Introducing the external-internal ratio

If you've been reading earlier entries in the Tim Callan on Marketing and Technology blog, you've seen that I tend to invent these frameworks to aid thinking about how and what to do in business.  That's what the baskets-versus-fruit parable is.  That's what the five qualities of successful experimental marketing programs are.  That's what the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Marketing Departments are.  I have lots of them.  Here's a simpler one that's a little quicker to explain, but still very useful in thinking about how you allocate your resources, time, or attention.

The external-internal ratio is a simple method of thinking about how you allocate your focus.  The basic idea is that if you're in any kind of marketing, sales, or customer service role, you want to maximize the percentage of your time and effort that directly influences people outside the company.  Better to spend an hour working on web copy than an hour working on a memo for your VP.  Better to drive out and visit a large account than spend a morning in a cross-functional meeting.  Better to focus on influencing a journalist who covers your beat than a manager in another department.

If you've taken any Pragmatic Marketing courses you're probably familiar with the term NIHITO.

NIHITO:  Nothing important happens in the office.

That's a variation on the same idea.  A bit of an overstatement, perhaps, but it makes the point.

Obviously it wouldn't make sense to be purely external facing.  For one thing, oftentimes we can use internal communications, meetings, and influence directly in the service of better external facing activities.  But with a little common sense the external-internal ratio still applies.  Building a slide deck that teaches your creative agency how to communicate better with your customers is much more external than building a slide deck explaining the business to the CFO, at least in most organizations.  Interacting with the sales team or the customer support team oftentimes counts as a highly external-facing task because these individuals are either passing on information about the market or learning ways of becoming more effective in dealing with the market.

I challenge myself and my team to be as external facing as we conceivably can.  Do you have to have this meeting?  Can we make this meeting shorter?  Do all these people have to be here?  Are you spending a lot of time carefully crafting e-mails when you could just give it to me unadorned?  Are you making fancy presentations when you could just be sharing a few facts?  I also try to walk the walk by being a manager who doesn't require lots of internal management.  I encourage those around me to be the same way.

How I got involved in user experience design

For my entire career as a software and internet product manager and product marketer, I've been a strong proponent for focus on optimizing the user experience.  Here's the story of how it all began.

I majored in English.  My thinking at the time (which turned out to be valid, by the way) was that most people are in jobs that you can't major in, implying that most people are doing something other than their major in college.  So while many of my friends were choosing to major in organic chemistry or electrical engineering, I instead spent four years of my life on something I absolutely loved.

Coming out of college I did have the practical problem of getting a job.  I asked myself, "What salable skills do you have, Tim Callan?"  One obvious answer was writing.  So I hunted around for writing jobs, and eventually I went to work for a small Windows ISV as the documentation department.

My first job was to create all documentation for upcoming product releases.  That meant writing and layout for manuals and quick start guides and creating help systems.  So I had to sit down and explain how to use our powerful but complex products.  Complex and too often counterintuitive.  I found myself writing long explanations to make sense of obscure functions.  I found myself going to great pains to emphasize or highlight a few key product points that would prevent people from getting lost in the weeds of the product's functionality.  I found myself patiently articulating how a certain function actually behaved, as opposed to how you'd expect it to behave.

Let me give you a simple example.  Our flagship product had a calendaring function and one of the things you could do was set alarms that would go off at specific times.  It happens that there were no concepts of noon and midnight in this product.  Rather there were 12:00 am and 12:00 pm.  Now, it wasn't obvious to me which of these meant noon and which meant midnight.  I mentioned this fact to the VP of development, who said, "12:00 am is midnight, of course."  Then I mentioned it to the VP of marketing, who said, "Everybody knows that 12:00 am is noon."  Or vice versa.  I can't really remember, but then that's the point.

