Nigeria Startups Tips, News and Ideas
Many medical marijuana users struggle with the fact that the main pain-relieving substance in cannabis, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), also has mind-changing qualities, meaning that relief from pain often involves a high that can interfere with everyday life.
Read more here.
The post [Syqe in Times of Israel] Medical marijuana best taken in ‘micro-doses’ with no high, Israeli firm says appeared first on OurCrowd.
Crisp, a demand forecasting platform for the food industry, has today announced the close of a $ 12 million Series A funding round led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Spring Capital and Swell Capital.
Crisp launched out of beta in January of this year with a product that aimed to give food suppliers and distributors a clearer picture of customer demand at retailers. Before Crisp, these organizations usually had several data scientists compiling data from various sources into an unintelligible spreadsheet, making it difficult to see general demand outlooks, and nearly impossible to spot anomalies.
Not only does this lead to losses in revenue, but it also contributes to a terrible amount of food waste.
Crisp looks to solve this by giving these suppliers and distributors a visualization of their data instantly and in real time. The company has built integrations with a large number of ERP software, ingesting historical data from food brands and combining them with a wide range of other signals around demand drivers, such as seasonality, holidays, price sensitivity, past marketing campaigns, changes in the competitive landscape, and weather that might affect the sale or shipment of ingredients or the product itself.
The end goal is to consolidate data across the industry, from brands to distributors to grocery stores, so that each individual link in the food chain can do a better job of matching their supply with their demand on an individual basis.
Since launching out of beta, Crisp has expanded beyond food brands and suppliers into retail and distributor space. The company has also expanded beyond produce and dairy into verticals like beverages, bakery, CPG, flowers, meat and poultry. The startup says its seen an 80 percent increase in the number of customers using the platform since January.
Obviously, the coronavirus pandemic brings its own unique challenges and opportunities to Crisp’s business. On the one hand, grocery store shopping is booming and the supply chain behind it is certainly in need of better data science and demand forecasting as user behavior shifts rapidly. On the other hand, user behavior is shifting rapidly.
With state by state, and sometimes county by county lockdowns and shifts in the restrictions imposed on small businesses, Crisp has had to manually track what’s going on around the country in order to provide clear insights to its customers.
“This period we’re in has increased that willingness to share data and increased collaboration between everybody in the supply chain,” said founder and CEO Are Traasdahl. “We’ve seen a big shift there. Earlier, everyone assumed that everyone else was able to deliver, but now this ability to have a full, top-down visibility across a whole depth of companies, not just the companies next to you in your trading relationships, but being able to unify data and have more insights from multiple steps away from yourself, and get that data in real time been accelerated.”
Crisp currently has 33 employees (with plans to hire on the back of the funding), which is 33 percent women and 15 percent people of color. Half of Crisp’s management team are women.
On this morning’s WJR Business Beat, Jeff discusses a study just released by Avionos, Who Wins Where, which provides lessons and insights for e-commerce brands. The study reports that the COVID-19 outbreak has accelerated changes in online shopping that are not only surprising, but also favorable to online merchants.
Here’s a breakdown of further key points from the study:
Tune in to the WJR Business Beat as Jeff breaks down the study further:
“You must focus on convenience and efficiency to create a supreme customer experience if you want to drive sales and put more money in your pocket.”
– Jeff Sloan
Tune in to News/Talk 760 AM WJR weekday mornings at 7:11 a.m. for the WJR Business Beat. Listeners outside of the Detroit area can listen live HERE.
Are you an entrepreneur with a great story to share? If so, contact us at editor@startupnation.com and we’ll feature you on an upcoming segment of the WJR Business Beat!
Good morning, Kevin.
We all tend to think that it’s discounts and deals that drive online consumer purchasing, but in the COVID-19 era, it’s convenience and free shipping that are the biggest drivers of consumer purchasing. According to the study Who Wins Where, lessons for digital brands, just released by Avionos, the COVID-19 outbreak has accelerated changes in online shopping that are not only surprising, but also favorable to online merchants, if featured effectively.
