Learn to better communicate your value proposition to your prospective customers. This video explains the difference between the features, benefits, and value of a product.

This course will explain what it means to communicate in terms of the value your products and services bring to people's lives.

In this video, we will review the websites of a small business, a start-up, and a side hustle to see how they talk about the features, benefits, and values of their products or services.

• Do they lead with features?

• Or are they talking mostly about the benefits of their product?

• Are they doing a good job of conveying value?

Learn the basics of the customer buying funnel. I share a simple visual of the consumer buying funnel and discuss each step in the buying process.

This buyer's funnel is also sometimes referred to as the marketing funnel or sales funnel. For our purposes, we'll think of it in a customer-centric way. We call it the buying funnel because we want to empathize with what our customer is going through and how they feel at every stage of the process. That will help us know how to meet them where they are!

We'll talk about how the customer goes from not even knowing that your business or industry exists to becoming a loyal customer and every step in the process in between.

Learn what your customer is going through at the awareness phase, the evaluation phase, post-purchase phases and everything in-between!

The buying funnel will help improve your marketing, customer service and communications with customers.

In this video, you will learn how top companies market their business to people in different phases of the buying funnel.

We'll look at awareness ads that companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald's run online and in print.

I'll show you how Shopify invites customers to try their software for free to help encourage people in the consideration or intent phase to select Shopify as their platform.

I even show you the inside of the box from the Vornado fan I just bought with messages aimed at consumers like me, in the post-purchase phase.

You'll see how businesses communicate with customers differently depending on the stage of the buying funnel they think a customer is in.

These examples will help you to construct your own sales, communications, content marketing and advertising strategies to attract more customers to your business.

We dig into the popular (and false belief) that you should build your product without listening to your customers.

We start by evaluating Henry Ford's quote, "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

And asking the question... what really happened when Henry Ford stopped listening to customers?

The term, Product-Market Fit, is used to describe the degree to which a product or business satisfies strong market demand.

Quite simply, is your product a great fit for your market?

There are lots of products attempting to solve the problem(s) that your products or services do. But, which one is the best? Which one is the exact right fit for the segment of the market it is trying to satisfy? How could your product better serve your target customer or target market?

Getting your product to be the perfect fit for your customers' needs isn't easy. It often takes a lot of iteration. Then, just when you think you got it, time goes on and your product needs to evolve again.

The quest for product-market fit isn't just important. It is imperative for long term success.

What does product-market fit look like in real life?

We examine the product-market fit of three popular products.

1. Netflix subscription/streaming services

2. Google Search

3. Purina Dog Food

What does product-market fit look like in the real world?

This video discusses some strategies for achieving product-market fit for your business.

Key concepts include:

• Persona Mapping

• Industry/Product Analysis

• Iterative improvement

• How to know when you are on the right track to product-market fit?

Understanding the Price/Quality Matrix and where you stand.

Consumers will judge your product on two key dimensions:

• Price

• Perceived Quality

Where is your business? What about your competitor's business, products and services?

This video will introduce the concept that will help you find a firm grasp on the location of your business in the price-quality matrix.

Let's explore the three most common and successful pricing strategies. You have already encountered these pricing strategies as a consumer. You just never thought about it like this before. Understanding some of the most common pricing strategies will help you decide how to position your business and products for success.

The three pricing strategies we introduce in this lecture are:

• Luxury/Premium/Profit Strategy

• Product Quality Leader

• Economy/Market Penetration

• What are the pros and cons of each pricing model?

• How do you move your product between squares in the matrix?

• What are the pitfalls to watch out for when pricing your products or services?

Circuit City locations were all over the United States. It was a huge brand in the electronics and appliance retail vertical.

At its peak, Blockbuster employed almost 85,000 people and had close to 10,000 stores.

Now they are both out of business.

What happened?

In this video, we introduce the idea of a virtuous business cycle or lack thereof (vicious business cycle). It was these vicious cycles or lack of virtuous cycles that ultimately lead to the demise of both businesses.

Developing virtuous cycles in your business is imperative for achieving your business development goals. In this part of the business development course for small businesses we examine the idea of virtuous business cycles in more depth.

• What is a virtuous cycle in business?

• How did the lack of virtuous cycles hurt Circuit City and Blockbuster?

• What is Apple's virtuous cycle?

• What virtuous cycles do for a business.

Now that you understand what a virtuous business cycle is, we will provide business development tips for creating them for your business.

Furthermore, we will talk about ways to disrupt your competitor's virtuous cycles to help you grow, gain and maintain market share for your business.

I was first introduced to the OKR system by John Doerr, a former Intel executive, venture capitalist and advisor to Google in his book called Measure What Matters.

He outlines the revolutionary framework for goal setting that Google used to propel itself and its products to one of the most universally known and used companies in the world.

This video lecture introduces our business development students to this goal-setting framework. The goal is to learn this framework so you can apply it to your small business.

The Objectives and Key Results framework isn't just for big companies like Google and Intel. Google used the OKR framework when they were still just a small startup too!

We create a fictional business, Bill's Pizzeria, and use the OKR framework to help them achieve their goal of increasing table turnover in their restaurant.

With that objective in mind, we lay out the key results and cascading objectives for Bill, the owner and Susan, his restaurant's General Manager.

Let's see how OKR's help them both achieve their individual objectives and goals for the performance of the store and its staff.

Now that you understand what OKRs are and what the framework is designed to do, it is time to implement them into your business.

This video lecture offers students of this business development course tips on how to use the Objectives and Key Results framework in their own small business, start-up or side hustle.

Authors Neil C. Churchill and Virginia L. Lewis penned a great Harvard Business Review article about the 5 stages of small business growth.

These stages are important to understand if you want to make good decisions about what the important next steps are that will help your business grow.

This video will introduce the 5 stages of small business growth and talk a little bit about each one.

The five stages of small business growth are:

1. Existence

2. Survival

3. Success

4. Growth

5. Maturity

Join this lecture to begin familiarizing yourself with each stage.

Take a deeper dive into the Existence and Survival phases of small business growth.

We discuss key elements of these two stages that will help you make the best decisions to grow your business when you are at these points.

• What is the most important thing to do in the survival stage?

• Okay, your business exists, what now?

• What are the most important business development steps you should take at this point?

Congratulations! Your business is in the Success and/or Growth Stage!

What does that mean though?

What should you look out for?

How do you make sure your business keeps growing?

How do you know if you reached the success or growth stage?

We'll answer these questions as we dive into the specifics of the success and growth stages of small business growth.

The maturity stage of small business growth is the final stage in the process. When you make it to this point, congratulations! You've built a stable mature business.

There are still important things to consider and do for your business at the maturity stage. We discuss what the best things are to work on in a mature business because growing and developing never ends!

Thanks for joining me for this course on Business Development Principles for Small Businesses. I hope you enjoyed learning as much as I enjoyed sharing the information.

I wish you the best of luck with your small businesses, side hustle or startup as you grow and improve your business!

This video will mark the end of our course together.