Wil Reynolds is Founder and CEO of Seer Interactive, a leading SEO and search marketing firm in Philadelphia.

Over the past 11 years, Wil Reynolds has dedicated himself to doing two things well: driving traffic to sites from search engines and analyzing the impact that traffic has on the bottom line of companies. Wil’s career began at a web marketing agency in 1999, where he spearheaded the SEO strategies for companies that included Barnes & Noble, Disney, Harman Kardon, Debeers, Doubleclick, Hotjobs, and Mercedes Benz USA (to name a few). Although the internet bubble burst, Wil’s passion for web marketing has always been strong. Wil founded SEER Interactive in 2002.

Today’s guest post is from thought leader, André Taylor. André is an award-winning business leader and one of today’s most dynamic voices on the subject of personal and business success. He’s a dynamic speaker and the founder of several successful and interesting businesses. He also counsels and coaches growing companies and the entrepreneurs behind them to help them flourish.

Here’s the point. Successful people are always working on projects that will make them more successful long term. By diligently working on these projects, often with no progress apparent to others, they create seemingly out of nowhere, even more success.

Unsuccessful people are always working on things they must “get out of the way” today. They are always in “maintenance mode” doing things that consume time, money, and energy but do not create anything of long-term value and significance.

Successful people INVEST their time. Unsucessful people “use up” their time, and sometimes describe what they do as “KILLING TIME.” When you INVEST your time you’ll have more time later. When you KILL time there is no return. How do you INVEST your time?

1. Think 3-5 years out. That old question: “Where do you want to be in 5 years?” is not just for interviews. Really, where do you want to be?
2. Decide that you will build ASSETS. Whatever work you do, think about it as creating value. How do you make something of lasting value EVERY day?
3. When you’re trying to determine if what you’re doing will have long-term value ask yourself if the outcome is in one of these three categories:
   CASH – CONTENT – CONNECTIONS

If you notice, the word CONSUME is not in that equation. Yes, you want to enjoy the outcome of your work but I find that so many people have such a Consumer Mentality that they cannot think in terms of long-term investment, diligence and ASSET CREATION.

The most important thing you can do in your life is to BUILD… not just BUY. It’s to leverage your TALENT, not just your TOOLS. It’s to create WEALTH, not just WORK.

So take a closer look at what is on your plate and if it doesn’t NOURISH you long term, SCRAP IT. That’s the discipline of those who FLOURISH!

7 Steps for Converting Your Knowledge and Brain Power into a Real Business

It’s no secret that over the last several years, business has been increasingly tough, and in many ways, it has been arguably tougher on middle management than on any other group of workers.

Now, that’s not to minimize the plight of the working class or blue collar workers whose jobs are being outsourced, but middle managers – who were told to invest heavily in their educations, to commit to building a carefully crafted resume over a 10 or 20 year career arc, and to live like that was something they could sustain with appropriate salaries – now find themselves out of work, unhirable, and with a lifestyle that’s just too darn expensive for the kind of, “I’ll do anything to provide for my family”-kind of work that might be available to them.

Before you think, “Don’t cry me a river for somebody who was making six figures and now has to take a job as a manager at Home Depot,” the reality is that there has been a set of implicit promises in that person’s life. As I’ve written about before (see, “The Reluctant Entrepreneur”), what has transpired is that many of these folks have now decided that they need to hang out their shingle. They are realizing they have a lot of intellectual capital that is valuable to many different organizations, but as a consultant vs. an employee.

The challenge is that they end up, all too often, being a “smart guy or gal for hire,” and have not made the transition to owning a business. They have brain equity, but any business they create, especially one eponymously named, is hard to make valuable, other than as a vehicle for marketing their brains on a by-the-drink basis.

For some, that’s just fine. They’re doing fine and they’ve replaced the income they had before. They have a reputation of some kind in the market, and that works for them. For others, this consulting/brain-for-hire space is intended to be a temporary situation – whether that’s wishful thinking or not – and is a way to earn income until their next “real job” shows up.

However, for those who realize that working for a series of employers that can RIF you in at will – and for whom loyalty does not assure you of one more day of work than your employer requires – they realize that having their own business could be a very meaningful, and in fact necessary step in their lives.

