AFFILIATE MARKETING

5 Financial Blind Spots That Could Be Preventing You From Making More Money

Published

3 hours ago

July 26, 2024

5 Financial Blind Spots That Could Be Preventing You From Making More Money

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Money can often be the barrier between being stuck where you are or breaking through to the next level. This includes having or not having a budget, using it properly, hidden revenue or even misaligned goals — all of which influence your growth trajectory. These four common secrets have helped my company elevate our clients to the next level.

1. Financial transparency for ROI

The first blindspot we often notice with new clients is not having a clear reporting connection between your tools, like ads and a CRM like HubSpot, to see which channels drive the most significant return on investment (ROI). Do you know your best-performing channels? Or your best-performing piece of sales copy? What is the most opened document that leads to a closed deal?

And we’re not just talking about marketing and sales; this applies to many connected platforms — for example, the closed-loop revenue or your ERP systems. When things are not connected, they are disjointed and siloed. You end up flying blind. Without connecting your marketing tools with your revenue tools, and with that being CRMs, finance platforms, or ERPs, to name a few, there is a disconnect, and the arms and legs end up moving in different directions.

Here’s a simple example we see all the time: If you knew that one channel drove more deals by a 75% faster conversion rate, wouldn’t you invest more time and energy in that channel than one that only had a conversion rate of 10%? Many people don’t want to share the revenue numbers within the company, but all of that information informs the other departments; without sharing these revenue numbers, your money secret is keeping it in hidden silos.

2. Strategic investment for avoiding blind spots

Another financial blindspot is not investing in marketing. We have had prospects come in with no budget and no internal marketing team, but we want to grow by 150% and spend a total of $1,000. I wish achieving growth like this was possible, but unfortunately, it’s not. The old adage that you get what you pay for, or it takes money to make money, speaks the truth. Your investment goals should match your growth goals. The amount of money invested should be measured not just by short-term, quick wins but also by looking at long-term investment to growth.

You would never measure an HR department strictly on the number of hires. However, looking at the whole picture of longevity amongst many other important KPIs, You would not use an HR department for a few months. It is something that is constant and needs care and attention. Marketing is no different — if you strictly only measure marketing by the number of leads, you are missing out on the full picture. Marketing helps push leads through nurture campaigns, creates automation, leads scoring, builds new campaigns and tests, supports sales enablement activities and many other components. A buying cycle is rarely a straight line to click and buy unless we’re discussing Amazon.

That said, everyone has budgets, margins and bumper lanes they need to stay in. I am by no means saying throw your budget to the wind, but your goal should match your budget. If you have modest growth goals, be realistic about the budget needed to get there. Set incremental micro goals but stay the course for long-term growth.

3. Data-driven decisions to save money

Another money secret that costs companies is spending without the data to back it. We had a company inquire about a new website, a full blow-up, new navigation, new content, new page layouts, migration onto a new CMS, a new theme and the works. They said they had a $75,000 budget for the whole project. In theory, it sounds great, right? Willing to invest? Check. Has a budget? Check. Know what they want the end result to be? Check. But when we asked them the next question, they looked at us like we were crazy, “Do you have data that backs the changes you are looking to make?” Are you running a tool like Hotjar to see real user data behind how these proposed changes will impact your existing inquiries and the only source the sales team was currently using for leads?

The answer was no. When the heat map was overlaid, do you know what happened? Well, they were looking to build that new navigation out and replace the old one — nearly 90% of the traffic was going to two pages of their site directly from the navigation, both of which they had originally wanted to remove. In this case, it wasn’t just about having the money but also about making sure the decisions you make with the budget are informed by real data: user data, sales data, marketing data and more. The more informed you can be by closing the loop on your data, the better your end result will be.

