Growth startup (10/12): growth program management review

Here I am again with a new post from this series of growth marketing, based on my learnings from CXL’s Growth Marketing minidegree. ;)

Last Sunday, we focused on email marketing:

• More than just email marketing,
• Don't forget the basics,
• Do’s,
• Don'ts,
• Go further and shine brighter.

GROWTH STARTUP SERIES PREVIOUS POSTS:

Growth startup (1/12): open-minded growth vs. traditional marketing review

Growth startup (2/12): building a customer-centric growth process review

Growth startup (3/12): running growth experiments with research and testing review

Growth startup (4/12): conversion research review

Growth startup (5/12): mastering a/B tests review

Growth startup (6/12): attribution models review

Growth startup (7/12): conversions review

Growth startup (8/12): product messaging review

Growth startup (9/12): email marketing review

This time, we’ll focus on growth marketing fundamentals and management according to Sean Ellis, founder and CEO of growthhackers.com, and John McBride, senior manager, B2B Growth at Calm.

Let’s dive into it. ;)

The levers for accelerating growth

We’ve already learned with this series that growth is not magic. It’s hard-working based on hypotheses, experimentation, data, analysis, and actions. And it has levers:

• Acquisition (intent);
• Activation (“aha” moment);
• Retention (core value);
• Referral (???);
• Revenue (your North Star metric or the value delivered to customers).

If you pay attention, these levers are connected to the customer’s journey. In other words: you need a holistic approach to better manage your growth marketing.

Like other elements of any digital strategy, it is essential to work from the perspective of the consumer, who really needs to be heard and taken into account. ;)

The multiple silos of growth

If we’re talking about the customer’s journey, we need to work with different teams’ anxieties throughout the organization. 

And to avoid bumps because of separate teams’ miscommunications and resistance to participate, bring everyone together to discuss the customer’s journey, key objectives, and the possibilities for growth on each step of the customer.

The growth team

It's the team that plans and executes cross-functional growth testing against high-leverage objectives. In general, growth teams can work under two main models:

• Autonomous team model: reports directly to the CEO.
• Functional team model: reports into another team (VP Product for example).

In case your organization has a Head of Growth, he/she will mostly:

• Analyze data to find opportunities;
• Help team focus on generating ideas;
• Run weekly growth meetings.

The head of growth needs to understand that his/her position is of fundamental importance for the development of an internal culture of growth. In other words, it is a position for those who are not self-centered.

Cross-functionality

Growth mentality can help organizations to set up an internal culture of growth, expanding best practices (as experimentation) to other teams.

And cross-functionality is a strong tool for that. It is also a challenge for the growth team and the head of growth.

After all, connecting the dots can leverage growth marketing or bury it.

Acquisition and engagement

Here, the challenge is to understand how to hire people according to your needs. If you'll have to manage acquisition and engagement at the same time, it's ok to keep them working in separated teams linked by cross-functionality.

Once you mature it, an ideal growth team will have all the people resources you need to go to every step of the process.

Growth team in a larger organization

Generally, growth teams in larger organizations tend to interact with marketing and product engineering.

And they need to work together focused on actions that could lead to growth. Without this team effort, growth marketing can be more difficult and inefficient. It’s very important for the teams involved to work together and sick the same key objectives.

Above all, the leadership should build the necessary alignment.

The growth meeting

The objective is to keep the team focused on the high-leverage growth objectives. It also essential to accountability and discussions around optimization of growth processes.

It is one of the most important parts of growth management because it can be a good start for making growth scalable across the organization.

Experiments implementation

Everything starts with brainstorming, hypothesis, and owner’s assignment.

After that is very important to set expectations and SLAs with the other teams (planning, resources alignment, etc.).

Some key checkpoints:

• Train the team to ship experiments faster,
• Run your tests,
• Do analysis,
• Accept negative results as learnings,
• Record test results.

Testing management

By testing, you can improve your growth (and collect results), taking two types of experiments:

• To discover,
• To optimize.

"The more testing you do, the fast you tend to grow in companies."

Sean Ellis, founder and CEO of growthhackers.com

The objective is to learn and discover where you're losing people and then work on opportunities to fix what is necessary. But, be careful: do not make mistakes when defining the objectives of your growth objectives.

Key objectives must be related to your business instead of micro results.

Example:

• Increase signup activation rate (good objective),
• Increase sales (bad objective because it is too broad).

Once testing is a reality, the next step is to do regular checkings, without rushing ahead to the next thing.

Prioritize quality instead of velocity. It's better to have one good experiment than five dubious ones. Prioritizing also helps organizations to achieve immediate and sustainable growth.

Tools

Having bad or too many tools can increase the time spent to ship experiments.

This is important because in many organizations the high number of tools can difficult things, instead of help teams to achieve their objectives.

Analyze

It is the most time-consuming part of the process. That's why automating analytics is a good way to overcome delays or long-term processes.

Regardless of where you focus or how you call your marketing team, you should think about starting running experiments to optimize your user experience (and consequently improve conversions) — and the only way to do this is basing your decisions on data. You would be impressed with how the benefits go beyond increasing your MRR.

EXTRA MILE

grow your growth marketing