💡JCNews #54

Le marketing qui va vite.

Chers amis, fans de bonnes lectures,

Bienvenue aux 50 personnes qui nous ont rejoints depuis mardi dernier ! Si vous lisez ceci et n’êtes pas encore inscrit, rejoignez vite les 2 885 personnes qui ont déjà eu la bonne idée de le faire. C’est juste ici 👇

Dans les JCNews cette semaine, mes dernières lectures les plus intéressantes, dont un zoom sur un must-read à ne pas manquer !

Ecrivez-moi pour en parler, sur Linkedin ou sur Twitter. Les JCNews sont aussi disponibles sur le Blog Alan. Je compte sur vous pour les partager 😊

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💡Must-read de la semaine

Chaque semaine, je publie un must-read que vous choisissez. 

👉 Comment accélérer significativement le rythme de votre équipe marketing (First Round)

• “I believe that speed is the single most critical — and most overlooked — characteristic of a winning marketing team. [...] They build MVPs and validate hypotheses with their users. But marketers have a harder time adopting this mindset and are more campaign-driven.”

• “To find the one program that might be a real game-changer, you probably have to sift through 10 other ideas. Maybe some of the marketing strategies sounded brilliant on paper, but when you get into the execution, you realize that many assumptions were incorrect. You need to focus your team’s energy on nurturing the seeds that have the most promise — and divest from the ones that don’t”

• “The programs that end up having a sizeable impact on the company are typically massive and can take one or two years to build, with plenty of micro-iterations along the way. The faster you make those iterations, the faster you’ll course-correct to a truly impactful program.”

La vitesse n’est pas la caractéristique principale d’une équipe Marketing et pourtant on devrait penser le marketing comme le produit : des cycles courts, de l’apprentissage, de la prise de risque. Bref, un biais pour l’action, comme chez Alan.

To go faster, start by understanding what’s slowing you down:

• Real speed is moving fast towards impact and learning. It’s moving as fast as possible towards the most important thing, based on clear directives.

• You might think you're moving fast by putting a plan in motion and getting things out the door, but wasting time on initiatives that don't pan out is the biggest drag on startup marketing teams.

• “We started talking to customers and what we heard was an emphatic, ‘I’m just running a small cupcake shop and I don’t know anything about HR — I want to find answers to my questions and to avoid big mistakes,’” says Rezaei. “It became clear that we had wasted a whole year on the wrong content strategy. From that point forward, we started to incorporate more short, Q&A-style tactical HR topics that could rank high for SEO. It was a huge learning experience for me.”

La vélocité c’est avoir de la vitesse dans la bonne direction.

“Check engine light” signals that point to a poky marketing department:

• You’re not shipping. “If it’s been two weeks since we talked about a program and nothing’s live yet, that’s a bad sign. If we talk about launching an event program, we better have an MVP event within two weeks — something’s got to be live.”

• Your goals are all long-term. “If the metrics for your program all say, ‘At the end of the quarter we’ll have this,’ that’s a red flag. Long-term business goals are important, but they need to be complemented with short-term goals, such as ‘In two weeks, we’ll have 10 new demos.’

• Your team lacks new learnings. “If you ask, ‘What do we know this week that we didn’t know last week?’ there better be a new answer to that question. [...] Fast teams are always solving new problems.

• You’re too dependent on other teams. “Many leaders accept limitations that can actually be removed, especially when it comes to cross-functional dependencies. How often do you hear something like, ‘Well, it takes engineering a month to build us a landing page’? Earlier in my career I accepted these as facts. With experience I learned it was my responsibility to voice, even demand, what marketing needed to succeed.”

Avoir des points d’étape hebdomadaires est un must-do très pertinent pour répondre à ces questions essentielles : chez Alan, chaque Alaner publie chaque semaine une update hebdomadaire (HPFO) pour faire le point sur ses objectifs personnels, les équipes (crews) ont leur crew weekly updates aussi et nous publions une weekly update au niveau de la boîte à lire par tous pour identifier les shippings et les points bloquants.

Move faster by getting out of the basement — especially if you don’t feel ready.

• It’s hard and uncomfortable to do new things, which tempts us to spend months of planning and creation in isolation to get it right. But you don’t learn anything in the basement.