I took a quick survey of the employees in our twenty-person company and determined that roughly 50% of us felt that 12:00 am was noon, and 50% felt it was midnight.  In the intervening years I've discussed this topic with plenty of other people, and I can confidently say that there exists no consensus on this matter in our culture.  That make sense, of course, because 12:00 am and 12:00 pm are nonsense words.  The true, meaningful words are noon and midnight.

But this product had an expectation for what these terms meant.  You could type in an alert for 12:00 am (or 12:00 pm) on a certain day, and the program would accept it.  And then somewhere along the line, the alert would go.  But according to my quick and dirty research, 50% of the time this alert would go off at midnight, therefore failing in its function to let you know that it was time for your noon appointment.

It was easy enough to determine which was which.  At 11:55 one day I set a pair of alerts called A and P, set for 12:00 am and 12:00 pm, respectively.  One or the other popped up five minutes later and I wrote that fact in big bold letters in the manual in the hopes that users would see it and notice.  But that seems a backward approach, now doesn't it?  A better approach would be for the machines to work the way the humans expect them to.

That's one pithy example, but this kind of thing was going on all the time.  I had become familiar in college with a concept in psychology they called human factors, and right around this time the software development community was rediscovering it under the name usability.  So I appointed myself usability manager and started proposing how to change the product to be more intuitive to human beings.  I did on-the-cheap testing by walking around with a yellow pad and watching people perform tasks in the product.  As the company grew I developed a department under me and eventually got to the point where I had a full time interface designer working for me.  He was much better at it than I had been.

During that time I postulated Tim Rules of Human-Machine Interactions, which state,

1. Machines are here to serve humans and not the other way around.
2. If humans expect a machine to behave in a certain way, and it behaves differently, then the machine is always wrong.
3. Machines that defy the expectations of the target user are misdesigned, even if the actual creator understands how to use the machine.
4. To the extent it is possible, it is more efficient to create a machine that works as target users expect it to than to educate target users to change their behavior.

In the intervening twenty years usability became user interface and then user experience.  The tools got more sophisticated, with multivariate testing and heat mapping and follow-home studies and discreet choice analysis and so many others.  But these four rules have always served me.  My conviction in them has not wavered, and I continue to use them to this day.

What not to say: Internal customer

Oftentimes business speak has the primary harm of being obfuscatory or simply silly - "I reached out across the cross functional matrix to create alignment of goals and synergies" rather than "I cooperated" - but sometimes there are bizspeak terms that are downright detrimental to organizational performance because they mislead or force the wrong behaviors.  One of those terms is internal customer.

In case you're lucky enough not to be familiar with this maddening phrase, internal customer means the employee or group of employees who will directly benefit from the work you do at the firm.  There is nothing inherently wrong with having a term to describe this relationship, but in practice it's a highly loaded term that I've only seen misused.  The problem is customer.  Customers are, of course, god to any company.  Sam Walton famously said,

There is only one boss.  The customer.  And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.

I like that sentiment a lot, as do many people in successful companies.  And as a result this word customer becomes incredibly powerful.  The customer is always right.  It's what the customer wants.  Customers first.

But the phrase internal customer is a perversion of this powerful positive sentiment.  Customers by definition are not internal.  Internal people are part of our team and must all band together to delight the customers.  Customers are not part of our team and expect to be delighted, and if they're not, they'll leave us for someone else who does delight them.  The customer does not expect to sublimate her desires to anyone else's.  Internal people, on the other hand, don't have the privilege of expecting to be delighted and must constantly sublimate their desires to those of the customer.

At its best this phrase is misused by good-hearted people who accidentally credit too much importance to the wrong things.  At its worst, it is a deliberate manipulation pulled out by scheming people who seek to advance their own agendas at the expense of the company's greater good.  These people know how powerful the word customer is and know that they can create an environment where it is politically impossible to say no to them, and they do it by confusing themselves with actual customers.

In organizations I run, I ban the phrase internal customer.  There is no such thing.  If you say that phrase, I won't hear it.  My simple rule of thumb goes as follows.

If the party in question receives compensation from the company in return for goods or services rendered, it is not a customer.