So, here are 7 steps that someone who wants to move from brain equity to brand equity should undertake:

1. Commit to being in business. Now, this is far different from committing to selling your time – it’s the idea that you actually want to have a business. That business could take many different forms, but you want to leverage your knowledge, your industry contacts, your expertise, and you want to put it inside a business that can scale and grow, and become meaningful apart from your hourly availability.
2. Write it down. Actually start documenting some of your best ideas. Don’t worry about your writing skill or PowerPoint finesse – just grab a yellow pad and start jotting down some thoughts, starting with some broad categories.
   1. What are the areas of expertise that people know you for? This is different than a resume exercise – it’s really getting into the specifics of what you know. Doodle on that, and work on it over time.
   2. Come up with a couple of pictures that show how you look at the world in your area of expertise, whether that’s manufacturing, marketing, operations, HR, whatever it is.
   3. Think of a couple of best practice areas where you help other people. Think about the things that people call you about, saying, “Larry, I’d like to know how to [fill in the blank].” If you’re the person who gets the call, and your name is Larry, think about what that question is, and the type of advice you give. Start documenting what you do.
3. Identify advocates. Think about the people who have made that call, and have appreciated your advice. These are friends and advocates – people who want you to succeed and who respect what you do. This is different than a significant other or family member who is cheering you on, but may not know your area of expertise or if you’re any good at it. This is talking about people that actually know that you are good at what you do, and are actually willing to be help you.
4. Identify other people who can help you do what you do. That is, fellow experts or other firms you’ve worked with. These are the resources that you could bring together to add value for customers.
5. Think about the different services that you could offer your advocates. Using your network of friends and other resources, and the knowledge that you’re documenting, what exactly could you offer them? Think in terms of packages, things that have a defined beginning, middle, and end.
6. Narrow it down. Look of that list of things you could offer, and just “meditate” on it for a while. Which of those things are you most passionate about? Which are things that excite you? Come up with five or six things you could do, and then decide which two or three you’d most like to do. Then – with your advocates and friends from the prior step in mind – think of the one or two things they would most like to receive.

So now you’ve committing to having a business. You’re starting to document what you know, who’s a friend or advocate, and what resources are available to you. You’ve thought about what you could do, which of those things you are most excited about, and which things your likely-best initial audience would be most excited about.

Which brings me to point 7:

7. Now you can begin the work of developing a value proposition thought process around those one or two key offerings. For our purposes, the essence of a value prop is the intersection of your value creation strategy, your value capture strategy, and your value communication strategies. That is to say:
   1. what you’re going to do for them that is valuable to them (how it would actually pay off for them, make money for them, or benefit them),
   2. how you’re going to get paid (what others have charged for similar things, or what you think you could charge for it)
   3. and how you can put words, pictures, and ideas around it, so that you actually have the beginnings of brand identity – a real company that exists beyond your hourly availability.

These steps take you from being a general-purpose “big brain-for-hire”, and moves you into being an expert firm – offering very specific value to a very specific audience, and leveraging a wide range of resources that are bigger than yourself.

If you’ve done all these 7 steps, you would have translated your brain equity into genuine brand equity – corporate value, company value – for you and your future customer.

It would be great if pricing were a simple gradeschool math equation:

A + B * (X / Y) = Ideal Price

If you’ve priced anything before, you know it’s just not that simple. Pricing is complicated. Finding the ideal price for your product, in your target market, accomplishing your revenue goal, is NOT simple.

The key to remember is that, as much as any factor regarding your value proposition, pricing establishes the competitive context for your product.

Now, a multitude of factors play into the equation, so the math is messy.

You can get solid numbers like Fixed and Variable Costs from your Finance department. Competitors prices can be gleaned via a little research.

Then there are the fuzzier numbers, like price elasticity, the demand curve and perceived number of potential buyers. Demand will change when price changes (think back to Econ 101). Estimate the impact each potential price point will have on demand. The change in demand will also impact the number of transactions or volume you’re likely to generate.

And finally, the marketplace comes into play: expected rate of price increase, relative position in the market, customers’ perception of value, and regulatory oversight costs.

Just about everything is important in understanding the context of the pricing environment. Leave out one factor and you may have left out the component that eats your profit margin. And of course, customers don’t always make rational buying decisions, either. Your pricing has to make sense to the buyer, not just your team.

You need to be relentless in managing your pricing strategy. Wow! That’s depressing.

Ok – here’s the thing: no one can dial in on this 100%, 100% of the time. It’s a discipline and it requires vigilance. But remember, literally perfect pricing is impossible because the market doesn’t stand still. Your special deal pricing will prompt your competitors to counter. The new level of pricing sets a new expectation among your customers. And.. new entrants can price above or below you with some new features (or trim some features) – so it starts looking like new product categories have appeared within your space.