Ceci est probablement la conséquence d’une tendance à ne pas assez valoriser la prise de risques ! Décomposer le risque en plus petites étapes permet d’en prendre plus.

Marketing strategies:

1. Put on your black hat to break down large problems. “Start with defining one big, inspiring statement. For example, ‘In one year we will have 5,000 partners that are selling our product to their customers.’” [...] “Let’s assume that it’s one year from now and we’ve failed at our goal. What went wrong?” [...] “The aim here is that you want to get to a list of five to 10 major assumptions implicit in achieving the long term goal.” [...] “The next step is flip the negative statements into positive ones and reframe them to include the key levers that will make the program work. These are your core assumptions that must be true for you to hit your long-term goal. 

2. Lean into motion goals to get into that “ship it” mindset. [...] “Instead of spending all your time building the perfect plan, the best thing you can do now is to try to ship something within one to two weeks,” [...] To jump-start that kinetic friction, she sets motion goals to get everyone moving. “An example of a good motion goal could be to sell the program to one partner this week. [...] It should take six days, not six months to get in front of your target audience with a marketing concept.

3. Obsess over weekly targets. What can you do every single week to move the needle?” 

4. Establish a biweekly learning meeting. Every two weeks host a meeting where you try to codify learnings across the team. You articulate what people have learned that they didn’t know two weeks ago,

5. Pick the right tools — not just the shiniest tools. [...] Before you start looking for shiny new toys, Rezaei cautions against jumping the gun here. “At the beginning of any new program, I keep it low-tech because otherwise that just contributes to the sunk cost fallacy. [...] Any one tool is only as valuable as it is simple and enables quickness. When adding to your marketing stack, prioritize technology that has ease-of-use and removes repetitive workflows for your team, not old school enterprise tools that technically can enable a workflow if you bring on an army to operate them,”

6. Make a decision on whether to go forward. “If after one quarter of iterating, you keep missing goals and just can’t get it right, honestly consider if you should abandon the program.

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🏯Construire une entreprise

En plus d’articles triés sur le volet, je partage un principe de leadership d’Alan par semaine. Le même que je partage en interne et à nos investisseurs tous les mercredis.

👉 Nous donnons du feedback avec empathie (Healthy Business)

• L'empathie est là pour améliorer la communication. Le principe de l’empathie n’est pas de cacher les choses importantes, mais plutôt, par un feedback humain, d’aider l’autre à s’améliorer de la manière la plus efficace.

• Nous pouvons et nous continuerons à dire les choses qui peuvent être blessantes. L'idée du feedback empathique est de partager efficacement avec ses collègues comment s’améliorer, sans cacher les éléments importants. Chez Alan, on aide les gens autour de soi à grandir, et on est transparent quand ils ne sont pas assez performants à leur niveau. 

• Néanmoins, le respect prime toujours, indépendamment de notre statut ou de la nature de nos désaccords. Il est indispensable d’exprimer nos points de vue de manière réfléchie, sans condescendance ni agressivité.

👉New Defaults: les principes fondamentaux pour construire une entreprise (Stratechery). J’ai particulièrement aimé la partie sur le “status quo”

• First, it should be the default that free speech is a good thing, that more information is better than less information, and that the solution to misinformation is improving our ability to tell the difference, not futilely trying to be China-lite without any of the upside.

• Second, it should be the default that the status quo is a bad thing; instead of justifying why something should be done, the burden of proof should rest on those who believe things should remain the same. This sounds radical, but given the fact that the world is undergoing profound changes driven by the Internet, it is the attempt to preserve the unsustainable that is radical.

• Third, it should be the default to move fast, and value experimentation over perfection. The other opportunity cost of decisions not made is lessons not learned; given the speed with which information is disseminated, this cost is higher than ever.

👉 Les trois règles du freemium (Medium)

The downsides of freemium:

• Added costs: Given that SaaS is an extremely high-gross-margin business, one might think that you can easily support free users. However, even if your gross margin from paying customers is 80% to 90% (i.e. your CoGS are only 10% to 20%), those costs can become very significant if you grow a large user base that doesn’t generate any revenue.

