PROFIT BusinessCast

When Dr. Meghan Walker first started seeking listings for Bright Almond, a service that connects consumers with licensed naturopathic professions, she assumed it would be easy.

“I was a practitioner and I said, ‘I want to see more people and I want to help more people,’” she recalls. Bright Almond’s CEO and co-founder assumed her peers would be similarly enthusiastic about a platform that allowed them to reach a bigger potential clientele. But getting in front of busy practitioners to pitch her offering proved more challenging than she expected. “Do you use technology, do you pick up the phone, do you go visit their practice?” she asks. “And how do you reach 20,000 eligible practitioners across the country?”

That wasn’t the only challenge the Bright Almond team faced in setting up and publicizing their offering. Here are four obstacles Walker highlighted, and how her team overcame them.

Simple can be expensive

Consumers have certain expectations of the online platforms they engage with, and Walker says it was tough to meet those within time and financial constraints. “How do we look high-quality on a budget from the beginning?” she asks. She points out that the simplicity of Google’s look and feel cost millions of dollars and years to develop.

Bright Cove didn’t have nearly that much money or time. “That took a lot of strategy and planning for us,” Walker says. “And then really, like any startup, we had to become experts at everything—SEO, design, copy.”

Iterative expenses

There’s no such thing as the perfect tech product. “You have to put it out there, you have to see how people play with it, and then you have to go back and change it,” Walker says, admitting that she’s a recovering perfectionist. The analogy she uses is paving the pathway before seeing how people choose to walk across a lawn. ““You really should let them start to walk and trample, and then decide where you want to lay down the cement,” she says.

But releasing a minimum viable product and then modifying it as necessary comes with its own set of challenges. Walker says she was surprised by how expensive it is to experiment. She says entrepreneurs tend to assume they can set out a vision, then conduct tests and trials to see what works and what doesn’t. That’s particularly true of web-based companies. “We have the tendency to think the online space is free to access, but to do it well you have to pay to play,” she says. “And you have to be bang-on—you can quickly spend a lot of money trying to get visitors online, and if you don’t know what you’re doing it’s gone pretty quickly.”

Explaining yourself

For professionals who work a fee-for-service model—think lawyers, doctors, naturopathic practitioners—time is money. “It’s really hard for them to want to make time for you, unless you can clearly articulate [how] you are going to save them money or earn them more income,” observes Walker.

Simply touting your tech solution won’t attract their interest, as the Bright Almond team learned. Practitioners have to be shown how the platform will allow them to develop their business or client roster. “Despite the fact that it would be really easy for them to use and it would save them a lot of time and money, the concept of what it was was just too much for them,” she says of the early days. “So I think sometimes you just need to back up and keep it really simple.”

Investor issues

Female entrepreneurs are underserved by the investment community—Walker says less than 5% of women-led companies seeking venture capital receive it, despite the fact that they’re no less likely to succeed than ones run by men. “I think given the demographic of where a lot of venture capitalists are in their life and their accumulation of wealth, they’re not necessarily used to women asking them for money or women seeking the direct form of feedback that they are used to giving,” Walker notes.

In case passing the final year of aerospace engineering wasn’t pressure enough, Rahul Goel has a job. When he’s not in class, the University of Toronto undergraduate is also co-founder of PheedLoop, an event engagement tool.

PheedLoop started as a way for conference speakers to incentivize feedback from their audience. Attendees receive access to slides and contact info when they leave their thoughts in the app. But Goel soon realized that conference talks were just a small part of a broader market that needed someone to serve it. “We started it as a speaker feedback tool, and realized we could have a much larger impact if we shift our business to the entire conference, not just speakers,” he explains. Although there were plenty of event management apps, few received the kind of engagement that organizers seek.

So PheedLoop has pivoted to focus on the entire event engagement space. In the process, Goel has learned some valuable lessons that aspiring entrepreneurs at any age should seek to emulate.

Just start

The PheedLoop experience has taught Goel the value of simply taking a chance. “Just start,” he says. “Don’t waste too much time trying to iron out your idea or anything. Just put it out there and get going and you never know where it might go.”

Goel says it’s a particularly good time to be a young entrepreneur today. “Just based on observation it seems evident to me that younger people definitely don’t fear risk as much,” he says. “We feel confident more and more that as young people we have the ability to make significant change in the world.”

