This year, we have been focusing on only 3 marketing solutions.
This month, we could finally close the first deal for two of the three.
Both of the solutions took 4-7 months to close a deal from our first pitch.

As we had a difficult time to close each deal, I’ve decided to take a totally new action last quarter.
The totally new action is “to work with other companies for enhancing salesforce.” Becase we chose relatively high- profit-rate-solutions and used our direct sales, this action plan could be thought of by priortizing “creating the first case” as our first priority.

When people cannot produce a positive result, many of them choose an ordinary option: “to keep doing the same way.” However, it is a “non-creative” effort. Though a learning effect will allow them to gradually improve an effect and efficiency, it is still a more feasible way compared to “doing nothing” if we ignore the timeline.

At a very early stage of a startup, making a decision and taking an action without a timeline can mean a dead end because steadily growing the revenue/profit and scaling the company is very crucial. That is why “a creative effort” comes into a very important play.  Analyzing the issues/causes, sometimes ignoring any framework or box of thinking, and changing the usual way to do is to definitely produce a positive result on a certain timeline.

SOPHOLA expresses this creative effort as the deepest self-examination and improvement in our values, but everybody is not really embodying the value. It’s my responsibility to incorporate the value into the entire team. This quarter is the quarter when I first show how to do the creative effort!

P.S. To thank my global tech partner for supporting us, sent a local gift to them. Then the team shared such a lovely pic of them! 😉

Masaki “Mark” Iino
Founder & CEO
SOPHOLA, Inc