Intelligent Growth

2023 is ending in a few weeks. Name the best person you met this year. Which ones were truly strategic to your personal/professional growth and success? Which relationships didn’t turn out quite as impactful as you had hoped, and which relationships did you neglect? Which relationships should you deprioritize in the new year, so you can prioritize investing in others?

Year-end is an excellent time for every professional to evaluate and refresh their business relationships. This house cleaning can ensure that your strategic priorities enter the new year with strong, productive, and strategically aligned relationships. Conducting this year-end business relationship house cleaning not only helps in maintaining healthy relationships but also in aligning your relationship management strategies with your overall business goals. It’s a proactive approach that sets a positive tone for the new year and lays the groundwork for continued success.

Join David Nour and Jenn Cordz for the next episode of Intelligent Growth LIVE as they discuss year-end business relationship house cleaning today, Tuesday, 5-Dec, at Noon ET LIVE.

Most leaders want their teams to set clear targets, measure progress, align efforts across different groups or departments, motivate employees, and ultimately drive performance and continuous improvement. What if organizations could execute their strategy more effectively by clarifying what success looks like and how it can be achieved? That’s where we believe OKRs, NPS, and FAST Goals come in - they create accountability at every level of the organization. From Alignment and focus to measurement and tracking, motivation and engagement, strategic planning, continuous improvements, and sustaining a culture of performance, these tools are often misunderstood rather than implemented as enablers and empowering of accountability.

Join Avnir leaders Jenn Cordz and David Nour on the next episode of the Intelligent Growth LIVE, today at Noon ET, as they discuss OKRs, NPS, and FAST Goals - The Power of Accountability.

As we approach year-end and are in the critical planning phase for 2024, ensuring your Revenue Operations (RevOps) strategy is integrated and aligned to the business outcomes is a strategic imperative. Today, Avnir leader, Jenn Cordz, will discuss the top 10 warning signs that are key indicators your strategy is off course. Addressing these signs is pivotal for sustainable growth, profitability, and long-term success.

We will explore the nuances of declining revenue growth, misaligned KPIs, inconsistent sales and marketing synergy, high customer churn, inefficient lead management, low sales conversion rates, missed revenue targets, high Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC), the absence of data-driven decision-making, and limited scalability. Each warning sign is dissected, providing valuable insights for senior executives to recognize gaps in their current strategies.

Join us today at Noon ET as I discuss actionable strategies to realign your RevOps approach, ensuring it becomes a catalyst for growth, customer satisfaction, and enhanced operational efficiency.

Customer satisfaction and obsession are crucial concepts in customer service and experience, but they differ in depth, focus, and implications for every organization. The tone is always set from the top, by the thoughts, actions, words, and behaviors - as servant leaders - in several highly differentiated areas: defining the team or organization’s purpose, the scope of how the organization will meet its customers, the proactivity, longevity, and consistency of the experiences the organization creates for its customers. Leaders who create a culture of experimentation toward real innovation (vs. innovation theater) get beyond departmental boundaries to create tangible outcomes and impact. They go beyond exchanging Relationship Currency to nurture Reputation Capital and Professional Net Worth for individuals, teams, and the organization.

Join Avnir leaders David Nour and Jenn Cordz for the next episode of Intelligent Growth LIVE today at Noon ET as they discuss Customer Centricity - Beyond Satisfaction to an Obsession.

It’s been said that when the rate of change outside the organization is faster than within it, the organization is in trouble. The same notion could be said about our skills, knowledge, and behaviors, particularly in a world where business models, tech innovations, and the evolution of value creation are accelerating at a record pace. So, what are the eight foundational skills for every professional to master? How about specific skills we all need to unlearn and relearn to remain relevant?

You may notice a new brand of the Intelligent Growth livestream/podcast today - but it’s not just a new banner. It’s the evolution of the vision to democratize Relationship Economics - what the Nour Group has focused on creating, advocating, training, and implementing in enterprises for the past two decades. Most who hear about digital transformation are perplexed by its value creation. The Nour Group’s digital transformation to Avnir is a new chapter in both digitizing a proven process and digitalizing how individuals, teams, and organizations organize, activate, and monetize their relationships.

