Business Development Metrics

A friend and former colleague called me recently to ask my advice on a new entrepreneurial venture that he was contemplating. His main question was around whether he should wait for all the elements of his business offering to be ready prior to launching. Essentially, he was wondering how much of the product/service needed to be fully baked for him to launch successfully.

It’s a good question, and smart of him to be considering it. But, I suggested that he approach his new entrepreneurial undertaking from a much more practical standpoint. I advised him that all the planning, scheming and strategizing that go into starting a new business is, in reality, not worth all that much in the grand scheme of things. Because, ultimately, what it’s really all about is what you can sell.

Yep, my advice for budding entrepreneurs (and business people, in general) usually comes down to that statement: “It’s all about what you can sell.” Nothing else matters all that much.

As they say about war, the moment the first bullet is fired all the detailed war plans go out the window. Same thing with business plans. Once you launch in the real world, you’ll find out soon enough what works and what doesn’t. The market is pretty ruthless that way. Either your customers/consumers want (and hopefully buy repeatedly) what you’re selling, or you need to retool quickly and come up with something that will sell. Absent that, you’re out of business. Success metrics can’t get any clearer than that.

In my first business course in college, my professor opened up the semester by asking a seemingly simple question that lies at the heart of marketing (and business). It’s a question that you’d think most people would just innately understand (and be able to answer), but almost no one ever got it right the first time he posed it. His question: “What is a product?” Some in the class blathered on about products being a basket of goods and services filling a specific market need, and others (like me) just scratched their heads, knowing that whatever we conjured up was probably going to be wrong anyway (had to be a trick question). So what was the answer? It was so deceptively simple, yet powerful and insightful: A product is whatever the customer wants it to be.

That basic business tenet became the foundation for my own thinking about marketing. When you break our business down to what truly matters, it really must start with the needs, wants and desires of the customer. And it ends with engaging, satisfying and delighting her or him, consistently over time. The single-minded delivery on that “promise made, promise kept” concept is the basis for all great brands — and market leading companies.

Of course, it all still comes back to what sells. If you have the classiest, most memorable, highest value brand in the world, but it’s not selling, you don’t have much of a business.

So, as you contemplate your exciting new ventures, or try to figure out how to jump start a marketing plan for an established product, make sure that whatever you are selling is something that people actually want to, and will, buy. And when they do, you know you’ve got a winning strategy and business.

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