What's Your Edge?

The concept of iteration is much like a masterful sculptor chiseling away at a block of stone to reveal a magnificent work of art. Just as a sculptor refines their creation through a series of careful, deliberate strokes, organizations can harness the power of iteration to sculpt their strategies, products, operations, and processes into something truly exceptional – achieving what we have termed...

In the realm of modern business, the quest for customer-centricity takes on the character of a strategic venture—fraught with challenges yet ripe with proven top and bottom-line rewards. However, like intrepid explorers who encounter obstacles along the way, business leaders often stumble upon common pitfalls that unknowingly jeopardize their path to competitive-level customer-centricity.  This ep...

  Imagine the business world as an intricate puzzle, with each piece representing a different participant in the business community: prospective and existing customers, suppliers, channel partners, influencers and connectors, and competitors. Just as solving a puzzle requires fitting the pieces together, businesses can strategically connect the dots of their ecosystem to create a comprehensiv...

    In the vast cosmos of business, growth shines like a distant star, beckoning companies toward success and prosperity. Amidst this celestial journey, businesses seek a guiding light to navigate the ever-expanding universe of opportunities. This guiding light is segmentation. Like the North Star or Southern Cross, it leads businesses to prioritize their efforts, allocate resources stra...

Customers are the gold vein for every business.  As such, businesses continuously embark on the exciting treasure hunt to find and keep customers. Unearthing the hidden treasures of customer acquisition and customer retention leads to growth and prosperity. The quest to discover new customers and retain the loyalty of existing ones is not without challenges. Competitors lurk like claim jumpers, of...

Business leaders must continuously engage in strategic planning to steer their organizations toward growth and success, especially when facing a dynamic and unpredictable environment. In this episode of What’s Your Edge , we’ll explore 12 ways you can de-risk your strategic planning and execution. Strategic planning has both advocates and detractors, especially as to whether it positively impacts...

Business-to-business(B2B) success is measured by growth. Companies that sustain profitable growth over time know how to make sure all aspects of their organization create and/or enable customer value through customer-centricity. This includes every functional department within the organization from Human Resources/Talent Management to R&D, to Finance, to Production/Manufacturing, from Marketin...

Building a brand is like building a house. You need a solid foundation, strong walls, and a roof that keeps everything inside safe and dry. When you have an authentic brand, you have the foundation for building customer trust and customer loyalty, as well as trust with employees, and partners. But, without authenticity, your brand reputation is like a house of cards, ready to come tumbling down at...

Scaling a business is the focus of this episode of What’s Your Edge? Scaling, regardless of the company stage, has been a recurring topic in many of our customer, partner, and prospect conversations of late.  We, too, have been exploring how to scale, which is why we launched our online store .  Scaling a business is often compared to climbing a mountain, and for good reason. Both endeavors requir...

If you’re like many of our customers, you compete every day to find new customers, and keep and grow the value of your existing customers. Welcome to What’s Your Edge? – a series of VisionEdge Marketing podcasts dedicated to helping you use data, analytics, process, and measurement to create a competitive edge for you and a superior customer experience. This is Laura Patterson and in this episode,...

Performance management serves essentially as your business GPS for navigating growth. By tracking, evaluating, and reviewing performance along the way, your business can:   identify areas for growth and development, foster a culture of measurement and accountability , and f acilitate alignment between the organization’s customer-centric business outcomes and your various functions objectives.    S...

How do you plan for and predict what’s going to happen in the near future? Predicting what’s next and planning for it takes more than the ability to read the tea leaves, AKA experience, emotion, gut, and intuition. Instead, look for trends and patterns in your data. You don’t need to be a sophisticated data scientist to derive solid insights from data and make data-driven decisions. So, grab your...

This episode of What’s Your Edge? explores the importance of having enough resources to achieve your growth strategies, performance target and KPIs. Over the past few weeks, I’ve talked with several customers who were disappointed with the results of their current growth strategies, programs, and tactics.  In each instance, a key challenge was having enough wood behind the arrow. Here’s a snapshot...

