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Customer conversion is dependent on the right customer conversation
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Rasheed Ogunlaru (Soul Trader)
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These books portray people in ways that are hurtful and wrong. Ceasing sales of these books is only part of our commitment and our broader plan to ensure Dr. Seuss Enterprises' catalog represents and supports all communities and families
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Dr. Seuss
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For the existing enterprise, whether business or public-service institution, the controlling word in the term ‘entrepreneurial management’ is ‘entrepreneurial’. For the new venture, it is ‘management’. In the existing business, it is the existing that is the main obstacle to entrepreneurship. In the new venture, it is its absence. The new venture has an idea. It may have a product or a service. It may even have sales, and sometimes quite a substantial volume of them. It surely has costs. And it may have revenues and even profits. What it does not have is a ‘business’, a viable, operating, organized ‘present’ in which people know where they are going, what they are supposed to do, and what the results are or should be. But unless a new venture develops into a new business and makes sure of being ‘managed’, it will not survive no matter how brilliant the entrepreneurial idea, how much money it attracts, how good its products, nor even how great the demand for them.
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Peter F. Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Routledge Classics))
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Man/Woman, it has always insisted, does not live by bread alone. The weakness of the church is that it has too often accepted the separation between the material and the spiritual … leaving the material to the economic and political power structure.… The crisis of a city like Detroit provides the church with an extraordinary opportunity to develop and practice a vision of a new economy and a new educational system which meets both the material and spiritual needs of human beings.… Churches are … in an excellent position to develop small enterprises that provide models of how to meet the needs of the community and the city and at the same time teach young people the importance of skills, process and respect for Nature. All over the city churches are surrounded by vacant and unused land. If Detroiters, and especially young Detroiters, could see this land being used by churches for organic gardens to supply produce for local needs or to plant Christmas trees for sale at Yuletide or greenhouses where vegetables are grown year round, the idea of a self-reliant living economy to meet the material and spiritual needs of people could come alive.10
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Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
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The violence exercised in the service of human commodification relied on a scientific empiricism always seeking to find the limits of human capacity for suffering, that point where material and social poverty threatened to consume entirely the lives it was meant to garner for sale in the Americas. In this regard, the economic enterprise of human trafficking marked a watershed in what would become an enduring project in the modern Western world: probing the limits up to which it is possible to discipline the body without extinguishing the life within.
The aim in the case being economic efficiency rather than punishment, this was a regime whose intent was not to torture but rather to manage the depletion of life that resulted from the conditions of saltwater slavery. But for the Africans who were starved, sorted, and warped to make them into saltwater slaves, torture was the result. It takes no great insight to point to the role of violence in the Atlantic slave trade. But to understand what happened to Africans in this system of human trafficking requires us to ask precisely what kind of violence it requires to achieve its end, the transformation of African captives into Atlantic commodities.
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Stephanie E. Smallwood (Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora)
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He shook hands. With greening faces, with eyes full of sparks, his two friends leaned upon their canes. One had on a crushed bowler (why?)... Both were weary. Both knew that what was approaching was the end. Both had spent the day in their offices and when they interrupted their work with an indiscreet nod, when they turned the conversation toward that end, both broke in "Lord, we have strayed from our business." And ever deeper sunk their eyes, a deathly shadow was descending. The words of his friends had been bought with blood, but they were stolen. Someone, listening, recorded them on a phonograph and thousands of cylinders began to twang. A new enterprise opened, on sale a bronze throat, a screaming cavity; an experienced mechanic installed the throat phonograph. The purchased throat squealed day and night and his friends grew exhausted and one day he said to them both "Lord, I am going." He grinned. And they grinned: they understood everything. Now they stood on the platform, stood with him and saw him off. Someone long and dark with the face of an ox, shoulders crooked as a sorrowful cemetery cross and wrapped up in a frock-coat, swept into the coach. And then the bell rang, and then they waved their bowlers; three wooden arms swung in the air.
("Adam")
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Andrei Bely (Silver Age of Russian Culture (An Anthology))
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In the early stages of the state, taxes are light in their incidence, but fetch in a large revenue; in the later stages the incidence of taxation increases while the aggregate revenue falls off.
Now where taxes and imposts are light, private individuals are encouraged to engage actively in business; enterprise develops, because business men feel it worth their while, in view of the small share of their profits which they have to give up in the form of taxation. And as business prospers the number of taxes increases and the total yield of taxation grows.
As time passes and kings succeed each other, they lose their tribal habits in favour of more civilized ones. Their needs and exigencies grow.... owing to the luxury in which they have been brought up. Hence they impose fresh taxes on their subjects -farmers, peasants, and others subject to taxation; sharply raise the rate of old taxes to increase their yield; and impose sales taxes and octrois, as we shall describe later. These increases grow with the spread of luxurious habits in the state, and the consequent growth in needs and public expenditure, until taxation burdens the subjects and deprives them of their gains. People get accustomed to this high level of taxation, because the increases have come about gradually, without anyone’s being aware of who exactly it was who raised the rates of the old taxes or imposed the new ones.
But the effects on business of this rise in taxation make themselves felt. For business men are soon discouraged by the comparison of their profits with the burden of their taxes, and between their output and their net profits. Consequently production falls off, and with it the yield of taxation.
The rulers may, mistakenly, try to remedy this decrease in the yield of taxation by raising the rate of the taxes; hence taxes and imposts reach a level which leaves no profits to business men, owing to high costs of production, heavy burden of taxation, and inadequate net profits. This process of higher tax rates and lower yields (caused by the government’s belief that higher rates result in higher returns) may go on until production begins to decline owing to the despair of business men, and to affect population. The main injury of this process is felt by the state, just as the main benefit of better business conditions is enjoyed by it.
From this you must understand that the most important factor making for business prosperity is to lighten as much as possible the burden of taxation on business men, in order to encourage enterprise by giving assurance of greater profits.
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Ibn Khaldun
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Ownership is dead. Access is the new imperative. International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that by 2020, 50 percent of the world’s largest enterprises will see the majority of their business depend on their ability to create digitally enhanced products, services, and experiences. Focusing on services over products is also a sound business strategy. Zuora’s Subscription Economy Index, which you’ll find at the end of this book, shows that subscription-based companies are growing eight times faster than the S&P 500 and five times faster than US retail sales.
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Tien Tzuo (Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It)
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Sales conversations are founded on “seduction”, a form of courtship a seller initiates in order to win the prospect’s trust in conversation before engaging into actual product selling. Marketing resorts to courtship as well when marketers gain their market’s attention with promises of a better future and more satisfactory situations. Whatever our role at work, we are all in sales and marketing, whether we like it or not. This is particularly true of technical performers who intend to hold a pivotal role for aligning technology with business needs. Mobile disposition in its higher form cultivates courtship essential for building strong and trustworthy relationships with other actors in a business enterprise.