4. Modern marketing channels to drive growth

What is likely costing you the most is using old-school channels without the ability to measure. Companies have spent the last decade on traditional marketing channels and are switching to digital. The company’s historical growth has relied on things like trade shows, print, postcards and online magazines. We ask what the ROI you have seen by each channel is, and rarely can they share a specific revenue number and say it is for brand awareness. Some of the budgets can be over 50 to 100 thousand dollars spent on these traditional methods, but there is no ROI attached, yet they continue them.

When the pandemic happened, we saw a massive influx in businesses shifting from once only boots on the ground to digital. The lockdown changed everything; there were no more trade shows, no more door knocking and no one picking up their mail or faxes daily. It made traditional selling channels challenging and obsolete and forced a new level of openness to try new ways to get the job done. In the example of running online magazine ads there are lots of ways to capture them, we can use UTM tracking, referral analysis or create a custom landing page for the offer and capture the leads directly. Without running them to a landing page or form, you rely only on the online publication for leads and analytics. We’ve had people show a list of just names, no emails to follow up with, or only show a random number of visitors to the page, not a single name. It’s important to know what they will provide for reporting and tracking when you publish or use traditional channels. The rule of thumb is to use connections and tools that leverage old-school methods into technology and not blindly spend on channels that cannot be measured.

Stop wasting time, energy and revenue on these blind spots. They have easy solutions, so you can avoid them and focus on growing your business!

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How Nvidia Pivoted From Graphics Card Maker to AI Chip Giant

AFFILIATE MARKETING

How Nvidia Pivoted From Graphics Card Maker to AI Chip Giant

Published

1 day ago

July 25, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

How Nvidia Pivoted From Graphics Card Maker to AI Chip Giant

A decade ago, Nvidia was a major graphics card maker, vying with competitors like AMD and Intel for dominance. Now it’s an AI giant with 70% to 95% of the market share for AI chips, and the brains of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s also the best-performing stock with the highest return in the past 25 years.

Why did Nvidia invest in AI chips over 10 years ago, ahead of the competition? CEO Jensen Huang and board member Mark Stevens, Nvidia’s two largest individual shareholders, talked to Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha to explain what Botha called “one of the most remarkable business pivots in history.”

Nvidia’s original product was 3D graphics cards for PC games, but company leaders noticed by the mid-2000s that the PC market was hitting a growth limit.

“We felt we were always gonna be boxed into the PC gaming market and always knocking heads with Intel if we didn’t develop a brand new market that nobody else was in,” Stevens explained.

^{Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia. Photographer: Lionel Ng/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

That need for a new market intersected with a product Nvidia already had on hand: its graphics processor unit, or GPU, which could be used to power tasks outside of gaming. Researchers at universities across the world began exploring the graphics cards, eventually building advanced computers with them.

Huang recalled meeting a quantum chemist in Taiwan who showed him a closet with a “giant array” of Nvidia’s GPUs on its shelves; house fans were rotating to keep the system cool.

“He said, ‘I built my own personal supercomputer.’ And he said to me that because of our work… he’s able to do his work in his lifetime,” Huang said.

Other researchers, like Meta AI chief Yann LeCun in New York, began reaching out to Nvidia about the computing power of its chips. Nvidia began considering the AI market when AI had yet to enter the mainstream and was a “zero billion dollar market” or a market that had yet to materialize.

“There was no guarantee that AI would ever really emerge because, keep in mind, AI had had many stops and starts over the last 40 years,” Stevens said. “I mean, AI has been around as a computer science concept for decades. But it had never really taken off as a huge market opportunity.”

Huang and other company leaders still believed in AI and decided to invest billions in the tech in the 2010s.

“This was a giant pivot for our company,” Huang said. “The company’s focus was steered away from its core business.”

Huang highlighted the extra cost, talent, and skills Nvidia had to account for with the pivot, as it affected the entire company. It took 10 to 15 years of effort, but that business decision led to Nvidia powering the AI revolution with an early ChatGPT partnership.