Join Avnir leaders Jenn Cordz and David Nour as they discuss a new chapter of activating dark relationship value. Today at Noon ET. Join the Avnir Power Users and Design Partners program at Avnir.com. Learn more about the Avnir evolution at Avnir.com/Resources.

Change management is the structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired (and ideally profoundly better) future state. Lasting change management requires a consistent and strategic effort, fraught with challenges such as cultural resistance to change, lack of a clear vision as to why we should change, and competing priorities, to name a few.

Sustainable change management plays a pivotal role in driving intelligent enterprise growth. As organizations evolve and expand, they often undergo significant changes in processes, structures, technologies, and cultures. While the ultimate goal is growth and development, the journey takes on even greater complexities - from cultural consistency across marketing, sales, and customer success to maintaining agility, tech integration, and the all-crucial customer focus.

Ask any leader, and they’ll profess that data really is the new renewable energy. They aspire to create an organizational philosophy emphasizing the role of data in their decision-making processes.

Data maturity in every organization does not occur overnight, and in the journey to creating a data-driven culture, decisions are based on data and analysis rather than intuition or experience alone. Data accessibility, quality, accuracy, the team’s analytical skills, decision-making incentives (and consequences in learning moments), collaboration with data, data security, privacy posture, and continuous learning while staying focused on the desired strategic outcomes are all important considerations.

In challenging economic times, astute and intelligent M&A opportunities arise. From digital transformation to deal volume, distressed deals as companies restructure, those who can acquire without financing, to stakeholder activism, and small to midsize deals strengthening, key trends continue to shape the M&A landscape.

One underlying challenge with many M&A events is each organization’s respective tech stack. From where they’re most often ignored to timing/unique phases of the M&A process where the tech stack should be particularly highlighted, three (3) unique perspectives emerge for every leader’s consideration.

Join Nour Group partners Jenn Cordz and David Nour as they discuss the biggest mistakes many leaders and their organizations make in their acquisition journey regarding the tech stack. Today, 26 September, at Noon ET. Join us in the Nour Forum (NourGroup.com/Forum) for the list of questions we’ll discuss and a summary of the key insights.

Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and Buyer Personas offer strategic value in the planning and execution of marketing strategies, sales activities, and customer engagement. Although commonly understood, strategic priorities to focus on limited resources, improve product development, enhance messaging and positioning, accelerate sales, and amplify customer retention are often missed opportunities in many organizations. Furthermore, Ideal Relationship Profiles (IRPs) and Needs-Based Segmentation continue to elude even the most astute teams.

Join Nour Group partners Jenn Cordz and David Nour on Tues, Sept. 19 at Noon ET as they discuss the importance of ICPs, Personas, Ideal Relationship Profiles, and Needs-Based Segmentation, how they impact sales motions, reporting, and executive dashboards toward intelligent and profitable enterprise growth.

Tech bloat refers to the excessive and often unnecessary accumulation of technology assets, software, tools, or features in an organization. It can lead to inefficiencies, increased costs and can be detrimental to productivity. Yet, it’s omnipresent in every organization we meet. Good people with good intentions add point solutions gradually over time, facilitated by several factors such as decentralized decision-making, rapid tech changes, M&A, FOMO, and vendor influences to name a few. Getting beyond denial is the first phase of recovery for most revenue leaders, followed by an independent audit of your processes, capabilities, and tech stack. In the medium- and longer-term, better tech governance, zero-based budgeting that drives the power of deduction, and better communication across functional leadership teams become the cultural necessities to avoid future tech bloats.

How do some organizations struggle, reduce staff, and cut everything from training and development to travel, entertainment, and marketing amid continued uncertainty, and others seem to thrive? What sets one group of revenue leaders (marketing, sales, and customer success) in their alignment, support of one another, and a seamless handoff between their motions to delight customers apart from their peers? How does a 35-year-old startup suddenly find and hit its stride in market traction and revenue growth?