That fearless attitude may be a luxury of youth, but Goel’s advice holds true for entrepreneurs of every age.

It’s about attitude

There isn’t too much overlap between aerospace engineering and entrepreneurship, admits Goel. But while the concrete skills required to succeed in each profession are substantially different, the mindset required is not. “The discipline you gain from studying something that rigorous, it’s definitely helped me not fear hard work,” he says. “And being an entrepreneur is definitely a lot of hard work.”

Learn new things

Goel didn’t have any of the necessary technical skills when he began working on PheedLoop. “I taught myself to code and launch something which I never imagined anyone would use,” he says.

That willingness to develop new capabilities has remained strong now that the service is up, running, and attracting customers. “We’ve constantly been propelled by the desire to constantly learn more technical skills,” Goel says. “As engineers that might be expected, and it’s just such a thrill to build something from scratch without even knowing where to start.”

Admit your shortcomings

After going through UofT’s Entrepreneurship Hatchery startup accelerator and then moving the company to Ryerson University’s Digital Media Zone, PheedLoop started to look for capital. Goel admits his youthful inexperience has posed some challenges. “In our first couple of investment meetings, we literally had no idea what we were doing,” he says. “We read a lot online, talked to people, but it’s just not the same. You go in and get asked hard questions that you didn’t prepare for or don’t know the answers to, and you make up answers. It’s just a process that you learn from”

But the people in those investment meetings didn’t dismiss PheedLoop out of hand simply because the team of young. “Most of the people that we talk to [are] just super-nice, and they’re actually there to help you and watch you grow,” Goel says. “They realize you’re coming from a place where you might not have a ton of experience. They give you very valuable feedback.”

Take it with you

The success of PheedLoop to this point has shown Goel that there’s a viable life in entrepreneurship.

Whether it’s winning their business as consumers or recruiting the most talented ones as employees, millennials are today’s in-demand demographic. But Generation Y is also a source of anxiety amongst bosses, who are still learning how to engage and retain them.

Millennials are different, but the stereotypes associated with them aren’t always helpful says Greg Leach, an account manager at Hunter Straker. Leach is also Vice-President of Marketing and Partnership Lead at the SIPO Foundation, an organization that helps young people network, collaborate and learn skills through events and workshops, including the upcoming SIPOconference.

Leach cites a recent TIME Magazine issue, which featured the cover line “The Me, Me, Me Generation: Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.” This negative stereotype is commonplace among managers, but Leach says it’s important to also take into the account the second bit of text on that TIME cover: “Why they’ll save us all.” Millennials are already the largest generation in the workforce, and they’ll soon make up a majority of it. Whether they like it or not, bosses are going to have to learn to work with them.

Here are three things you need to understand about millennials, and how you can use each of them to better engage and retain Generation Y.

Money doesn’t matter (as much)

Older generations were conditioned to think in terms of stuff—the homes, cars and appliances their salaries could provide. Leach says millennials are more concerned with intangible things. “Millennials are all about experiences,” he says, citing the example of patronizing Starbucks over Tim Hortons. “Am I going [so I can] pay $5 for a latte? You go there because of the experience.”

That focus on experiences over stuff translates to the incentives you provide your millennial employees. “[Companies] talk about what’ll entice people from a Generation X or Baby Boomer perspective, but millennials actually don’t care as much about the compensation,” says Leach. “They’re more willing to take less in compensation if it complements their lifestyle.”

Generation Y would rather have experiences that provide personal fulfilment instead. “Millennials are looking to be in an environment of constantly learning, trying new things, challenging themselves,” says Leach. “You need to obviously pay fair, but I think it’s all about growth opportunities. They don’t want to feel stagnant.”

What’s your why

A job is not just a way to pay the bills for the average member of Generation Y according to Leach. “They look at their job as an investment in something they’re super-passionate about,” he says.

Command-and-control is not a model for managing millennials, which is perhaps why they’ve gained a reputation for not know their place in the corporate hierarchy. “They want to speak up, they want to be heard, they want to collaborate and they want to communicate,” says Leach. “Your leaders at your organization need to be able to communicate and be fully transparent about what you’re trying to achieve.”