Employees get paychecks and bonuses and stock options and health care and whatnot.  They're not customers.  Agencies and printers and vendors are not customers.  The people you rent your office space from are not customers.  Contractors are not customers.  Advertising sales reps are not customers.  That guy who comes and fills the vending machines in the break room is not a customer.

Resellers are not simple customers, since they make money selling our products, but they're not the same as pure insiders either, since they may be able to drop us and resell our competitors instead.  In other words, some days they're customers and some days they're not.

Now there are plenty of outsiders that are in no way customers or even prospective customers.  That's okay.  We don't tend to confuse them for customers, and they don't tend to pull power plays in meetings where multiple VPs are present.  So we can be less concerned about them.

Also be aware that the same company can be a customer and not a customer at the same time, depending on where in the organization you're interacting and what you're doing.  If the guy who fills the vending machines works for Frito-Lay, and if Frito-Lay is a major purchaser of your IT solutions, he still is not a customer, even though someone else at Frito-Lay is.  There are very occasional instances where the same individual sits in both roles, usually near the top of the organization, and we have to be cognizant of them, but that's pretty rare and usually obvious when it happens.

So does that mean this phrase is always unambiguously evil under all circumstances?  I suppose if you're in a purely internal function like IT or HR or facilities and you never, ever do anything that could directly affect an actual customer, then I suppose it's an okay phrase so long as it's confined to discussions that exist entirely inside that sandbox.  But if you're in sales, marketing, customer service, engineering, legal, finance, or senior management, forget about it.  You need to keep clarity on who is the customer and who is not.  For anyone in any of those roles, forget the term internal customer.  It'll only do you harm.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Marketing Departments

Marketing programs cover a lot of ground.  These programs are widely variable in such qualities as:

• Expense range
• Time to execution
• Labor intensiveness
• Predictability
• Ability to be tied to ROI
• Skill set required
• And many more.

It can get pretty complex.  Therefore to facilitate planning and organization of our thinking about marketing programs, I use the framework I call the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Marketing Departments.  This framework captures and organizes the most basic marketing program types in use by high tech companies today.  It's meant to be an aid to thinking, not a proscriptive, dogmatic requirements document.  In other words, it may be that for the specifics of your marketing program you choose not to do one or more of these habits (or that your business has something special that doesn't sit on this list).  However, the bulk of high tech companies are covering this entire framework and doing little that falls outside it.  Therefore, it's a good tool for anyone who is creating a marketing plan or who is thinking critically about the program mix with an eye to improving it.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Marketing Departments are:

1. Advertising
2. Direct mail
3. Events
4. Public relations
5. Web
6. Collateral and sales tools
7. Channel marketing

Not necessarily in that order, depending on the specifics of your business.   I'm expecting to get into a great deal more depth on all seven of these topics in the months and years to come, but for today I'll just define the categories.

Advertising.  Advertising includes all paid placements for your marketing messages in media or venues that someone else controls.  Advertising can be purely direct-driven, with a call to action that may even be asking for a sale, or purely brand-driven, or anything in between.  Advertising includes print, online, broadcast, outdoor, in-product, or others.  If you have a newsletter and I buy a blurb at the bottom of it, that's advertising.  If I sponsor Masterpiece Theater on the local PBS station and I get a five-second bumper before the show, that's advertising.  If I negotiate with a software vendor to build a link into its product that promotes my after-market add-on, that's advertising.

Direct mail.  Direct mail is any marketing program whereby I push my message out in mass to targeted lists that meet specific criteria I set out.  Direct mail can be physical "junk" mail, or direct e-mail, or communications using other mechanisms such as RSS subscriber lists.  Most direct mail is call-to-action oriented and intended to drive ROI, but that's an accident of what direct mail tends to be good at, not a requirement of the program type.  If you send renewal notices by e-mail to your service subscribers, that's direct mail.  If you send gift baskets to your large accounts every holiday season with no call to action at all, that's also direct mail.