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Ernest Stambouly (Mobile Disposition: Delivering Enterprise Technology Capabilities at Digital Age Velocity)
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Let’s look at the case of Opsware. Why did I sell Opsware? Another good question is why didn’t I sell Opsware until I did? At Opsware, we started in the server automation market. When we received our first inquiries and offers for the server automation company, we had fewer than fifty customers. I believed that there were at least ten thousand target customers and that we had a decent shot at being number one. In addition, although I knew the market would be redefined, I thought that we could expand to networks and storage (data center automation) faster than the competition and win that market as well. Therefore, assuming 30 percent market share, somebody would have had to pay sixty times what we were worth in forward credit to buy out our potential. You won’t be surprised to find that nobody was willing to pay that. Once we grew to several hundred customers and expanded into data center automation, we were still number one and were more valuable stand-alone than any of the prior acquisition offers. At that point both Opsware and our main competitor, BladeLogic, had developed into full-fledged companies (worldwide sales forces, built-out professional services, etc.). This was significant, because it meant that a large company could buy one of us and potentially execute successfully (big enterprise companies can’t generally succeed with small acquisitions, because too much of the important intellectual property is the sales methodology, and big companies can’t build that).
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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APPENDIX QUESTIONS FOR HEAD OF ENTERPRISE SALES FORCE
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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Corporations could raise funds through the sale of stock and bonds, and many states offered charters that gave stockholders limited liability: they would not be held responsible for the corporation’s debts beyond their own investment. In exchange for all this, Americans believed that corporations had a greater obligation than other enterprises to serve a public good.
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Richard White (The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States))
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There are many potential explanations for the less-than-robust performance, but IBM’s current strategy suggests that one component at least is a challenge to the traditional shrink-wrapped software business. As much as any software provider in the industry, IBM’s software business was optimized and built for a traditional enterprise procurement model. This typically involves lengthy evaluations of software, commonly referred to as “bake-offs,” followed by the delivery of a software asset, which is then installed and integrated by some combination of buyer employees, IBM services staff, or third-party consultants. This model, as discussed previously, has increasingly come under assault from open source software, software offered as a pure service or hosted and managed on public cloud infrastructure, or some combination of the two. Following the multi-billion dollar purchase of Softlayer, acquired to beef up IBM’s cloud portfolio, IBM continued to invest heavily in two major cloud-related software projects: OpenStack and Cloud Foundry. The latter, which is what is commonly referred to as a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering, may give us both an idea of how IBM’s software group is responding to disruption within the traditional software sales cycle and their level of commitment to it. Specifically, IBM’s implementation of Cloud Foundry, a product called Bluemix, makes a growing portion of IBM’s software portfolio available as a consumable service. Rather than negotiate and purchase software on a standalone basis, then, IBM customers are increasingly able to consume the products in a hosted fashion.
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Stephen O’Grady (The Software Paradox: The Rise and Fall of the Commercial Software Market)
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In enterprise software companies, the two most important positions tend to be VP of sales and VP of engineering.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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In academia much bogus knowledge is tolerated in the name of academic freedom – which is like allowing for the sale of contaminated food in the name of free enterprise. I submit that such tolerance is suicidal: that the serious students must be protected against the “anything goes” crowd.
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Mario Bunge
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David and Neil were MBA students at the Wharton School when the cash-strapped David lost his eyeglasses and had to pay $700 for replacements. That got them thinking: Could there be a better way? Neil had previously worked for a nonprofit, VisionSpring, that trained poor women in the developing world to start businesses offering eye exams and selling glasses that were affordable to people making less than four dollars a day. He had helped expand the nonprofit’s presence to ten countries, supporting thousands of female entrepreneurs and boosting the organization’s staff from two to thirty. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Neil that an idea birthed in the nonprofit sector could be transferred to the private sector. But later at Wharton, as he and David considered entering the eyeglass business, after being shocked by the high cost of replacing David’s glasses, they decided they were out to build more than a company—they were on a social mission as well. They asked a simple question: Why had no one ever sold eyeglasses online? Well, because some believed it was impossible. For one thing, the eyeglass industry operated under a near monopoly that controlled the sales pipeline and price points. That these high prices would be passed on to consumers went unquestioned, even if that meant some people would go without glasses altogether. For another, people didn’t really want to buy a product as carefully calibrated and individualized as glasses online. Besides, how could an online company even work? David and Neil would have to be able to offer stylish frames, a perfect fit, and various options for prescriptions. With a $2,500 seed investment from Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, David and Neil launched their company in 2010 with a selection of styles, a low price of $95, and a hip marketing program. (They named the company Warby Parker after two characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.) Within a month, they’d sold out all their stock and had a 20,000-person waiting list. Within a year, they’d received serious funding. They kept perfecting their concept, offering an innovative home try-on program, a collection of boutique retail outlets, and an eye test app for distance vision. Today Warby Parker is valued at $1.75 billion, with 1,400 employees and 65 retail stores. It’s no surprise that Neil and David continued to use Warby Parker’s success to deliver eyeglasses to those in need. The company’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is unique: instead of simply providing free eyeglasses, Warby Parker trains and equips entrepreneurs in developing countries to sell the glasses they’re given. To date, 4 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through Warby Parker’s program. This dual commitment to inexpensive eyewear for all, paired with a program to improve access to eyewear for the global poor, makes Warby Parker an exemplary assumption-busting social enterprise.
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Jean Case (Be Fearless: 5 Principles for a Life of Breakthroughs and Purpose)
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Enterprise deals or “how to lose your freedom in 5 minutes” Being able to use our product for sales prospecting, I decided to go after some big names at the enterprise level. After one week I had booked meetings with companies like Uber, Facebook, etc. This is where the fun begins…or not… I spent 3 months doing between 4 to 9 meetings for each enterprise company I had booked meetings with. Every meeting leads to the next one as you go up the chain of command. And then comes the pilot phase. Awesome you might think! Well, not really… Working with enterprise-level clients requires a lot of custom work and paperwork. And when I say “a lot” I mean a sh*t ton of work. You need an entire department to handle the legal aspect, and hire another 10 people to entirely change your tech department to meet their requirements. During 4 months I went from being super excited to work with the most famous companies in the world to “this deal will transform our company entirely and we’ll have to start doing custom everything”. Losing my freedom and flexibility quickly became a no-go. The issue here is, with all these meetings I thought that they would adapt to our standards. That they understood from the start that we were a startup and that we couldn’t comply with all their needs. But it doesn’t work like this. It’s actually the other way around even though the people you meet working at these companies tell you otherwise. The bottleneck often comes from the legal department. It doesn’t matter if everyone is excited to use your product, if you don’t comply with their legal requirements or try to negotiate it will never work out. To give you an example, we had enterprise companies asking us to specifically have all our employee’s computers locked down in the office after they end their day. Knowing that we’re a remote company, it’s impossible to comply with that... If you want to target enterprise accounts, do it. But make sure to know that you need a lot of time and effort to make things work. It won’t be quick. I was attracted to the BIG names thinking that it would be an amazing way to grow faster, but instead, I should have been 100% focused on our target market (startups, SMBs).