Generally speaking, in today’s world, it’s all about providing a supreme customer experience, leading to a sense of efficiency, convenience and value, all of which are much less costly to online merchants to provide versus deep discounting.
Here’s a breakdown of further key points from the study:
70 percent of consumers when shopping a digitally native brand, that is a pure play e-commerce retailer, want a simple and easy online and mobile shopping experience as the most important factor contributing to their online purchasing.
56 percent of digitally native customers specifically say its fast, free shipping that is the most important key purchasing driver and 76 percent say that fast shipping speed contributes most significantly to a positive customer experience with that online retailer.
55 percent ask for an easy, reasonable return policy.
57 percent rely on those online consumer reviews, which we all know are so important.
And all of these factors fall into the category of convenience in the customer experience and they all trump discounting. So how about those deep discounts as a way to drive sales? Well, only 32 percent of consumers surveyed said that discounts and deals are the key driver of their purchasing.
That is really surprising. And if you’re an online retailer focused on discounts as the key driver to drive sales, you’re probably leaving money on the table. You could be selling through Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Shopify, or your own e-commerce site, but in any case, you must focus on convenience and efficiency to create a supreme customer experience if you want to drive sales and put more money in your pocket.
I’m Jeff Sloan, founder and CEO of StartupNation.com, and that’s today’s WJR Business Beat on the Great Voice of the Great Lakes, WJR.
The post WJR Business Beat with Jeff Sloan: Convenience is Key Driver of E-Commerce Sales (Episode 85) appeared first on StartupNation.
Things get busy when you’re executing on everything you’re writing about.
This is part 4 of 5.
1.Start with your revenue and monetization plan (are you targeting a sector that has money and can/will pay – Part 1)
2.Align yourself with others in your space (cheapest way to get traction/credibility – Part 2)
2.5 – Process, process, process – Start one, refine it, continually improve it – Part 2.5
4. Work on building a marketing strategy that can help expose and align your brand while strengthening its recognition with your partners (will this make us both look good)
5.Build customer advocates along the way, tell their stories (lead with examples)
In other words, don’t piss off your partners.
Before we dive into this head first it’s come up in past posts.
Your clients are your partners, your platforms that you integrate with are your partners, anyone who shares something about your platform, product, whatever are your partners.
Imagine if you have a reputation to keep up, because you do.
If one of your partners has plans to do something that is similar to what you’re doing, don’t go through with that partnership. If you play in the same space and you complement each other, go for it. This is what NDAs are for with clauses against copying one another.
If you find yourself at the point where your product has expanded past it’s initial borders and now starts to creep into what your partner does, don’t expect massive support.
So what’s the strategy play?
Work a connection and ask. Yeah I know, not much of a strategy, but it seriously works. If you learn to approach people in a certain way they almost always share too much information. People by and large are really excited about what their companies do. You just have to put them at ease in order to get that information out of them. This is much easier once you have an NDA in place, people are pretty forthcoming with what they are working on and what their goals are.
When you are working on something that integrates, look to connect to someone inside the company that sets up clients, work with them to understand best practices etc. This saves you a lot of time when you are building and working on features.
Hint on this they will also tell you what people need the most help setting up – this is a gold mine for industry information.
A platform partner is someone that you integrate with anything from a sign in with google to pushing an email address to a list in Facebook. If you built the integration, praise the holy hell out of why the integration is so great.
Every platform partner is a “product launch” treat it as one. When you decide to integrate with a partner, use the vision of your reason for integration as the blueprint for sharing awesomeness with people.
What makes them look good?
I know this is hard for people, repeat after me, “It’s not about my company, it’s about what I can do to make your company look good or accomplish something.” Sales isn’t sales anymore, it’s marketing, and marketing is all about storytelling which is actually customer experience, so you need to tell the “story” about how working with your platform partner has enabled you to do awesome things for your Client Partners. Bonus the client probably is their customer too in most cases which actually allows you to create a mini case study/story for them.
