325 Courses

Pricing influencers have a dramatic impact on your ability to set pricing.  The more flexibility you have the higher price you can charge and the more margin you can get.  In this course, Ken will walk you through each of the eight pricing influencers and give you strategies to help improve your position giving you more flexibility in your overall pricing strategy.  Ken will also explore tactics that you can apply to your business, supporting you in setting the most appropriate price for your product or service—without leaving money on the table. 

Time to put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard. Take a look inside the Prep Worksheet that prepares you to write the pricing strategy section of your business plan. The key to success is taking the time necessary to deeply understand your business and be prepared to run it—use this workshop and Prep Worksheet to do just that.

Customers as well as investors want to know that you’re going to be offering new and different products, services, and enhancements going forward. That’s what your product roadmap communicates. This walk-through details the 1-to-2 year plan that documents short term and long term product goals, taking you from product launch to the future incarnation of your product or service. Learn why your product roadmap is both a business planning tool and your rollout blueprint and why it’s so important to focus on benefits to the customer (not features!)

It may seem counterintuitive, but perfection is your enemy when it comes to shaping your product or service strategy. You may want everything to be perfect before you launch, but if you ever hope to start ringing up sales, you need to ruthlessly focus instead on just those elements of your offering that address the core customer need, and build a vision and a plan for development that tests your concept in the marketplace sooner rather than later. This learning stream offers guidance on how to shape a product or service vision, strategies for developing a minimum viable product, ways to create a roadmap you’ll stick to, and responses to questions about market defensibility. With examples of real companies cited throughout and workshop sessions for tailoring your own product or service strategy, this learning stream equips you with everything you need to build a product or service strategy that puts launch within reach.

How and why customers perceive the unique value of your product or service is something integrated into all aspects of your customer communication—from your website to marketing and social media to packaging. This lesson explains how that works by looking at a few top brands and how they communicate their unique value propositions.

The competitive matrix is a graphic that highlights your unique strengths vis a vis other players in the space. The visual snapshot is easy for investors to parse — but it’s more than a pretty picture. As you identify your most relevant strengths and how you stack up against competitors, the process of developing a competitive matrix gives you a greater understanding of your market and your business, and a valuable marketing tool. This learning stream will cover how to identify the most relevant strengths to plot on your graph, how to identify and evaluate competitors on the matrix, and how to position your business as a market leader.

When sizing your potential market, it's tempting to say the sky's the limit – but if your goal is an accurate projection, tighten the focus until you have a clear and specific picture. This course introduces the market funnel framework, a three-step process for defining your target audience and sizing segments in terms investors can use and you can apply to your financial plan.

What problem does your company solve for customers? Your answer is the reason your business exists. The story of how your company addresses a specific customer need is an essential component of your business plan; not only does it validate your business strategy, but it convinces investors that your company solves a meaningful problem. This learning stream covers strategies for identifying and developing a compelling problem and solution statement, including how to identify customer pain points and highlight the tangible remedies your offering provides.

Sales is all about the hustle. This Microcast provides an overview of the framework used for choosing selling models; it begins with choosing your models, examining what the competition is up to, then examining your costs and checking for consistency between your business strategies and selling models, and solidifying the models you’ll use. These steps are covered in depth in the videos “Direct and Indirect Selling Models,” “Build Your Selling Strategy,” and “Create Your Selling Strategy Framework.”

You've staked out a vision, studied the competition, and run the numbers – now, how to get from point A to point B? Use an execution strategy as your go-to-launch playbook. Your execution strategy contains all the nuts-and-bolts plans you need to start the business and gives potential investors confidence that you know what it takes to get to launch. With this course, you will have everything you need to develop an execution strategy that sets out the steps along your path to success.