67045 Courses

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.

What do you want to achieve with your marketing strategy? Your marketing objectives are the basis for all of your marketing activities and the foundation of your marketing strategy. This Microcast details what every entrepreneur should measure, where to target your customers, and how to evaluate the marketing methods of competitors. You will also learn how to decide what goals and measurements are right for your business—setting specific sales growth goals, landing partnerships, expanding distribution, and more.

Take advantage of the vast amounts of growth data available to you as you craft the market growth story for your business. By doing market research, computing your compound annual growth rate (CAGR), and validating your positioning, you will create an impressive market growth story. This market growth Microcast will help you get it done. Covered are: Deciding where you plan to sell your goods or services, identifying which segments of the market apply to your business, using historical growth rates, and how to validate your growth assumptions.

The Company Overview section of your business plan must excite investors. From the founders’ bios and company history to your business location and business model, it must be clear that you’re poised to succeed. This learning stream helps you navigate the five essential sections to include in your plan: company profile, team, staffing, business model, and current status—all with examples, as well as solid business mindset tips and how to talk to investors. The workshop provides a walk-through of the tactical aspects of the learning stream will be walked-through in the workshop step-by-step.

Contrary to popular belief, having plenty of competitors is a good sign – that's what makes a thriving market. This course delves deep into the competition, with strategies for identifying and evaluating competitors and classifying them to discover where opportunities lie to fill gaps in the marketplace.

One of the most important concepts of your product strategy is identifying your minimal viable product or service (MVP or MVS). This walk-through takes you through a process for identifying what key qualities of your product or service comprise your MVP. Once you identify the minimum offering that addresses your customers’ needs, you can position your business for launch.

It may seem counterintuitive, but perfection is your enemy when it comes to shaping your product or service strategy. You may want everything to be perfect before you launch, but if you ever hope to start ringing up sales, you need to ruthlessly focus instead on just those elements of your offering that address the core customer need, and build a vision and a plan for development that tests your concept in the marketplace sooner rather than later. This learning stream offers guidance on how to shape a product or service vision, strategies for developing a minimum viable product, ways to create a roadmap you’ll stick to, and responses to questions about market defensibility. With examples of real companies cited throughout and workshop sessions for tailoring your own product or service strategy, this learning stream equips you with everything you need to build a product or service strategy that puts launch within reach.

Your market’s growth rate is out of your hands — but how you position your business to capitalize on it is entirely within your control. By selecting the most relevant growth rate for your market segment and aligning your company’s objectives accordingly, your projections will hold up under scrutiny and set you on the path toward profits. This course solves the challenge of projecting future growth with a framework for researching statistics, methods for calculating growth rates, and a list of pitfalls to avoid.

These days, entrepreneurs have more ways than ever to sell their products or services, including directly to consumers online. The trick is to identify which selling strategies will yield the right mix of profits and market share. While using direct sales methods enables you to pocket more of the margin and establish direct connections with your customers, indirect sales methods can spread your products far and wide quickly and help your brand gain a foothold fast. This learning stream delves into individual selling strategies, outlining the advantages and disadvantages of each, and provides a framework for evaluating which are most appropriate for your business. Tips for connecting your selling strategies to your marketing strategy and incorporating selling models into your company financials are also covered. Extensive worksheets and exercises enable you to identify the sales techniques that will win customers most profitably.