It was March 2020 and a newly hired account executive at LinkedIn Corporation (LinkedIn) was keen to close his first major deal. His job was to help marketing teams acquire new customers and grow their businesses by leveraging the LinkedIn Ad network. He had secured a meeting with the vice-president of marketing for the video conferencing company Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (Zoom). He had just one hour to prepare for the meeting and determine the best way to position LinkedIn as a solution for Zoom to handle its growth challenges and opportunities.
It was 2019, and the senior manager of strategy and business operations at Lyft Inc. (Lyft), headquartered in San Francisco, had been tasked with helping the company expand its existing vehicle services infrastructure to include individual riders, also known as end users, in addition to drivers. She had information about the competitive landscape within the industry, along with valuable insights from interviews Lyft had facilitated with potential customers. She was aware that in order for Lyft to grow and ultimately scale in as frictionless a manner as possible, the company might have to re-evaluate its value proposition and figure out how to build trust with consumers.
Following its official launch on April 6, 2020, Quibi, a mobile-only short-form video streaming platform that had raised over $1.7 billion had failed to gain the traction it was expecting and fell well short of its first-year growth projections. The company ultimately announced that it was shutting down after just six months in October 2020. Exactly where had Quibi gone wrong, and what lessons could investors learn from their failed investment in the company?
The Sunshine Foundation of Canada (Sunshine) was a national, Canadian-focused, self-funded charity established in 1987 and headquartered in London, Ontario. In the second half of 2020, the chief executive officer (CEO) and president was deciding how to create an effective email template that would serve the larger organization as the first point of contact for potential donors. Sunshine’s relationships and donor pipeline were the organization’s lifeline, and with strong competition in the non-profit milieu, the CEO knew securing funds in the individual-giving category would be difficult. How could she outline Sunshine’s differences and highlight why the prospective client would be interested in becoming a donor? How could she convert these prospects into new Sunshine donors?
Drop Technologies Inc. was a major success in the Toronto, Ontario, Canada technology community. Having raised its initial pre-seed funding with only a slide deck, it grew to become a popular loyalty mobile application across North America. In 2017, the company was featured in LinkedIn’s top 25 start-ups in Canada, and it closed CA$58 million in a series B funding round. In 2018, the marketing manager had to decide which marketing channel was most effective based on the goals of the company. Traditionally, Drop Technologies Inc. used paid social advertising and referrals to generate user growth. However, the rise of influencer marketing was on the marketing manager’s radar, who had previously tested this channel, but had yet to decide whether or not to allocate more of the marketing budget to it. While this channel had many potential benefits, it was still a new concept and held many potential risks.
The COVID-19 pandemic will eventually subside, and many businesses will recover, but in order to rebound, they must survive—which is why adjusting sales tactics to get through the outbreak is critical. This article provides six tips to those in sales on how to grow revenue. 1) Be Helpful: Businesses and service providers that lead with their hearts in this time of extreme need stand a better chance of surviving and thriving. Free consulting is typically touted as a bad thing, but offering discounted products or free resources that can help others maintain operations might be the best “selling” one can do right now. 2) Re-Evaluate Your Context: Think through who needs your help right now, and align your value proposition directly with our new shared reality. 3) Modify Products and Target New Markets: Develop new products or services that clients didn’t need yesterday—but desperately need today. 4) Add Value in New Ways: Consider helping your customers free up cash by offering more generous payment terms or more flexible purchase options. 5) Tweak Your Pitch: Consider adjusting a revenue-focused pitch to a cost-savings pitch. 6) Caring Over Content: Tell clients, “I know that the current environment makes it difficult to consider new purchases today, and I’m not expecting you to, but I wanted to reach out to see if you’d be open to having a discussion about a future solution when this calms down?”
In 2016 (A case), the founder of Tokyo Smoke, a cannabis retailing enterprise based in Toronto, needed to attract investors. The former Google Inc. employee had taken advantage of public policy changes in Canada and was modelling his retail business on Starbucks Corporation, which had educated North American consumers about coffee and captured a huge share of the coffee market. He needed investment capital in order to build his brand and needed to determine an appropriate valuation as part of his pitch for investment capital. By 2018 (B case), he had to address new challenges in his role as chief retail officer of Canopy Growth Corporation (Canopy), the Canadian licensed producer of cannabis that had taken over the company he founded. How could he position Canopy as a world leader in retail cannabis?
In 2016 (A case), the founder of Tokyo Smoke, a cannabis retailing enterprise based in Toronto, needed to attract investors. The former Google Inc. employee had taken advantage of public policy changes in Canada and was modelling his retail business on Starbucks Corporation, which had educated North American consumers about coffee and captured a huge share of the coffee market. He needed investment capital in order to build his brand and needed to determine an appropriate valuation as part of his pitch for investment capital. By 2018 (B case), he had to address new challenges in his role as chief retail officer of Canopy Growth Corporation (Canopy), the Canadian licensed producer of cannabis that had taken over the company he founded. How could he position Canopy as a world leader in retail cannabis?
Grocery Checkout Inc., an online grocery delivery service, had experienced dramatic growth since its founding in 2005, but investors were pressuring the chief executive officer (CEO) for even faster growth. An improved distribution network and order fulfillment system meant that GCO could handle a greater volume of customers. The CEO considered a number of growth options, including a sell option, and needed to decide which would best fit GCO and how his role might change within the company.
Kiai Marketing Group is a start-up advertising company providing innovative marketing solutions to businesses in London, Ontario. The company’s first undertaking is aimed at reaching the post-secondary student demographic by attaching a business’s advertising to laptop computers by means of a laptop skin. The proprietor needs an overall strategic marketing plan to secure his first client. The proprietor must decide what clients to target, how to reach the student market, what to charge clients, and what to pay the team of students displaying the laptop skins.
The founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Teksavvy Solutions Inc. has achieved sales of $18 million in just more than 10 years as an Internet service provider (ISP) across Canada but he must decide whether to distribute his service via cable carriers, telecom carriers or both, or even integrate forward into laying fiber-optic cable in homes and businesses himself. If he invests in last mile connections to homes, he will need a great deal more funds and he will need a healthy uptake by the new customers, most of whom would be located in smaller cities and towns. The added investment for this option would require him to look seriously at bringing in a venture capital company for major investment but he would have to sell it some equity and live under its covenants and guidance until some type of liquidity event would buy out the venture funder.