“Throughout history, it has never been easy to identify a deserving king!” I attempted to address this in my previous post, in the context of customer strategy. I proposed Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) as the key metric to identify king customers. However, I’ve found this philosophy extremely difficult to follow, which is why I wrote this post. It’s okay if you have not read my previous post...
It has been an interesting coincidence on the last few occasions in different discussions and industry forums I participated in, they have attracted a good amount of the classic “Products and Services” in IT deliberation. As such, this is not a new debate. It is common to see patrons from the products world root for it by generating IP and for the services gurus illustrate how they are able to...
A few weeks back I had written a post on entering the US market. It was very gratifying to see the response from so many of you on that post. So following the lead of that article, here is another one. In this post I talk about some of the basic things Indian companies can do to improve their probability of success in the US. If these come across as simplistic, its because they are not hard to...
I came across this rather misleading article by a New Investor in town, that India has a Series A drought. I think its a bit sensationalist and misleading and drinks a bit of his own coolaid and shifts blames on others, but I’d agree with the article on one count – Yes there is a drought. I am going to start this off on the right foot. This whole venture funding phenomenon is about at the best 15...
For any products company, product support is a given, and part of the products business fabric. However, almost all Enterprise Products Companies end-up offering the professional services beyond basic product support. These services could range from simplistic implementation support, to integration, to solutions-building, to architectural consulting, to IT advisory support. The decision to...
Let us face it, technology startups are often founded by geeks, employ geeks and hence are, more often than not, geekdoms. There is tremendous value in it. However, there is a significant downside to this as it relates to communication. Geeks speak geekspeak and unfortunately that is all the customers hear a lot of times. This is a HUGE mistake. Never forget who you are in the business for. It...
What do top technology companies have in common? Think about SalesForce, IBM,VMware, Workday, Apple, Riverbed, Cisco. What separates market leaders and category creators from the rest of the pack? They tell powerful stories. Stories matter. We see it over and over again. Companies that capitalize on an inflection point and grab a leadership position always have a thought-provoking point of view...