Keep your head about you. Test. Talk to customers. Watch competitors. Test again. Check the financial return. Watch costs. Rinse. Repeat.

Quick questions to ask yourself:

• How do you get a handle on all this?
• How are you testing pricing and its effect on sales?
• How often do you check your competitors?
• How deep a dialogue have you had with your best customer on your proposed pricing?

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal really is near and dear to my heart. It’s about KIVA, the micro-lending entity that is beginning operations in the United States, helping nascent entrepreneurs, with big ambition but more bite-sized dreams, accomplish those dreams through micro-loans. The significance, of course, is that we are now entering a world with a new normal in the economy – the reluctant entrepreneur.

You know who that reluctant entrepreneur is. That’s your friend who’s a middle manager that just got laid off from a large corporation, has been looking for work for a year, and now has decided he’s a consultant. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t, but he’s certainly gonna give it a go, because he has to put food on the table.

It’s tough out there, and a lot more people are finding themselves in this same boat, hanging up a shingle, freelancing or starting a business, not because of some burning passion to see a particular vision or concept come into existence, but as a survival tactic. However, there is an underlying reality that even people who are clinging onto their W2 paychecks are in fact, in many ways just on an extended contract. In other words, they are really no more secure than the person who’s actually embraced the reality of their “entrepreneur-ness” or independence (or lack of security).

Which brings me to KIVA.

Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty. Kiva empowers individuals to lend to an entrepreneur across the globe. By combining microfinance with the internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending.

KIVA isn’t focused on white collar former executives starting 6 figure consultancies, but the principles are the same. To start something new, whatever your overall context, you need a little “seed corn”, some good ideas, a lot of hard work, and just the sense that you’re not all alone, and that you actually have people pulling for you.

So I commend KIVA for doing that for these micro-businesses in tough places for people who have truly meager resources. I also just want to extend a word of encouragement to all those reluctant entrepreneurs, (including many whom I know personally,) that this new way of living and earning a living might, in fact, be the best thing that ever happened. Of course, only the perspective of time will allow them to embrace that assessment, and I hope some of them will.

For those of you still looking for “traditional” work – here’s a nice post on using LinkedIn to do so from my friend Carla Bobka at SocialPie.

Today, I’d like to offer something a little more “essay like” than my usual posts. Think of it as a declaration of optimism in a sea of gloom. Here goes…

When I look out to what the future might offer… I see a bright future! I see a world made simultaneously very small and unimaginably vast – a world of opportunities for whoever can connect people’s passions and powers to the creation of new products and services.

It doesn’t have to be fancy and complicated to make an impact. Think about the humble light bulb, the mundane aspirin or the any of the many modes of communication and transportation we use every day. Where would we be without them? Yet, we take them for granted.

Consider, for example, the simple pen. Whether writing inspiring words, drawing nature’s beauty or designing an airplane, the pen has brought comfort to many and given expression to countless ideas – and someone had to make it and sell it!

Victor Hugo, author of “Les Miserables” and a keen observer of life and human nature wrote, “An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”

Whether it is Hugo, Carnegie, Edison, or Steve Jobs, the mind of man (and woman), has only begun to unfold the canvas of innovation that our children and we will one day see and enjoy. Not a perfect world, and certainly not one without pain… but one where ideas truly shape the very world we live in.

I am a salesman and marketer proud of it – because those roles help people generate great ideas – bring those ideas to life and bring those ideas to market.

During the Economics module of my MBA program (Go Wildcats!!) I found that in the midst of a lot of very interesting information and principles – one really stood out. This one core economic principle gave language to something I had observed and already believed to be true. When I saw it in economic terms, it helped me better understand why I felt the way I felt about it. In fact, it reinforced it and codified it as an operating principle in my business thinking. This principle even applied to life in a broader sense. It is also a principle I have seen violated time after time in large and small companies. I think this happens because it can seem a bit counter intuitive.

Let’s look at a typical response from a manager about an employee who is underachieving- and ultimately can’t be brought up to speed, “we have already invested so much money into this person, we have to make this work”. How about the product development manager: “we have already put in a million or a hundred million or a billion dollars into this- we can’t kill it now”. And of course the marketing campaign: “we can’t just stop it because we’ve already invested so much money.”

The economic principle?
Every business decision should be made at the margin.

Among other things, “at the margin” simply means that sunk costs can never be recovered. At least not by simply putting more money into the same decision and process that lost it. The money that’s left the building will never come back by doing more of the same. That is to say that the money you have invested in Project X or Person Y or Initiative Z will never just come back to you.