But it’s not enough to talk in terms of corporate imperatives like sales targets and revenue growth. Leach recommends emphasizing the broader goals of your company and the difference it’s making in the wider world.

And don’t be surprised if Generation Y employees try to weigh in on your why or disagree with your methods. What you may hear as insolence, they consider to be collaboration. “They’re not just there to be your yes-people,” says Leach. “They’re people that are going to challenge the norm and I think people need to be open to that two-way dialogue.”

Loyalty is temporary

Job-hopping is a particularly millennial phenomenon, but it’s not entirely their fault says Leach. “There’s not a loyalty to the organization because they don’t see it back,” he says. “They’re trying to watch out for themselves: How can I set myself up long-term, because the days of working 30 years for one organization [are gone].”

A nine-person team at an educational institution had recently gotten a new leader, after several years of working for the same, beloved manager. The new boss called in Carol Henry help make the group gel.

“He knew he had fabulous people [who] had been working there for a very long time” explains Henry, a Lumina Spark Affiliate who spent 25 years in the Ontario college system, with a focus on professional development. “But he also knew that they were extremely attached to how things used to be done with their old leader.”

Henry met with the team on one of the organization’s professional development days. The team responded well, she says. “They were so ecstatic, because all of a sudden it became very light-hearted,” she remembers. Henry soon had them talking openly about the differences between the old and new leaders, what they were expecting, and how each wanted to contribute to the team. So successful was the interaction that the institution’s director of HR hired Henry to work with the organization’s administrators, and then with the Board of Directors.

Here’s what Henry has learned about professional development and leadership in her decades coaching and working in teams.

Know yourself

You can’t be an effective leader unless you understand who you are and what drives you according to Henry. “Awareness—both of self and of others—is the foundation for great leaders, and it’s a cornerstone of great communicating and great teamwork,” she says.

Henry uses the Lumina method, a personality assessment consisting of 144 questions used to measure 24 personal qualities. “You can really get a sense of where you are strong, where you have blind spots, where you avoid,” she claims. The tool measures takers in three different settings: the private self, where the subject is relaxed and no demands are being made of him or her; the public self, where the subject is at work or in social situations; and under stress.

That last one is particularly important, because it’s not enough to know how you react under normal circumstances. The true test of a leader is how her or she performs under trying conditions, and knowing your own personality will go a long way to helping you handle challenges better. “It is absolutely incredible how much stress will impact how you are choosing to behave,” says Henry.

Talk more

There’s no such thing as too much communication. “You rarely hear a complaint that ‘The senior management is telling us too much. They’re walking around talking to us too much. Please go back to your office!’’ notes Henry. Most organizations in fact have the opposite problem—not communicating enough, or in a way that leaves employees unsure of exactly what’s going on at the company.

The consequences of insufficient communication can be dire. Employees who think things are being kept from them will be prone to speculate, and their assumptions are unlikely to be positive. Head off that potential gossip spiral by being transparent with them.

Find others unlike you

The educational institution was an unbalanced organization, Henry says. “There was so much similarity in those admin teams, because they had been unknowingly and repeatedly hiring themselves, over and over again,” she explains.

The instinct to add someone to the team who’s like you rather than someone who can fill a skills gap or someone with complementary abilities is common among entrepreneurs and managers. You know how great you are, so it seems obvious that you need more people like yourself to make the organization better. But a self-cloning hiring strategy leads to a team that’s very good at one thing, and one thing only.

Identify what each person in your group is good at, and whether their second- or third-best skills could be used to fill gaps. “It is very important that we see the diversity that each member brings to the team and help them express themselves fully in that team role in an effective way,” Henry says.

Today, Evan Williams is an entrepreneurial inspiration for his work as co-founder and CEO of Twitter. But in 2005 he was running Odeo, the company that would develop and spin out the social network a year later—and not everyone thought he was doing a good job of it.

“He got a lot of flak for not making decisions fast enough [and] not being assertive enough,” recalls Tony Stubblebine, who worked for Williams at the time. “He was hiring people and really hoping they would solve a lot of the cultural problems of the company.” A decade later, Williams is the CEO of online publishing platform Medium, which Stubblebine describes as “one of the most innovative, well-run companies that I’ve ever run into.” Williams is also a good friend of Stubblebine’s, and an investor in Coach.me, the company Stubblebine founded in 2011.

