Growth Hacking for Pivoting…

Let’s start with the definition: "Pivoting" is fundamentally changing the direction of your business. Sounds like a serious decision... And it is!

So, when does one pivot?

The time for pivoting is when you realize the current products or services aren't meeting the needs of the market. Or it could be the other way around, which is when the market changes and you have to adapt in order to survive.

The Covid19 reality is a clear example of a market-changing dramatically and a time when you have to do the obvious: Adopt!

A pivot will affect your organization in many ways. Here is a list of what is expected to be affected:

• Your people. They will need to change their operations, their habits, and their whole working routine
• Your products. For example, during covid19 e-commerce businesses had to find ways to offer products that are easily sold online, because e-commerce has been the only source of sales during lockdown.
• Your sales. Moving away from channels as the traditional outreach via salesmen in the field and empowering the digital outreaching and prospecting via social selling. Turning from b2b to b2c and from physical to digital. It may also mean that you have an opportunity to explore new markets, new countries and new sales territories because you are no restricted by the physical element.
• Marketing. The marketing messages must change to fit the new reality, as are the ad channels used to reach the new audience and new keywords need to be added as focus keywords to rank for.

If we translate the above in growth hacking terms & language, this means:

• Changing or sometimes to recreating your website from scratch
• Changing the keywords of focus, which means adjusting your SEO and your Content Strategy
• Implementing new operational or marketing automation
• Changing the SMS or email sequences to fit the new sales flows
• Adjusting your paid ad strategy
• Changing the reporting and monitoring frameworks and deployments
• Changing the product, especially when we are talking about SaaS or a mobile app.

Sometimes you pivot having a clear direction. But sometimes you pivot believing that you just need to add a new product or feature, without being sure what will be the right one. Pivoting doesn’t always come with complete consciousness and realization.

Examples of clear pivots we worked on in the last period:

1. We supported the pivoting of a large scale physical festival event to a digital one.
2. We supported a famous florist in NYC to pivot from weddings and b2b focus to becoming a b2c e-commerce business with easy-to-sell products nationally wise.
3. We assisted a SaaS product in moving from concierge onboarding(1) to a pure self-service model
4. We helped a Mobile app to move away from a freemium model into a paid one
5. We helped a SaaS product to turn into a real product (on the self) and stop being an only a "packaged" services product
6. We helped an airline to increase their non-ticketing revenues and introduce a new offering which became a significant revenue stream

Pivoting can also be a synonym for "Digital Transformation" as this is actually the essence of the above pivots. Yes, pivoting has been connected to the unprecedented reality introduced by Covid19. But the truth is that pivoting is a continuous need.

(1) Concierge onboarding refers to the process of using a “concierge” to convert a potential customer or bring a new customer “into the fold”, ensuring that the customer is equipped with the knowledge and resources they need to maximize the value they get from the product (and increase the odds they will stick around for the long-term).