The only question that needs answering is:
What is the best use of our next dollar?

If you have put 5 million dollars into this ad campaign, and it has failed to generate results, will another million dollars applied the same way produce better results?

With today’s highly measurable advertising, primarily but not exclusively via the web - it’s hard to justify an ad campaign’s continuation simply because you have organizational momentum.

Can you trust the results? Whatever the investment – increasing it (“doubling down”) will not magically change the results. So if a dollar in only generates fifty cents out, then another dollar in will generate the same fifty cents! This is madness and a lose-lose situation – you are better off cutting your losses and just saying, “At the margin, the next best use of a dollar is either back into the budget for another purpose or reconfiguring, redeploying or rethinking what it is that we are doing”. It is never to just continue down the same path.

This is liberating!

Many managers and owners would benefit greatly by embracing this truth because it is always true.

How about you?

Do you made decisions at the margin?

Or have you been captivated by your past investments and felt compelled to justify that investment by continuing it?

Sharply defining your customer is a “starting block” for your go-to-market race.

• How many of them are there?
• What size?
• What is the published market research?
• Are there demographic and market research reports written on your target market?

In today’s sophisticated marketing world, you can’t go after a market without being armed with data – fortunately there’s lots of it.

At this stage of the game, you’re not necessarily looking at the way the market works, but simply defining the kind of company that your product or service most fits. Ultimately, it’s about knowing your customer. In every market segment, there are cultures, commonalities, unspoken rules of the game that exist in enclaves of the high tech, business and manufacturing worlds.

You need to know what these are. If you don’t have a feel for the people you’re selling to, you’re already at risk of falling further behind your competition.

While with a consulting firm focused on smaller business services firms, we worked with a small regional web design company with heavy specialization in user experience and interface design. As is typical for companies this size, they defined their customers primarily by geography – any business in their area needing help with larger web projects. Over a two-year period we helped them refocus on one particular market segment they had past success with – large, socially focused non-for-profit organizations.

While this was a positioning move, it was much deeper than just looking a certain way to a particular market – or choosing which mailing list to use. By focusing on the specific non-for-profit sector, they were able to start understanding the target customer’s culture, eventually adopting the language, pace and unspoken “feel” of the non-for-profit world.

They’re back on track, growing revenues and profits with a dedicated core of clients who view them as their specialist firm for web design and deployment in the non-for-profit field. In the same way, your understanding of your target customer will influence your marketing and the direct sales communication you have with them and the way you interact and serve them.

Adapted from the forthcoming eBook, “Know Thy Customer” by Jose Palomino

What level decision maker can you access?

If you want to sell to a specific type of company, you need to have access to call, talk and meet with the appropriate level of decision maker at that customer – whatever it takes to sell your product to them. Maybe you need to have access to CFOs of financial services organizations to sell your compliance solution.

While you may have many years and dollars worth of experience selling to financial services firms, you might find that you have no way to get your foot in the door of the C-suite, if your company never worked at that level before. That’s not to say that this marketing and sales capability cannot be acquired or developed – just that you need to know where you’re starting from and identify the gap as quickly as possible.

The “access” issue can go the other way, too. In the product development process, larger software developers often end up creating simpler versions that they try to sell “down market” to smaller customers. Yet, they don’t know the smaller customers (SMB) – the way they function, and what’s important to them. They often do not really know how to access this smaller customer (as in the Cisco example above).

It isn’t primarily a product issue – it is simply that a company that has been selling to Fortune 500 companies will face the same challenge connecting with decision makers in a $50 million dollar manufacturing company that a SMB focused company would have calling on GE. Movement – both up or down market – is possible and many companies manage to do it successfully. However, many more have failed or have had to make many learning runs till they got it right (e.g., Microsoft moving up-market in corporate IT with server software).

Access challenges run both ways: smaller companies face challenges selling to bigger ones, but oftentimes, bigger players can’t get small enough to sell to smaller companies or individual buyers.

Adapted from the forthcoming eBook, “Know Thy Customer” by Jose Palomino

Whether you developed your product with a specific customer need in mind, or happened upon a product and want to sell it to someone, you have to start by knowing your customer.

Before the Internet boom, I assembled a group of friends and raised angel capital to start a company to develop a commodity chemical trading system, based on the notion that a hundred pounds of a specific chemical powder was the same as any other hundred pounds of the same chemical powder. It would be a trading system for chemicals – a brilliant idea – or so it seemed.

Along the way, the web “happened”, and it was gaining traction all around us.