Join Nour Group partners Jenn Cordz and David Nour for the next episode of Intelligent Growth LIVE today, Tuesday, 5 September, at Noon ET, as they welcome long-time friend and client Steve Hardy, Prophix CMO. The conversation will focus on Steve’s CMO journey in joining Prophix, his relationship with his C-Suite peers, his search for exceptional talent, ABX, Buyer Personas, and the impact of Generative AI on the marketing function.

Ask many leaders, and they'll attest that their organization is often data-rich and actionable insight-poor. Rank and file often complain about the lack of transparency or shared insights from the available data within a function or across the entire organization.
Data storytelling combines the statistical rigor of data analytics with the narrative engagement of storytelling. It is critical in making data understandable, actionable, and impactful. From improved decision-making and accessibility to increased engagement, emotional impact, clarity, and focus, data storytelling transforms data into a narrative various stakeholders can understand, believe in, and support.

The continued market uncertainties are creating a slew of challenges and opportunities for many leaders and their organizations. Based on our survey of global clients, the good news is that an estimated 48 percent are hitting their revised revenue goals for the year. 22 percent of this group is actually outpacing their ’22 targets, predominately in industrial manufacturing and financial services. Unfortunately, the bad news is that 58 percent are missing their opportunity pipeline, with 85 percent sharing that their average sales cycles have dramatically slowed. More importantly, 42 percent are missing even adjusted revenue targets. With fewer at-bats, every hybrid relationship touch point - physical/in-person, virtual/digital, and global matters more than ever. Cutting marketing budgets will certainly bring future challenges in revenue predictability, and recovery will remain sluggish for many companies.

What are the critical differences between an enterprise revenue operations (RevOps) environment vs. hyper-growth or even mid-market companies? Beyond BU complexities, independent agendas, and an overcomplicated tech stack, a solid foundation is often missing. So, what’s the answer? “Let’s hire a VP of Ops” who is often charged with parting the sea! This incredibly elusive role comprised of a multitude of demanding technical skills, functional knowledge, and diplomatic behaviors is not setup to succeed due to governance, team, and tech stack challenges. This is exactly why an independent perspective is critical as a baseline of what they’re walking into and how to prioritize their lowest hanging value-enabling fruits. Ultimately, only a cultural shift toward a holistic 360-degree view of every customer will deliver the real strategic value of RevOps to every enterprise.

What do the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems, the neural network of an organization, vulnerability as the currency of trust, the YMCA Effect, and the hyper linear scale of economic activity and connections have in common? They're the topic of the next Intelligent Growth on the Neuroscience of Relationships and Physical Proximity with Clark Dean, Executive Managing Director, Partner, and Board Member at Transwestern.
As more leaders struggle to nurture their culture through the lingering effects of remote work, research is showing that physical proximity - you and your teams working, building, and nurturing internal company relationships - is critical to creating a high-performing environment.

Our team has analyzed over 200 Revenue Operations (RevOps) job descriptions on LinkedIn. From hands-on, highly tactical requests for help (think Hubspot Admin) to what should ideally be a strategic role such as a Director or VP of RevOps, most outline a traditional job description. RevOps proficiency exists at the intersection of strategically understanding the business outcomes, combined with marketing, sales, and customer success motions, process optimization to reduce redundancies/functional overlaps, and the tech skills to connect often disparate functional platforms. Additionally, you need business acumen to measure the right KPIs, data analytics, and visualization skills to create said metrics in consumable reports and dashboards, and the ability to articulate not just descriptively where an organization is on a RevOps maturity spectrum but prescriptively where the leadership should double down in their investments of time, effort, and resources. In essence, what many organizations seek in a single role is a Unicorn!

We believe there is a better way: Jobs to be Done! In this approach, you align talent to value creation and de-risk critical tasks RevOps must deliver to create enterprise value. And many leaders who continue to search month-after-month, or go through a merry-go-round of candidates, contractors, and short-term employees, should be more open to the Hollywood Talent Model.

M&A, although appealing in its inorganic accelerant of enterprise growth, involves potentially significant digital and relational pitfalls.