It seems like there’s a downpour of gloomy economic news. That’s the only way to frame the most recent headlines such as “Stocks sink as investors wait for the Fed’s rate hike”; “Climbing Housing Costs Could Prop Up Inflation for a While”; “Surveys of households and business leaders point to a lukewarm U.S. economy.” Adverse market conditions call for being an instrument flight rule rated pi...

Well-conducted primary research can yield valuable actionable insights to guide strategic growth decisions. The quality of your insights often depends on the quality of your research, especially the research questions. Rating scales, especially Likert Scales, are common in research instruments. Composing these properly is the focus of this episode of What’s Your Edge?   Conducting primary research...

Are you feeling like me, wondering “what’s next” at the start of each business day? Trying to be agile and grow in an environment that feels ever more unpredictable? “We have entered a pronounced Era of Uncertainty”, claims colleague Tony Zambito , a leading authority on buyer insights. Today’s business leaders who want to grow their, market share, customer value, global footprint and competitive...

Hootsuite.  Slack. Toggl. Dropbox. All of these Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions have one thing common.  They are all examples of consumer-grade solutions. B2B solutions designed to be intuitive, create a user-friendly experience, require no human interaction to implement and use, and immediately deliver value.  They illustrate what is known as a product-led growth strategy (PLG).   A produc...

A colleague and I were having a conversation about some of the growth challenges B2B companies face, particularly when it comes to bringing new products/services to market, and why they struggle to overcome some of the challenges. Blind spots. Often the blind spot is a lack of customer-centricity. And that is the focus of this episode of What’s Your Edge? Remember when you were learning to drive?...

There are two customer-centric prerequisites to improve your customer acquisition rate and drive successful business growth. And that’s the focus of this episode of What’s Your Edge? Remember when you were picking courses in school and some courses listed prerequisites? For example, Computer Science 2 required Computer Science 1; Chemistry 2 required Chemistry 1; Finance required Statistics, and s...

Who wouldn’t want fast and easy customer growth for your business? How can there be a downside to quickly closing new deals and acquiring easy wins?   Fast-growing trees provide insight into 4 potential pitfalls of fast growth. And that’s the focus of this episode. Our yard was bare when we first moved into our current home.   With a strong western exposure on the front and a steep backyard perfec...

There’s nothing more comfortable than something that fits perfectly. Whether it is great fitting shoe. A right fit job. Or the right fitting customer.  Finding customers, acquiring customers, and retaining right fit customers is the focus on this episode of What’s Your Edge. A right fitting customer is essential to realizing customer lifetime value – an excellent KPI for every organization....

All of us rely on patterns, that is a recurrent automated response to help us save time, effort and potentially minimize risk. Sometimes however its necessary to change patterns to grow and improve business performance, that’s the focus of this episode. Winning at a triathlon if you don’t know how to ride a bike or swim is quite a challenge.  I know from experience. When I first started racing, I...

In this episode, we’re using a fishing story to illustrate how to ensure Marketing and Sales work together when it comes to customer acquisition . There have been many meetings over the years where I’ve shared a story about summer weekends with my grandparents as a child to help companies understand upstream and downstream marketing, to address Sales and Marketing alignment , and to improve their...

If you had a chance to read the recent Korn Ferry article The CMO is Forever Changed , perhaps the statement “linking marketing activities and business results hasn’t always been the strong suit of CMOs” rang familiar. It did for me. For us at VisionEdge Marketing, it continues to corroborate our research benchmarking CMOs regarding their ability to prove their value, impact, and contribution to t...

The goal of operational excellence is to improve business performance through process. Operational excellence is what enables organizations to achieve long-term sustainable growth. At its heart, operational excellence is about how every person within an organization delivers value to a customer. Dr. Joseph Juran , one of the early experts in quality management and operational excellence posited th...