It’s a different way of looking at profit, Joe Knight, author of HBR Tools: Business Valuation explains. Think about how company income statements usually work: You start with revenue, subtract cost of goods sold (COGS) to get gross profit, subtract operating expenses to get operating profit, and then subtract taxes, interest, and everything else to get net profit. But, Knight explains, if you do the calculation differently, taking out the variable costs (more on how to do that below), you’d get the contribution margin. “Contribution margin shows you the aggregate amount of revenue available after variable costs to cover fixed expenses and provide profit to the company,” Knight says. You might think of this as the portion of sales that helps to offset fixed costs.

It’s a simple calculation: Contribution margin = revenue − variable costs

Analyzing the contribution margin helps managers make several types of decisions, from whether to add or subtract a product line to how to price a product or service to how to structure sales commissions. The most common use is to compare products and determine which to keep and which to get rid of. If a product’s contribution margin is negative, the company is losing money with each unit it produces, and it should either drop the product or increase prices. If a product has a positive contribution margin, it’s probably worth keeping. According to Knight, this is true even if the product’s “conventionally calculated profit is negative,” because “if the product has a positive contribution margin, it contributes to fixed costs and profit.”

1 – Paid Acquisition (I want fast growth)
Paid acquisition tips:
Always add value.
Align your ad, targeting and website experience with your ideal customers
Target your ideal customers first then branch out
Work out your benchmarks (CPA, AOV, LTV)
Be organized and be prepared to do the boring work (rinse & repeat what works)
 
2 – Viral Acquisition (I want huge growth)
This strategy is by far the cheapest way to acquire emails, social followers and more. All you have to do is follow the below steps.
1 – choose a prize that your target audience would get excited about.
2 – build a contest (lots of tools which help you do this)
3 – launch the contest
4 – market the contest
5 – watch the viral growth happen.
 
3 – Join Venture Acquisition (I want guaranteed growth)
Some examples of this:
Joint email promotion.
Joint event and sponsorships (e.g. web summits)
Guest appearance on podcasts
Join contests (what we discussed above)
Joint product launch
 
4 – Content Marketing Acquisition (I want long-term growth)
The best types of content are:
Resource lists
Case studies
Best xxxxx (like this post)
In depth product reviews & comparisons
Personal story (I had this problem & this is how I solved it)

It was a rebuilding year in a sense, as emerging tech for the enterprise steadily proceeded but didn't result in as many new targets to track as last year. Yet it's also abundantly clear the largest digital shifts by far are still ahead of us. Here's how 2017 is breaking down.

We looked at B2B versus B2C Digital Quotient scores across the four dimensions and also peered into the survey data for details on underlying practices for each dimension.

Strategy—attention deficit. B2B companies are behind B2C companies in how they use digital tools and data to set strategy. They often treat overall strategy and digital strategy differently. 

Organization—beyond legacy structures. Most B2B players haven’t taken concrete steps to mobilize the organization around digital tools and data. 

Capabilities—skills deficit. With lower levels of strategic focus and organizational discipline, it’s not surprising that B2B companies are behind those in the B2C sector in digital capabilities. 

Culture—a firm base. On average, across cultural DQ measures, B2B companies aren’t far behind their average B2C counterparts in core areas such as trust and internal and external agility.

In the short-term, these APIs and iPaaS solutions faciliate best-of-breed marketing stacks — the most popular approach to marketing technology today according to a recent study by WalkerSands.

Many of today’s marketing stacks could be characterized as “macroservice architectures” — big chunks of semi-closed applications that have relatively small pipes of data being exchanged between them.

However, it’s not much of a conceptual leap to see how these best-of-breed stacks can evolve into more flexible microservice architectures with more versatile and powerful interactions that span an entire business.

According to the Accenture research, disruptive growth is defined as “driving the disruptive growth agenda and generating new value for the business.”

There appears to be a misalignment on business priority and accountability. Only 37% of the CMOs surveyed by Accenture viewed disruptive growth as very important and are committing time and resources on innovation. And yet, three in four CMOs say they have total or a significant control of levers that drive disruptive growth at their organizations.

To get started with leading disruptive growth initiatives at their organizations, the Accenture research points out that CMOs need to first make their marketing priorities disruptive. They need to develop their disruptive growth strategy around these objectives:

Focusing on an outcome-driven orientation rather than product or service orientation
Improving and eliminating any friction from the customer experience
Tapping into customers’ unmet needs and creating new needs

What do MySpace, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter have in common? They're all social. They help us understand the social web we sit within, and they also give us the social reinforcement and support that we crave. In the consumer product world, the "most engaging" (AKA time consuming) apps are all social. Uber, Amazon, and Google are all world-changing, but they don't command the time and attention of Facebook and Snapchat. After all, they're utilities that a person comes to, uses to solve a problem, and moves on.

Marketer's have allocated 12% of company revenue to the marketing expense budget to last year’s 11%.

CMOs have taken on responsibility for aspects of sales, IT and customer experience functions in 30% or more organizations.

27% of the marketing expense budget is now allocated to technology, or 3.24% of revenue in 2016 vs. CIO’s tech budget of 3.4% of revenue.

We’re also seeing a strong correlation between a CMO’s willingness to share in the risk and the size of the budget they’re able to command. 

While the majority of marketing leaders expect budget increases again next year, the percentage of marketers bracing for a cut has grown nearly 5X from this time two years ago.

While investment in new technology for products and services continues to be a priority (55% of the CEOs ranked it in their top 2), a focus on innovating in the way their companies engage with customers was a top priority for more CEOs (58%).      They are recognizing that changing market conditions, particularly more tech-savvy business buyers, requires them to become more industry and business focused, to adapt their sales practices, and to think about new delivery models.

And, more importantly, they feel this shift is paying off where it counts.  42% of the CEOs cited improvements in customer experience and service as the key change that has driven more wins (Incidentally, the combination of new or better products was only 15%).

General Management - What do best-in-class marketers do better and differently in their pursuit of marketing excellence? Find out in this infographic, packed with data from our annual benchmark study.

ust as the public market slide for tech stocks triggered a tightening in the funding environment for existing startups and helped subject some high-flying companies to markdown valuations – CloudFlare, Taboola and Twilio, for starters, there’s also been a negative trickle-down effect on the youngest of companies. The torrent of venture money seemingly available to nascent, early stage companies may be slowing to, well, a trickle.

Despite the obvious pain for the affected companies, this resetting of the VC-entrepreneur ecosystem could be a good thing. Over the past couple months, several venture investors with whom I spoke saw evidence of a silver lining.

“Some of the best companies get started during difficult years in our economy,” said Aileen Lee, founder and partner at Cowboy Ventures. “Later this year, or in 2017, will be a really good time to start a company.”

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