Ready, Set, Transform - Infinite Edge Q3 Newsletter

Greetings from inside the agonizingly slow tech industry reset,

If you’re still alive in Q2 2024, it could feel like you’re living a chapter in a dystopian novel. It starts like this: Today, we find ourselves in the shadowy remnants of the old-world, fire sales blaze with desperate intensity, casting flickering lights on a landscape where time itself seems to crawl. Amid this slow decay, a whisper of renewal stirs as emerging industries begin to catch the faintest breath of wind. It's not yet a gale strong enough to resurrect the fallen giant, but it's a promising sign that the tide is turning.

Meanwhile, the battlefield of commerce is littered with the casualties of weaker companies unable to navigate the storm. Their hopes dashed as they failed to round the pivotal corner. For those still standing, competition thins, sharpening the struggle for survival in the narrowing corridors of power. On another front, nascent technologies teeter on the brink of adolescence. Their potential, vast but unproven, like a sailboat in the eerie calm, poised in suspenseful stillness before the wind surges, filling its sails and charting its course towards new horizons.

AI-sourced dramatic tone aside (thank you writer.ai), but it’s really important we view these business cycles through the lens of the game that it is. It’s not a question of survival. It’s a question of thriving through the ups and downs of constant market shifts. It’s about playing the long game.

We’ve reprioritized and reset many times in the last 12 months without missing a beat on delivery.

The best leaders are those that can context-switch fast. Moving between planning next quarter’s product launch strategy, tee-ing up a customer webinar interview, and digging into pipeline metrics before lunch is the order of the day. It takes a unique mindset, and leadership quality to be in the trenches and above the trenches guiding the ship all at the same time.

For those of us who love learning, expressing ourselves, and dealing with difficult questions, it’s as energizing as it gets. At the same time, think of yourself as a curator of an idea that has already been born. If you’ve made the most of the last 18th months, the resources to scale efficiently have already been created. Now it’s time to put those resources to work to build trust and cultivate opportunities with buyers that are ready to move forward.

See what our client Folloze had to say about our contribution over the past two years.

Client Spotlight

The IEC team was built for the long game. In our four years working with tech scale-ups, we’ve been keeping VC-funded companies from spending like drunken sailors. We’ve focused on creating a long-term path while taking the necessary steps towards positive cashflow and profitability. And most importantly, we’ve helped them develop highly efficient revenue growth engines to stay the course and kick-start the next wave of growth.

Our blend of strategic and practical experience and services is designed to address the whole system of a healthy growth engine. We address issues like: go-to-market strategy shifts, team composition, and organizational alignment, pricing and packaging models, ICP refinement, core messaging, partner ecosystem activation, and more to find the right balance for right now. We stand by our mantra of being “ready for anything” and we’re proving it with our portfolio of clients who are experience a resurgence in growth heading into Q3 ‘24.

Our latest work for ShopWare is a great example of how we challenge the status quo and helped a company achieve its full potential.

Read the full case study

If you’re like most of our clients, you’re ?finding that many of your marketing efforts aren't paying off?

In today's challenging market, achieving results from traditional strategies is becoming increasingly difficult. Expenses are climbing, consumer behaviors are evolving, and the old methods no longer align with current business objectives.

As companies face changes in their resources, budget cuts, and constant change, many marketing executives are having trouble meeting their ROI goals.

Maybe it's time to rethink your approach, but the constraints of time, resources, or expertise are holding you back. The more you delay, the more complicated the situation becomes.

Learn more about our Marketing Reset Services.

Are You Ready to Play the Long Game? ?

Join us for our upcoming Future Ready CMO Meet Up

The Future Ready CMO community is over 700 members strong with a cross-sector group of marketing professionals looking to make a meaningful difference in the world.

We feel a great responsibility to not only respond to what's happening in the world today, but also to define what it means to be a marketer and a leader in this environment.

Our free monthly community meetings are meant to help marketers learn and become the leaders the world needs now.

Join us for our summer series: “Playing the Long Game.” Together we’re learning critical skills to have an impact beyond our short-term-focused jobs and even our lifetimes.

We're looking at ways to take care of ourselves to be successful in a game that's getting harder and harder. Or, how to think long-term but act short-term.

Join us for our August meet-up: ?

Register here: Unbound Creativity: Learning to Work With Intuition to Create

Join us on Wednesday, August 21st at 9AM PST, to equip yourself for sustained success and strategic insights to thrive in times of change.

Our Services

Reach out to learn more about the services, accelerator workshops, and talent we provide to help your business become fully self-sustaining, and valuable for the long haul.

Inquire about services

Paying attention to the dynamics of change

Growth markets are fun, exhilarating, and addicting. But it’s the market transformations and big global events that teach us the important lessons. Now, more than ever, it’s an excellent time to observe and learn from the dynamics of change, read the signals, and navigate towards the next market upswing.

Here’s what we’re seeing:

• We are still in the eye of the storm, with many scale-ups continuing to restructure to hold steady as they build more predictable models for growth. We saw this coming in 2020 and we knew that a holistic, growth-oriented approach to marketing would be a critical factor, often overlooked by early and mid-stage scale-ups. ?I’ve been through the ups and downs of the infinite cycles of birth, decline, and rebirth. Mindset, focus, pragmatic decision-making, and swift action are essential.
• We’re normalizing the notion of smaller, more efficient GTM teams. Not only is this the fastest way to get a business back on track, but it’s also the most fun and rewarding. Many scale-ups are recovering from VC-imposed sales-first strategies. “Hire sales, that’s where the money will come from. Cut marketing. It’s an easy expense to remove.” These same companies are now investing more in marketing and scaling back to a small team of high-performing sellers. And guess what, the growth needle is moving. But cross-functional collaboration and connections are more important than ever.
• Contingency plans are critical. The inevitable decline starting in 2022 and accelerating in 2023 forced us to refine and prove the viability of our service model and lean into our promise of helping scales up be ready for anything. Leaning into marketing doesn’t mean hiring more marketers. It involves creating a bottoms-up strategy designed to leverage the best of multi-disciplined strategy efficiently, and accountably. ?

Keep us posted on how change is impacting your business and approach to leadership. We’re always eager to learn from others.

Join the Future Ready CMO Community