Events.  Events are timely.  Events are run by the company or its partner during a specific time period for a specific target audience with a specific end in mind.  Events tend to be a little less direct-response oriented, but they don't need to be.  Events include trade shows, webinars, limited-time feel-good offers, and parties.  If you get a booth at CES, that's an event.  If you create and run your own trade show, that's an event.  If you take customers or prospects out to a hockey game, that's an event.

Public relations.  Most marketing programs are what we call controlled communications, meaning the company chooses exactly what will be said.  If you create an ad or make booth signage or write a sales script, that's a controlled communication.  Public relations encompasses all activities seeking to influence uncontrolled communications that are generally visible to the interested public.  Public relations includes press relations, investor relations, analyst relations, social marketing, and word-of-mouth marketing.  If you do a press tour and call on the New York Times, that's public relations.  If you run a Twitter feed, that's public relations.  If you comment on someone's blog, that's public relations, too.

Note that I have a strong personal habit of using the abbreviation PR.  In the high tech marketing world PR can sometimes mean public relations in the broad sense and sometimes mean press relations in the narrow sense.  I, too, use it contextually.  I'll be sensitive to being clear about which usage I mean at which time.

Web.  At this late date in history all technology sold to the public depends on the web, at least for distribution of marketing messages and typically for lead generation, support, and often actual order taking and fulfillment.  Web includes static site content, knowledge bases, SEO/SEM, and web analytics.  Companies can have multiple sites based on different geographies, brands, customer bases, and uses of the site.

Collateral and sales tools.  These are the marketing assets you create, either for direct customer consumption or to enable your sales team.  Data sheets, white papers, slide decks, and videos are all collateral or sales tools.  ROI calculators and product selection wizards are sales tools.  But so is a sales script or a few bullets or a key stats document.  Sales tools and collateral don't have to be fancy.  They just have to be effective.

Oftentimes I and others refer to the deliverables in this category as assets.

Channel marketing.  Channel marketing refers to a your reseller channel, if you have one.  Channel marketing can encompass all of the above categories.  In other words, you may need assets for your channel or a web site for them or you may direct market to your channel.  What's specific to this category is that it doesn't encompass programs aimed at the end customer.  Rather, channel marketing is aimed at your resellers and seeks to make them more effective.  Sales training modules for your own team are sales tools, but the same modules for your resellers are channel marketing.

Introducing BOOK GANG

Until a week ago I was Vice President of Marketing for VeriSign's Trust Services (SSL) business, recently acquired by Symantec.  I was with the company for almost seven years and built my department from nothing to the point where there were twenty people under me.  I am a big believer in investing in people to grow them and improve the value they have for the company.

To help the marketing staff continue to learn and improve, one thing I did was to create BOOK GANG.  BOOK GANG stands for Business Optimization Oriented Knowledge Gatherers Acquiring Necessary Grokitude, and it was a voluntary book club consisting of VeriSign marketing employees who wanted to increase their marketing and business skill set.  Each month we'd choose a book and read it, and then BOOK GANG would assemble for lunch on a scheduled day to discuss the book and how it applied to our own business.  At the end of the meeting we would choose the next month's book.

I covered the books and the lunch from my budget.  Everyone else's part of the deal was to read the book (I read them also).  Any time prior to purchasing the books a participant could drop out for that month without penalty, but if you don't get two of the books read, you're kicked out of BOOK GANG.

I liked it a lot as a program.  It was a very inexpensive way to improve our employee assets and to give us a common vocabulary and framework that we could use to think about relevent marketing programs for our own business.  It showed the employees that the company wanted them to succeed.  It gave them something to belong to and deepened relationships between people who otherwise wouldn't work with each other that much.  It was fun.  Wherever I land in my career, I'll continue to invest in programs of this sort.

BOOK GANG continues without me.  I won't be a participant moving forward, but I'll try to pull some of the old BOOK GANG books off my shelf and write a bit about them.

