A Marketing Framework for Hyper-Growth Companies

In over 20 years of consulting digital transformation and marketing leader; and leading the marketing org for B2B tech start-up and scale-up organizations, I’ve pinned down what I called my “Marketing OS” (See sample screenshots at the end). Certainly, every marketing strategy should be shaped to meet the unique needs of a given business. However, in the world of B2B technology, SaaS, IT managed services, and cybersecurity, I’ve found enough commonality that this framework provides a great starting point to get results quickly and efficiently; helping these businesses realize their rapid-growth (20-40% CAGR) or hyper-growth (40%+ CAGR) goals. I hope others find this useful and of course I welcome feedback as I’m eager to discover what others have found to be successful – and to keep evolving.

Growth Marketing Disclaimer: While the scope of the marketing function should encompass product strategy, pricing strategy, and go-to-market strategy, and even customer experience; it’s absolutely critical that the business operations be ruthlessly committed to scalability. Nothing is more frustrating than successfully acquiring customers at a break-neck pace only to see business systems lurch and processes crumble under the weight of the demand, causing irreparable brand credibility damage. While implementing a hyper-growth marketing and sales operation, investors and management must avoid inefficient or undefined operations. Build operations that anticipate that your hyper-growth goals will become reality or your organization will fall into the “Shoulda Coulda Woulda” archives of history.

Now, with that said, onto the marketing framework to achieve hyper-growth.

The "Big 3" Goal Types

Marketing must have an eye on both the long-game (positioning the brand in the market, building reputation, implementing scalable Martech) as well as the short-game (fill the funnel, capitalize on market-moving situations, provide deal-closing support materials). Despite pressures from outside of marketing to focus on the here-and-now only, achieving hyper-growth requires balancing both the long- and short-game. The best place to start is to define company objectives – what does success look like and what are the measurable performance goals Marketing should aim for to influence those company objectives. In my framework for B2B technology startups and scale-ups, the answers fall into three primary categories:

1. Brand: Accurate awareness and stand-out credibility amongst your target market
2. Demand: Interest and preference from in-market buyers
3. Experience: Positive perception, optimized revenue opportunities, and brand advocacy

But setting “S.M.A.R.T.” goals depends on the unique objectives and situation of each company. I typically create 2-3 goals per category above. A few examples from each are:

Brand Goals

• Increase “organic” website visits X%
• Inclusion in X analyst reports on X market category

Demand Goals

• Generate X% of pipeline required for net new sales bookings
• Generate X MQLs

Experience Goals

• Generate X positive published reviews by NPS “advocates”
• Generate $X in up/cross-sell opportunities
• Conduct X joint-marketing campaigns with strategic partners

As illustrated below, these three layers of goals allow you to influence growth from every vantage point – future prospects with Brand Awareness, in-market prospects with Demand Gen, and current customers with Experience.

Goal-Centric Team Structure

Accountability is key. To structure a high-performance marketing team, you should map your team to your goals to ensure there is clear ownership, empowerment, and aligned skillsets. Even though marketers are typically an agile bunch, its helpful to allow individuals to lean into core strengths while having the versatility to pinch in where needed. Start with establishing a leader for each strategic goal/function of marketing and then surround them with expert marketing contributors.

Brand: The Communicator

If you’re thinking brand is a warm and fuzzy luxury just for well-established companies – you’re dead wrong. Brand is your reputation, your purpose, your point for existing. Of course, the brand function for a tech startup is absolutely nothing like the brand effort for a major consumer brand. But nonetheless, B2B buyers are humans too so you’re not getting off easy. Their decision process is not purely logical, but also emotional and about self-preservation too. You must craft the right message, target the right people, and deliver it in the right channel, and the right time. This requires focus, and thus its best to task a director with Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) that the board agrees are indicative of increasing brand awareness and accurate perception.