Imagine if your company basically wrote a case study for a platform partner as a result of how you integrate, what company in their right mind wouldn’t help share that on social media and social channels, maybe even their blog or a link to their newsletter.
You’ve just managed to create content that benefits your company, your partner platform’s company, your client via providing them exposure, and you’ve amplified the spread of your content.
Why write another boring case study that only focuses on your product – there’s no incentive for your platform partner to share it – use your noggin to work smarter, not harder.
When you’re small, you are always looking to get on and remain on your partner’s radar. You also want to align as much as possible to leverage their brand and reach.
What’s in it for them?
What every company wants – more exposure that leads to more revenue. If you integrate with a specific platform and you call out results when combining them (assuming your story is great) drive them that traffic, allow people to find out more about them ON YOUR WEBSITE – push that traffic to them.
This does two things – 1. It makes your life easier when you’re dealing with simplified integrations and 2. It makes you look like a revenue source which will bump you up on the priority list when opportunities come up.
If you go to any large website – say shopify etc, you’ll see a list of agencies that they farm out work to, want to hit the top of that agency list – drive the most traffic to shopify. You want to be a top app in their app store, talk great about their platform whenever possible.
It’s that simple, people reward relationships that benefit them. Show a benefit.
Look, I get it, this seems so simple, but really, think about all the conversations you have with sales people telling you what their platform and features enable instead of simply asking what would be on your wishlist of things that would be amazing for blank then explaining how your product solves for them.
If you did your research, you can always walk people into the answer you’re looking for. Always. It’s all about positioning your questions and sprinkling leading questions every so often to direct them back to the answer you want to hear them say.
The same goes for working with partners, always be positioning to be top of mind.
How to make them look amazing without trying
Ok so this is a bit of a lie, people always think their product is the best thing since sliced bread. It’s not.
The key to making people look good, is being overly humble and grateful. Honestly, I watched this terrible display of ass kissing and brown nosing from people around me at large companies, the polished act literally worked every time. Everyone likes a little bit of a suckup. Our partners loved it.
So instead of trying, don’t. Build content meant to benefit you indirectly.
Put your platform partners first and slide the business to them. Then share that out on social media. If an article is shared by you about one of your partners, at the very least it will be reshared by the person in charge of partnerships. Make this person your friend, always promote their content on things like LinkedIn, shoot them the love, people like it when you’re top of mind.
And now the actionable parts.
How to build internal advocates at partner companies
This really isn’t overly hard –
Rinse and repeat.
If you do this correctly, you’ll work your way down to having a good list and rapport with those that are part of the partnership team, those on the marketing team and a few content writers for those companies, when you comment, your company will not be top of mind along with your name, keep this shit up.
Consistency is how to make this happen.
How to ensure you’re top of mind always
Want to be top of mind, do good work. Again, not super complicated, but it does take time and the results aren’t immediate.
As stated above, go out of your way to make people at your partner companies feel good. This could be retweeting the company’s tweet, commenting on an employees posts as relevant, anything you can to ensure that your company is popping up in and around the types of activities that
These are your customers – find ways to make them shine and amplify their messages on your website, on social media, etc.
Some people look at this as a double edge sword where you’re sharing the clients you work with, fear not good companies already know using tools like BuiltWith. It’s all about maintaining the relationship.
What makes them look good?
Back to part 1 for the refresher:
Companies buy things for one of these reasons, hopefully all 4.
Make sure that whoever your contact is at your customer account that is in charge of running your software looks like a f*cking rockstar.
What does this mean? Build trust, work through implementation fully, support and fill in gaps initially, and be a source of knowledge on best practices for getting the most out of your software.
This isn’t sales, this is customer success and a vested interest in ensuring that 1-4 from above go off without a hitch.