Williams’ transformation from so-so manager to culture-defining leader is a good example of the power of coaching, says Stubblebine. “One of the things that a coach can help you do is help you define who you are and who you want to be as a leader, and then put that into practice,” he says. “I’m really proud of this entrepreneur, who you would consider to be a top performer—he’s a billionaire because of Twitter, he started two or three companies that people think of as major startups—but [who] keeps investing in his own performance.”

Stubblebine’s own experience with an executive advisor is what caused him to start Coach.me, which he believes solves two of the big problems with coaching: geography and price. Rather than rely on the best tutor you can find within a reasonable driving distance of your location, Coach.me connects users to coaches virtually. And while Stubblebine usually pays $600 per hour to work with his advisor, Coach.me’s tutoring rates start in the low tens of dollars. Feedback, self-accountability and monitoring are vital when it comes to self-help type initiatives, so there’s also a free app to let users track their progress towards their goals.

Here are three things Stubblebine says you should understand about working with a coach to become a better entrepreneur and leader.

Collaboration is key

A coach can’t help you get to your goals without your cooperation. “They don’t just come in and fix you—you have to work on it together and you have to be ready to work on yourself,” says Stubblebine.

It’s also not enough to spend an hour in your coach’s office each week and then go about business as usual for the other 167. So Coach.me focuses on “checking-in every day and making daily progress and improvement to your business or whatever you’re working on.”

Why stick to one?

The world of business is becoming ever-more complicated, and no one guru can possibly teach you everything you need to learn to be a better leader. “Think of coaches sometimes as specialists,” suggests Stubblebine. “When you’re working with the coach, there’s one thing at a time that you’re going to work on.”

Don’t just engage the first coach in the phonebook with expertise in that area either. “Now that you have access to so many different coaches and it’s so easy to vet who’s good and who’s not, you can just kind of go piece by piece and level-up all of these different characteristics of yourself,” says Stubblebine. “Cycle through coaches as you improve various parts of your life. You can always go back to a coach that you liked or if you feel like you need a refresher in some area of what you’re working on.”

It’s worth it

Time and money are the two things every entrepreneur could do with more of, and coaching expends both. But Stubblebine points to Warren Buffet to show why a tutor is worth making space in your schedule for. “His autobiography is called Snowball, and the metaphor there is: start with a small snowball and you roll it down a steep hill and it gathers momentum, and by the bottom of the hill it’s just this massive, multi-billion dollar enterprise,” Stubblebine says.”

Julian Bolster runs six businesses, simultaneously. Not content with that entrepreneurial workload, Bolster is also an executive coach at the Bolster Life Group, and is in the process of launching yet another venture.

Thanks to his experiences as a serial CEO, Bolster is well-acquainted with the frustrations and challenges that startup founders face as they attempt to get their ventures off the ground. Time and money are perennial concerns, but Bolster identifies two that he believes are becoming increasingly common: vision and visibility.

Increased competition and the looming threat of disruption have made it harder than ever before for companies to cut through the clutter and establish visibility in the marketplace. That’s particularly true for startups, who are often up against established industry players but lack the resources to out market them.

But an even bigger hurdle for many founders is getting their employees to buy into their big idea in the first place. An entrepreneurial vision and the passion to fulfill it are the basic requirements of entrepreneurship. “[But] trying to get everyone else in the company to hold true to that vision, especially when that vision doesn’t appear to be something very sexy in the moment, can be a challenge,” says Bolster.

Getting buy-in is becoming increasingly difficult, because there’s a growing desire among employees to belong to something that matters. “They no longer want to work for a work-mill, for a place where they just sell their time for money,” explains Bolster. “We’re very much in the age of the startup, and I think younger employees have this very romantic idea of belonging to a company that stands for something and that is out to do something big.”

Simply having a big vision for your company isn’t enough. Entrepreneurs know they’re no slackers. As Bolster notes, there’s a perception that founders must work 75-hour weeks and forego what makes them happy to succeed—a style of functioning he believes leaves you without the energy to actually accomplish anything. But employees need to see you doing more than giving orders for them to understand how much of yourself you’re putting into the business. “The new entrepreneur has to lead with a sense of vulnerability and personal investment,” says Bolster. “They are willing to roll up their sleeves and go into the mailroom to fix a machine or start at the coffee bar serving coffee to guests.”

