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Susan Gunelius
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Tag: Customer Acquisition
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How Cannabis Brands Can Increase Customer Lifetime Value – Cannabis Business Executive – Cannabis and Marijuana industry news
How Cannabis Brands Can Increase Customer Lifetime Value – Cannabis Business Executive – Cannabis and Marijuana industry news
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Why & When Customer Lifecycle Automation is Critical in Your Business | Entrepreneur
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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Your business needs more customers, but you’ve encountered a roadblock. You can’t spend more money on advertising unless you get more customers, but getting more customers requires more marketing dollars — and the cycle continues. This is where lifecycle automation can help.
First, let’s get some clarity on what this means. While automation is using technology to perform tasks or processes without human intervention, lifecycle automation refers to automating and optimizing customer interactions at every stage of their journey throughout an entire product or service’s lifecycle (e.g., from acquisition and onboarding to engagement and retention). Lifecycle automation encompasses a broader range of activities and stages compared to general automation and is designed to enrich the customer experience and maximize business outcomes.
Sounds pretty powerful, right? It is — and yet it’s also one of the tools most consistently underused by small businesses. Here’s why it’s important and when you can get the most from it.
Related: How to Navigate to the Next Phase of Your Business — 3 Tips as You Scale
Why does customer lifecycle automation matter?
If you’re not yet convinced that customer experience has a clear business impact, maybe this will do the trick. Research has found that companies that invest in improving their customer experience have seen, on average, a 42% improvement in customer retention, a 33% improvement in customer satisfaction and a 32% increase in cross-selling and up-selling.
Those are some compelling statistics, giving you all the reasons you need to prioritize customer experience. Lifecycle automation fits into this by ensuring every customer gets a personalized, excellent customer experience in a predictable, trackable way.
For example, your team won’t forget to follow up if you automate sending notes reminding prospects to schedule an appointment. Or, after a purchase, you can automate sending an invoice to your customer and set up automatic reminders to pay it. After you’ve delivered a project or service, you can also automate review requests or recommendations for another purchase.
When applied well, lifecycle automation can increase sales without increasing advertising costs and free your team to focus on more important tasks.
Lifecycle automation has three phases: Collect Leads, Convert Clients and Create Fans.
Related: 6 Ways to Exceed Your Customer’s Expectations Just With Good Manners
1. Collecting leads
In the collect leads phase, you’ll aim to get the attention of your ideal audience and capture their contact information so you have permission to follow up with them. This includes targeting people (by criteria like interests, behaviors, demographics or location), attracting them with great content (e.g., videos, ebooks, infographics or blog posts) and capturing their information (through a web form, often in exchange for a free consultation or premium content).
For example, one independent pharmacy we have worked with grew revenue by 20%, despite facing big competitors, by engaging patients through automation. Their Collect Leads stage strategy involved setting up an iPad in the lobby to gather walk-in information, which was delivered to their CRM via a landing page with a form. This made it possible to follow up with people who didn’t become customers immediately.
Related: 5 Ways Businesses Can Get Traffic and Generate Leads
2. Converting clients
In the convert clients phase, you’ll make your product or service the obvious choice when the leads you’ve attracted are ready to buy. You can start by engaging them through an automated campaign, offering an irresistible deal, closing the sale and using automation to communicate next steps.
The pharmacy mentioned above succeeded in this phase by implementing an automated welcome campaign. They also segmented their list to nurture relationships through emails personalized to customers’ medical conditions, such as diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular issues.
Related: 6-Step Plan to Convert Leads Into Sales
3. Creating fans
Finally, there’s the create fans phase, often overlooked by small businesses. You can turn this phase into a goldmine by delivering on your customer commitments, providing additional value that delights customers and encouraging referrals by creating incentives for customers and partners.
Before implementing lifecycle automation, the independent pharmacy referenced above had around 15 to 20 Google reviews. Now, they have close to 500 reviews due to consistent follow-up, and the highly personalized service automation allows them to deliver to their community.
When you set up lifecycle automation, you’ll never lose a lead, and each customer will get the right messaging to move forward in their customer journey no matter what stage they’re in.
