How to build a long-term sustainable business? In this Expert Insight Interview, Amos Schwartzfarb discusses his new book Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business. Amos Schwartzfarb is a Managing Director at The Techstars, working with businesses to get them on a high level of repeatability and build long-term sustainability.
This Expert Insight Interview discusses:
- Focusing on your repeatability
- Identifying your ideal customer
- Identifying KPIs
- Understanding financial model
Repeatability
Starting a business brings so much excitement about growing and scaling that people usually do not think of repeatability. However, to scale your business, you should first develop repeatability. Following some frameworks can bring you closer to achieving repeatability. Those frameworks help you identify your ideal customers, business model and its drivers, what you should prioritize, and how to measure your business.
The Ideal Customer
Knowing your target customer is essential when starting a business. Repeatable sales are necessary for startups, and they come from targeting ideal customers. Strive to close your sales 100 percent of the time. And you can do that only if everything aligns regarding your offer and customers’ timing and personal wants and needs. If somebody says no, that means that person is not your target customer today. Thus, start with customers who completely align with your ideal target, and eventually, when you build repeatable sales, you can expand your target market.
Priority
Another essential is to identify all the assumptions on your business and to start prioritizing them. Prioritizing things saves you time and energy to do things that are the most effective for your business. Start ignoring anything that is low priority. Anything that is a high priority and validated, focus on it. Those are daily things that help your business grow.
KPIs
Understanding how KPIs work in business is a must. Focusing solely on your revenue formula means focusing on a lagging indicator that you cannot change. Thus, focus on things that are directly related to some part of your revenue formula. Those things can change very often, and you can take action on them, meaning they are leading indicators. Doing one thing unlocks something else and ultimately leads to unlocking revenue.
Financial Model
Sometimes people go into opening their business with superficial knowledge of finances, which makes them overoptimistic. However, things usually take longer and cost more than we thought. The financial model helps you understand how the future would look like if certain things happen. Then, you use that understanding to track your business progress, learn from it, and evolve it over time because you have a clearer understanding of how to leverage against unexpected circumstances.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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