Success. What does the word mean to you? Success will mean very different things to different people. The question came into my head when I heard someone on the radio being described as successful. I thought, what does that really mean? What I see as successful could be very different from my friends. For example, someone in a well-paid, high-level job could be seen as successful but if they didn’t enjoy the job or felt overwhelmed, does this still translate as successful?
In the business world, success is perhaps slightly easier to define, but as the three experts on the following pages emphasise, it is still a fluid situation. Customers’ demands change all of the time. What once worked, may not work in the future. So what was once successful, may start to fail. Perhaps the key is to recognise that success isn’t a permanent state. It’s good to celebrate a successful project or a client win but it won’t mean that the next project or bid will be successful.
I’ve highlighted some key points from our three respondents below. But be sure to read their answers in full. Shafqat Islam, President at Optimizelysaid: “In the world of marketing, there’s always pressure to prove the value of our decisions internally. But I’ve always believed that we should reduce the ‘marketing of marketing’ as much as possible. If we’re truly successful, our work will speak for itself. The campaigns we run, the leads we generate, the brand impact we create – all of that should be visible in the results.”
John Greenstein, CEO at Bluescape, said: “In business, and often in life, as well, the rules and timelines are constantly in flux. Business is an inherently complex discipline that requires working with dynamic customers, changing requirements and evolving market conditions. As a result of these variables, the fundamental definition of success becomes multidimensional and fluid. Measuring business success requires a holistic and sometimes nuanced approach.”
And Myles Leach, Managing Director at NFON UK views success as the following: “We only work with resellers and don’t sell to end-users directly. We get great benefits from this. We gain instant access to a much wider end-user customer base, helping us break into new vertical markets and our partners have the confidence that we won’t ever be in competition with them as their success is crucial for ours.”
Shafqat Islam, President, Optimizely:
Success, to me, lies in the outcomes – clear, tangible results that speak for themselves.
In the world of marketing, there’s always pressure to prove the value of our decisions internally. But I’ve always believed that we should reduce the ‘marketing of marketing’ as much as possible. If we’re truly successful, our work will speak for itself. The campaigns we run, the leads we generate, the brand impact we create – all of that should be visible in the results.
At Optimizely, we hold ourselves accountable for driving real business outcomes. Whether it’s pipeline growth, customer acquisition or improving customer experience – those are the metrics that matter. As someone who’s been both on the product and marketing side, I know firsthand how critical it is to align marketing efforts with business objectives.
My journey began by building tools for marketers by co-founding Welcome (now known as Optimizely CMP), the market leading content marketing platform. Now, as President of Optimizely, I get to use tools like these every day to drive our own growth. This gives me a unique perspective on what success looks like – it’s not only about how much we’re talking about our wins, but how much we’re delivering to the business. It’s about real, measurable impact.
Experimentation is another a big part of success. At Optimizely, we experiment constantly —from optimising content to personalising customer journeys. In marketing, there are no failures, only learnings. Every experiment teaches us something that helps us improve, and that’s a key measure of success as well. Are we learning and evolving? Are we taking risks and pushing boundaries of what’s possible?
Ultimately, if we’ve done our jobs successfully, everyone will see the impact without us having to explain it. Success isn’t about applause, it’s about outcome.
John Greenstein, CEO, Bluescape:
Measuring success can be as simple as asking: “Did we win?”
This straightforward approach works best when you are involved in a competition with universally accepted rules and defined end states; the final score is all that matters, and success is as simple as “Yes.”
As the saying goes: “You are what your record says you are.”
However, in business, and often in life, as well, the rules and timelines are constantly in flux. Business is an inherently complex discipline that requires working with dynamic customers, changing requirements and evolving market conditions. As a result of these variables, the fundamental definition of success becomes multidimensional and fluid. Measuring business success requires a holistic and sometimes nuanced approach.
Indeed, defining a business goal at the outset of any initiative, or at least identifying a North Star to guide subsequent actions, makes it easier to measure progress. However, if the initial goal was chosen incorrectly, then making substantial progress toward that goal might not correlate with success.
In complex situations, the journey is often equally important as the destination, and in this context, measuring success requires plotting a series of outcomes on multiple axes.
When measuring success at our company, I consider performance against quantitative goals established and agreed upon at the outset of a programme, such as performance against targeted financial projections, KPI-based outcomes or measurable sentiments. I also find that measuring success requires considering additional qualitative factors, such as team sentiment, ethical performance, agility and economic sustainability.
Despite the complexity inherent in leading a business and the multiple quantitative and qualitative metrics available to track success, I try to keep in mind that all businesses are fundamentally simple at their core: a business exists to produce goods and services that provide value to customers.
So, measuring business success boils down to being able to affirmatively answer a few basic questions: Are we pleasing our customers? Are we fulfilling otherwise unmet needs in the market? Are we achieving our financial objectives? And is the team enjoying coming to work every day?
Myles Leach, Managing Director, NFON UK:
We only work with resellers and don’t sell to end-users directly. We get great benefits from this. We gain instant access to a much wider end-user customer base, helping us break into new vertical markets and our partners have the confidence that we won’t ever be in competition with them as their success is crucial for ours.
Enabling and supporting our partners is our number one priority. Our comprehensive wrap-around support structure means that we measure success in terms of how prepared and confident our partners are taking our solutions to market and that their MRR [Monthly Recurring Revenue] is growing. We work hand-in-hand with them to achieve this. They are true partnerships.
We find a lot of new and smaller partners, particularly those new to the CX market, usually start as commission partners, selling our services to their business customers and receiving a commission on every deal they make on both MRR and NRR [Net Revenue Retention]. This is attractive to them because we take all the financial risk and look after pricing and billing. And then when they are ready and if they wish to, we help upwards develop them to our wholesale model giving them complete control over their pricing, margins and ownership of our customers. Be it commission or wholesale all our partners enjoy our wrap-around support model as part of their partner programme, and I think it is fair to say receive an excellent partner experience because of it.
In addition to this, we also provide Marketing, Professional Services and Support-as-a-Service for any of our partners who have limited internal resources, lack a dedicated engineering, technical department or marketing function, or who simply face major time constraints. This has worked especially well with, for example, IT resellers breaking into the comms market and looking to consolidate their services, providing their customers with a complete IT and communications service from one supplier under one monthly invoice. With the market driven by what the customer needs, our partners are able to collaborate directly with us, sharing their customers’ requirements back to us. In turn we will use that information to develop new features and technology solutions. Our R&D schedule is very much based on what our user-customers want, and as we own and develop our own technology, we can be agile and highly reactive to the (ever) changing needs of the market.