When you need lifecycle automation most
It’s never too early to set up lifecycle automation, but it works best when you’re starting to see revenue growth in your business. You’ll see the most impact if you already have a sizable contact list and a reliable way to ensure it keeps growing (e.g., a solid lead generation strategy).
As you can imagine, lifecycle automation becomes crucial when you have more customers than you feel you can serve and respond to individually. When your business starts losing potential customers because you’re not getting back to them fast enough or creating an accidental bottleneck that’s holding your team back from moving sales forward, lifecycle automation is a must, not a maybe.
Lifecycle automation allows you to invest time that would be spent on one-off communications to customers in things you most enjoy doing — serving customers, developing new services, or spending time with friends and family. For entrepreneurs who want to grow their businesses while also making the most of their time, customer lifecycle automation is the way.
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Clate Mask
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How to Go From Unknown to a Must-Have for Your Clients
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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Going from unknown to must-have in your client acquisition process can be a challenging task. But it is not impossible. By following a few simple steps, you can increase your sales and become an authority in your industry. Below are three easy steps that anyone can follow to achieve this goal:
1. Targeting
When it comes to selling your product or service, choosing the right audience is crucial. It will help ensure that you’re offering a solution to a problem that your potential customers actually have. And it will also increase the chances of making a sale.
First and foremost, it’s important to have a clear understanding of who your ideal customer is. This will require some research and analysis of your current customer base, as well as a deep dive into the needs and pain points of your target audience.
Once you have a better understanding of who your ideal customer is, it’s time to start narrowing down your target audience even further. This can be done through a variety of methods, such as demographics, interests and behavior.
Related: Personalization: A Perspective On The Future Of Targeting
2. Messaging
When crafting your messaging, it’s important to keep your target audience in mind. Catering your messaging to the stage of the buyer’s journey that your average customer is at is crucial. For example, your average customer doesn’t yet understand the problem that your product or service solves. Then it’s not effective to talk about how awesome your offering is. Instead, focus on educating and informing your audience about the problem and how your solution can help.
Once you’ve honed in on the right messaging for your audience, it’s important to differentiate yourself from your competitors. Most businesses use similar phrasing, deliverables and outcomes when describing how they can help customers. By changing just one of these aspects, you can create an uneven playing field and tilt the odds in your favor. For example, offering a performance-based model or pay-on-completion pricing can set you apart from competitors and make you more attractive to potential customers.
3. Leveraging press
When it comes to marketing and growing a business, leveraging public relations can be one of the most effective strategies. Not only does it increase brand credibility, but if done right it has the potential for short- and long-term lead generation results. Boosting personal and company reputation attracts and converts qualified sales leads at an increased rate compared to competitors. Utilizing press with a well-oiled sales and marketing funnel is like adding the cherry on top to a gourmet cake.
Boosting your personal and company reputation through press can attract and convert qualified sales leads at an increased rate compared to competitors. Utilizing press with a well-oiled sales and marketing funnel is like adding the cherry on top to a gourmet cake.
So, how can you effectively leverage press within your business? Here are some tips:
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Identify your target audience and develop a plan to reach them. This includes determining which publications and outlets your audience reads or watches, as well as identifying relevant journalists and influencers to target.
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Create a press kit that includes all the necessary information about your business, such as your mission and vision, key differentiators and any recent accomplishments or newsworthy events. Make sure to include high-resolution photos and branding materials.
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Develop a list of compelling story angles that showcase your business in a positive light and highlight the value you provide to your customers. These can include customer success stories, industry trends and expert insights from your team.
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Reach out to journalists and influencers with a personalized pitch that outlines your story angle and the value it offers to their audience. Be sure to follow up with them to ensure they receive your press kit and to answer any questions they may have.
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Monitor your press coverage and track its impact on your business. This will help you identify which outlets and stories are generating the most engagement and leads, and can inform future PR efforts.
By following these tips, you can effectively leverage press to increase brand credibility and generate leads for your business. In today’s competitive landscape, standing out from the competition is crucial and leveraging press can be a powerful tool in achieving that goal.