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Guillaume Moubeche (The $150M secret)
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Privatisation of government-owned enterprises is crucial to the project [neoliberalism]. One of the appealing features of tax cuts for neoliberal governments is that reduced revenue provides them with an excuse to sell state assets to meet the sudden budget shortfalls. The sale of state assets creates more lucrative business opportunities for the corporations that can afford to buy such things as power stations, water treatment plants, telecommunications providers, government banks and airlines. It's something of a windfall for a business to acquire an asset that will always deliver a return so long as citizens still need things like water or power supplied to their homes, a bus to catch from one place to another, or a telephone connection. And - unlike a state-owned asset - a private corporation never has to adjust its services due to democratic prompting from the electorate. Why do power prices keep going up across Australia? Because most of the power supply is now owned and operated by private corporations. They're free to price gouge on the supply of an essential service, because they can't be voted out of office. p.58-9
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Sally McManus (On Fairness)
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Privatisation of government-owned enterprises is crucial to the project [neoliberalism]. One of the appealing features of tax cuts for neoliberal governments is that reduced revenue provides them with an excuse to sell state assets to meet the sudden budget shortfalls. The sale of state assets creates more lucrative business opportunities for the corporations that can afford to buy such things as power stations, water treatment plants, telecommunications providers, government banks and airlines. It's something of a windfall for a business to acquire an asset that will always deliver a return so long as citizens still need things like water or power supplied to their homes, a bus to catch from one place to another, or a telephone connection. And - unlike a state-owned asset - a private corporation never has to adjust its services due to democratic prompting from the electorate. Why do power prices keep going up across Australia? Because most of the power supply is now owned and operated by private corporations. They're free to price gouge on the supply of an essential service, because they can't be voted out of office.
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Sally McManus (On Fairness)
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Read the notes.Never buy a stock without reading the footnotes to the financial statements in the annual report. Usually labeled “summary of significant accounting policies,” one key note describes how the company recognizes revenue, records inventories, treats installment or contract sales, expenses its marketing costs, and accounts for the other major aspects of its business.7 In the other footnotes, watch for disclosures about debt, stock options, loans to customers, reserves against losses, and other “risk factors” that can take a big chomp out of earnings. Among the things that should make your antennae twitch are technical terms like “capitalized,” “deferred,” and “restructuring”—and plain-English words signaling that the company has altered its accounting practices, like “began,” “change,” and “however.” None of those words mean you should not buy the stock, but all mean that you need to investigate further. Be sure to compare the footnotes with those in the financial statements of at least one firm that’s a close competitor, to see how aggressive your company’s accountants are. Read more. If you are an enterprising investor willing to put plenty of time and energy into your portfolio, then you owe it to yourself to learn more about financial reporting. That’s the only way to minimize your odds of being misled by a shifty earnings statement. Three solid books full of timely and specific examples are Martin Fridson and Fernando Alvarez’s Financial Statement Analysis, Charles Mulford and Eugene Comiskey’s The Financial Numbers Game, and Howard Schilit’s Financial Shenanigans. 8
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Any company generating between $5 million and $150 million in revenue. I find that companies in this niche have the ability to pay, and aren't ground down by layers of management and decision-making that can be associated with massive enterprises.
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Alex Berman (The Cold Email Manifesto: How to fill your sales pipeline, convert like crazy and level up your business in 90 days or less)
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Factor markets are markets for the purchase and sale of factors of production. In capitalist private enterprise economies, households own the factors of production (the land, labor, physical capital, and materials used in production). Goods markets are markets for the output of production.
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Christopher D. Piros (Economics for Investment Decision Makers: Micro, Macro, and International Economics (CFA Institute Investment Series))
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Mass Mobilization of Youth
Despite the well-founded dissatisfaction of the younger generation with the kind of life offered by the bloated affluence of megatechnic society, their very mode of rebellion too often demonstrates that the power system still has them in its grip: they, too mistake indolence for leisure and irresponsibility for liberation. The so-called Woodstock Festival was no spontaneous manifestation of joyous youth, but a strictly money-making enterprise, shrewdly calculated to exploit their rebellions, their adulations, and their illusions. The success of the festival was based ont he tropismic attraction of 'Big Name' singers and groups (the counter-culture's Personality Cult!), idols who command colossal financial rewards from personal appearances and the sales of their discs and films.
With its mass mobilization of private cars and buses, its congestion of traffic en route, and its large-scale pollution of the environment, the Woodstock Festival mirrored and even grossly magnified the worst features of the system that many young rebels profess to reject, if not to destroy. The one positive achievement of this mass mobilization, apparently, was the warm sense of instant fellowship produced by the close physical contact of a hundred thousand bodies floating in the haze and daze of pot. Our present mass-minded, over-regimented, depersonalized culture has nothing to fear from this kind of reaction-equally regimented, equally depersonalized, equally under external control. What is this but the Negative Power Complex, attached by invisible electrodes to the same pecuniary pleasure center.
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Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
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For the nature of these activities, you can divide field visits into three categories: 1. purely technical visits or technical sales visits (e.g., demonstrations, technical requirement discovery, or troubleshooting), 2. transactional sales (e.g., dropping by to take an order), and 3. enterprise sales (e.g., running solution-design workshops, presenting to groups of decision makers).
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Justin Roff-Marsh (The Machine: A Radical Approach to the Design of the Sales Function)
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Although Reed tried valiantly, the income from print sales never balanced out the high cost of framing, advertising, printing announcements, and the rent on New York’s prestigious gallery row, West Fifty-seventh Street. She confessed that the Delphic Studios were “a philanthropic endeavor rather than a business enterprise” and that, sadly, “sales were so infrequent as to make hope of any return at all from commissions a remote possibility.
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Mary Street Alinder (Group f.64: Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and the Community of Artists Who Revolutionized American Photography)
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In those meetings, I learned that even economic diagrams needn’t be linear. Ours was a nest of concentric circles, and an enterprise was measured by its value to each circle, from the individual and family to the community and environment. I realized that Rebecca and her colleagues were trying to do nothing less than transform the System of National Accounts, the statistical framework here and in most countries for measuring economic activity. For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment. This group was inventing a new way of measuring profit and loss.
