Mentoring Assignment Two

Mentoring Assignment Two

Nicole Talerman

Dylan Stewart

Torrey Mayes

“By submitting this reflection, the members of our mentoring team affirm that we all participated in the meeting/call with our assigned mentor and we all participated in the creation of this reflection document.”

As the marketing manager at Sageworks Valuation Solution, our mentor, Colin Tierney has much experience with financing, working on go-to-market strategies, staying competitive, and building a team. Through his entrepreneurial roles in both well-established firms and start-ups, Colin has developed a complex understanding of these aspects of business and has provided us with incredible insights.

Throughout our conversation, Colin stressed that valuations are primarily a signaling tool for how board members and potential investors perceive a company. Colin talked about unicorn companies with billion-dollar valuations, and how they are growing in numbers. He is skeptical of many valuations, as they could be based on invalid assumptions, and not really signal the value of the actual product. Tierney talked about the difference between finance perspectives and accounting perspectives in valuation, as the finance perspective bases valuations off of rough estimates while the accounting perspective is more thorough, taking a retrospective look at historical financial situations of the company. These strategies can lead to radically different numbers, although neither perspective is right or wrong and both can be useful to show how to grow and understand the key drivers of a company. In conclusion, Tierney stressed that the market ultimately determines a company’s value and that valuations are generally fruitless, unless the company is being sold or raising money. Tierney also shared his experience of the budgeting process, and how employee’s perspectives and owner’s perspectives clash due to the fact that employees constantly want to spend more money and create reasons to get budgeted, while owners want to spend as little money as possible with the greatest return on investment.

As a marketing manager, Tierney has experience identifying customers in both Business-Business and Business-Consumer cases, and found that it was a similar process in both. In looking for potential customers, Tierney stated that it is not just important to know their basic demographics, but also to know what they like to do and find similar people in order to develop a consumer base. One of Tierney’s biggest marketing challenges has been finding out who his buyer is when introducing a completely new product. In his marketing strategies, Tierney segments his user base by different personas and customer types. He recounted working at Ralph Lauren where there were 5-10 different customer segments from middle-aged women to young men. Tierney does not have a lot of experience pricing products, but stated that pricing is particularly difficult when introducing a completely new product to the market. He stressed the importance of looking at comparisons, and stated that once a product is out there, it is very hard to increase price and easy to decrease it. In his experience with Sageworks, the software space is unique in that it is a B-B space that is not public, and their prices and competitor’s prices are not openly shared.

Understanding competition is critical for an organization, as it helps someone to understand what a product is worth and to articulate what the ROI is when looking to raise money. It is important to strategically position the product as more or less valuable than the competition, deciding if it is a mass-market or luxury item and evaluating your ability to convince a customer to make a purchase. He also stated that it is important to collect data on why a customer doesn’t make a purchase. Understanding competitors, how they price and build products, and what their strategy is, by using methods such as secret shoppers, can give a lot of information about your customers and potential business strategies.

In building a brand, Colin stressed the role of social media, and how it is different between the B-C and B-B spaces. He has found that in B-B, social media is more complex and harder to use. In a B-B space, building a cool, consumer-focused brand is unimportant, and instead, businesses try to curate content and promote the company as an expert in the field. He generally uses LinkedIn in his space, but follows his customers, who are accountants and bankers, wherever they interact. He likes to use social to identify the smartest people in his industry, drawing attention to his products, keeping them up to date on what he is doing, and using their credibility to influence customers and push them down the sales funnel.

Tierney believes that within an organization, everything comes down to the people. In Sageworks, he looks for smart people who know the industry really well and care about the product. He also stressed that culture is huge, and that more and more companies are thinking about values as a way to recruit and obtain employees to build a market. One of Tierney’s biggest challenges has been adapting to employees coming and going and teams shifting, especially in digital industries that are constantly changing. Speaking with Tierney was incredibly valuable in learning how to demystify ratcheted valuations, identify customers and properly promote products, stand out among competitors, and build a productive team and inclusive culture.

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