Hi

The best channel would be the one with the biggest difference between the customer life time value (LTV) an the cost of his acquisition (CAC); provided of course that there is not big limit on its throughput (some channels may simple have limit capacity i.e. your network).

Anyway you probably would have to try to be efficient and try to target them with some mass weapon (probably their LTV is lower than for big customers). My guess would be:
1. Some content marketing: Slideshare (both presentation on your product as well as around the efficiency of workers, recruiting etc.), Linkedin especially group discussion and sharing of your staff from your blog or slideshare. Good try would be probably also Youtube channel and youtube ads
2. Mass events. Conferences around the topic, networking events – there you can present yourself and strengthen your position as the expert on the topic
3. Cold calling – use Linkedin for it and their premium version
4. Partners and affiliation / success fees . Since they have low LTV talk with partners who are already selling them staff. In Poland we have for example a company selling cafeteria system / benefit programs. They can sell you directly or through their channels. Talk with SaaS providers for the small and medium companies (SME) especially connected w. A good partners could be companies selling e-learning solutions, training companies etc.
5. Integrate. Analyze the pains of the typical HR manager at the SME and build within your solution something which solves the pain for them i.e. does some sort of statistics their need for their bosses or helps them rank the candidates. You can also build heavy knowledge base where you keep ready-made solutions for them that make their work much easier.
6. Referral program. Create a system where people get something for referring you i.e. free training for something, access to nice software for longer etc.
That would my first choices. For more I would need more data on it

Best
Asen

Hi
I think depends heavily on the targeted group.
At some point we will see the rise of big platforms with standardized trainings for specialists and middle management. Here, it should gravitate to subscription model but different price plans and paid per worker within the program. The very simple reason is that with standardized products you would end up competing on price and the subscription model gives high benefits to HR Manager (predictable costs, no problems with meeting new demands not budgeted earlier) and for provider (lock-in for longer period and predictable cash flow).

The other group of solutions courses will be customized made specific to the needs of a specific group. When you look at the structure of the company actually those trainings make the biggest chunk of the training market. In this category you would have: welcome trainings, product trainings, internal procedure trainings, update trainings etc. Here it is more difficult to predict how it will be developing. Companies can be charged per training made or some sort of prepaid number of hour trainings. For sure this is where the innovation has to still happen and whoever is providing a more resilient, scalable solution will have higher chances of dominating the whole market

Btw I would not be surprised it companies start paying for exclusivity – to make sure that given trainings is not available to at least immediate competitors.

Best
Asen

Hi

Heavily depends on you payback time for customer (how long in months it takes you to get money back invested in acquiring them). If it is more than 12 months than you have to work on reducing the cost of acquisition. Without lowering the cost (and lowering the payback time) the growth wthout funding will kill you - you will have exhausted all the money before getting to the payback time.

The other thing to do when you have long payback time is to work on increasing the value of customer. This is usually done by introducing annual payment (for SaaS solutions), up-selling, cross-selling and other (full list how to do it you will find here:https://medium.com/@asengyczew/19-best-ways-to-boost-your-ltv-the-ultimate-guide-61b9417fd779)

Now, if the payback time is short (6-12 months) than just try to exhaust the market - get 100% penetration, approach new potential customers, The bigger share you want to get the bigger range of acquiring customers you will have to use. Some people do not react to offers by mail or phone so you have to go old-school and have direct sales.

Sometimes, the niche is too small for your appetite (or too small to sustain the business in the long run). In those cases you have to find other customers – either go global or look for other similar segments / markets where you can use the same solutions.

Hope it helps

Best
Asen

Well depends whether there any synergies or not :)

If you can get lower rents because you have 2 business in the same locatin then there is at least one big benefit.

