Labcast Podcast by OpenView Labs

Labcast Podcast by OpenView Labs

By Kevin CainBusinessEducationInvesting
Download on the App Store

Labcast Podcast by OpenView Labs episodes

  • The Art of Building and Nurturing an Online Community
    If you want to build an online community, you’re going to need to do more than share a few tweets or create a blog. Mackenzie Fogelson explains why engaged communities are creations of both on and offline efforts.
    There are plenty of advantages of building an online community: lower customer acquisition costs, increased brand awareness, loyal lifetime customer groups. But those long-run benefits are no products of overnight success. Mackenzie Fogelson, founder and CEO of Mack Web Solutions, stresses it’s not enough to simply be active on social media. Engaged online communities are built on nurtured relationships, patience, and a passionate offline team.
    In this week’s Labcast, Mack outlines the steps to building an online community, identifies common pitfalls, and offers tips for developing sustainable influence.
    For even more tips, be sure to download Mack Web’s “The Truly Monumental Guide to Building Online Communities.”

    This Week’s Guest

    In the beginning you feel like nothing happens. You have no engagement, nobody’s commenting on your blog, you feel like you’re just doing this for nothing and then all of the sudden you gain some traction. It’s being consistent and really just starting. Saying, “Okay I’m going to start small by doing one or two blog posts on our blog a month that gear towards this specific thing that would help us reach these goals and also help usf help our audience.”

    — Mackenzie Fogelson, Mack Web Solutions
    Key Takeaways

    * It’s an online and offline effort. [2:10]
    * Advantages of building an online community = lower customer acquisition costs and creating a lifetime customer group. [ 5:20]
    * 4 key steps to build your online community:




    * Set your target revenue and community/brand building goals. How many subscribers do you want in a month? What type of resource would you like to be for your customers? What’s your brand personality? [8:20]
    * Determine your success indicators. [10:35]
    * Brainstorm the means to accomplish your goals (hint: it all starts with content). [11:20]
    * Execute your campaign, analyze your data every week, and use your success indicators to lead you in the right direction. [12:25]




    * Don’t just broadcast your message; build relationships. [14:45]
    * Building an online community is a team effort. Don’t let it fall strictly on marketing and your social media person. [17:45]
    * Download Mack Web’s “Truly Monumental Guide to Building Online Communities” for more tips and examples.

    Listen
    Labcast 123: Mack Fogelson Explain Why and How to Build an Online Community
    Subscribe to Labcast
    Transcript
    Kevin Cain: Hi there, welcome to another edition of Labcast. I’m your host, Kevin Cain and today I’m joined by Mack Fogelson to talk about community building. For those of you who don’t know Mack, she’s an expert in building online communities and is also the Founder and CEO of Mack Web Solutions, an organic web marketing agency that helps clients create the virtual presence they need in today’s web-d...
    0 min
  • Achieving Successful Scrum Team Dynamics
    Scrum has the potential to boost your team’s productivity, but realizing that potential is up to you. Mitch Lacey, agile coach and author of The Scrum Field Guide, explains why ensuring greater success starts with improving your organizational alignment.

    In the world of Scrum it’s fairly common for organizations to quickly jump into practicing the agile methodology and then become frustrated or disappointed when they don’t see significant immediate results. Of course, going through the motions of Scrum and actually practicing it effectively are two very different things. In fact, as Mitch Lacey explains in this weeks’ Labcast, the road to the latter starts much earlier in the adoption phase — by establishing the right organizational and team dynamics.
    This Week’s Guest


    When I’m talking with a senior leadership bringing Scrum in it’s all about organizational alignment. How do we understand the culture that we want? How do we highlight the principles and values more of the competencies that we want within the organization and people to achieve the end goals?

    — Mitch Lacey, author of The Scrum Field Guide
    Key Takeaways

    * To truly make scrum a success, integrate it into your company’s culture and organizational alignment.
    * When it comes to reluctant members, stress Scrum’s ability to change the direction of a project so they get what they need.
    * Scrum starts at hiring. Don’t hire based strictly on technical ability. Consider competencies.
    * Consider two approaches for your Scrum of Scrums: The Bottom-Up Perspective and the Top-Down Perspective.
    * Prioritization is key. Meeting with your customers and stakeholder at the beginning of sprints to identify and prioritize issues.