From platform and ecosystem integrations to data consolidation and maturity elevation, systems and cultural compatibilities, cybersecurity and trust risks, competency and capabilities gaps, legacy vs. forward digital and relationship opportunities, business continuity, and regulatory compliance are just a few pitfalls for astute leaders and their teams to consider.

In the post-pandemic world, micro-events have emerged as a dynamic and effective tool to engage and influence your audience, foster meaningful connections, and propel your business forward. By offering a range of smaller experiences, from virtual gatherings and targeted workshops to interactive webinars, every team has an immense potential to enhance their brand awareness, increase customer loyalty, and skyrocket conversion rates. With their ability to provide personalized and immersive experiences, micro-events empower businesses to create lasting impressions and drive valuable engagement with their audience. Join Nour Group partners David Nour and Jenn Cordz today, Tuesday, 18 July, at Noon ET LIVE on YouTube (links on other platforms) as they discuss micro-events as a strategic enabler of your GTM strategy.

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) represent a significant strategy for growth and diversification for many companies, though the outcomes can be both positive and negative based on how the process is managed. From strategic fit and cultural integration, including retention of key talent, to post-merger integration, communication, technology integration and lasting change management, the journey is fraught with risk.

This risk is greatly amplified when it comes to intelligent and profitable growth. Although increasing market share and reducing cost redundancies often top the list, integration costs and distractions from the core business are seldom sufficiently and thoroughly debated.

Join Nour Group partners David Nour and Jenn Cordz tomorrow, Tuesday, 27 June at Noon ET on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter channels as they discuss M&A challenges and opportunities in fueling profitable growth.

Effective ecosystem strategies can deliver valuable near-term benefits as well as generate long-term growth and resilience. Leaders are finding significant opportunities to outperform their competitive peers, using this countercyclical strategy to combat continued uncertainties and disruptions and lower risk to fuel growth. The key is to create an interconnected set of services to fulfill a variety of needs in a highly integrated experience.

Generating non-core revenue from your ecosystem isn’t easy. But the potential opportunities are huge - an estimated $100 trillion value pool by 2030 or 1/3 of the world’s total sales output. And delighted customers are more than willing to use ecosystem services from a trusted incumbent. So, where do you begin, and what are the specific actions to capture meaningful business value?

Join Nour Group partners David Nour and Jenn Cordz today, Tuesday, 20 June, at Noon ET LIVE on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter channels as they discuss Ecosystem Building as a Strategy to Combat Downturns and Disruptions.

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is designed to break down silos between sales, marketing, and customer success teams, aligning them to drive intelligent and profitable growth. This holistic approach ensures smoother processes, efficient collaboration, and greater visibility across the revenue-generating units of the business.

So, where should RevOps be structured within the organization? Who and what capabilities should encompass the RevOps team? And what should be the expected enterprise value creation or impact from the RevOps function?

Join Nour Group partners Jenn Cordz and David Nour today, Tuesday, May 30th, at Noon ET LIVE on Nour Group’s LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter channels as they discuss RevOps Governance, Team, and Impact.

In challenging economic times, most organizations tighten their spend and focus the aperture of their investments on the greatest return on investments. RevOps investments are critical in optimizing the organization's go-to-market strategy. But at what cost? And how can every CRO, CMO, and CEO zero base everything, including how they think about and implement cost savings in their RevOps initiatives?
From total spend to comparative spend based on the company's size and stage of maturity to seat utilization and tech stack purpose, key areas of every RevOps could benefit from a healthy discussion. Our research and RevOps X-Ray analysis show that significant functional overlap exists in many RevOps tech stacks, percentages of use are lower than expected, and various departments duplicate processes and tools.
Furthermore, longtail impacts (vs. ad-hoc functional needs), over-engineered integrations, data silos (the result of under-engineered integration misses), and qualitative and quantitative discussions are critical in every ROI consideration.
Join Nour Group partners Jenn Cordz and David Nour as they discuss the final episode in the mini-series Strategic Value of RevOps: Spend & ROI. Today, Tuesday, 4 April, at Noon ET on Nour Group's LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter accounts.

