Entrepreneurship, Strategy

Could Online Retailers Be Profitable and Grow?

Most online retailers are not profitable yet and the industry estimates are not looking good either. The online retail industry has so far been competing with each other on price and costly customer acquisition, which in combination does not auger well for profitability. The prevalent belief is that only at scale (aka, a billion dollar or more in revenue) can these retailers believe to be able to amortize their customer acquisition and marketing costs. This belief stems from the assumption that you need to pay (or offer a hefty discount) for people to shop online and to market (aka advertise) […]

Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Shift from Competing Organizations to Competing Networks

In the past few years, I have started seeing a definite trend that is shaping up and one that can have an immense impact on all of us and how we do business. There is more competition between networks of organizations competing with each other rather than individual organizations competing. This was prevalent in the B2B space in the IT industry, where software vendors would team up with hardware vendors and implementation partners and go to market together. They win the deal together or lose the deal together to a different network. Airlines around the world always had these networks […]

Sales

Are You Measuring the Right KPI’s for Your Sales Teams?

  Jason Jordan, recently published a post on HBR Blog titled – In Sales, Can You Manage What You’re Measuring. In this post, he talks about the KPI’s that sales teams have and if they are the right sets of KPI’s. He also talks about the fact that it far better to measure the lead indicators – “Sales Activities” to better predict and influence the result – “Sales Revenue”. This is a very interesting blog post and brings to focus a very important topic in sales management – How can a manager hold his sales rep accountable BEFORE there is […]

Sales, transformation

Do You Make this Common Mistake?

At the start of the year, I had decided that the theme for me this year was “Transformation“, specifically in 5 different spheres of my life. One of it was to transform my relationship with my son and wife – To spend more time with them with complete attention to them. In a step to achieve that, I tried to reach home earlier than normal yesterday. I reached home and started spending sometime with my 9 year old son. He has exams starting today at school and I was trying to teach him his Maths. In the middle, my phone […]

Leadership

Being A CEO of an Organization is A Lot Like Driving Your Car

My first boss had once said this – “Running an Organisation as a CEO is like driving a car”. – You need to know your destination. That’s the vision that you have for your organization. Every CEO should have a vision for where they want to steer their organization. They should also articulate this vision to their teams on an ongoing basis. – You need to know the route to your destination or have a map that could guide you to the destination. You should be able to at least see the next 100 feet. CEO’s need not have a […]