    Listen Here
    Labcast 122: Scrum Team Dynamics with Mitch Lacey
    Subscribe to Labcast
    Transcript
    Kevin: Hello there and welcome to another edition of Labcast. I’m your host, Kevin Caine, and today I’m joined by Mitch Lacey to talk about scrum team dynamics. For those of you who don’t know Mitch, he’s an agile practitioner and consultant and the founder of Mitch Lacey and Associates, Inc., a software consulting and training firm. Hey Mitch, thanks so much for joining me today on Labcast. How are you doing?
    Mitch: I’m doing fantastic. Thank you very much for hosting me.
    Kevin: Yeah. It’s great to have you here, and I’m excited today to talk about scrum team dynamics. At OpenView, we’re great proponents of scrum, it’s something we use in our organization every day. I know it’s not something that all people use, and so my first question to you is what advice do you offer people who are looking to bring scrum into their organization?
    Mitch: Advice on bringing scrum into the organization is an interesting one. I have a large banking customer in Western Europe, and they’re going through this transformation right now, and as you can imagine from a banking perspective, they’re fairly formal in their processes. They have a PMO office and stuff like that, and we see this uprising of teams, where they’re wanting to do scrum and they’re wanting to adopt the agile principles and values, and that’s sort of colliding with upper management,
    0 min
  • David Skok on the Keys to a Balanced, Profitable SaaS Sales Model
    One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneur and VC veteran David Skok sees software as a service (SaaS) startups make is trying to “buy their way into a repeatable, scalable model.” Sure, investing in hiring more sales reps will naturally result in more customer acquisitions. However, more sales reps is not synonymous with profitability.
    In this week’s Labcast, Skok, author of the popular For Entrepreneurs blog, explains why you need to make sure you have a sustainable go-to-market sales model in place before expanding you team. Listen in to learn the metrics to use for measuring the profitability of your model and the goals you should be setting for your sales funnel.
    This Week’s Guest

    “Ask yourself the following question: Is the lifetime value of your customer more than 3x greater than the cost to acquire that customer? If you’re in that greater-than-3x range, you have a viable business model and one that you should feel confident hitting the accelerator pedal on and expanding.”

    — David Skok, Matrix Partners
    Key Takeaways
    Startups can be broken up into three phases:

    * Search for product market fit. [1:10]
    * Search for a repeatable, scalable, and profitable economic model. [1:25]
    * Expanding your business. [2:40]

    There are two important metrics for measuring the profitability of your go-to-market sales model:

    * Lifetime value to cost of customer acquisition. [3:30]
    * Number of months it takes to recover cost of customer acquisition. [10:35]

    When examining the sales funnel, measure the conversion rate from visitors to leads, to opportunities, to closed deals. Over time, also measure your number of visitors. [14:35]
    Conversion rates vary from company to company. Generally speaking, if you’re implementing free trials, aim for a 10-20% conversion rate. On the flip side, if you have a heavily-invested sales proccess, aim for a 80-85% conversion rate. [12:55]
    Listen Here
    Labcast 118: David Skok Helps You Determine if Your Go-to-Market Economic Model is Viable
    Subscribe to Labcast
    Transcript
    Kevin: Hello, and welcome to this edition of Labcast. I’m your host, Kevin Cain, and today I’m joined by David Skok to talk about the viability of go-to-market economic models. For those of you who don’t know David, he’s a general partner at Matrix Partners, a venture-capital firm in Massachusetts that has invested in such companies as Apple Computer, Veritas, Sycamore Networks and Guild Group. David has a wealth of experience running companies, having started his first in 1977 at the age of 22. Since then, he’s founded a total of four separate companies, three of which have gone public. Hey, David, welcome to Labcast. How’s it going today?
    David: It’s great. And yourself?
    Kevin: I’m doing very well, thank you. As I mentioned in my introduction, we’re going to be talking today about economic models and go-to-market economic models and whether or not they’re viable. My first question before we even get to that is, if we think about start-ups and the different stages of start-ups, what exactly are you going to see as those stages and how does that break down?
    David: I think of a start-up in three phases. The first one would be the search for product market fit, which is really well talked about with this whole lean start-up philosophy. The second and third, I think, are slightly less well understood and less well talked about, so that’s where we’ll spend a bit of time today.
    The second one I think of as being the search for a repeatable, scalable, and profitable sales model.
    0 min
  • Achieving the Big Picture Business Results You Expect from Scrum
    With so many details to focus on, it can sometimes be easy to get lost in the day-to-day minutia of Scrum. That’s why Scrum expert Kenny Rubin, who has trained over 18,000 people on agile and Scrum methodologies, believes it’s so important to take a step back and look at things from a larger economic perspective.
    Alright, so you’ve implemented Scrum at your company. The big question is — have you seen any jump in revenue? If not, don’t give up on the Scrum just yet! Agile and Scrum training expert Kenny Rubin, author of the bestselling book Essential Scrum sat down to talk about what he refers to as Economically Sensible Scrum. Listen in to hear Kenny explain how to get things rolling from the executive level down to really ensure that Scrum gets adopted successfully across your entire organization.
    The podcast also highlights some top issues companies face implementing Scrum and how to overcome them to make sure that you’re not wasting time, energy, and resources. By using everyday examples such as waiting for a table at a restaurant, Kenny presents economically sensible Scrum strategy that any company can benefit from.
    “One of the core benefits of Scrum, is giving us confidence to succeed in a complex world. Other approaches that assume more stability in the environment won’t be as well-attuned to our needs.”
                          — Kenny Rubin, Innolution
    Key Takeaways

