Month: January 2023

Corporate CPR Episode 64: How to Have an Effective Revenue Strategy

/ Jana

On today’s show, we discuss how to have an effective revenue strategy.

Falkon CEO and Co-founder Mona Akmal is a product and engineering veteran who builds resourceful, kind, and output-driven teams that create and scale success-enabling products. With a passion for crafting elegant solutions to technically difficult problems, she has grown teams, businesses, and many products at Microsoft, Amperity, Code.org, and Zulily.

The impact of Mona’s work includes ramping from $0 to $11M in ARR and 15 household brands as happy customers at Amperity; from 10M to 100M students learning computer science on the Code.org platform; and from 1M to 1B docs in the cloud with OneDrive and Office.

Key Takeaways:

  • Engineering and Business intersect by focusing on
    • efficiency
    • balancing the entire equation with analytical thinking
    • processing many variables to optimize an engine/business
  • Challenges facing organizations in the Go To Market space
    • Siloed points of view. Various departments focused only on their departmental issues, and not net revenue retention.
    • Teams focused on execution and not thinking long-term.
    • Misunderstanding of the purpose of culture and operating principles.
  • Indicators of a silo problem
    • Ask different teams why they are not performing and they blame each other.
    • Conflict between senior leadership.
  • How to fix the problem
    • Executive leadership members are the neutral parties and need to do a good job of having a great data strategy, so there is a system of truth.
    • Have shared objectives.
    • Bottoms up feedback. Have conversations with average employees to gain non-digital data – very valuable perspectives. This will help gain a more full picture of the truth.
  • Recommendations for key metrics to focus on
    • Input metrics – who you are targeting, how you are targeting them.
    • Marketing activities and ROI on campaigns and channels.
    • Sales development activities – conversion numbers.
    • Employee productivity – cost vs output.
  • Recommendations for accurate and effective data
    • Data has to be directionally accurate. Focus on the trends, not the details.
    • Invest in operations – marketing and revenue.
    • Make employees’ lives easier by investing in the tools that will help them be productive.
  • AI trends within GTM
    • Conversational intelligence and coaching driven by AI.
    • Data governance – anomaly detection and data cleaning driven by AI.
    • AI GTM intelligence tools that will look at massive amounts of activity data and pinpoint the key things to focus on to maximize your revenue engine.

Top Takeaways:

  • Reflect on whether your objectives and key results as a senior leader are representative of a silo or not. Make sure you are also focused on revenue.
  • Invest in a good data strategy and spend 50% of your time focusing on the future.

Connect with Mona Akmal:

Website: http://falkon.ai

LinkedIn Falkon: https://www.linkedin.com/company/falkonai/

LinkedIn Mona: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mona-akmal/

The expert guest was booked via The Expert Bookers, www.expertbookers.com. 

Technical Project Management FAQs: Is Your Project Struggling With Unrealistic Deadlines?

/ Jana / Leave a comment

Developers are constantly under pressure to meet deadlines with a polished product ready to launch. However, as most developers can attest, projects often fail to launch as planned. They may end up released with fewer features or be delayed altogether. What causes this problem, and how can you solve it? Better technical project management is key. However, it’s not the technical side that you should be worried about. Learn what really makes your projects struggle to meet deadlines.

Technical Project Management FAQs: Is Your Project Struggling With Unrealistic Deadlines?

The Most Common Cause of Delayed Projects

Delayed launches not only increase the cost of a project, but they can even lead to cancellation entirely. Almost one-third of projects die before launch due to repeated delays. What causes this problem? A UK study surveyed and interviewed 40 software-developing companies to identify the most common causes of delays. The study found that poor coordination and unrealistic expectations were among the highest-ranked reasons. Interestingly, technical difficulties were rarely the reason.

Respondents also cited conflict between members, which stemmed from the aforementioned planning problems. Clearly, managerial issues have the most potential to disrupt a project’s success. When there’s a disconnect between management’s expectations and a team’s capacity to deliver, problems will arise, and delays become more common. If you’ve been struggling to meet deadlines, it could be a sign that your expectations are off the mark. It may be beneficial to bring in a third-party consultant to review your project.

How Do You Know If Your Deadlines Are Unrealistic?

Several signs point to a problem with your deadlines. First, if your team regularly needs to go into crunch time to meet deadlines, they’re probably unrealistic. Crunch time not only exhausts your team, but it also costs more in overtime and turnover as employees often leave after finishing highly stressful projects. Another red flag is when your deadlines haven’t changed despite making significant changes to the project’s scope or features. Changes take time to implement; your deadlines must change, too.

Nevertheless, some factors don’t neatly align with deadline viability. For example, you might be tempted to hire additional staff to accelerate project development. However, without a clear need and assignment for new hires, you may end up creating more conflict or disconnect with your team. The same UK study noted that “more is less” in many cases, and additional hires usually failed to make deadlines more realistic. Adding another wheel to a car doesn’t improve velocity; it just adds friction.

How to Meet Your Deadlines Consistently

If you regularly have to push back your deadlines, the most likely culprit is management. Communication is vital to ensuring accurate, viable deadlines. If you don’t discuss the scope of a project with your team and get their input, you may overpromise to a client and underdeliver. However, you may be able to optimize your staff’s performance and improve your delivery times with better strategies and organizational tools.

At Project Genetics, we specialize in getting projects back on track. Contact Project Genetics to speak to one of our representatives.