🤘 Dejan Gajsek

Coming from a full-stack marketing background, my vote goes toward retention than acquisition.  Why? Because even if you kill it with acquisition and get new customers for your service, if your "bucket is leaky", you're going to eventually lose them because there's something that isn't right in your client funnel.  According to Forbes, acquiring new customers can cost five to seven times more than retaining them. This means that until you fix the churn issue, you'll be hemorrhaging money. Only w ...Read More

This would definitely depend on the maturity of the company itself, for example, a pre-seed company would have different needs than Series B or series D. The best thing to do at the start is to capture the baseline KPIs and objectives, clarify the goals, and then work backward on how to achieve them, what tech stack you'll need and which team-members to pull  How this looks like in real life is, you'll do a bunch of interviews with sales, marketing, product and customer success teams and then te ...Read More

If you're banking that your sales teams will use your materials then you ask them first! Start with the top 2-3 sales reps or a sales manager who has a low-down on the biggest objections and reasons why deals aren't closing.  Prioritize the top objections and construct your battlecard. Make sure that there are supportive links or any other collateral that supports talk tracks and arguments you are saying.  This isn't all. Your battlecards need to be easy to use. (Most of the) People don't want t ...Read More

I never thought of checking competitions as immoral or "scammy". I would go and say that I do like to play detective and spy on the best competitors but that's simply called gathering intel.  If I'm being a little bit philosophical here, that's what you do in life as well as in business. You go out and search for success factors that resulted in a positive outcome in someone's life. If you do that on 4-5 individuals you will come up with overlapping patterns and factors that you can (up to a cer ...Read More

Outdated information is almost worse than having no information since you might be making decisions from data sources that are no longer relevant or valid.  To make sure this doesn't happen to you, come up with a process or SOP (standard operating procedure) where you refresh/update your information on a regular cadence. This could be bi-weekly but even quarterly works.  It's also important that you incorporate some sort of social listening and competitor tracking solutions. Your prospects are a ...Read More

Pricing will be one of the elements of how your brand is perceived.  Priced low - you might be thought of as an early-stage startup who doesn't have product/market fit yet or isn't confident in their solution, Priced high - clearly the confidence in solving an issue is there and it usually correlates with the perceived image of the company.  I always like to think of real-life physical examples and then translate them into a software solution. Someone who buys a $10,000 watch or a designer bag, ...Read More

OOOOhhhh I love that question.  There are always tracks you just need to start looking for them. I call this operation Ghost Recon.   Play a Secret Shopper - all of us have some sort of email account for checking messaging levels. Opt-in to the product and check its positioning and messaging.   Online Fishing holes - While G2, Capterra and TrustPilot usually hold at least few reviews those might be gamified or there are just not that many. Better source? Reddit and private forums or channels lik ...Read More

Oof. I feel seen. If you're in an early-stage startup or if your department is usually quite small then you will have to rely on tools. If budget is the limit, fret not, there are tons of free options.  In the past, I've used these tools which are still a great way to get started but there are more solutions out there.   The one piece of advice I'd give you is to try not to do the same tasks twice. Document the first research and create a first-team playbook for scrappy research. You'll have a l ...Read More

There's definitely an overlap but competitive intelligence is based on building systems and tools to combat and defend yourself against competition while market intelligence gets you the research and information about the needs, wants, and trends of the market.  If you combine both and add customer intelligence to the mix, you will have a super sophisticated integrated intelligence program that when used correctly, can build you massive leverage in the industry.  You can think of market intellig ...Read More