By the end of our days together, I understood economics in a whole new way. A balance sheet really could be about balance.
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Gloria Steinem (My Life on the Road)
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Gartner’s 2015 survey found that CEOs expect that revenues attributable to digital products, marketing, and sales will double from an average of 21 percent in 2014 to 42 percent in 2017.
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Mark Raskino (Digital to the Core: Remastering Leadership for Your Industry, Your Enterprise, and Yourself)
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In the lean enterprise, Sales and Production Scheduling are core members of the product team, in a position to plan the sales campaign as the product design is being developed and to sell with a clear eye to the capabilities of the production system so that both orders and the product can flow smoothly from sale to delivery.
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James P. Womack (Lean Thinking: Banish Waste And Create Wealth In Your Corporation)
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Young had to change the game-by literally giving his software away via free download-to achieve dominant market share and become credible to corporate information technology (IT) departments. In that case, Young decided where to play and how to win, and then built the rest of his strategy (earning revenue from service rather than software sales) around these two choices. The result was a billion dollar company with a thriving enterprise business.
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A.G. Lafley (Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works)
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In 2008, Box had a good way for companies to store their data safely and accessibly in the cloud. But people didn’t know they needed such a thing—cloud computing hadn’t caught on yet. That summer, Blake was hired as Box’s third salesperson to help change that. Starting with small groups of users who had the most acute file sharing problems, Box’s sales reps built relationships with more and more users in each client company. In 2009, Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
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I’m most endeared to the fact that they used gifts and talents that were taught to them by other enterprising women who looked just like them. These are gifts and talents they brought with them from Africa and other distant shores. These were gifts and talents women used to appease their owners, and make their lives comfortable. These were gifts and talents used to fuel economies and for building communities. In one book I read, nickels from the sale of chicken eggs paid the college tuition of three children.
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Robin Caldwell (When Women Become Business Owners (A Stepping Into Victory Compilation, #1))
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When you are scaling a sales team, the to-do list is endless. Hiring, training, coaching, pipeline reviews, forecasting, enterprise deal support, leadership development, and cross-functional communication are all part of the day-to-day.
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Mark Roberge (The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million)
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The old order types were simple and straightforward and mainly sensible. The new order types that accompanied the explosion of high-frequency trading were nothing like them, either in detail or spirit. When, in the summer of 2012, the Puzzle Masters gathered with Brad and Don and Ronan and Rob and Schwall in a room to think about them, there were maybe one hundred fifty different order types. What purpose did each serve? How might each be used? The New York Stock Exchange had created an order type that ensured that the trader who used it would trade only if the order on the other side of his was smaller than his own order; the purpose seemed to be to prevent a high-frequency trader from buying a small number of shares from an investor who was about to crush the market with a huge sale. Direct Edge created an order type that, for even more complicated reasons, allowed the high-frequency trading firm to withdraw 50 percent of its order the instant someone tried to act on it. All of the exchanges offered something called a Post-Only order. A Post-Only order to buy 100 shares of Procter & Gamble at $80 a share says, “I want to buy a hundred shares of Procter & Gamble at eighty dollars a share, but only if I am on the passive side of the trade, where I can collect a rebate from the exchange.” As if that weren’t squirrely enough, the Post-Only order type now had many even more dubious permutations. The Hide Not Slide order, for instance. With a Hide Not Slide order, a high-frequency trader—for who else could or would use such a thing?—would say, for example, “I want to buy a hundred shares of P&G at a limit of eighty dollars and three cents a share, Post-Only, Hide Not Slide.” One of the joys of the Puzzle Masters was their ability to figure out what on earth that meant. The descriptions of single order types filed with the SEC often went on for twenty pages, and were in themselves puzzles—written in a language barely resembling English and seemingly designed to bewilder anyone who dared to read them. “I considered myself a somewhat expert on market structure,” said Brad. “But I needed a Puzzle Master with me to fully understand what the fuck any of it means.” A Hide Not Slide order—it was just one of maybe fifty such problems the Puzzle Masters solved—worked as follows: The trader said he was willing to buy the shares at a price ($80.03) above the current offering price ($80.02), but only if he was on the passive side of the trade, where he would be paid a rebate. He did this not because he wanted to buy the shares. He did this in case an actual buyer of stock—a real investor, channeling capital to productive enterprise—came along and bought all the shares offered at $80.02. The high-frequency trader’s Hide Not Slide order then established him as first in line to purchase P&G shares if a subsequent investor came into the market to sell those shares. This was the case even if the investor who had bought the shares at $80.02 expressed further demand for them at the higher price. A Hide Not Slide order was a way for a high-frequency trader to cut in line, ahead of the people who’d created the line in the first place, and take the kickbacks paid to whoever happened to be at the front of the line.
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Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
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Good enterprise sales strategy starts small, as it must: a new customer might agree to become your biggest customer, but they’ll rarely be comfortable signing a deal completely out of scale with what you’ve sold before. Once you have a pool of reference customers who are successfully using your product, then you can begin the long and methodical work of hustling toward ever bigger deals.
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Anonymous
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Very few people writing about this new industry in the mainstream press truly understood how personal computers had already begun to revert to institutional machines. This was mainly because it was easier for most journalists of the early 1990s to envision and get personally excited about the potential of educational software, or of managing their personal finances, or organizing their recipes in the “digital” kitchen, or imagining how amateur architects could design funky homes right on their home computers. Who wouldn’t be excited about more power in the hands of people, the computer as an extension of the brain, a “bicycle for the mind,” as Steve put it? This was the story of computing that got all the ink, and it was a story no one unfurled as well as Steve. Bill Gates wasn’t swayed by that romance. He saw it as a naïve fantasy that missed the point of the much more sophisticated things PCs could do for people in the enterprise. A consumer market can be an enormously profitable one—put simply, there are so many more people than businesses that if you sell them the right product you can mint money. But the personal computers of that time still didn’t have enough power at a low enough price to excite the vast majority of consumers, or to change their lives in any meaningful way. The business market, however, was a different beast. The potential volume of sales represented by all those corporate desktops, in all those thousands of companies big and small, became the target of Bill Gates’s strategic brilliance and focus. Those companies paid good prices for the reliability and consistency that Windows PCs could deliver. They welcomed incremental improvement, and Bill knew how to give it to them. Steve paid lip service to it, but his heart wasn’t in it. He thrilled only to the concept of how a dramatically better computer could unlock even more potential for its user.