Other ones are:
1. opportunities to do some cross selling. You can give coupons for customers of nail salon to the baked goods and vice versa
2. you can share people - with 2 business (especially if they have different seasonality you might be able to optimize better usage of people)
3. any business in your vicinity generates some additional traffic
4. you can get some savings on buying services: accounting, loans etc,
5. you can have joint loyalty program

Drawbacks: for every business you need different skills and some overheads that cannot be share. In some cases may make more sens to have the same business in 2 locations than to have 2 business in one location

For sure also have a look at ways to boost the value of the customers. Here are 19 practical examples: https://medium.com/@asengyczew/19-best-ways-to-boost-your-ltv-the-ultimate-guide-61b9417fd779

Hope it helps

Take care
Asen

Hi

Specific tactics depends on the business, but usually you should try to go for the niches for which your product is much better. There, are probably much more incline to switch (they usually feel neglected by the incumbent player)

The other thing that works well is optimizing what you do today in order to be more effective at acquiring customers and converting them - bigger efficiency can compensate to some extent for lower budget / resources.

The last group of actions is finding a way around the current information distribution system so you can bent the rules in your favour (this really depends on the nature of your business, segments targeted and the way the information flows). The usuall suspects are: getting refferal system for happy customers you can spread the world around (i.e Dropbox), affiliate programs, getting influential evangelist (i.e. Canva and Guy Kawasaki) or tones of small but with some coverage bloggers / local opinion leaders (i.e. Buffer)

Hope it helps

Best regards
Asen

Always charge the side which bigger so in this case you take the money from demand side. Here you service is actually finding for the demand some supplier.

We had it well developed over the Socialism in Eastern Europe - you woud pay just to get in the que for some product

You can charge demandin 3 ways (at least):
1. for access to the marketplace / offers from supply
2. % from every transaction
3. Create price plan for speedy fullfilment of the orders and charge basically for being first in theque. Could be auction based pricing

Hi
There would be 2 different types of business. In the marketplace you have to get both the users and the payer so you have to have 2 set of tactics. Some of them are:
1. creating your own supply (for some time you work as the supplier) i.e. Uber hired guys, Udemy produc coures on its own
2. you try to satify as well as possible at least one part of the marketplace - Udemy concentrated on the professors
3. convince suppliers to bring their own customers - again Udemy
4. use other platform. Airbnb use craiglist Udemy used Groupon
5. create enough liquidity so that
6. upsell to the customers
7. make refferal program - have a look at dropbox case.

here ther is a lin to the Udemy creator talkin about marketplaces and a nice presentation as well. The presentation and the movie is in English; the rest in Polish but please do not pay attention to it:
http://startupakademia.pl/2015/02/04/jak-stworzyc-marketplace/

Subsription model - well it is just the ecommerce but with different payment: so direct, earned, paid traffic; lots of affiliate. Some tricks are: preinstalation, different payment plans, refferals etc

Have a nice day

Hey
There is plenty of ways to do it. I will mention just some of them:
1. 3 circle model (with common parts) - where every circle repesents different feature. You put the respective competitors in the right place
2. Traditional column chart. You put 3 different charts on the same chart. Every chart is a different feature or KPI; every competitor has 1 column
3. Canva model - you put the cava model of every competitor
4. Snake chart. in rows you have different feasstures and in stead of column you have scale. Every competitor is a different snake graph.
etc
Hope it was helpful

Hi
I have quite a lot of experience in setting up and running PMO (as a part of performance improvement and turn around projects)
In short what you need:
1. Agreed with your boss framework in which projects will reported to you and steering committee or other supervision body. You need also some tool to help you with seeing where you are and making reports. I used Excel (with VB macros) and Google Sheet. For more advance solution you can use Asana, SmartSheet, Lean Kit,
2. Agree on how projects should be run – how often you meet with PM, how often PMs are meeting with their team, how team leaders are chosen, how resources are allocating to the project and who decides on this; what is the reward / motivation scheme for PMs and team members
3. Communicate it to the project leaders / stream leaders – I proposal to make a training and presentation available to everybody – record it so that you do not have to answer stupit questions time and again
4. Execute and improve
That is in short
If you want to have a look at the excel just write to me

Best regards
Asen