Demand: The Scientist

Of course, every startup wants marketing to focus on Demand Generation; and often that is simply seen as Lead Generation. Sadly, it isn’t that simple. Demand Generation requires research and studying buyer behaviors and having a confident grasp on your target market’s typical Buyer’s Journey. With that, you must carefully craft messaging and outreach that delivers something truly compelling and at the most relevant time based on where your prospect is in their buying process. This is made incredibly difficult since B2B buyers are not just individuals, but rather groups. And these groups don’t want to talk to your sales reps. They want to do 70% of the buying process on their own terms until they’re really comfortable reaching out and engaging with your brand. So, yes, creativity is required. But Demand Gen is a science – research, hypotheses, testing, analysis are at the heart of it. And Demand Generation adapts the carefully crafted content of the Brand leader to create value at each stage of the Buyer Journey. As such, this too requires extreme focus separate from Brand and with OKRs that are meaningful in achieving the ultimate end – newly acquired customers.

Experience: The Advocate

Once the Buyer Journey results in a new customer, we must focus on the Customer Journey. As customers, we like reliability. It simplifies our hectic lives. The same goes for B2B tech buyers. If you can deliver a positive experience with consistency, you will reduce churn and increase Net Retention – translation… increase growth. Most SaaS, IT managed services and cybersecurity products have a bit of complexity involved in onboarding, optimization, and achieving business results for the customer. For that reason, many customers are left disillusioned by the outcomes not living up to the promise of what they bought. Marketing should collaborate with Customer Success Management, onboarding, and service teams to architect a seamless customer experience with an eye on opportunities for up/cross-sell campaigns, saving brand detractors, and leveraging brand advocates.

Additional Critical Related Roles

Common roles that vary in whether they fall in the Marketing team directly or otherwise work extremely close with Marketing are:

1. Product Marketing (The Engineer): Sometimes aligns under the Product team, provides the technical marketing depth and ability to translate engineering strategy into business value stories.
2. Revenue Operations (The Organizer): Sometimes aligns under Sales or Business Operations, defines and enforces process and procedures that scale productivity and forecast performance.
3. Sales Development Team: Sometimes aligns under Sales, but works primarily with marketing toward the shared objective of generating new opportunities.

Marketing Plan

with the goals and team defined, the rest of the Marketing Plan begins to take shape. My typical outline is as follows and builds in a natural progression of foundational information. I recommend addressing these in this particular order.

1. Analysis: organization, industry, competition
2. Objectives: marketing objectives and key results
3. Target Market: Total addressable market, target market, segmentation, personas
4. Message & Positioning: brand, benefit, positioning, segmentation variations
5. Product Portfolio: definitions, packaging, pricing, roadmap
6. Marketing Strategy: new market expansion, land-and-expand, thought leadership, etc.
7. Sales Alignment: direct vs. indirect channels, sales team, process, and goal alignment
8. Budget: Cost Per Outcome (CPO) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) modeling, and break out by goal, campaign, and time periods
9. Marketing Operations: people, platforms, and processes to ensure efficient execution
10. Assumptions, Dependencies, & Risk: articulate known variables to start scenario planning to be ready for best- and worst-case scenarios

Expanding on each topic and how to define each is a deep exercise dependent upon the organization. But this outline is a great foundation.

Marketing Management

We’ve built the plane, but now it’s time to fly it. We’ve addressed the Goals, the Team, and the Plan – great! But how will you execute it? To use another analogy, climbing a mountain, consider these three management components:

1. Strategy: the way to the top of the mountain; see listed in the plan outline above
2. Culture: instill the desire to climb the mountain; defined by your communication, coaching, and collaboration skills
3. Process: the tools and tactics to climb the mountain; defined by your ability to define systems and methods to optimize productivity and output

Each of those management components have books written about them. So, in the spirit of sharing a “framework” for building a Marketing function to achieve hyper-growth goals, I’ll leave it here. I hope this is helpful to others out there.

If you are also passionate about B2B marketing, revenue operations, business systems and automation, growth hacking, and the like, please connect. I look forward to meeting you and sharing ideas.

P.S. Big shout-out to my friends at Plannuh for influencing my ideas and refinement of my Marketing OS; and for building an amazing marketing operations and performance management platform. And also, another shout-out to my peers in The Next CMO community for sharing ideas and experiences that have also refined my own ideas.

P.P.S. With so many documentation, collaboration, and communication tools at our disposal, organizing a sophisticated marketing organization that be difficult with documents spread across the enterprise resulting in confusion. I found building my Marketing OS with Notion to be great low-code customizable yet structured way to get it done. Here are a few screenshots.