Our company’s Chief Technologist developed a side-project to create dynamic websites for small businesses. Back then, things like Facebook and MySpace didn’t exist. It wasn’t easy to create a web presence or an identity on the Internet.

So, the idea was born – instant websites for smaller businesses.

We completely switched gears. While we started with what we thought was a brilliant idea, we came across something in development that we thought was even more valuable. Before we sold the company, we grew to several thousand customers – small change by today’s standards, but an interesting illustration of adaptation.

Adapted from the forthcoming eBook, “Know Thy Customer” by Jose Palomino

New products happen in different ways.

You may have designed your product or service with a specific customer in mind. You may have also “backed into” the development of an innovative product, and now you’re looking for an actual market. I’ve been called into client situations (more than once) where they’ve already invested millions of dollars into a product and then ask me – “How do I sell this? And, who should we sell it to?”

Sometimes, the development of a new product doesn’t start with a specific problem. You might think, “these are my current customers, how can I expand my offerings to them?” In this case, you’re looking to leverage customers you have access to today.

Other times, it’s not clear what the application of a new product will be. Companies that create large business solutions often stumble across other applications and tools to support the primary product, and say, “…there’s got to be some kind of market for this.” This is often true of services that arise around a specific technical product. Eventually it becomes clear that the services can be bundled and sold.

Then there are product “accidents.” In the late sixties, a 3M scientist stumbled upon glue that was not sticky enough. In 1974, Arthur Fry, another 3M scientist was singing in his church choir and became frustrated with his bookmarks falling out of his hymnal. He applied some of the “not sticky enough” glue to his bookmarks.

We know it today as the “post-it” note. But back then, the question that needed answering was “Would anyone else buy it?”
Of course, the answer was and is – “yes – billions!”

Adapted from the forthcoming eBook, “Know Thy Customer” by Jose Palomino

My favorite client also became one of my best friends. Tony was a Brooklyn-raised child of the Depression. He was an early IT professional – the kind that could talk about having programmed in IBM 1401 Autocoder language in the early sixties.

Tony took a chance on a self-taught PC programmer and hired me to manage “microcomputers” at a major financial services firm in the mid-eighties. He identified and affirmed my entrepreneurial spirit and encouraged it. I joined a truly great computer company because of Tony. A few years later, Tony brought me into his last job, where he helped me launch a new consulting firm.

All told, Tony touched my professional and personal life for nearly 20 years and several significant career moments. Tony has been gone for some time now and I miss him dearly still.

I remember being on the “buy-side” of many vendor meeting with Tony. If he felt the salesperson wasn’t respecting his intelligence – or if the rep wasn’t fully prepared… well, Tony wasn’t Brooklyn born and raised for nothing. He could cut to the main point and make an unprepared salesperson very, very uncomfortable.

However, I also saw something else – if Tony assessed that you were there to help – truly committed to finding answers that were mutually beneficial – then you would gain a fiercely loyal ally – a prospect that would go the extra mile to help a vendor close the deal.

I mention Tony in this discussion about customers to illustrate a simple point: in all of your planning for go-to-market, positioning and strategic advantage – don’t forget that at the heart of every business – every organization – you will find… people and relationships. The more strategic your offering is, the more this simple truth exerts influence on your go-to-market plans.

• People – not “organizations”, make business decisions. They make these decisions for many different reasons. Logic should and does win – often, but not always. And, it would be fair to argue that logic is used to substantiate an emotional decision – even big-ticket corporate purchases.
• Plans, message stacks and sales processes will fail you if you don’t infuse them with a sales culture that understands this truth.

Adapted from the forthcoming eBook, “Know Thy Customer” by Jose Palomino

“Understand that what is important is what’s important to the customer. That’s what we all get paid for in the last analysis: how does the customer buy, and why.”

Peter Drucker, quoted in:
The Essential Drucker: In One Volume the Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management

Carefully crafted messages alone won’t sell your product or service. You must target your message for your best audience and via the most effective venues. While doing this you must continuously refine your position against relevant competitors in the marketplace.

To leverage your message to the greatest degree possible:

• really know your target market
• anchor your approach to market on an accurate competitive understanding, and
• carefully select and design your primary approach to enter your chosen market.

Think about your prospective market(s) within a framework of key questions and “points to ponder”.

Jot down some thoughts that you can discuss with trusted advisers.

Very few (read: none) companies fail because they knew their markets too well.

Very few (read: almost none) companies succeed without making knowing their customers their top priority.