I can’t stress this enough – in most companies, no one has a vested interest in seeing someone succeed in most roles – they don’t care. Often when you get to the top of your domain, you’re making it up as you go along.
Knowing this, be the partner that helps the person making it up as they go along to achieve massive success and empower them to make decisions based on what you’re product can unlock, whether that’s more time, increased budget, better company insights, or something even better, unlocking some external understanding via data in the market.
What’s in it for them?
It’s all about them. Treat them like your only client.
SaaS is a bit of a misnomer in that it treats large swaths of customers the same and bigger customers usually get better prices. Interestingly enough, in the early days of getting customers signed on, pricing per customer could be wildly different because it’s all about perceived value.
If you can learn to ask the right questions – you can strip through all the bullshit and start figuring out what success looks like to the company, what’s accomplishable, and what you can do as a company to ensure that your lead contact looks like a genius.
If you do this right, you start asking questions to determine what will expand their budget – with that comes a bigger piece of the pie for you as the company selling in.
Think about your product as being make or break for them. You really should be in regular contact with the companies using your product, trust it’s easy to tell when a company really doesn’t care.
The truth is, when people like me are talking to clients, we have a good amount of sway in deciding what products people want to work with to accomplish workflow goals. Because we’re a trusted entity when it comes to wanting to align our outcomes.
Be that person, be the expert, stay connected, make yourself available.
How to make them look amazing without trying
This is a talent, but anyone can learn it. Align your goals with the goals of your lead contact.
It’s really that simple. What you want doesn’t matter. What the client wants, needs to be narrowly focused to give yourself the best chance of success. Ask what their boss looks for in a program, what would unlock more resources, staff, budget, etc.
Back from the process post 2.5 when we talked about how important understanding your own internal processes are, the same goes for your clients. When you know what their process looks like and how you can add value through your product to build a better process or free up resources you’ll find a lot of success.
Your success is predicated on your main contact thriving when you know what they are being graded on and you focus on working with them to improve their internal processes to make their lives easier, you win.
How to build internal advocates at partner companies
Be human, relate to their role. In my earlier advice I said you should know your industry down pat. I really do believe this. When you can talk from a place of expertise having played an active role, you can define the role your product will play in an existing workflow.
You want to structure everything around the internal employees goals relative to the company’s goals. What does this mean?
It means that your contact has internal goals for their department and the executive team has goals for the department as a whole, these often are different. Inter department there are goals for process and workflow. Executive level goals are more general revenue and or results.
The workflow and process bits the executive team doesn’t really care about, they only care that it’s working to produce the numbers needed.
How to ensure you’re top of mind always
Be present. Your goal is to make a friend. Connect with them on LinkedIn, support their posts, go above and beyond to help them help their company grow. Take interest in their success. Most people don’t stay at companies for that long anymore, create a great impression and you’ll get repeat business. Create an amazing impression and people will recommend you to other companies.
Most high level people go to conferences with other high level people in the same field. Your product and your reputation will travel with them.
Partner marketing is the most cost effective way to grow your user base. When you’re starting out and usually when you’re humming along the one thing that keeps coming up on the regular is lack of resources.
There are tons of smaller complementary companies out there all trying to grow, everyone is in the same position, literally everyone. Find ways to build your network to connect to people that are similarly situated, you gain insights, advice, and a great peer network when you’re rolling out projects. It even allows you to form amazing partnerships.
The Takeaway
The best marketing is word of mouth.
The best way to get word of mouth is to be humble.
The best way to be humble is to put the needs of your partners first.
Business is a marathon not a sprint try your best to be good to those around you.
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Startups – Rapid Growth and Innovation is in Our Very Nature!
We couldn’t say first as Infor, WeWork, and MongoDB attained the uber-mythical decacorn status before UiPath. Infor was acquired, WeWork no one is certain as to what the valuation is, and MongoDB currently trades at $ 12B+ market cap.
AlleyWatch
