Maidsfield Blog - Partnering and Business Development

When it works, it’s a great feeling and well worth the effort to get everything in place.

Being sent a cheque from your partner, WITH COMPLIMENTS: “we just sold 100 licences of your software and see enclosed your share, thanks”

As CEO, it’s your job to build a business engine and continue to build and enable this engine. It doesn’t mean that you have to be the centre and control everything. If you make all the decisions, you may the bottleneck to your company’s growth.

In building your business are you focussing on what really makes your business work?
Is it clear to everyone in your team, what it takes to generate sales, delivery your services and grow happy customers?

Define and operate according to a process. Encourage people to continually experiment and test new and better ways. Know how your operate at your current level of business and understand how it will scale.

As CEO, as your business scales, you have your business engine and processes defined so that you can be removed from every stage, at the appropriate time. Then you can really focus on enabling your business to grow rather than control every fine detail.

Uncertain times delays much long term focussed spend, thus reducing everyone’s business visibility.

Although many people I speak to in the tech-sector say that their business has not yet seen any recession impact, there is much caution.

Does your company’s growth depend on your product’s adoption cycle? A product’s adoption cycle is how long it takes to prove the value in your product or service.

When you’re launching a new product to the market, we need to understand the length of time it takes for the customer to see the full value. How can you build a business case for your product without the customer seeing the value?

When you start to experiment with the market to determine the best route and approach, the length of the Adoption Cycle determines how fast you can adjust, learn and be ready test again. An Adoption Cycle of 1 month allows you to adjust every month. An online business with 1000s of customers and a short time-span to prove its worth, can experiment many times a day working to give the customer better value and beat the competition. Isn’t this one of the reasons why SaaS based businesses can move and change faster?

It traditional software businesses the cycle is slower with many months being typical. Its one thing to sell a concept of what you’re software can do if it doesn’t cost the client too much to try it out. It’s not so easy to get your client to spend money, including their cost of change, without seeing proof that what you’re offering.

It takes experimentation to get better; you get better faster with shorter adoption cycles.