For those of you who’ve read my “She’s right again” blog posts, you know some of the big lessons I learned around the “dot-bomb” era. But like all harsh lessons, just learning the negative is not enough. What really matters is what you do about it.

Well, since I wasn’t going to write new laws, solve world peace (no Nobel for me) or invent a new machine – I was left with looking at what I’ve been looking at for a long time: business models and go-to-market methodology (I know, sounds exciting!)….

From my experience, came a sincere desire to figure out “what happened?” and “what could be better?”

I wanted to discover and give voice to something new. A better way to bring “an idea who’s time has come” to the marketplace. I knew that the notion of “new”, “exciting” and “useful” as essential dimensions of a value proposition had to have operational implications. Nothing substantive would change if all that changed was a “tag line”– as important as that is.

Great ideas would still fail to attract an audience – money and energy wasted.

Not only money and energy wasted – but also an old way of doing things. What else needed to change? For over 50 years, companies involved in complex or big-ticket sales have dichotomized “developing the message” and “delivering the message”. Even companies that derive the majority of their revenue from their direct sales channel rarely ask their sales teams, “What’s happening out there?” – relying instead on traditional market research and industry experts.

Is this a wrong practice? Marketing experts are not typically sales professionals and the converse is usually true. That wasn’t the issue nagging at me. What was “off” was this: why not take advantage of the intense customer-facing resource that is your direct sales force for real-time market intelligence?

Marketing owned message delivery in all venues except direct sales. In other words, the marketing function “owned” the website, marcom and other communication vehicles, except that which happend in the sales interview. So – marketing contribute to the “what” conversation at the strategic level (as in “what are we? who do we serve? what makes us different”) and could shape a message – a value proposition statement – and control how it manifested in advertising, marcom and other public delivery – but stopped short of providing real and specific guidance for direct sales.

Salespeople usually have to synthesize and deliver the messages found in marketing collateral and given by corporate and product marketing to prospects.

I believe this state of affairs can be – must be – radically altered.

How would your go-to-market program look if message development – that is – identifying what is new, useful and exiting about your product – were purposefully connected with your sales team’s message delivery? Why should message design end before entering the sales department?

Likewise, why ignore the wealth of immediate and grounded marketplace insight – the thousands of hours of conversations between your salespeople and customers?

While these questions have been asked in other quarters – thay are not asked that often – and not enough to change common practice. I’ll take a deeper look at this in another post.

Meanwhile – what do you think?

Do your sales and marketing folk truly collaborate? Do they share insights and idea?

A recent article in the WSJ, Slicing the Bread But Not the Prices, discussed the Panera Bread company.

The title line read, “While rival restaurants offer discounts, Panera focuses on employed eaters willing to spend.”

Wow! What a focused target market statement. And – the secret to why Panera is growing in stores opened over a year, where Cosi, a competitor that most casual observers put in the same category, reported a loss of $969,000 for its second quarter and a 14% decline in revenue.

Note: I have eaten at both places, and have generally had a good experience with Panera and Cosi – so these are business model observations and not a critique of the food.

Panera knows who its market is. It’s created a wi-fi experience, offered fresher ingredients, and has not cut prices on the menu, and has held firm on offering a good value meal to those employed eaters willing to spend. Its created a magnet effect in attracting a market that wants what it has to offer. And so Panera picked up a higher percentage of a smaller market segment – however in so doing has managed its growth and managed to grow.

There’s a lesson in this: Really Really Know Your Market!

Don’t assume that it’s the same target market that you started off with 2-3 yrs ago when you had your perfect business or product marketing plan – when you thought you knew where your sweet spot was. Take a look at who is really buying your product or service. Many companies have found that there might be other markets that they didn’t initially consider or were unknown.

Take the example of the newspaper with the largest circulation numbers – USA Today. They started with self-service kiosks, and quickly became a hotel staple, followed by national papers like the WSJ or NYT. USA Today initiated a new niche in their market, which was hotels wanting to offer an amenity to patrons at a low cost, versus travelers picking up the paper on their own. Nowadays, we take this for granted – just about every major hotel chain slips a USA Today under your hotel room door so you can have the convenience of a national paper delivered to your room – but at the time, this was new and an example of a breakthrough value proposition.

What are some examples you can think of in which companies started off with an initial offering and then tightened their focus, tightened their lens of who they would sell to?

Are you still broad-based – or have you focused like a laser beam on those markets, those customers who view your pricing and your value proposition as being unique, distinct, and highly desirable to them, and “doubled down” on that?