Leaders focus on people as their primary means of influencing the business.

As you help develop and support the growth of people on the team, the people help grow the business.

This is why the job of the leader is to:

1) Find, convince and hire talented people to join the team

2) Align the team around an inspiring vision to collaborate on

3) Give the team all the support and resources they need to succeed

4) Help level up team members’ skills, mindset and capabilities

5) Coach team members through challenges and growth plateaus

6) Build the right environment and culture to help team members thrive

7) Remove people who put 1-6 at risk and cannot be coached out of it

Do all of these and the business will grow all by itself.

The best companies treat Positioning as an ongoing, ever-evolving loop influenced by their market and customers, not as a one-time exercise with an end point.

Each time you tell your company's narrative and story, more prospects are found and more deals are closed. Each cohort of customers reveals additional information about:

1) What types of customers are ideal fits

2) Who has the most success with the product

3) What type of messaging resonates with those customers

4) What pain points the product still fails to address

5) What other solutions those customers are looking for

As more information is uncovered, it needs to be fed back into positioning to change the overarching story around a company / brand.

With every cycle, more scale is found because more opportunity is uncovered (e.g. more TAM, higher LTV etc.)

Organizations that over-rely on Sales and Events for pipeline put their sales targets at risk.

This is most often seen inside Sales-led organizations where Marketing has a limited budget.

How can you expect to hit aggressive sales projections when you aren't engaging with your buyers on channels where they are spending most of their time?

Instead, investing into digital and buyer-centric channels increases the odds of hitting pipeline targets.

Growing Marketing Generated Pipeline is the key to hitting aggressive sales projections.

When Marketing stops over-relying on events and begins building new channels to acquire customers, it forces the organization to be less Sales-led.

This takes time which is why Marketing leaders need to lobby CEOs and Boards with the right budget asks to invest in the right channels to become more Marketing-led.

Focusing on a broader set of customers inevitably leads to growth of customers that fit your ICP.

Segmentation theory argues that segment your best fit prospects / customers and customize your messaging to those people.

While there is truth to this, especially in enterprise B2B environments where ABM is a lever, broader awareness marketing still has massive benefits:

1. You inevitably reach your ICP as you increase your awareness in a broader category (e.g. Trello captures all types of organizations and functions by going after the broader project management space)
   
   
2. You enable customers to identify additional expansion ICPs for the business (e.g. verticals and markets who your perfect segmentation strategy ignored)
   
   
3. You grow the brand as more people know of you and refer you as a solution (the downside is your CAC increases as you go after a broader market so this needs to be managed)

Even in environments where TAM is super small, there needs to be an element of marketing that goes...

The most expensive kind of customer is a New customer.

This is why it's shocking how so many marketers focus entirely on acquiring new customers as their primary means of impacting growth.

New Customers require a lot more investment to attract, nurture and convert towards any offering.

Meanwhile, existing customers present a lot of growth opportunities that companies leave on the table. These include:

1) Increasing retention rates and LTV -- this has the double benefit of giving you the ability to spend more to acquire new customers.

2) Expanding existing customer accounts -- including working with product and customer success teams to increase usage in terms of functionality and number of users.

3) Upselling and Cross-selling -- having existing customers buy additional solutions that connect to the core offering.

Marketing thinking about these growth levers increases the odds of the business growing faster and hitting its targets.

Think beyond new customer acquisition and you'll instantly...

Increased price transparency helps everyone win.

• Customers win because they can self-serve and identify if a solution is a good fit for them.
• Sales wins because they have conversations with more qualified prospects who understand what they're in for.
• Marketing wins because all MQL thresholds include price education earlier in the buyer journey.

Most importantly, efficiency increases because far less time is spent on having customers jump through hoops to get a pricing 1-pager that they cannot afford.

Even if you're a B2B enterprise company with a $100K offering. Boldly put your starting price point on a pricing page for the world to see.

Your whole Go-To-Market motion will improve and your buyers will trust you more.

Increased sales volume breaks internal processes.

As you close more deals, your organization has to figure out a way to deal with increased complexity.

This is where questions like the following become increasingly important:

1. How can we deliver faster?
2. How can we increase automation across the business?
3. How many people do we need to scale?
4. What will our margin be as we scale?
5. What is the core business we are in?
6. Which opportunities should we say no to?
7. What kind of operational framework will help us scale to the next level?
8. What should our product focus on to help us scale even more?
9. What are our scaling bottlenecks?
10. Who do we need in which seats to scale?

These kinds of questions only become relevant and evident as sales volume crosses certain thresholds.

This is one of the most undervalued contributions of sales: As more deals are closed, the organization is given an opportunity to examine key strategic questions that would otherwise remain unaddressed.

As those questions...

Rethinking meetings for mental health and productivity is more important now than ever before. Here are 12 principles worth following:

1. Don’t use the full scheduled window
2. Gamify / add rewards for ending meetings earlier
3. Don’t attend meetings you don’t need to be present for
4. Don’t invite everyone possible to a meeting
5. Add a 5-10 minute buffer minimum between meetings
6. 7 to 10 minute meetings are often all that’s needed
7. Longer meetings don’t equal increased value
8. Sometimes the best meeting is no meeting
9. Use asynchronous communication (Loom, Slack) instead of meetings
10. Cancel / push unnecessary meetings every morning
11. Change frequency of recurring meetings. They don't need to be as frequent as you think.
12. Try to purposely take a day / afternoon / morning off meetings

Scaling companies would be a lot easier if companies behaved more like sports teams.

Training in most companies halts after onboarding. This is part of the reason why tenure in a lot of roles (especially executives) is below 2 years. In a market where the demand for talent far supersedes the supply of talent, internal training can be a competitive advantage.

Hire high potential employees and invest in them by:

1. Having them report to a manager that educates them on how to level up their skills.
2. Give them access to premium education resources so they can self study and improve on their own time.
3. Help them connect with communities so they can learn from others facing similar challenges.

Each of these empowers team members to come back to the company with capabilities to contribute even more.

As they level up based on your investment, reward them with higher compensation to recognize their increased ability to contribute.

If your business model doesn't allow you to invest in team...

Increasing team member tenure can be one of the keys to unlocking growth long-term.

Each time you lose someone, you take on the added tangible costs of onboarding and training replacements + the intangible costs of lost institutional memory.

This is why employee satisfaction and retention is not an HR issue. It is one of the biggest growth priorities for companies yet unfortunately not treated as such.

People leave companies for a variety of reasons. These include:

Level 1 - Salary, Title, Benefits. What do I financially gain from working here?
Level 2 - Safety, Security. Can I trust this company / leadership to take care of my needs?
Level 3 - Culture. Do the values of this company resonate with me personally?
Level 4 - Opportunity. Do I see a path for personal and professional growth here?
Level 5 - Alignment. Does this align with my long-term goals?

Each leader in a business must be fully attuned to these questions and proactively engage team members to ensure all 5 levels are...