Revenue Growth Blog | by Justin Theng

The '50th Step' for Entrepreneurs Imagine your life as a total journey of approximately 50 steps. At the risk of sounding like I'm waxing philosophically, I've been pondering the many twists and turns of entrepreneurship and it's really a journey made with steps. Contrasted to how I used to think about business - as a house built brick by brick. Upfront admission here, throughout this post I use phrases and sayings we all know very well. They aren’t intended as puns, or cliches but do I think whoever coined the phrases stumbled upon wisdom I have only just started to discover. As such, these phrases which are now just thrown around casually, belie very profound things about business, and life, in my humble opinion. If destiny were a total of 50 steps, which of these statements most closely resembles the way you currently think? A) My next step, will determine all future steps. B) My future steps, will determine my next step. C) My 50th step, will determine m...

Understanding your Key Customer Indicators Who is your intended audience? What type of person do you anticipate benefiting the most from your product or service? Watch the Car Chat:  You've got your customer segmentation down pat you know who your customers are and you know where your customers are going to be if you want to talk to them. Now the thing that you need to figure out is what the Key Indicators are that show you  when a prospect is an ideal customer. For example, let's say you sell Cyber Security products to companies. Now one of your key indicators might be on a government mandatory notification portal. For example, when companies of a certain size get data breaches online, they have to notify the government that they have been breached, so that their shareholders or their customers are aware that they might be at risk.  Now as a Cyber Security company, you might go onto those government notification portals because everybody on that list has recently been brea...

Have You Strategised Your Strategy? One of the biggest changes in business today is an ever increasing diversity of business environments, ranging from stable to highly unpredictable, fixed to highly malleable, favourable to harsh. To succeed leaders need to match their approach to strategy with their market landscape. To facilitate this the Boston Consulting Group created an incredibly useful Strategy Palette. BCG uses a very simple analogy to explore how this would work. The Classical Strategy Let's say you own a lemonade business. You run it in a stable and predictable environment. In this instance you would use the classical approach; analyse, plan, then execute. This is how most people think about strategy. You realise that joggers are your best customers, so you position your stand along the jogging trails and become the biggest lemonade business in town. The outcome for the Classical Strategy? Be big. The Adaptive Strategy Now let's say there are some freak storms. ...

Artificial Intelligence vs Buyer Personas. Who Wins? MARKETING IS ALL ABOUT PEOPLE . As the old adage goes, 'If you show me the heart of a man I can sell him anything.' But the tricky part is, no one is going to just go ahead and show you their heart because let's face it, they know you're going to try to sell them something 8 times out of 10. A person’s intentions are one of the hardest things to understand. And the truth is, often people themselves aren’t  really  aware of their own intentions. THE RATIONAL, OR CONSCIOUS, MIND IS LIKE AN ICEBERG We are only aware of about 5-10% of what is going, the other 90% or so is hidden deep within our subconscious and unconscious minds. This is something that Bernbach and Ogilvy, the pioneers of modern advertising discovered back in the 1950s. The way our conscious and unconscious minds work together is likened to a man riding an elephant. Our rational mind is the man, thinking he’s in control. While our emotions and unco...

The Coming of Decentralised Search and Consumer Data Recently I had the privilege of speaking at an event for young marketers looking to future-proof their career. One of the questions asked was, "What is the one thing that someone should do to give themselves the competitive advantage." My answer, is to a large part the inspiration for this piece. The best way to stay ahead of the game is to understand the business of search, and social media, as a whole. This will allow you to predict with stunning accuracy what lies ahead. Because companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others to come are not building these gargantuan platforms out of the goodness of their heart. It's a data business, and your personal data is the key to their success. The more the better. Recent sentiment towards centralisation of anything (think Blockchain craze) reveals an underlying mistrust of the corporations that hold our finance, transactions and information in their hands for profit. N...

Evolve Your Business at The Rate of Change Change is happening fast. Constantly. Companies who don’t evolve, are being left behind. When it comes to observing the rate of change, nobody knows it best like a business owner. New companies in your industry spring up overnight and the revolutionary products of last year or the year before, are now old news. Companies that don’t integrate their technologies and keep them best-in-class are rendered obsolete as the market out paces them. But that’s not you. Most leaders have some level of recognition that the “that’s how we’ve always done it” mindset isn’t going to work forever. Beyond technology, there’s the shifting powers between west and east that effects everything from appetite for new products, to the price of cryptocurrency and everything in between. Leaders like you, are confronted with an increasing rate of change and complexity and finding ways to deal with it is probably one of the reasons you’re reading this blog post. “Change...