The five qualities of successful experimental marketing programs

In the high technology space marketers often find themselves attempting to develop new marketing and sales models.  Maybe you're going after a new segment or offering a new product.  Oftentimes the mix of marketing and sales activities you use for your established products and customer bases are not successful with these new initiatives, even if the product itself is solid and the customer need real.

Under these circumstances marketing and sales leadership find themselves in the mode of discovering a business model rather than executing a business model.  In other words, the point of marketing and sales activities is not actually to make money but rather to determine the methods that will enable the company to build up to a successful revenue stream.

This distinction is important and in my experience usually lost on those responsible for marketing and sales strategy.  Therefore you see behaviors like forcibly growing revenue at negative profit by scaling up programs that are too inefficient to be sustainable ("We're losing money on every unit sold, but we'll make it up in volume") or plugging away at some minor, one-off program that at best can hope to yield a few hundred thousand dollars ("There are only fifteen target customers in the world, but damn it, we'll get 'em all").  These are bad decisions in all but the most extreme circumstances, but they happen routinely when an organization becomes completely focused on hitting a revenue target (executing a business model) as opposed to building the knowledge base that will later allow you to grow and profit at the same time (discovering a business model).

When I'm in charge of the marketing for a new product initiative, I always insist on understanding whether we're executing a proven business model or seeking a new business model.  And even in the case of existing, successful businesses, often companies are trying to expand into parallel markets or improve efficiency or simply eat their own children before competitors do.  In these cases a company may actually run both activities simultaneously, sometimes even on the same customer base.

When marketing programs are in place to seek a business model rather than execute one, then I have a handy list of the five key qualities to which an activity or campaign must adhere.  Violate any of these rules and you're getting confused about the distinction between seeking and executing, to  your own detriment.

Successful experimental marketing and sales campaigns and activities must be,

1. Testable
2. Repeatable at scale
3. Affordable
4. Offering speed to results
5. Not absurd

Let me explain each of these qualities in turn:

Testable.  When we're seeking a business model, that means we're in a scientific mode.  We have hypotheses about how our activities may affect customer behavior, ultimately resulting in sales.  We spend our budget, skill, and manpower to test these hypotheses, and based on the measured results of these tests, we can adopt and implement ideas (a home run), further explore or refine where potential appears to exist (a base hit), or abandon them completely (strike out).  Without the testing component, there is no progress.  We don't know what we can scale up and what we need to modify and what we simply throw away.

Note that not all tests result in metrics or numbers.  Often that's what we're looking for (e.g. leads generated or incremental sales booked), but sometimes the test is softer.  Was there a lot of interest at the trade show booth?  How much PR pickup did we get?  Does the partner community approve of the idea?  These test results are also very important, even though they aren't conducive to an ROI calculation.

Repeatable at scale.  The point behind testing is that when you find the results that work, you can go out and do them again, and ideally you can do them much bigger than you did the first time.  The classic example is a direct marketing program (let's say direct mail to a specific target list) in which we measure the ROI of the program.  If it's positive, we can then run everything at ten or 100 times the scale of the original test.  Upside is large and downside is small.

Activities that aren't repeatable at scale are not model-seeking activities.  A one-off, unique opportunity that will never come up again in your lifetime is not repeatable.  Even if it's gloriously successful, there's nothing you can do with that.  Now, a marketer may still decide to take a flyer on such an event, if the price is right and it seems likely to help the business.  But under those circumstances that is a business model execution decision, not a business model seeking decision.  You're running the program for the direct benefit in itself, not for knowledge that you will apply in a scaled-up fashion.

Affordable.  One fact of life is that we have limited resources.  Budget, time, attention, development roadmap, number of times you can send offers to your installed base without burning them out - all these things are examples of finite resources that can run out.

Experimental programs consume these resources, just as model-driving programs do.  The more resources you spend on your experimental program, the less you have to get to your critical business number.  Therefore when running experimental programs, it's important to keep a tight grip on running affordable programs.

