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What problem does your company solve for customers? Your answer is the reason your business exists. The story of how your company addresses a specific customer need is an essential component of your business plan; not only does it validate your business strategy, but it convinces investors that your company solves a meaningful problem. This learning stream covers strategies for identifying and developing a compelling problem and solution statement, including how to identify customer pain points and highlight the tangible remedies your offering provides.

Gain an understanding of how margins work so that you can choose the right price for your product or service. Having a justified pricing strategy will help you avoid common mistakes such as guessing at price-setting, skipping competitive pricing research, leaving money on the table with a too-low price, or misunderstanding the whole value of what you're offering. Learn how supply and demand for your product or service impact price, how to quantify the level of value you're delivering (don't under-value it!), and how market forces impact your pricing. 

How are you going to create demand for your products and services? This two-part Learning Stream examines eleven marketing programs in depth, including email marketing, SEO, content marketing, and advertising, with examples of how you can apply the right ones to your business. Explored in this Learning Stream are tactics for deploying the marketing programs you choose, examples of their use, and their impact on your overall marketing budget.

Time to put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard. Take a look inside the Prep Worksheet that prepares you to write the pricing strategy section of your business plan. The key to success is taking the time necessary to deeply understand your business and be prepared to run it—use this workshop and Prep Worksheet to do just that.

The competitive matrix is a graphic that highlights your unique strengths vis a vis other players in the space. The visual snapshot is easy for investors to parse — but it’s more than a pretty picture. As you identify your most relevant strengths and how you stack up against competitors, the process of developing a competitive matrix gives you a greater understanding of your market and your business, and a valuable marketing tool. This learning stream will cover how to identify the most relevant strengths to plot on your graph, how to identify and evaluate competitors on the matrix, and how to position your business as a market leader.

A nascent trend can be wind in the sails of your company. Identifying trends that are relevant to your business, while steering clear of fads, convinces investors that you’ve done your research. And for your business, catching a trend on its upward swing can speed time to profitability. This learning stream not only identifies specific trends to watch, but points you to definitive sources for uncovering the up-cand-coming trends that are most relevant to your business.

What are the most effective ways to attract customers to your product or service? This video walks through three key steps in depth: Analyzing the marketing programs your competition is using, choosing a marketing mix for your business, and creating your marketing plan.

Time to put pen to paper—or fingers to keyboard. Take a look inside the Prep Worksheet that prepares you to write the pricing strategy section of your business plan. The key to success is taking the time necessary to deeply understand your business and be prepared to run it—use this workshop and Prep Worksheet to do just that.

How and why customers perceive the unique value of your product or service is something integrated into all aspects of your customer communication—from your website to marketing and social media to packaging. This lesson explains how that works by looking at a few top brands and how they communicate their unique value propositions.