In conclusion, going from unknown to must-have in your client acquisition process requires a combination of targeted messaging, effective positioning, leveraging press and building a community. By following these steps, you can increase your sales and become an authority in your industry.
Related: 5 Golden Benefits of PR
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Carson Spitzke
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A Guide to Consolidation Strategy in Acquisitions
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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
The search fund model is a method of investing that enables entrepreneurs to take a unique path to business ownership. It is structured to help searchers (entrepreneurs who engage in the search fund model) acquire, operate and scale an existing business instead of building one from scratch.
By offering a rapid path to business ownership, and CEO status, search funds have created a new breed of entrepreneur — those who embrace the notion of plug-and-play.
A critical factor in the search fund equation is the economic upside searchers could see for their efforts. Historically, this has meant a 32.6 % internal rate of return and a 5.5x multiple on invested capital.
Related: How To Find Success During Search Fund Launches
Value creation
With competition brewing in the form of fellow searchers and even some traditional private equity funds showing interest in acquiring smaller businesses, how do searchers achieve their edge? They look towards combining two or more companies with synergies in size, geographic coverage, key personnel or supply-chain advantages — in other words, a consolidation.
Programmatic mergers and acquisitions (M&A), according to McKinsey, “remains the least risky approach with the smallest deviation in performance and the largest share of companies that generate positive excess total returns to shareholders (65%)” when compared to large one-off transactions, selective deals or organic growth.
What does this mean for searchers competing at the smaller end of the enterprise spectrum? It represents an opportunity to bring the tailwinds of M&A-based growth further downstream, and to industries it has yet to touch.
However, in a survey of 185 Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) businesses purchased by Harvard Business School graduates in the past decade, only 8% have implemented a consolidation strategy of buying multiple businesses in the same industry vertical.
Challenges
The timeline and structure of search acquisitions are often limited to two years. Additionally, searchers are often freshly minted MBAs with limited operational and M&A execution experience, which makes adding an additional business target to acquire a daunting task. However, the benefits vastly outweigh the possible downside.
Related: Search Funds: What You Need To Know About This Investment Model
Advantages
With this business strategy inherently being an operational play, key considerations when looking for a second (or more) target could include financial and further operational synergies in the form of:
- Capital structure improvements from the combined larger size of the businesses
- Ability to take on additional debt at a lower rate
- Capital intensity reduction
- Shared fixed assets, working capital and capital expenditures
- Margin expansion from greater purchasing power and unit economics
- Valuation multiple arbitrage
- In a similar vein to “greater than the sum of its parts,” businesses when combined, often command a higher value than if they were to stand alone
Related: Data Security and the Downside Risk of M&As
Picking an industry
With that, what can searchers do to further de-risk a search consolidation? The answer to this lies in a refined thesis. Searchers with a background operating in a specific industry (i.e., healthcare) have an inherent advantage in launching a search with a focused thesis.
Finding an industry to commit to can be challenging for those with multiple passions. However, the following markers could indicate the right fit:
- Fragmented industry landscape (i.e., medical, dental, and veterinarian practices)
- Industries in which business owners primarily operate a single entity or location
- Mature and standardized industry operations
- Businesses that have relied on tried and tested practices over the years
- A large number of companies
- Many businesses serve a similar customer profile but in different geographies
- A large number of companies within the target enterprise value of the fund
- Understanding the average value of a business in a target industry can help filter out opportunities that are either too small or too large
- Historically stable growth and sustainable profit margins
- Businesses that have operated profitably for many years and serve customers who have (if B2B based)
Picking a business
Zooming in a layer deeper, companies characteristic of success in the search consolidation model touch on a combination of the following elements:
- Competitive industry advantage
- intellectual property, proprietary software, etc.
- Seller motivated to exit
- retirement, change in a succession plan, career transition, etc.
- Historically stable recurring revenue
- Strategic avenues for growth
- geographic expansion, marketing strategy, recruiting key personnel, etc.
