Why Shopify Doesn't Need a Chief Marketing Officer
Only half of the companies in the Fortune 500 companies list will be on the list in 10 years. That's it, that's the reason.
Probably no one has written more than me about the need for Shopify to move their messaging up-market. But to be fair to them, I think there is a pretty straightforward reason why they have not.
1 - Let's take it for granted that Tobi is building a 100 year company, as he states. That means he can be patient.
2 - If you can do that, you can wait for churn, and time is on your side.
3 - If you focus on the entrepreneurs, you will influence the next generation.
4 - And the next generation will win the future.
Here is some research I found on the S&P 500 (similar) --> By 1990, average tenure in the S&P 500 had narrowed to 20 years and is now forecast to shrink to 14 years by 2026. At the current churn rate, about half of today’s S&P 500 firms will be replaced over the next 10 years as “we enter a period of heightened volatility for leading companies across a range of industries, with the next ten years shaping up to be the most potentially turbulent in modern history” according to Innosight.
This is something of a warning sign for SaaS companies in general that I have experienced first-hand. When I was CEO at Merchantry, I had the distinction of identifying seemingly viable venture-backed companies that - when looking in the rear-view mirror 3 years later - had an 80% likelihood of going out of business. If it wasn't 80%, sometimes it surely felt that way 🤦♀️
How inefficient is your goto-market strategy if half your customers will be out of business in five years?
Not a statistic any CEO wants to be responsible for -- as they say, sometimes your life can be a warning to others. ;-)
It is a lesson for any SaaS CEO looking to refine their ideal customer profile.
* We tend to think in terms of revenue segments.
* We tend to think in terms of categories.
* We hardly tend to think in terms of viability, funding, and strategy of our CUSTOMERS. Because we think it doesn't matter.
Yet it does.