“Every CEO’s job is supposed to look around corners,” Huang said. “You want to be the person who believes the company can achieve more than the company believes it can.”

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Nvidia Makes Up Half of Mark Stevens’ $8.8 Billion Net Worth

Published

3 days ago

July 23, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

Nvidia Makes Up Half of Mark Stevens' $8.8 Billion Net Worth

What if you invested in Nvidia 30 years ago, before it went public, and held on?

Venture capitalist Mark Stevens is currently one of Nvidia’s top individual shareholders, second only to CEO Jensen Huang. He invested in the AI chipmaker in 1993 as a new partner at Sequoia Capital. Stevens has been on Nvidia’s board for most of the company’s history, serving from 1993 to 2006, and then again from 2008 to the present. Nvidia went public in 1999.

“There’s at least three times I can think of where we almost lost the company,” Stevens told Bloomberg. “Jensen has his famous saying of, ‘We’re 30 days away from going out of business,’ which is almost laughable today, but in the ’90s it was the reality.”

No one anticipated Nvidia going from a $8 million or $9 million Series A to a $3 trillion market cap today, Stevens said.

According to a Friday Bloomberg report, the over four million Nvidia shares Stevens owns are now worth about $4.7 billion and comprise over half of his $8.8 billion fortune. The rest of his net worth comes from his 6% ownership stake in the Golden State Warriors and other investments made throughout his venture capital career.

Though the AI boom has propelled Nvidia stock to new heights, Stevens says that it wasn’t easy to hold on in the early days. The chip market was crowded with competitors, and it was expensive to keep the best Silicon Valley talent.

^{Mark Stevens looking through a 360-degree display. Photo by Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images}

Nvidia currently leads the AI chip market, with tech leaders like Microsoft and Google believed to be among its biggest customers. Those clients could one day be Nvidia’s competitors, joining other chipmakers like Intel and AMD.

Huang said in June that Nvidia’s strategy in response to rising competition was to make AI chips with the “lowest total cost of ownership.” Tens of thousands of Nvidia’s chips are the brains of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Huang has the largest individual stake in the company, with 3.8% or over 934 million shares. He cashed in on $169 million worth of shares in June. Other Nvidia executives and directors have sold shares worth more than $700 million since the start of the year.

Nvidia has seen over 3,000% stock growth in the past five years, which has made early investors wealthy. Some long-term employees are reportedly in “semi-retirement” based on stock grants alone.

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NLRB Drops Expanded Joint Employer Appeal

Published

4 days ago

July 22, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

NLRB Drops Expanded Joint Employer Appeal

The proposed expanded joint employer rule, which an International Franchise Association (IFA)-led coalition challenged in federal court, was defeated Friday when The National Labor Relations Board dropped its appeal of an earlier ruling in favor of the coalition.

“This announcement means that the latest attempt to implement joint employer is finally finished and represents a landmark victory for franchise small businesses in communities across America,” Matt Haller, IFA president and CEO, said in a statement. “The franchise business model is the best vehicle for American workers to generate upward mobility and create small business ownership from all walks of life. Make no mistake: while today’s news means the current threat is behind us, IFA will remain vigilant against any attempts to target the franchise model or our members.”

Some form of the Joint Employer Rule has existed for years, but in 2023, the NLRB expanded it in a way that directly impacted the franchise industry. Under the proposed expanded version of the rule, two companies — say, McDonald’s and a McDonald’s franchisee — could more easily be considered “joint employers” of the same employees. That would make McDonald’s legally liable for any labor violation committed by one of its franchisees, even though McDonald’s itself did not hire and does not manage that employee.

Although this is the end of this attempt to expand the rule, attorney Jim Paretti of labor relations law firm Littler Mendelson recently told Entrepreneur what the NLRB’s options are moving forward. “The short answer is that the board can keep trying to write a rule,” Paretti said. “They can go back to the drawing board, try again and write something more narrow.”

Read More: Bloomberg Law

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