If we use the above direct mail example, test cells can often be very small compared to the dialed-in programs that you run at scale.  If your average test sell is just a few percentage points the size of a scaled-up program, then you can afford to try out some reasonable hypotheses.  If they don't turn out, you haven't lost much, but if they do work, then you can suddenly multiply them thirtyfold and enjoy a big win.

Offering speed to results.  If we're here to learn, then speed to results is critical.  I want a program where I can have a sense for how it turned out in a few days and a fully valid result in a month.  That's important because the experimental programs themselves (being small in scale, likely not to work out, and never fully optimized) even under the best of circumstances do not constitute business success.  We have to take those results and implement them before we get the financial and market rewards we require to call our businesses successful.  Add in the fact that discovering the right sales and marketing model often requires multiple - and sometimes many - iterations, and you have an environment where speed is key.

Not absurd.  Note that I didn't say proven or certain or unable to fail.  Note that I didn't even say likely.  Often these are the standards business hold all marketing and sales activities up to before giving them the green light.  If you do that, then you'll create an environment where you never can truly experiment.  Instead, we need a lower standard than that.

Now, I said not absurd because we're not here to do dumb stuff either.  Remember that earlier discussion of limited resources?  We certainly can't be wasting them, not even in our experimental programs.  Therefore each experimental program has to be based on a reasonable hypothesis, one that seems to have a very real chance of success.  There's nothing wrong with some of your ideas not panning out.  Otherwise you're probably not being aggressive enough in your experimentation and therefore missing out on some of your potential.  But at the same time, make sure that everything you try is offering a genuine, legitimate contribution to the base of knowledge you have for your market and its responses to your products.  Make sure you only try things that might work.

Apply all five of these criteria rigorously to all experimental marketing and sales activities you undertake in your organization, and you'll be a step ahead on discovering those new opportunities and markets and offerings than you would be any other way.

Do you need more baskets or do you need more fruit?

I have found that a good analogy goes a long way toward explaining a phenomenon or principle that is complex or dependent on a great deal of specialized knowledge.  (More on that topic later, I promise.)  Today I'd like to introduce you to the baskets vs. fruit metaphor.

I invented this metaphor to facilitate discussion around how to set a marketing mix between lead generation and true demand generation (or you can call it awareness or preference building or even brand building if you prefer).  It's the fruit and baskets metaphor.

Imagine a small village in pre-industrial society.  This village is situated on the edge of a medium-sized wood.  In the wood can be found fruit trees.  The members of the village have learned that they can go into the wood and hunt around, and with sufficient effort they will find trees bearing fruit.  They can pluck the fruit and bring it back home, and with enough effort the entire village can eat this way.

Because it's a dense wood and fruit trees are infrequent, it takes a lot of work to find one, and leaving the wood and returning to the exact same tree later is nearly impossible.  Furthermore, it can be a considerable trek through the wood to any given tree, meaning that the time required to go back and forth can hack out a decent piece of a given forager's day.

Therefore, someone in the village stumbles on the idea of baskets.  The villagers weave baskets and send them out with the foragers.  When foragers discover a fruit tree, each can harvest and carry back an entire basketful rather than what can be carried just in a pair of hands.  The result is instant and meaningful.  Each forager is coming home with more fruit than before.  Efficiency is up, and the village is prosperous.

What do the savvy villagers do?  Weave more baskets, of course.  As they create and send out more baskets, the amount of fruit returning to the village increases.  Life is good.

Unfortunately as the villagers continue to produce and release an ever increasing number of baskets, a strange thing starts to happen.  Baskets start coming back less than entirely full.  Soon the average baskets is only 80% full when the forager returns from the wood.

How do the villagers address this problem?  More baskets!  They produce a bunch of additional baskets and send them out into the wood, but now the baskets are coming back 50% full and the villagers are still behind on their production goals.  I'm sure you know what the villagers do next.