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Brent Schlender (Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader)
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The only people in any enterprise who ever describe anyone except the people who buy the enterprise’s products and services as “customers” are IT personnel. The only people in the enterprise who ever talk about “aligning with the business” are IT personnel. (Maybe the head of sales has talked about aligning her function with a new strategy or a new value proposition, or the head of manufacturing has talked about aligning with new key performance indicators—but aligning with the business?) That view can’t be good for IT. It is a legacy of the
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Richard Hunter (Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value)
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LOW: Sales Effort Sales effort is a measure of the length of your sales cycle and includes the number of touch points required to make the sale. Where CAC measures the amount of money you’re spending to get a new customer, sales effort measures the time and energy you’re spending. The best way to track sales effort is to look at both the average number of days from someone scheduling their first demo to closing and the number of calls it takes to close a deal. Your ability to keep sales effort low depends greatly on your industry and customer base. If you’re doing enterprise sales, your sales cycle will be long and require more effort than if you’re targeting solopreneurs and other small businesses with a single decision-maker. A three- or four-month sales cycle is reasonable in enterprise sales—and worth it because the ACV might be $50,000. If you’re spending that much time for $5,000 contracts, though, that’s rough. No matter what your sales process looks like, you want your sales effort to be as low as possible. Here are some ways to lower this number. Self-Serve Sign-up and Onboarding. Many inexpensive products can get away with low price points because they have a low-touch or no-touch sales process. They have a self-serve sign-up and onboarding process, which requires almost no sales effort. The higher your ARPA, the less likely they are to become customers without some sales effort. But finding places to offer self-service along the journey can reduce the amount of hand-holding your team has to do while making the process speedier for your customer. One-Call Close. Self-service isn’t going to work in a lot of spaces, but you can try to get to a point where the decision is made by a single person. You can do this by targeting a founder, a developer, or a single manager. You can also streamline the back-and-forth of providing more sales materials, getting on second calls, waiting for input from the committee—and on and on. Educate your customers as much as you can ahead of time so they have the information they need and develop checklists to gather the information you need to close the deal quickly.
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Rob Walling (The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital)
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How Should I Structure My Pricing? Pricing is the biggest lever in SaaS, and almost no one gets it right out of the gate. Fortunately, you don’t need a PhD to structure your pricing well. Like most things in SaaS, finding the right pricing structure is one part theory, one part experimentation, and one part founder intuition. I wish I could tell you a single “correct” structure, but it varies based on your customer base, the value provided, and the competitive landscape. Most founders price their product too low or create confusing tiers that don’t align with the value a customer receives from the product. On the low end, if you have a product aimed at consumers, you can get away with charging $10 to $15 a month. The problem is at that price point, you’re going to be dealing with high churn, and you won’t have much budget to acquire customers. That can be brutal, but if you have a no-touch sign-up process with a product that sells itself, you can get away with it. Castos’s podcasting software and Snappa’s quick graphic design software are good examples of products that do well with a low average revenue per account (ARPA). You’ll have more breathing room (and less churn) if you aim for an ARPA of $50 a month or more. In niche markets—or where a demo is required or sales cycles are longer—aim higher (e.g., $250 a month and up). If you have a high-touch sales process that involves multiple calls, you need to charge enough to justify the cost of selling it. For example, $1,000 a month and up is a reasonable place to start. If you’re making true enterprise sales that require multiple demos and a procurement process, aim for $30,000 a year and up (into six figures). One of the best signals to guide your pricing is other SaaS tools, and I don’t just mean competition. Any SaaS tool a company in your space might replace you with, a complementary tool or a tool similar to yours in a different vertical can offer guidance, but make sure you don’t just compare features; compare how it’s sold. As mentioned above, the sales process has tremendous influence over how a product should be priced. There are so many SaaS tools out now that a survey of competitive and adjacent tools can give you a mental map of the range of prices you can charge. No matter where your business sits, one thing is true: “If no one’s complaining about your price, you’re probably priced too low.
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Rob Walling (The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital)
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Once we pushed the Opsware stock price back above $1, the next problem was to rebuild the executive team. We had cloud services executives, but now we were a software company and needed software executives. In enterprise software companies, the two most important positions tend to be VP of sales and VP of engineering.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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Even the simplest multiples are defined and computed differently by different analysts. A PE ratio for a company can be computed using earnings from the last fiscal year (current PE), the last four quarters (trailing PE), or the next four quarters (forward), yielding very different estimates. It can also vary depending on whether you use diluted or primary earnings. The first test to run on a multiple is to examine whether the numerator and denominator are defined consistently. If the numerator is an equity value, then the denominator should be an equity value as well. If the numerator is a firm value, then the denominator should be a firm value as well. To illustrate, the PE ratio is a consistently defined multiple since the numerator is the price per share (which is an equity value) and the denominator is earnings per share (which is also an equity value). So is the enterprise value to EBITDA multiple since the numerator and denominator are both measures of operating assets; the enterprise value measures the market value of the operating assets of a company, and the EBITDA is the cash flow generated by the operating assets. In contrast, the price-to-sales ratio and price to EBITDA are not consistently defined since they divide the market value of equity by an operating measure. Using these multiples will lead you to finding any firm with a significant debt burden to be cheap.
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Aswath Damodaran (The Little Book of Valuation: How to Value a Company, Pick a Stock, and Profit (Little Books. Big Profits))
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We have increased our population to the level of 7 billion and beyond. We are well on our way toward 9 billion before our growth trend is likely to flatten. We live at high densities in many cities. We have penetrated, and we continue to penetrate, the last great forests and other wild ecosystems of the planet, disrupting the physical structures and the ecological communities of such places. We cut our way through the Congo. We cut our way through the Amazon. We cut our way through Borneo. We cut our way through Madagascar. We cut our way through New Guinea and northeastern Australia. We shake the trees, figuratively and literally, and things fall out. We kill and butcher and eat many of the wild animals found there. We settle in those places, creating villages, work camps, towns, extractive industries, new cities. We bring in our domesticated animals, replacing the wild herbivores with livestock. We multiply our livestock as we've multiplied ourselves, operating huge factory-scale operations involving thousands of cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, sheep, and goats, not to mention hundreds of bamboo rats and palm civets, all confined en masse within pens and corrals, under conditions that allow those domestics and semidomestics to acquire infectious pathogens from external sources (such as bats roosting over the pig pens), to share those infections with one another, and to provide abundant opportunities for the pathogens to evolve new forms, some of which are capable of infecting a human as well as a cow or a duck. We treat many of those stock animals with prophylactic doses of antibiotics and other drugs, intended not to cure them but to foster their weight gain and maintain their health just sufficiently for profitable sale and slaughter, and in doing that we encourage the evolution of resistant bacteria. We export and import livestock across great distances and at high speeds. We export and import other live animals, especially primates, for medical research. We export and import wild animals as exotic pets. We export and import animal skins, contraband bushmeat, and plants, some of which carry secret microbial passengers. We travel, moving between cities and continents even more quickly than our transported livestock. We stay in hotels where strangers sneeze and vomit. We eat in restaurants where the cook may have butchered a porcupine before working on our scallops. We visit monkey temples in Asia, live markets in India, picturesque villages in South America, dusty archeological sites in New Mexico, dairy towns in the Netherlands, bat caves in East Africa, racetracks in Australia – breathing the air, feeding the animals, touching things, shaking hands with the friendly locals – and then we jump on our planes and fly home. We get bitten by mosquitoes and ticks. We alter the global climate with our carbon emissions, which may in turn alter the latitudinal ranges within which those mosquitoes and ticks live. We provide an irresistible opportunity for enterprising microbes by the ubiquity and abundance of our human bodies.