- Alignment with the financial mandate of the search fund
- Viable exit vision over a five to seven-year horizon
Eight percent is a small but growing fraction of the ETA community that has chosen to tread the path of consolidation. As more seasoned operators and mid-career searchers get involved, the odds of a consolidation strategy becoming more commonplace is only set to grow. This next wave of search fund entrepreneurs could bring revolutionary methods in creative financing, operating and growing businesses — a win-win for budding entrepreneurs and seasoned operators alike!
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Karl Eshwer
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How To Find Success During Search Fund Launches
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Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Search funds have started flipping the script on generalists winning in a largely specialized business environment. The efforts of a specialized thesis have recently proved more fruitful than the opportunistic approach, as Stanford’s 2020 Search Fund Study found, “Searchers who focus their search, as well as developing and adhering to a systematic approach of creating deal flow and analyzing deal opportunities, have a higher likelihood of identifying and closing an acquisition.”
Although the inspiration for a thesis and industry vertical might be apparent based on the searcher’s passions and past experience, often finding an enterprise that fits the search mold could prove challenging.
Related: Search Funds: What You Need To Know About This Investment Model
The good news, however, is that value chains in almost every industry are riddled with opportunities that fit the model. They are the hidden gems. What this means, for example, is if the goal is to serve as an operator in the healthcare supplement industry (from knowledge gained over the years as a professional athlete), an operation that makes or procures a certain ingredient that goes into the final product, as opposed to the final product sold to consumers, would make for an ideal opportunity.
This “value-chain-based searching” approach also opens up flexibility on the geographic front. Running a geographically agnostic search while widening the pool of potential targets might not be viable for most searchers. Offsetting this with more businesses within an industry’s value chain helps keep the net wide while respecting the searcher’s mandate.
While necessary from the outset, alignment with the entire cap table on a thesis (and geography) and continuing commentary through the process unlocks resources that come from having a large experienced team and seeing multiple searchers and transactions from an investor’s lens — the successful, the break-evens and those who didn’t make it. The most valuable resource of which is a playbook, be it in the form of time committed to mentorship or proprietary documentation conducive to a successful search.
Related: Search Funds: A Financing Option for Business Buyers
Whoever first said, “it takes a village,” was probably a searcher. Building out a team who are unequivocally sold on the vision and believes in the mission is crucial to the searcher’s experience as a leader pre-CEO, as well as their chances of landing on a hidden gem of a business. Most searchers achieve this through interns, both in undergrad and business school, looking for an appetizer to private equity.
While more heads the better by way of sourcing and in the data room looking over opportunities, a key factor lies in the fund’s governance. Karl Scheer, now CIO at the University of Cincinnati, was clear in his governance remarks, “you can’t have investment success with a bad governance structure.”
Although at a vastly different scale, the same principles apply in aligning incentives and what a potential intern or search fund fellow can get for their time and effort. Additionally, a decision to build out a remote vs. in-person team in 2022 remains a personal preference. This could change with a clearer answer as work dynamics continue to get tested and studied over the next few years.
Another important set of people to have in a searcher’s arsenal is a set of mentors who celebrate your success by way of unbiased advice — advisors, for lack of a better term. With a large population of the search community embarking on the search journey out of business school, a valuable pool of resources could come from a supportive group of professors and classmates in touch with the focus industry. The Stanford Search model dubs these people as “river guides” and even suggests an incentive structure with which searchers have found success over the years.
With the people in place, the tools to set the search up for success help close the loop on the most effective use of everyone’s time. A tech stack helps automate low-effort tasks like initial outreach, and net-net gets the searcher in front of more potential targets. A project management suite opens up a layer of transparency on what everyone’s working on and helps move the needle from zero to one.
Finally, like many things, we are tuned to think the next opportunity around the corner could be a better bet, and regardless of how good the current deal looks, it’s hard to think past the “what-ifs.” With most searches limited to a two-year time horizon to complete an acquisition and competition from other searchers as well as some private equity funds intensifying, having a “take the train” approach should be top of mind. If a deal fits the thesis, can model out successful growth over the next five to seven years, has a viable exit strategy, and is an experience a searcher deems enjoyable above all else — go for it!
Related: A New Breed of Private Equity Investors Present More Exit Options Than Ever for Entrepreneurs
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Karl Eshwer
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