Working alongside, not above, your employees is the key to engaging them. “When an organization has a flat bureaucracy, it allows [employees to] see where they fit into the whole organization,” he says. “Rather than [the vision] just being a motivational motto plastered on a poster that’s hung in some lunch room in the back of the building, you want it to be something that people can personally relate to and they seem themselves being a part of.”

In practical terms, that means decentralizing leadership. Bolster cites the example of Toronto travel firm G Adventures, which has about 15 people with the title of CEO—Chief Expedition Officer. Bolster met one of these CEOs on a promotional tour of the company a few years ago. “That individual was given the opportunity to create the role as they saw best, to go out and bring their ideas to the boardroom table, to really contribute not as an employee doing labour or work but as a thought leader,” Bolster says. “You could see the effect that had on the employees—they were personally invested.”

To run one of the world’s biggest companies is an impressive achievement; to have run two just seems greedy. Fortunately former PepsiCo president andApple CEO John Sculley, isn’t hoarding the insights he gained in those two high-profile jobs and the other experiences he’s had during his long career in business.

Moonshot!: Game Changing Strategies to Build Billion-Dollar Businesses is not an autobiography, Sculley insists, but a book of lessons that I and other entrepreneurs have learned while building successful businesses.

Sculley thinks the book particularly timely because of broader economic trends that are incentivizing entrepreneurship. Large corporations and governments aren’t hiring, and the rise of the contractor economy means it’s relatively cheap to embark on a new venture.

“We’re in this truly amazing moment for anybody who’s interested in building a successful entrepreneurial business on a substantial scale,” says Sculley. Here’s what he thinks new entrepreneurs need to understand if they want to make the most of this opportune moment for entrepreneurship.

Outcomes matter more than technology

Today’s most talked-about startups and valuable companies can be found in the technology sector. Solutions like cloud computing, Big Data analytics and mobility are the buzzwords of business, but Sculley says entrepreneurs need to focus on what these technologies enable, not the technologies themselves. “It’s the derivative effects of those technologies that is shifting market power from large, incumbent product and service companies all over the world to new companies,” he says. “Customers are paying more attention to the opinions of other customers than they are to the established positions of the incumbent companies.”

Sculley cites the example of the food services industry, where established players like McDonald’s are facing tough competition from upstart fast-casual outfits. The reason that the global fast-food giant finds itself backed into a corner is simple, according to Sculley. “If you go online and look at customers’ opinions of Shake Shack and Chipotle, you’ll see very happy customers and they’re telling other customers just how good they feel,” he explains.

Deliver a standout product with great service, and you too could benefit from making today’s empowered consumer happy.

Take advantage of mentorship

Sculley admits to knowing fairly little about Silicon Valley culture when he moved there to take over Apple in 1983. Unlike today’s entrepreneurs, he couldn’t simply seek out a mentor to learn from. “I had been really only in Corporate America, so it was an entirely new experience to me,” he says. “There was no one there I could turn to—there was no e-mail, there were no mobile phones, there was no easy way to have conversations on a routine basis with somebody.”

Today’s entrepreneurs face no such problem staying in touch with mentors, and there’s no shortage of experienced business people—like Sculley himself—willing to offer advice and assistance. You just have to be willing to ask.

Focus on the customer first

Entrepreneurs and established executives alike are taught that they need to lay out a thorough business plan in order to succeed. Yet if you review that laboriously-crafted plan just a year later you’ll find that very little actually got done says Sculley. “My sense is that the business plan is really just a budgeting process,” he says. “What you really want is the customer plan.”

Research suggests that acquiring a new customer can cost five to eight times as much as it would have run you to keep an existing one who departed instead. “Keeping a happy customer happy inside of your franchise is a far better business decision than just going out and trying to find another customer,” Sculley says.

Have a sense of urgency

Big established corporations have a lot of middle managers with veto power. “That means that things take a long time to get ‘yes’ answers,” observes Sculley.

The art gallery business in Toronto is cutthroat, but fortunately Marianne Katzman knows what she’s doing. Katzman, director at Katzman Contemporary, has spent over a decade in the art world, and done everything from hanging paintings to ordering supplies and writing cheques to pay the bills.

