Valuation & Customer acquisition

Question 1

valuation

unicorns

Answer 1

unicorns
- venture backed companies
- private (non listed) companies
- less than 10 years old
- valued at least at 1 billion dollar
- the number has accelerated strongly since 2009
- unicorns are becoming more common
- most of them are in the US
- many of them are eCommerce / Internet Software /
Fintechs
- corporate VCs are also hunting unicorns

ponies - less than § 100 mio
centaurs - $100 mio up to $999mio
decacorns - $10bio up to $99bio
centicorns - not existing yet

Question 2

unicorns

venture specifics

Answer 2

• short history
• lack of resources
• great importance of intangibles
• high flexibility
• high risk and high chance

Question 3

valuation methods

Answer 3

• NPV
• Cost validation
• profit validation
• Dave Berkus method
• Scorecard method

Question 4

customer acquisition

Answer 4

customer acquisition framework (Rahmenkonzept)

1. customer lifecycle
   helps companies understand how customers are
   experiencing the product and how they act
2. sales funnel (Trichter)
   shows internal processes that companies need to
   follow in order to move prospects down the funnel
   effectively and efficiently
3. content strategy
   is the way how the company educates its customers
   about their pains, possible solutions and how the
   product solves the problem.

Question 5

customer acquisition framework

customer lifecycle

Answer 5

visitor:
- everyone who gets in touch with the product
- potential customer
- conversation necessary to move to the next stage

prospect:

• once he converts on a website, signs up for free trial
• potential customer who expressed interest
• a bought list of contacts from a third is not a prospect
• the need to express their interest

activated user:
- primary goal is to activate the prospect by delivering
them the core value unit for the first time
- metric: activation rate

customer:

• user becomes customer as soon as she / he pays
• metric: daily / weekly active user rate

active customer:
- uses your product regularly, receives value and installs
habits of using it
- metric: renewal rate /churn

loyal customer:

• renews or sign up for additional features
• metric: net promoter score / referrals

Question 6

customer acquisition frame

sales funnel

Answer 6

leads: (Hinweise)
- can enter the sales funnel from outbound and inbound
channels
- action required to move to the next stage: filtering bad
data, enriching inbound leads

Marketing qualified Lead:
- not every lead is created equal so it pays to have some
sort of lead scoring system that correlates with the
historic probability of closing a deal
- action required: lead score reaches the level needed to
be moved to the SQL stage

Sales Qualified Lead:
- a sales development team conducts lead qualification
the qualification process depends on your target
audience audience and it should provide your sales
team with enough information

opportunity:

• when a lead passes all the necessary qualification
• action: completed demo or guided free trial

proof of concept:
- the higher the deal size, the more important the PoC
becomes
- fully self serving product is easy to show in a demo
- action: negotiation and proposal delivery

closed:
- funniest stage of all
- customer sends signed proposal and pays for the first invoice
- real work begins here
- customer success team needs to train and fully onboard
the customer so that everyone on their team can access
the product
- action: product setup

Onboarding:
- CST leads this process by training customers on how to
use the solution
- action. training completed

Renew / Upsell:
- The effectiveness of your customer success team is
measured by renewal, upwelling and churn metrics

Question 7

customer acquisition frame

content strategy

Answer 7

awareness:

• goal: enlighten customers about industry trends
• blogs, articles
• creators: marketing

education:
- goal: educate customers on more effective and efficient
ways of doing daily business
- types: white papers, ebooks, webinars,…
- creators: marketing, sales, CST, chief evangelist

selection:
- goal: educate customers on your product and
alternatives
- types: sales presentation , product demos, case studies
- creators: marketing, sales, CST

training:

• goal: teach customers how to use your product
• types: workshops, product webinars, FAQ
• creators: Product marketing sales, CST, sales engineer