Everything I’ve just mentioned is encompassed within this rubric: the ecology and evolutionary biology of zoonotic diseases. Ecological circumstance provides opportunity for spillover. Evolution seizes opportunity, explores possibilities, and helps convert spillovers to pandemics.
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David Quammen (Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic)
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The two most important qualities for success in business are patience and foresight, and the man who lacks patience is not cut out for success in competitive enterprise.
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Brian Tracy (The Art of Closing the Sale: The Key to Making More Money Faster in the World of Professional Selling)
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The pie includes the long-term value customers enjoy over and above the price they pay, which we’ll call surplus. An enterprise creates surplus by inventing a product that materially improves their lives, providing free after-sales service or not using misleading marketing tactics.
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Alex Edmans (Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit – Updated and Revised)
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Kate never had any money, but she loved to save it. When she was ninety-three her youngest daughter took her to a dollar store where she found an elevated tray filled with tiny aluminum percolators, one-cuppers. The frank and ethical enterprise attached a notice informing its customers that these percolators did not work. They were only 5 cents, so Kate bought two of them anyway.
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Donald Hall (A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety)
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SAKEFA
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In a research study called “How today’s fastest growing B2B businesses found their first ten customers,” startup veteran Lenny Rachitsky interviewed early members of teams from Slack, Stripe, Figma, and Asana. In studying how these earliest companies found their first customers, it was concluded that a significant number came from the founders tapping their personal networks: Only three sourcing strategies account for every B2B company’s very early growth. [These are: Personal network, Seek out customers where they are, Get press.] Thus, your choices are easy, yet limited. Almost every B2B business both hits up their personal network and heads to the places their potential customers were spending time. The question isn’t which of these two routes to pursue, but instead how far your own network will take you before you move on. It’s a huge advantage to have a strong personal network in B2B, which you can also build by bringing a connector investor or joining an incubator such as YC. Getting press is rarely the way to get started.44 Just as Uber’s ops hustle worked for solving the city-by-city Cold Start Problem, B2B startups have an equivalent card to play: they can manually reach out and onboard teams from their friends’ startups, building atomic networks quickly, as Slack did in their early launch. Or, many productivity products begin by launching within online communities—like Twitter, Hacker News, and Product Hunt—where dense pockets of early adopters are willing to try new products. In recent years, B2B products have started to emphasize memes, funny videos, invite-only mechanics, and other tactics traditionally associated with consumer startups. I expect that this will only continue, as the consumerization of enterprise products fully embraces meme-based go-to-market early on, instead of leading with direct sales.
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Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
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Adequate Size of the Enterprise All our minimum figures must be arbitrary and especially in the matter of size required. Our idea is to exclude small companies which may be subject to more than average vicissitudes especially in the industrial field. (There are often good possibilities in such enterprises but we do not consider them suited to the needs of the defensive investor.) Let us use round amounts: not less than $100 million of annual sales for an industrial company and, not less than $50 million of total assets for a public utility. 2. A Sufficiently Strong Financial Condition For industrial companies current assets should be at least twice current liabilities—a so-called two-to-one current ratio. Also, long-term debt should not exceed the net current assets (or “working capital”). For public utilities the debt should not exceed twice the stock equity (at book value). 3. Earnings Stability Some earnings for the common stock in each of the past ten years. 4. Dividend Record Uninterrupted payments for at least the past 20 years. 5. Earnings Growth A minimum increase of at least one-third in per-share earnings in the past ten years using three-year averages at the beginning and end. 6. Moderate Price/Earnings Ratio Current price should not be more than 15 times average earnings of the past three years.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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is what happens when we confuse morality with frugality. We’ve all been taught that the bake sale with five percent overhead is morally superior to the professional fundraising enterprise with 40 percent overhead, but we’re missing the most important piece of information, which is: What is the actual size of these pies? Who cares if the bake sale only has five percent overhead if it’s tiny? What if the bake sale only netted 71 dollars for charity because it made no investment in its scale and the professional fundraising enterprise netted 71 million dollars because it did? Now which pie would we prefer, and which pie do we think people who are hungry would prefer?”1
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Greg Warner (Engagement Fundraising: How to raise more money for less in the 21st century)
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Old gangsters had indeed moved into more legitimate enterprises—why limit yourself to prostitution and drugs and loan sharking when there were so many other ways to turn a buck?—but even with the best of intentions, it never worked out. Guys like the Aches couldn’t help themselves really. They’d start out legit, but once things got the slightest bit tough, once they lost out on a contract or a sale or something, they reverted back to their old ways. Couldn’t help it. Corruption too was a terrible addiction, but where were the support groups?
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Harlan Coben (One False Move (Myron Bolitar, #5))
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The art of persuasion is a paradox. The more we attempt to persuade people, the more they tend to resist us. But the more we attempt to understand and create value for them, the more they tend to persuade themselves.
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Andy Whyte (MEDDICC: Using the Powerful MEDDICC Enterprise Sales Framework to Close High-Value Deals and Maximize Business Growth)
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To build a long-term, successful enterprise, when you don't close a sale, open a relationship.