That's right.  They produce a whole boatload of new baskets and send them into the wood.  But now the baskets are coming back only 20% full and the villagers continue to fall short of their fruit production quota.

I hope the metaphor is obvious.  The village is your company, and the wood is your market.  Fruit is revenue (or unit volume, or customers, it doesn't really matter to the metaphor).  Foragers are sales professionals, and baskets are lead-generating marketing activities.  In the beginning the company has sales professionals who are getting sales the hard way, one at a time, as so many companies do in the beginning.  The company discovers lead gen, and originally the results are fantastic.  Sales are up, sales efficiency is up, and life is good.  We're all gonna be rich.

However, as the company continues to scale, it inexorably finds that lead generation efficiency declines.  Each dollar spent earns less than the previous dollar.  Marginal contribution of marketing spend drops, and ROI declines until it reaches or even drops below the breakeven point.  Business plans never seem to account for this phenomenon; managers seem to think they can scale anything to infinity and never hit a wall.  Therefore the company is suddenly behind target as sales and marketing efficiency has inexplicably slipped from where it was this time last year.

So what do they do?  More lead gen!  I've seen this response more times than I can count.  Sure, we're losing money on every letter we send, but at least we can get to our revenue goal.  And you can buy some sales that way, but of course the lead generation efficiency just continues to drop and it gets more and more costly to artifically drive your growth.

The problem the villagers face is not that anything is wrong with their baskets, nor that they have too few of them.  The villagers' problem is that they don't have enough fruit.  They have gotten to the point where they're havesting the fruit as fast as the wood produces it.  If the village is to continue its growth, its inhabitants need more and better sources of food, not more and better ways of transporting food back to the village.  In the real world, the company is maximized on its demand realization initiative, and to continue to grow it needs to increase the amount of demand the market has for its goods and services.

So if weaving more baskets won't solve the problem, do the villagers just throw in the towel and starve?  Of course not.  There are lots of things they can do to produce more food.  The village can:

• Visit another wood.  Maybe there's another wood within walking distance, and maybe that wood has fruit in it.  Surely it's not as convenient as the wood we're used to, but it's better than starving.  Translation:  Expand into new markets where analagous target buyers will need your product.  Maybe that's a new geography or a new industry vertical or a different size of business.  Surely it will be more difficult than the market you already know, but it beats missing your financial targets.
• Start digging for tubers.  Maybe there are other things to eat than fruit in this wood.  Maybe the foragers can look for that also while they're out.  They might need new tools and training, but you can divert energy from making baskets to provide those.  Translation:  What else can you sell to these same people who are buying from you today?  You can still increase revenue if you increase wallet share rather than increasing the number of actual logos that buy from you.
• Plant fruit trees.  If the village looks far enough into the future, it can plant fruit trees so that in a few years it will be able to add them to its yield.  The villagers need to plan in advance, of course.  That requires forward-thinking management that isn't always there.  Translation:  Invest in developing your market well in advance of the time your growth starts to flag.  So often I see businesses fail in this way.  They're growing fast and making lots of money, and clearly they must be invincible.  Therefore, instead of pouring profit back in and building for the future, they suck it out as fast as they conceivably can.  Maybe the reasoning is that it'll be the next guy's problem to solve, not yours.  But if you plan on being around for the long haul, make sure you don't do something today that will stab you in the back five years from now.

People who work with me know this metaphor, and it's a convenient way to discuss where our focus needs to be.  Do we need to be adding baskets or fruit?  How much of each?  If we overinvest in baskets, they'll be half empty and we'll fall short of goal.  If we underinvest in baskets, we'll be leaving some fruit to rot on the ground.  If we do need to invest in fruit, are we looking for a new wood or trying to dig up some roots?  Does the sales team have shovels, and have we shown them what plants with edible roots look like?  Are we even sure we know how to spot one of those plants?  And lastly, how long is it until we've havested all the available fruit trees, and how far in advance do we need to plant new trees to they'll give us fruit by the time we need it?