📕 How Atlassian Does Over $1b in Deals; The Strategic Messaging 🐐; Peeling the TAM Onion
Earlier this week, Atlassian shared the company’s Term Sheet template to outline their idea of standard terms, and hopefully prevent some unnecessary seller and buyer bickering. Ideally, this allows both parties to focus equally on other crucial areas of a deal like diligence and integration.
This level of transparency plays well with founders and shows just how competitive the big players are in finding the best tech and talent. Most interesting on the sheet to take away: an average holdback amount is typically 10-20% of the purchase price, and is paid out in 15-18 months.
🐐 Andy Raskin is to strategic messaging what Michael Jordan is to basketball: the G.O.A.T (we aren’t trying to hear it, LeBron fans). But there are plenty of other great minds who have contributed to the growing “story as a strategy” approach, and offer a different perspective on the frameworks to build your story. Tl;dr incoming.
StoryBrand: Everyone has a bit of self-doubt and a desire for self-betterment, which we build aspirational identities upon. Companies able to align with our aspirational identities turn us into powerful evangelists and can do so with the same classic framework used for making movies.
Public Narrative: A tactic which helped Obama win his first presidential election, Public Narrative helps leaders motivate their followers to challenge the status-quo. Just think of your customers as your followers, and hone the story of self, the story of us, and the story of now.
Strategic Messaging Map: Probably the best of the group at actually explaining how to implement new messaging, the Strategic Messaging Map outlines a step by step process for creating tagline and slogan all the way down to proof points and value statements.
🔮 Dropbox will forever be a legend for their increased storage referral program, which grew the company from 100,000 to 4,000,000 users in just over a year. But not every business is going to be able to find that one magic tactic, and oftentimes it’s other less splashy strategies that accelerate growth to the next level. Just take Zapier, who went into the nitty gritty depths of content marketing to take advantage of long-tail search terms and slowly build a community of brand ambassadors over time.
🚦 Unsettling stat of the day: the typical CMO’s tenure is half that of a CEO’s. And the big reason they can’t seem to stick is a misalignment on expectations. CMOs need the green light to go into full disruption mode, as well as confidence that management has the patience to invest in the future. Our favorite tidbit from this 2019 Disruptor CMO Playbook: the importance of reframing your category—creating and owning a new one will always be easier than taking down Goliath (check out our Read of the week for more on this).
😈 Investors can’t seem to decide what TAM (total addressable market) suits their investments best. Their shoulder devil whispers to aim for the largest market possible, while the angel pleads for a more manageable, niche market. You’ll see founders attempt to show the best of both worlds with a TAM SAM SOM graph, but these top down estimates have vague definitions and only 3 markets. A better approach is to look at your TAM as an onion, with the center as the initial niche group, and each exterior ring as an addition to your continuously growing TAM.
🎸 Play Bigger focuses on the concept of category design, and the steps a business can take to become a “Category King”, which is probably not what you think. A Category King does more than just sell the most in a given industry—they introduce a completely new product to the world that we never knew we needed, fundamentally changing the way we decide to spend our money. Think of Uber starting ride sharing, or even Elvis introducing Rock and Roll. Fortunately, you don’t have to start over to get there; instead, you can tactically reposition your existing offering. Thirteen Fortune 100 companies can speak to that and saw 53% growth from defining their category.