Unstoppable
The theme of the Netcore international sales conference was “Unstoppable”, and I built on it. I spoke about the need to set growth expectations not on past performance but the market opportunity. We had enough success stories that we could now start thinking bigger. Instead of thinking in growth percentages, we needed to look at multiples. In the red ocean of competition, we needed to create our blue ocean where we could create a repeatable sales motion. Instead of us chasing customers, we needed to get customers to chase us for the products which delivered great value to them. And to do this, we needed to change our approach – from thinking about our solutions to solving problems for our customers. We needed to move beyond thinking retention, engagement, and personalization to helping customers grow revenues, cut costs, and supersize their profits – laying a foundation for their exponential, forever, profitable growth. We needed to help them create the best moat in their business – a “profits monopoly” (profipoly). Our ProfitXL idea could help them do just that. A few slides captured this “switch pitch”:
The last point about Netcore’s profitability mindset got a rousing response from the audience. Our enterprise customers want profitable growth, and yet the vendors who are trying to sell to them remain unprofitable even after years of being in business! I have always felt proud of Netcore’s focus on balancing growth with profitability. Our bootstrapped nature means we do not face investor pressure to toggle from growth-at-all-costs to a sudden turn about cutting costs in efforts to breakeven and conserve cash. This is the same mantra which now resonates with our customers. It is a theme I have covered extensively in my essays on new ideas on marketing.
I then spoke about 5 Ms: a entrepreneurial mindset, a mission that thinks 10X bigger (moonshot, and not just roofshot), creating a moat with our progency approach combining product and agency, thinking monopoly in an account by using the full-stack of products we have to land and expand, and finally, making our demos magical.
I ended by saying that the next stop in our journey was to go from Unstoppable to Unlimited: unlimited growth, opportunities, and scale. And for that every Netcorian will also need to become better – learn one new thing each quarter to become better at what they do. Companies are people collectives. As they grow, so will Netcore and so will our customers.
It was one of my better talks in recent times. The occasion helped – I wanted to inspire the team gathered on to greater heights. They are on the frontlines, and if we have to grow 10X, we need them to up the game and create our unique space with product and service to deliver the profitability outcomes our customers want and expect from us.