• Less focus on core users: An important factor to keep in mind is that having a freemium model will almost inevitably have a strong impact on your product roadmap.

The benefits of freemium:

• More active users: One of the biggest challenges that SaaS companies face is driving adoption of their product. And while some users can be enticed by a free trial period, there’s a subset of consumers who are just more likely to keep using the product if it’s free. Others won’t even sign up in the first place if there’s no free plan.

• More evangelists and a positive impact on your brand

• More user feedback

Making the decision

1) Does your paid plan have a gross margin of 80–90%?

If you have a lower gross margin — for example, because your product is not fully self-service, requires extensive customer support or is extremely costly in terms of tech infrastructure — freemium will probably not work for you.

2) Does your free plan attract the right audience?

If your free users are too different from your paying users, your free-to-paying conversion will be low — and you’ll risk developing your product for the wrong audience.

3) Is your product inherently viral?

If your answer is no, that doesn’t make it a complete no-go, but it does mean that it’s much less likely that freemium is right for you.

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🗞Dans l’actu

📱Monde des technologies

👉 Ce que les réseaux sociaux peuvent apprendre des lieux publics  (Casey Newton). 

Public spaces display a number of features that build healthier communities, according to researchers. “Humans have designed spaces for public life for millennia,” they write, “and there are lessons here that can be helpful for digital life.” Here’s a list (emphasis theirs). These spaces:

• Develop programming – social activities – that draw different groups in, without over-optimizing for any one group

• Offer visual cues as to what kinds of behavior are invited in the space

• Are designed to be physically accessible and attractive to many different populations

• Engage stewards, leaders, and maintainers who can do the labor of community-building 

• Are designed in partnership with the communities that use them.

👉 Checkout.com lève un demi-milliard de dollars  (The Information).

• Stripe competitor Checkout.com has raised $450 million in a round led by Tiger Global Management with participation from Greenoaks Capital, Coatue Management, DST Global and Insight Partners, according to Bloomberg.

• The financing values the London-based company at $15 billion, or triple its last valuation. 

🏥 Santé

👉 Arnaud Vaissié: “la santé devient une préoccupation majeure des entreprises”  (Le Figaro) 

• Arnaud Vaissié, PDG et cofondateur d’International SOS, leader mondial de la maîtrise des risques de santé et de sécurité à l’international, explique l’impact de la pandémie dans le monde professionnel. “Ce que le 11 septembre était à la sécurité, le Covid-19 l’est à la santé, mais avec une puissance démultipliée: avec ce virus, la santé devient une préoccupation majeure des États et des entreprises.” 

• “Il y a maintenant la nécessité de mettre en place une politique de santé qui va au-delà du concept assurantiel”. Ces questions de santé doivent être traitées “au plus haut niveau, par les CEO et les boards”. La figure de Chief Health Officer (CHO) apparaît. 

• “C’est un changement considérable. Dorénavant, les entreprises que nous accompagnons se soucient davantage des questions de bien-être des salariés, de prévention des maladies, d’organisation du travail optimale avec la disparition progressive de la frontière entre vie professionnelle et vie privée liée au télétravail.”

👉 Talkspace, le player américain de la thérapie en ligne, entre en bourse (Bloomberg) 

• The deal is worth $1.4 billion and will provide Talkspace with $250 million for investing in growth.

• Since it was founded in 2012, Talkspace has served more than 2 million people, and currently has 46,000 active members treated by about 2,600 providers in all 50 US states.

• Since the beginning of 2019, the number of Talkspace users covered by employers or health plans has grown from just 2 million people to more than 39 million today, showing increased coverage of telemental care.

• The company links patients with licensed therapists by video chat and text, allowing them to seek treatment from home.

💚 Alan

👉Comment concilier la croissance d’une entreprise et le bien-être des salariés (BSmart). J’étais ravi de participer à l’émission Smart@Work aux côtés de Xavier Laurent et Éric Albert pour discuter du management de demain et de nos Leadership Principles.

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C’est déjà fini. Bonne semaine et à vous de jouer maintenant ! Invitez vos amis à s’inscrire👇

Et écrivez-moi pour en parler, sur Linkedin ou sur Twitter. Les JCNews sont aussi disponibles sur le Blog Alan.