Katzman got her start at what she calls “a very small ma-and-pa gallery at Yonge and Eglington,” where she learned the tools and tricks of the trade. After a few years in the corporate hospitality industry, where she chose, managed, and consulted on artwork, she had the chance to work for the highly-regarded Toronto art dealer Leo Kamen. “This was the epitome of where I saw Canadian art thrive,” she remembers. “He was part of the community, the language and the history of what was happening currently [in the art world].”

Katzman and her husband, Dario Del Degan (partner at Katzman Contemporary) now have a gallery of their own. Here’s what the two of them say niche businesses should keep in mind if they want to be successful.

Pick your moment

When Leo Kamen decided to retire, he offered his gallery to Katzman. At the time, Katzman and Del Degan were working at a boutique culture and communications firm in Shanghai. But when Kamen made his offer, Katzman couldn’t say no. “I just felt like it was a huge fast-track—this was not starting from ground zero, this was starting with a business that already has a 30-year history,” she recalls. “I would be taking not only his roster of artists but also his roster of clients.”

Really commit

Del Degan’s background is in academia—he has a PhD in theatre. He spent time as a sessional lecturer both before and after the spell in China, but in 2013 the gallery had to move and the couple decided to buy a building.“I decided that the gallery needed a little more help after we had a couple of assistants who weren’t really helping Marianne grow,” says Del Degan. “So this pressure to help the business grow and have our investment in the property be worthwhile prompted me to leave academia altogether and join Marianne full-time.”

There’s a risk to having both spouses working in the business, Katzman acknowledges. “Our entire income is coming from one source, and we have to be very diligent and careful about that,” she says.

Offer something unique

There’s a finite market for any niche product—that’s what makes it niche, after all. So distinguishing your offering or business from the competition is crucial. “What you have to do in order to survive in [the art gallery business] is to be a unique brand—to know exactly who you are and what you’re doing,” says Katzman. “How we do that is by the idea that no idea exists in a vacuum or a white box.”

Katzman Contemporary emphasizes connection—the idea that the artist, idea, space, and community are all linked. “What we’re doing is taking an idea and giving you a suggestion of the way to read it—it’s a contextualization,” says the proprietor.

Del Degan echoes the importance of articulating a unique market position. “[Standing out] means identifying who your audience is and identifying that particular niche, and then promoting it as far and wide as possible,” he says.

Staying power is also crucial, because success won’t come overnight. “You have to consider the investment of time over a long period, and having the resources there to cover you for that long period, until you can build your reputation to such a point where people are coming to you,” he says.

Welcome newcomers

Galleries can be an intimidating spaces, leaving those without formal art training feeling unsophisticated and out of place. Del Degan says Katzman Contemporary tries to dispel those associations. “Once of the things that we are trying to do as a gallery is be much more approachable, and have an open-door policy with the visitors who come through,” he explains. “That means maintaining a friendly disposition when people walk through the door to make them feel comfortable.”

One of Ian Chamandy’s clients is a company that installs retail shelving. When a new Home Depot opens, for example, this firm fills the big box with the racks that hold $13 magnetic tape measures and $65 high-leverage cutters. “Once they’re done, the store opens,” says Chamandy.

Chamandy is co-founder of Blueprint Business Architecture and co-author of the recently-released book Why Should I Choose You. He believes that conventional business strategic planning is broken and obsolete. “Many of the traditional business practices were developed post-Second World War in institutions like Harvard and Stanford Business Schools or in big companies like General Motors and IBM and Proctor & Gamble,” he notes. “Things like ‘mission, vision and value,’ ‘selling the features and benefits,’ for decades and decades were axioms of business, and now they’re not working anymore.”

Instead, Chamandy and his business partner (and co-author) Ken Aber threw out that traditional thinking and developed a new methodology for strategic planning that distills a business down to a single core proposition, expressed in seven words or less. “That short phrase ends up guiding the entire architecture of your business, every part of it, everything it does and everything it says,” he explains.

