Free to Five

It is not enough to say, “we are building a great travel website”, as there are tons of travel websites out there. While you need to meet your quotas and always adhere to company policies, there is a great deal more that happens behind the scenes. Learn to get motivation through seeing the team achieve rather than getting that deal! Figure out your key drivers, and get the right team members to manage them accordingly. So, all energy went into driving those three datapoints, with one key manager in charge of each datapoint (e.g., head of marketing drove traffic, head of web design drove contacts, head of call center closed transactions). The Unified Interface framework uses responsive web design principles to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience for any screen size, device, or orientation. 49. Discounts will automatically apply at checkout once the customer has enrolled. To take online payments, we suggest using PayPal and/or Google Checkout to save on monthly merchant account fees until your volume may dictate a merchant account will pay for itself. To start, I want to summarize what I feel are the various pieces to the social marketing technology puzzle, to ensure whatever strategies and tools you employ, include all of the various components you may need.

And, there are tons of startups out there trying to pitch social media marketing, management and analytics tools. This is one of the reasons only 5-10 startups in 100 actually succeed, as it takes a really special person that has the right combination of skills and startup DNA. But, I haven’t found anybody that is doing everything yet, especially in a price point affordable to most startups. But, more importantly, you need to be able to quickly identify when things are not going to plan, so you can put new initiatives in place to make up for any shortfall. Obamacare and a bankrupt Medicare will continue to put additional strains on an already broken system. The CEO needs to set acheivable proof of concept points, and put key managers in place for hitting those goals. Keeping the business on plan, on budget and liquid is a no brainer requirement for any startup CEO. You may find the requirement of hiring a broker to help you in this respect, but that may incur a lot of cost. I expect to see a lot of industry consolidation in this space, as marketers are going to want all pieces of the puzzle aggregated into one easy-to-use social platform.

There are a handful of companies that already provide numerous pieces of the puzzle, and I am going to focus on them below. The companies that are most progressed in this space, include companies with affordable solutions focused on SMB’s (e.g., HootSuite, TweetDeck, SproutSocial) and companies with very expensive solutions focused on larger enterprise-scale clients (e.g., Radian6, Sysmos, Meltwater, ExactTarget). This includes cheerleading the staff, from top to bottom, and getting prospective business clients and investors excited about getting involved with the company. There is no single right answer for “who makes for the best startup CEO?”, as everyone is different in terms of skills, style and personality, and every business is different in terms of economic, industry and competitive dynamics. So, it is important that your sales and motivational skills, are tempered with equally important business judgment and intellect to come across as credible and backable to all parties involved.

BBB Business Profiles are provided solely to assist you in exercising your own best judgment. The longer you let cash-using problems go unfixed, the shorter your liquidity runway, and the higher odds you will run out of money and potentially go out of business. It feels like the Wild West out there in the social media marketing world. My previous startup, iExplore, positioned itself as a niche killer for adventure travel (compared to the general online travel agencies like Expedia). I like to ask questions that give me an indication about whether the candidate is self-aware because self-awareness is important for growth. The idea concentrates on asking a sequence of questions that will help the customer to understand the needs and the process of purchase decisions. 4. Managing the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software: Hand in hand with reporting goes managing the CRM (and more specifically the use of the CRM by the sales team). The methods you are going to use to promote your store and products will provide you with the much-needed difference that could change failure to success. The problem is, with the glut of fragmented solutions in the marketplace, many of which are still learning the business themselves, it can be a daunting task to identify the right technologies to use to optimize your social marketing efforts.