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Patricia Fripp
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In the first case, you fear setting the price too low; in the second, you fear setting it too high. It is the job of your real-estate agent, of course, to find the golden mean. She is the one with all the information: the inventory of similar houses, the recent sales trends, the tremors of the mortgage market, perhaps even a lead on an interested buyer. You feel fortunate to have such a knowledgeable expert as an ally in this most confounding enterprise. Too bad she sees things differently. A real-estate agent may see you not so much as an ally but as a mark. Think back to the study cited at the beginning of this book, which measured the difference between the sale prices of homes that belonged to real-estate agents themselves and the houses
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Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
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MORAL AND QUESTIONS: The speculative public is incorrigible. In financial terms it cannot count beyond 3. It will buy anything, at any price, if there seems to be some “action” in progress. It will fall for any company identified with “franchising,” computers, electronics, science, technology, or what have you, when the particular fashion is raging. Our readers, sensible investors all, are of course above such foolishness. But questions remain: Should not responsible investment houses be honor-bound to refrain from identifying themselves with such enterprises, nine out of ten of which may be foredoomed to ultimate failure? (This was actually the situation when the author entered Wall Street in 1914. By comparison it would seem that the ethical standards of the “Street” have fallen rather than advanced in the ensuing 57 years, despite all the reforms and all the controls.) Could and should the SEC be given other powers to protect the public, beyond the present ones which are limited to requiring the printing of all important relevant facts in the offering prospectus? Should some kind of box score for public offerings of various types be compiled and published in conspicuous fashion? Should every prospectus, and perhaps every confirmation of sale under an original offering, carry some kind of formal warranty that the offering price for the issue is not substantially out of line with the ruling prices for issues of the same general type already established in the market? As we write this edition a movement toward reform of Wall Street abuses is under way. It will be difficult to impose worthwhile changes in the field of new offerings, because the abuses are so largely the result of the public’s own heedlessness and greed. But the matter deserves long and careful consideration.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Basics will come into play with direct selling, conglomerates will break themselves down intentionally into micro-enterprises to stay nimble.
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Richie Norton
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In a classic enterprise sale, you will often have a strategic buyer (who is excited about the change you can bring), an economic buyer (who controls the purse), a technical buyer (who might have approval/blocker rights), and then the actual users of your product. Can you identify your champion? Can you identify who might be a saboteur?
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Giff Constable (Talking to Humans)
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We would have won, but the other guys gave the deal away.” “The customer selected us technically and thinks we are the better company, but our competitor just gave the product away. We would never sell so cheaply as it would hurt our reputation.” Anybody who has ever run an enterprise sales force has heard this lie before. You go into an account, you fight hard, and you lose. The sales rep, not wanting to shine the light on himself, blames the “used car dealer” rep from the other company. The CEO, not wanting to believe that she’s losing product competitiveness, believes the rep. If you hear this lie, try to validate the claim with the actual customer. I’ll bet you can’t.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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Details derail sales. Buyers want to be stirred into action. American architect and urban designer Daniel Burnham understood this. When he was eulogized by his arch rival Frank Lloyd Wright as “an enthusiastic promoter of great construction enterprises,” Wright spoke to Burnham's sales abilities more than his architectural style, and said, “His powerful personality was supreme.
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James M. Kouzes (Stop Selling and Start Leading: How to Make Extraordinary Sales Happen)
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Outside of IT, executives are laser-focused on four things—increase sales, reduce expenses, optimize assets and mitigate risks. The successful CIO must become conversant in these things.
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Jim Maholic (IT Strategy: A 3-Dimensional Framework to Plan Your Digital Transformation and Deliver Value to Your Enterprise)
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BENEFITS OF MSME REGISTRATION
There are diverse blessings that groups get after acquiring MSME registration in India below the MSME act. They are as follows:
COLLATERAL FREE BANK LOANS
Collateral loose loans are loans supplied to the lender through the borrower with none guarantee. One can method a borrower for a mortgage despite the fact that he/she has not anything to spend money on or pledge. The Government of India has made collateral-loose credit score to be had to all small and micro-enterprise sectors. This initiative ensures finances to micro and small-zone firms. Under this scheme, each the vintage in addition to the brand new firms can declare the advantages.
REGISTRATION SUBSIDY
A big 50% subsidy is given to the status quo having a certificates of registration granted through MSME. This subsidy for patent registration may be availed through filing packages to diverse ministries.
CONCESSION ON ELECTRICITY BILLS
One of the large advantages to the MSMEs, organizations registered below the MSME act can get a concession on strength payments. For doing this, they should post the payments along side an utility and a replica of the registered certificates through MSME.
PROTECTION AGAINST DELAYED PAYMENTS
Taking into consideration the uncertainty with the sales technology through diverse groups, the authorities offers a layer of defensive to them in opposition to bills. The Ministry of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprise has given enterprise proprietors and firms to acquire hobby on bills not on time through the client.
Under the MSME registration advantages, a client is predicted to make a fee for the goods/offerings inside 15 days of the purchase. If the client delays, the fee for greater than forty five days, the agency is eligible to rate compound hobby that's three instances the charge notified through RBI.
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brayden jollie
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Henrique Dubugras, the co-founder of Brex, told me he was most excited about companies focused on rebuilding insurance. Mario Schlosser, the co-founder of Oscar Health, pointed to the wealth of opportunities still left to revamp healthcare. Max Mullen, who co-founded Instacart, raved about the future of food; Max Levchin of Affirm and PayPal talked about the importance of “clean water, access to food, climate change, and improvement in education.” For Neha Narkhede of Confluent, it was “the consumerization of the enterprise,” meaning a bottom-up adoption of tools to make enterprise sales happen. Michelle Zatlyn, the co-founder of Cloudflare, was excited about the future of social networks. And on the life science and healthcare side, Arie Belldegrun of Kite Pharma was excited about cell therapy, while Nat Turner of Flatiron Health was keen on the application of data in “neurology, neurodegenerative disease, and cardiovascular diseases.” The most interesting response came from Tony Fadell, the co-founder of Nest. “I think it’s more important to look at the markets than spaces and industries,” he told me. Beyond Silicon Valley, big changes are happening in India, in Southeast Asia, and across Latin America. “These places are going through massive transitions, just like China has already. You need to pay attention to these new markets and see what unique problems you can solve for these markets. You always need to think in the context of the problems of the place you’re going after.
