đ The rise of the pod people; Self-caring your way to effective leadership; Simplifying revenue attribution...
Tech startup culture is known for two things: brooding dev teams and amazing office snacks. Kidding (sort of). Whatâs actually at the heart of startup culture is breaking down norms and creating new solutions to perennial problems.Â
Speaking of problem-solving â weâve got some great content this week on solving the internal struggles most startups face, from team structure to leadership burnout and revenue attribution.Â
đ¸ Our biggest takeaway from 2020 is to expect the unexpected. Itâs one of the reasons why weâre seeing companies adopt more agile, cross-functional approaches to building teams. Atlassianâs case study on implementing Agile Pods within their marketing department shows its benefits. They took key players from central services (think copywriters and designers), and assigned them to different teams within specific business units, enabling better campaign execution and providing a little cushion for external events that could impact the business. Ultimately, what agile pods bring to the table is better resource allocation, and in turn, earned time. Pods operate transparently with dedicated program managers to cut down on the busy work and keep teams focused on the essentials.
đ¤ Weâre big believers in the idea that everyone should work in customer service at least once in their life. Typically, your customers arenât reaching out to provide glowing reviews of your product. They reach out to support when thereâs an issue. Being down in the trenches with your support team is essential for so many reasons; but most importantly it provides insight into how your product is working outside of controlled environments. From a strategic standpoint, your marketing and C-suite can garner more authentic feedback to answer questions like, âare we highlighting the right value proposition?â For the dev team, it can highlight if you are building the right set of features to meet your marketsâ needs, or are you overwhelming them with useless bells and whistles.
đŚ Few things stall company growth quicker than a burnt-out leadership team. As leaders, we generally focus on what we can do for others to help them improve performance, but as cliche as it sounds, you canât take care of others unless you first take care of yourself. A solid, repeatable self-care routine will dramatically impact the way you lead your team. Self-care in this context doesnât mean using the Calm app once a day or dipping into a bubble bath. Think about when youâre most productive and how youâre allocating your time; simple actions like blocking out no meeting times or stepping away from your space to eat lunch can do wonders for your productivity. We structure our companies to work in systems so thereâs something to be said for structuring our day in the same way.
đ°Pricing strategy is one of the most important and hardest parts of defining your business model. The challenge of pricing strategy lies in balancing the cost of acquiring customers with maximizing the value of each contract, making it heavily dependent on how well you understand your customer and their pathway to buying your product. As ProductPlan points out, pricing should be done during the validation stage of your product because you will have a better chance of building it into your value proposition. Itâs the right time to get insights on how your audience buys products, and more importantly, why they renew contracts. Remember, doing this early doesnât mean pricing strategy doesnât need to be set in stone, you can always amend down the road.
đ When Dreamdataâs CEO and Co-Founder, Lars Grønnegaard says that âB2B attribution is really all about figuring out whatâs working and what isnât in terms of real business, or revenue,â you get a sense of how important attribution really is. Heâs tackling one of the biggest challenges startups face â accurately tracking revenue from lead to money in the bank. In B2B, revenue attribution is tricky because sales cycles are longer and youâre not targeting one individual, so companies need to think about the different roles within their customer profile and how they interact with each other. Another issue is data, which is everywhere. To discover whatâs driving revenue you need to centralize your data, or at least make sure all your systems can talk to each other. Then you can develop a narrative with it to tell the story of where your revenue comes from.