Take the retail shelving firm. The company has been in business for three generations, and over that time has developed techniques, systems, processes and procedures that allowed allow it to complete jobs faster than the competition. “If they get a Home Depot done a week or two faster than any of their competitors, that means the store can open a week or two sooner, and that’s a week or two of retail sales that it wouldn’t otherwise have,” notes Chamandy. “That’s north of a million dollars a week for a Home Depot, and really that’s the only metric we care about—money.”

When the company enlisted Chamandy and his team to develop their business blueprint, that speed of delivery ended up being key. The firm puts up ‘Opening Soon’ signs while it’s conducting installations, and during a conversation about how it finishes faster than the competition, one executive suggested a tweak. “I want [them] to say ‘Opening Sooner,’” Chamandy recalls him saying. That thought became the basis of the firm’s core proposition. “This company was not in the business of retail shelving, because all of their competitors are in that business as well,” says Chamandy. “What makes them uniquely remarkable in that category is that they get finished faster, and that’s expressed as ‘Opening Sooner.’”

Identifying your core proposition and expressing it succinctly allows you to make every business decision with more confidence and clarity, according to Chamandy. “Those seven words or less guide every decision you make and every action you take,” he explains. So if your core proposition is ‘Opening Sooner,’ then every idea or proposal must be put to the following test: is it going to make a material difference in getting clients open faster, or not? “If it is, then it’s something that is aligned with who you are,” says Chamandy. “If it isn’t, then you know to take that off the table.”

Every salesperson knows the sales funnel. Prospects go in at the top, deals come out at the bottom. But that analogy for the sales process is no longer useful according to Lisa Shepherd, president of The Mezzanine Group, a B2B marketing company serving SMEs.

Shepherd is also the author of The Radical Sales Shift: 20 Lessons from 20 Leaders on How to Use Marketing to Grow Sales in B2B Companies, a book she was prompted to write after she noticed a change in the sales landscape. “I spend a lot of my time with owners and operators of small and midsized businesses, and over the last three years I’m hearing a constant lament from them to do with their sales departments and teams,” she explains. “They often say something like, ‘We can’t find any hunters. I need to hire some hunters to go out there and sell what we sell.’”

Demographic factors are partly responsible for this shift. There’s a reticence among newly-minted salespeople to go out and hunt, to knock on doors and set up calls. One thing I’ve learned in sales is that every “no” you get gets you closer to a “yes,” but today’s salespeople tend to just tick prospects off a list when their voicemails don’t produce call-backs or their emails aren’t returned.

While Shepherd acknowledges that there is a different mindset today amongst those doing sales for the first time, she also believes things have gotten more difficult. “The challenge now is yes, it’s easy to send out emails and relatively easy to make phone calls and leave voicemails, but the problem is it’s really easy for emails to get deleted and nobody answers their phone anymore,” she says. “Nobody’s got time to have a conversation with a salesperson.”

Buyers are also better prepared when they do call. Shepherd cites a Corporate Executive Board (CEB) study which found that on average, a buyer completes 57% of their decision process before contacting a selling company. “I find that statistic so powerful,” she says. “If I’m a salesperson and I’m waiting for my phone to ring, the buyer that I’m talking to has already made more than half of their decision.”

This newly-informed buyer is one reason why Shepherd believes the sales funnel analogy isn’t accurate anymore. Most versions of the sales funnel start with awareness at the top, and then proceed through familiarity and consideration, until finally the prospective customer makes a decision. But Shepherd outlines a better analogy for the modern sales process in her book: pinball. “I don’t think it’s as neat and as clean as that old funnel,” she says. “I see so many customers that pop around and bop to different points—they can come from consideration and pop back up to awareness, or they can move straight from familiarity into a decision.”

The availability of information about your company (and competitors) online makes it easier for a buyer to get relevant information about your offerings without having to pick up the phone and call. “Sometimes you’ll have a customer come into your company, and maybe they’ve found you via search and they’re really ready to make a decision,” Shepherd suggests. But sometimes there’s a much longer journey from start to sale. “A customer might come to an event that you host, and then maybe they download a whitepaper that you’ve put on your website and emailed to them a few months later,” Shepherd says. “They can bounce around from all of these points on the pinball landscape before they finally get to decision.”

That doesn’t mean you’ve lost all control over the sales process. The book emphasizes that as a business owner you can control the bumpers and the gates of the sales pinball machine.