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Ali Tamaseb (Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups)
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Pair 3: American Home Products Co. (drugs, cosmetics, household products, candy) and American Hospital Supply Co. (distributor and manufacturer of hospital supplies and equipment) These were two “billion-dollar good-will” companies at the end of 1969, representing different segments of the rapidly growing and immensely profitable “health industry.” We shall refer to them as Home and Hospital, respectively. Selected data on both are presented in Table 18-3. They had the following favorable points in common: excellent growth, with no setbacks since 1958 (i.e., 100% earnings stability); and strong financial condition. The growth rate of Hospital up to the end of 1969 was considerably higher than Home’s. On the other hand, Home enjoyed substantially better profitability on both sales and capital.† (In fact, the relatively low rate of Hospital’s earnings on its capital in 1969—only 9.7%—raises the intriguing question whether the business then was in fact a highly profitable one, despite its remarkable past growth rate in sales and earnings.) When comparative price is taken into account, Home offered much more for the money in terms of current (or past) earnings and dividends. The very low book value of Home illustrates a basic ambiguity or contradiction in common-stock analysis. On the one hand, it means that the company is earning a high return on its capital—which in general is a sign of strength and prosperity. On the other, it means that the investor at the current price would be especially vulnerable to any important adverse change in the company’s earnings situation. Since Hospital was selling at over four times its book value in 1969, this cautionary remark must be applied to both companies. TABLE 18-3. Pair 3. CONCLUSIONS: Our clear-cut view would be that both companies were too “rich” at their current prices to be considered by the investor who decides to follow our ideas of conservative selection. This does not mean that the companies were lacking in promise. The trouble is, rather, that their price contained too much “promise” and not enough actual performance. For the two enterprises combined, the 1969 price reflected almost $5 billion of good-will valuation. How many years of excellent future earnings would it take to “realize” that good-will factor in the form of dividends or tangible assets? SHORT-TERM SEQUEL: At the end of 1969 the market evidently thought more highly of the earnings prospects of Hospital than of Home, since it gave the former almost twice the multiplier of the latter. As it happened the favored issue showed a microscopic decline in earnings in 1970, while Home turned in a respectable 8% gain. The market price of Hospital reacted significantly to this one-year disappointment. It sold at 32 in February 1971—a loss of about 30% from its 1969 close—while Home was quoted slightly above its corresponding level.*
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Vision mission: What was the original market or technology insight that led you to create this company? Customers: Who do you envision buying this product or service? Who will use it? Problem statement: What’s the problem you think you can solve for your potential customers? Use cases: What are the specific ways people will use this product or service to solve their problem? Product/solution: Give a detailed explanation of the technology behind the solution—what does it do now, and what else is it capable of doing? Ecosystem: In many cases there are other companies involved in solving the problem or adding additional value. These companies form an ecosystem around the problem and solution. What are all the companies and where in the ecosystem are the control points where one company has leverage? Competition: Who else is trying to solve this problem—or, if no one else sees the problem yet, who might jump in to compete with you to solve the problem once you identify it? Business model: How will your product or service change business for your customers? Will it increase their return on investment or reduce costs in a significant way? Or does it allow them to do something that couldn’t have been done with prior technology, creating huge value? Sales and go-to-market: Enterprise companies should articulate how the product or solution will make its way to the market. Through a sales force? Through distribution partners? Both? For a consumer company, how will users find out about your solution? From app stores? Search? Viral adoption? Growth hacking techniques? Advertising? PR? Organization: How is the company organized? Who are the major influencers on the company? How are decisions made? What kind of culture will work? Funding strategy: What’s the next funding event? A private financing? An IPO? How much runway does the company have before it needs more money and what kind of funding is in place to execute against the category strategy?
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Al Ramadan (Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets)
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The essence of business consulting
Business consulting is becoming a well-liked hit everywhere in the world. Consultation providers are important to business folks since they help them in making informative choices. That is solely potential after serving to them understand the workforce within the enterprise world. Managers who analyze the functionality of their businesses are bound to make higher earnings than those that don’t consult an expert for surveillance. They should perceive the risks concerned, weaknesses and strengths in order for their businesses to survive competition.
It is with enterprise consulting that companies are capable of analyze as well as improve upon their strategic operations. This turns into attainable because of the experience across assorted fields translating into a spectrum of new ideas. Any effective enterprise consulting will allow you to faucet into their varied sources, capabilities as well as services. Your online business will take pleasure in proven approaches, ideas and even methods. Because of this you would not have to reinvent the wheel again. You make use of confirmed strategies and construct upon them. In spite of everything, this can ultimately translate into increased productiveness in addition to more sales for your online business.
As a Richmond Business Help way to grow to be more productive in addition to worthwhile, the companies of a enterprise consulting cannot be ignored. Simply just remember to are on the same page as them. It's highly vital for a business to be on the identical wavelength as their enterprise consulting team. The enterprise states its wishes whereas the enterprise consultants rework it into an achievable aim. The business states its desires and the enterprise consultants define whether or not it's practical and the simplest method to turn dreams into reality.
Involving a professional guide will information you in making crucial choices. They usually present you with different scenarios that are more likely to happen in the market in the present day. Additionally they explain how your decisions are prone to impression on what you are promoting in the future. In addition they present strategies on find out how to diversify the product line rather than relying on a single product. They are going to guide you to ensure that there's utmost progress and competition is at per.
Enterprise consultants enhance the information stage of a business. Their data is effective. They've been involved in varied tasks earlier than and understand all of the facets involved in the planning process. Additionally they have a clear understanding of the dangers concerned in each enterprise growth step. You possibly can due to this fact depend upon them for the event of your enterprise.
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Thompson Brothers
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Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises. Demosthenes
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John Care (Mastering Technical Sales: The Sales Engineer's Handbook (Artech House Technology Management Library))
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Xerox had an attractive financial model focused on leasing and servicing machines and selling toner, rather than big-ticket equipment sales. For Xerox and its salespeople, this meant steadier, more recurring income. With a large baseline of recurring revenues, budgets were more likely to be met, which allowed management to give accurate guidance to stock analysts. For customers, the cost of leasing a copier is accounted for as an operating expense, which doesn’t usually entail upper management approval as a capital purchase might. As a near-monopoly manufacturer of copiers, Xerox could reduce costs by building more of a few standard models. As owner of a fleet of potentially obsolete leased equipment, Xerox might prefer not to improve models too quickly. As Steve Jobs saw it, product people were driven out of Xerox, along with any sense of craftsmanship. Nonetheless, in 1969, Xerox launched one of the most remarkable research efforts ever, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), without which Apple, the PC, and the Internet would not exist. The modern PC was invented at PARC, as was Ethernet networking, the graphical user interface and the mouse to control it, email, user-friendly word processing, desktop publishing, video conferencing, and much more. The invention that most clearly fit into Xerox’s vision of the “office of the future” was the laser printer, which Hewlett-Packard exploited more successfully than Xerox. (I’m watching to see how the modern parallel, Alphabet’s moonshot ventures, works out.) Xerox notoriously failed to turn these world-changing inventions into market dominance, or any market share at all—allowing Apple, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and others to build behemoth enterprises around them. At a meeting where Steve Jobs accused Bill Gates of ripping off Apple’s ideas, Gates replied, “Well Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke in to steal his TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.
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Joel Tillinghast (Big Money Thinks Small: Biases, Blind Spots, and Smarter Investing (Columbia Business School Publishing))
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In hiring someone to sell your product to large enterprises, the opposite is true. Knowing how your target customers think and operate, knowing their cultural tendencies, understanding how to recruit and measure the right people in the right regions of the world to maximize your sales—these things turn out to be far more valuable than knowing your own company’s product and culture. This is why when the head of engineering gets promoted from within, she often succeeds. When the head of sales gets promoted from within, she almost always fails. Asking yourself, “Do I value internal or external knowledge more for this position?” will help you determine whether to go for experience or youth.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)