Week 5 – MBA6101 – Ascend Your Start-up

In Chapter 5 of Ascend Your Start-Up, Yu states that her life was one part luck, one part determination. While I can see how she concludes this, I am more aligned to Oprah Winfrey's supposition: “I believe luck is preparation meeting opportunity. If you hadn't been prepared when the opportunity came along, you wouldn't have been lucky.” So, life is a journey and there are thousands of decisions made in a lifetime. Each one forms the trajectory or arc of your story. Don't know something? Find someone or something (a book, an article, a podcast, a Google-search) to get to know what you don't know.

Yu repeats that sometimes you have to go backward to go forward. I think that she means we should pause, give due consideration, pivot--if need be--to stay on task, focused, driven. Repeatedly asking yourself "why?" will work to gut-check each decision. Does this act ladder up to the vision, the mission, the purpose of your business? What are your customer's telling you? Are you listening? How do you make an advocate of your customer? Yu posits that customers go through six stages in their [purchase] journey, the last of which is advocate. Here they are:

1. Evaluate: customer is doing research on the product(s) or service(s) that will address their need(s)
2. Invest: biz has the oppty to show how their solution solves their problem/need and outlines how you do it better thank or differently than your competitor does it so talk about how you've successfully delivered it to someone else
3. Deploy: how you onboard your customer ensures your customer understands the value they provide to your biz
4. Adopt: this is where your customer uses your product(s) or service(s)
5. Expand: how satisfied a customer is with your product or service can be inferred by how much they expand their footprint with you--find out what that trigger is and apply some predictive modeling for other customers to ensure they get the same positive experience as other customers
6. Advocate: get customer feedback, keep a loop that goes back to product or service group in your organization, get positive reviews on your website, to build on word-of-mouth

Yu stresses the importance of the customer experience, as a make or break endeavor for businesses. This is where data comes in. Analyze what you know about customer behaviors. Glean insights and take action, making adjustments as necessary to stay relevant, engaged, and constantly innovating.

The responsibility to manage the customer experience starts at the top and includes the Board, C-Suite, Executive Leadership, all the way down the rungs of an organization's ladder to the frontlines. It is imperative to ensure the frontline knows the value the organization places on them being the face of the brand.