In challenging economic times, most organizations tighten their spend and focus the aperture of their investments on the greatest return on investments. RevOps investments are critical in optimizing the organization's go-to-market strategy. But at what cost? And how can every CRO, CMO, and CEO zero base everything, including how they think about and implement cost savings in their RevOps initiatives?

From total spend to comparative spend based on the company's size and stage of maturity to seat utilization and tech stack purpose, key areas of every RevOps could benefit from a healthy discussion. Our research and RevOps X-Ray analysis show that significant functional overlap exists in many RevOps tech stacks, percentages of use are lower than expected, and various departments duplicate processes and tools.

Furthermore, longtail impacts (vs. ad-hoc functional needs), over-engineered integrations, data silos (the result of under-engineered integration misses), and qualitative and quantitative discussions are critical in every ROI consideration.

Join Nour Group partners Jenn Cordz and David Nour as they discuss the final episode in the mini-series Strategic Value of RevOps: Spend & ROI. Today, Tuesday, 4 April, at Noon ET on Nour Group's LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter accounts.

Most of us believe that driving our cars without a dashboard would be silly, if not dangerous. Yet, many enterprise growth strategies need help to pinpoint critical insights and corresponding levers to manipulate in the expansion, integration, optimization, or transformation of their marketing, sales, and customer success efforts. In essence, their RevOps is flying blindly!

From product-market fit to go-to-market fit and the eventual scale of your revenue growth, there is a definite art and science to scaling. Good intended functional areas aim to measure their own progress, regrettably, at the cost of missing the bigger, more holistic picture. Too many leaders are concerned with attribution yet lose sight of why (or why not) certain marketing, sales, or customer success motions fall short.

Join Nour Group partners Jenn Cordz and David Nour as they discuss the next episode in the Strategic Value of RevOps: Dashboards mini-series. Today, Tuesday, 28 March, at Noon ET on Nour Group's LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter accounts. Nour will be in the Nour Forum right after at 1 PM ET to share actionable insights - join us at NourGroup.com/Forum.

If you watch the original Star Wars episodes 4-5-6, you'll get to know Luke Skywalker. Watch all three, and you'll go considerably deeper into the character, his trial and tribulations, and how wisdom impacts his journey to become a Jedi Master.

In your work (and life), similarly, you can read any of the David Nour books - Relationship Economics, Co-Create, and Curve Benders, and get great insights on business relationships, unique value-creation, and the future of work. So, how are they different, and what is the individual, team, and organizational transformation journey that can be extracted from all three?

Join Nour Group partners Jenn Cordz and David Nour to discuss the Star Wars Trilogy of RE, CC, and CB and transformation insights you can count on TODAY, Tuesday, 7 March, at Noon ET - LIVE on Nour Group Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter.

How would you describe one of your favorite brands? Why or how have you created an affinity for this brand? Regarding professional relationships and enterprise growth, our research highlights a spectrum of familiarity with individual brands. Some we outright reject; others we feel rather neutral about. Others, yet we prefer or even insist on.

In business relationships, you should aim to build a preference for your technical competencies and an insistence on the manner in which you build strategic relationships. Always.

Join Nour Group partners Jenn Cordz and David Nour, Today, Tuesday, 21 February, as they discuss Your Relationship Brand Familiarity LIVE at Noon ET

In a thriving economy, or a declining one, one attribute consistently sets high-performing teams apart from dysfunctional ones: the quality of their relationships. Call it "having each other's back," "getting on the same page," or "a team of rock stars;" the attributes of individuals, teams, and the organization, we've found are very consistent.

What if there was a roadmap for your to measure and elevate your culture to a high level of relationship-centricity?

Join Nour Group partners Jenn Cordz and David Nour for the next episode of Intelligent Growth LIVE as they unpack the Relationship-Centric Blueprint for High-Performing Teams from David Nour's forthcoming Relationship Economics, 3rd Edition book, available for preorders now. Tuesday, Jan. 31, Noon ET - LIVE on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.