    * Holistic benefits of Scrum. Kenny shares the key business benefits of adopting Scrum. [3:27]
    * How to assure Scrum gets adopted at the executive level. Three categories of issues companies tend to face the most when using Scrum. [7:34]
    * Bon appetit. What can restaurants teach us about Scrum? [9:47]
    * Life cycle profits. Kenny borrows an idea from Don Reinertsen’s book, Flow on how to establish a framework. [13:54]
    * Economically sensible Scrum. Kenny highlights what he thinks OpenView does best when it comes to economically sensible Scrum. [22:09}

    Listen Here
    Subscribe to Labcast
    Transcript
    Kevin: Hello, and welcome to this edition of Labcast. I’m your host Kevin Cain and today I’m joined by Scrum expert Kenny Rubin, to talk about economically sensible Scrum. For those of you who don’t know Kenny, he’s a certified Scrum trainer and has trained over 18,000 people on agile Scrum methodologies and has coached over 200 companies, ranging from startups to Fortune 10. In addition, he’s also the author of the best-selling book Essential Scrum, A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process. Hey, Kenny, welcome to Labcast. Thanks for joining me today. How is it going?
    Kenny: It’s going fantastic. I appreciate you having me today.

    Kevin: Yes. We’re really excited to have you here, actually, Kenny. You know, as you know, OpenView is an organization that’s very committed to Scrum. It something that we practice here, internally, and that certainly we encourage our portfolio companies to do, as well. So, you know, I’m really anxious to get some perspective from you about Scrum and sort of some of the details around it, today. So, you know, to kind of start that off, I was wondering, with a real softball question, but,
    0 min
  • Labcast: How to Win the War for Top Tech Talent

    If your idea of the perfect pitch for software engineers is "the opportunity to work with cutting technology," you're setting yourself up for failure. Tune in to this week's labcast to hear OpenView's Diana Martz share more insights into our latest report, "How to Win the War for Top Tech Talent."

    The post Labcast: How to Win the War for Top Tech Talent appeared first on OpenView Labs.

    0 min
  • Labcast: Don’t Let Details Derail Your Content Marketing Goals
    You may be incorporating content marketing into your marketing strategy, but are you focusing on the right metrics and goals?
    In content marketing, it’s easy to get caught up in the metrics and details: page views, bounce rates, and amount content. In this week’s Labcast, Robert Rose, Chief Strategist for Content Marketing Institute shares his advice for choosing the right metrics and setting the right content marketing goals.
    Key Takeaways

    * Know your overall goals: Before revamping your content marketing, determine how that change is going to impact your marketing, overall. [4:00]
    * Check out Content Institute Marketing’s latest report on Content Collaboration Tools: It evaluates the effectiveness of 13 content marketing solutions. [6:25]
    * Satisfaction over Transactions: Examining customer engagement and satisfaction is a key content marketing metric. [13:30]
    * Stop reporting all your metrics: Don’t get too caught up in page views and bounce rates. Focus on your overall goals. [17:17]


    “In many cases, we’re so focused as marketers on numbers of transactions, that we lost sight of actually closing better, more valuable customers that are more highly engaged.”

    Listen Here:
    Labcast 112_ Robert Rose Discusses Content Marketing Goals, Execution, and Metrics 1
    Transcript:
    Kevin: Hello there, and welcome to this edition of Labcast. I’m your host, Kevin Cain, and today I’m joined by Robert Rose, who’s the Chief Strategist for the Content Marketing Institute. Robert joins me today to talk about a number of things pertaining to content marketing, from establishing good goals, to executing against those goals, in which he’s going to talk to us about a new report from the Content Marketing Institute, and he’s also going to talk to us a little bit about how to measure your goals and measure executing against them.
    Hey, Robert. Welcome to Labcast. Thanks for joining me today.
    Robert: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
    Kevin: So, one of the things we wanted to talk about today in this podcast was a little bit about your experience working with companies, both the Content Marketing Institute and otherwise. I know you’ve had a chance to consult with big companies, small companies, helping them with their content strategies. And what I would assume, and correct me if I’m wrong, but, one of the first things that you’d probably be talking about with those companies is, how do you set the right goals for your content strategy and your content marketing program? Where do you want it to go?
    And I wondered, what kind of advice do you offer to those companies to make sure they’re getting to the right goals, with enough specificity that they’re actionable, and that actually has some meaning for them?
    Robert: Sure, and that’s exactly the right way to think about it. Whether it’s a start-up or a Fortune 50 company, what we have learned over the last couple of years of doing this is that most organizations, we’re not coming in and doing something new. They’ve been doing content marketing, in some form, for a long time. Ostensibly, really, since the beginning of the business. What they have lacked, really, is this idea of a plan for how content marketing can positively affect the business.
    So they’ve started, sort of, ad hoc. “We need a social media strategy. We need a Twitter strategy. We have to have a blog. We have to have content and a white paper programmer,” whatever it is,
    0 min

About Labcast Podcast by OpenView Labs

From the publisher's feed

Gathering the best ideas for building technology companies, in virtually every area of operations.