person, at least until the new, positive, habits have formed for good. While this might not seem cost-effective in the short-term the Six Sigma savings that will appear once the system is up and running properly are sure to more than make up for it.

  Consider what will boost compliance: After support of management has been assured and the infrastructure is in place to make the project really pop, the next step will be to ensure that the rest of the team members have a motivational reason to fall in line. While active rewards aren’t going to be required once the Six Sigma process has been properly internalized, they are a good way to help the team get used to looking at problems as though Six Sigma is the solution. While the right way to track team progress is going to be different for every team, it is vital that each member of the team feels an immediate and compelling reason to commit to the new program, at least at first.

  After all, companies are like any other body that is currently in motion, the bigger the company, the more inertia is needed when making large changes. This is where your startup has the opportunity to outmaneuver the b
ig boys and start gaining some ground as quickly as possible.

  Who else is using Six Sigma in your field: While Six Sigma has proven its worth in a wide variety of different fields, this doesn’t mean that each of these fields is going to be ready to adopt the process with open arms immediately. While looking to the future is one thing, if your startup is also going to the first company to adopt Six Sigma as a common practice in its industry, then you need to be prepared from extreme resistance from every side and especially any members of the old guard that you may have brought on to ensure the real work gets done. Luckily, the science behind Six Sigma is solid which is why it should be fairly easy to come up with specific examples of how it can help your company to silence any opposition.

  Consider training objectives: Depending on the size of your team, training everyone as a whole might make sense. Eventually, however, different training levels are going to need to be enforced, as not everyone is going to need to be a Black Belt. As such, it is important to look more closely at the various levels and the qualifications for each before determining how training can best be broken up for maximum effectiveness. It is important to also factor in how the training will affect any other duties the trainees might have as well as what areas are going to be focused on most stringently.