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Venture Capital Trends and Critical Success Factors in Tech, Photonics and Advanced Manufacturing

Michele Nichols Fri, Jan 15, 2021

Marketing Mix Marketing Strategy

Venture-capital

Traditional thinking dictates that a venture capitalist’s first step after investment is to strip out overhead cost and create efficiencies. But in recent years, we’ve noticed a shift in the conversation - new leadership is now focused on leveraging and positioning the existing brand. We are working with investors and CEOs to:

Assess the current state of marketing and sales effectiveness
Understand brand equity and refresh branding
Define the company’s position in the market
Create alignment between sales, engineering, and marketing to improve product development and product launch
Pivot to enter emerging markets or push deeper into existing markets
Provide voice of the customer (VOC) and improve CX

Increasing Morale Under Changing Ownership

Changes to the ownership structure can create employee and customer fear, distrust, and risk aversion, which can hinder progress in any of these initiatives. If your employees are protecting their turf and operating from a sense of scarcity, it’s hard to tap into their potential to explore new ideas.

A greenfield project can help. The excitement around a new product launch, new market, or new brand investment can help your team see beyond today’s struggles and into tomorrow’s possibilities. Our process recognizes the value and input of every stakeholder, and helps them arrive at an action plan together, with clear milestones, critical success factors and KPIs.

Critical Success Factors (CSF)

A successful venture capital investment is different in every industry, every company. Be sure to develop a common understanding of expectations, reporting requirements, and frequency. From product development or IP pipeline to sales pipeline, customer count, bookings and customer acquisition costs, you can develop a simple dashboard to improve alignment and actionability.

Critical Success Factor	KPIs	How to Get There
New market entry or market share increase	Clearly defined personas and targeted key messages Market share	Corporate positioning based on demographic and market research and VOC, a strong unique value proposition, and clear competitive advantage
Strong and motivated management team	Engineering, sales, and marketing alignment	Customer-centric sales methodology and CRM-based sales process Reporting and metrics dashboards
Fair entry price	Perceived value	Market assessment and positioning
Proper deal structuring	Customer acquisition cost Win rate	Defined sales process CRM and marketing automation
Proactive monitoring	Defined sales and marketing goals and benchmarks	Successfully implemented and adopted systems with closed-loop reporting
Clear exit strategy	Recurring revenue growth and profit metrics Succession or transition plan	Corporate positioning Sales and marketing activities to drive growth

About Launch Team, Inc.

We are a multi-dimensional, highly focused marketing firm that has helped companies in technical and engineering-driven industries succeed. We've been doing this for over 30 years, increasing and improving our offerings along the way. Our team's backgrounds include optics, chemistry, biology paired with a core business and marketing focus. This allows our team a unique understanding of your business, the decision makers you work with, and the engineers who will evaluate your solution.