By Leo Valiquette
This is a story about a dining room set and organically grown frozen meat products, but it could just as easily be a story about a B2B technology product or service.
A couple of months ago, Francis wrote that customer service must be a deliberate strategy. How you approach customer service ought to be a strategic decision that is carefully and deliberately made. Retaining good customers, after all, is far less costly than acquiring new ones.
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By Daylin Mantyka
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are Techvibes, MarketingProfs, Co.Create and GigaOM.
Which accelerator, if any, should you join?
Ian MacKinnon talks about the pros and cons of joining an accelerator and whether or not it’s right for your company.
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By Bob Bailly
Artists, poets, writers, revolutionaries, magicians, explorers, musicians and creative innovators of all kinds are among us today. Their muses, oracles and inspiration are available to us all if we want to understand their secrets.
And one of those secrets is that they are all great storytellers.
Why are stories so powerful for humans? Why are the best orators also great storytellers? What can we learn from our desire to tell, listen and interpret stories that can be applied to what we do in our business lives?
To the best of our knowledge, humans are the only animals that have the ability to remember the past beyond their own lifetimes. This feature likely arose and continued as an essential aspect of human evolution for two reasons: the advent of language, and the need and requirement to seek a narrative for the events and interactions that shape our lives.
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By Jeff Campbell
I had an interesting call with a long time colleague and friend today. He is a well known and respected leader in his field. His expertise and notoriety has been developed over years of innovating and perfecting processes that are measurable, repeatable and produce consistently high-quality results. This guy is and has to be a great salesperson in order to sell his ideas and grow his business. Currently he is managing a software business, developing and offering software that provides automation and process management in his area of discipline.
He explained that, while his company has marquee customers internationally, the majority of its business is confined to one region. Expansion to new territories is critical, he explained, for strategic reasons; expanding global implementations will mitigate risk of competition coming into the region from elsewhere and increase value for stakeholders.
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This is the 11th article in a continuing series chronicling the growth path of Screach, a startup based in Newcastle upon Tyne in England’s North East. Screach is an interactive digital media platform that allows users to create real-time, two-way interactive experiences between a smart device (through the Screach app) and any content, on any screen or just within the mobile device itself. We invite your feedback.
By Leo Valiquette and John Hill
Growing a startup is all about establishing and managing relationships. There are the relationships that open doors and create opportunity. And then there are the more pedestrian ones involved with the day-to-day processes that get product to customers.
Relationships in both categories gave the Screach team plenty of reason to lose sleep over the past couple of months. The first was a pitch opportunity for CEO Paul Rawlings that made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. The second was the potentially disruptive hiccup presented by the Chinese New Year.
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