The Metric Fallacy

Actionable Metrics are the Real Deal?

We all know by now vanity metrics don’t do the trick. Whether it's app downloads, website visits, or social media likes, these numbers often give a feel-good illusion but rarely translate to business impact. Brian Balfour, the former VP Growth @ HubSpot, nailed it when he talked about the need to focus on metrics that actually drive growth, like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). If your actionable metrics aren't moving, your vanity metrics are just smoke and mirrors.

The Silent Killers: Churn and Burnout

We often talk about growth as though it's the end-all, be-all. However, if you're not looking at customer churn and employee burnout, you're setting yourself up for a crash landing. According to a study published by Harvard Business Review, a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by up to 95%. Yet, customer churn rarely takes center stage in growth discussions.

Your North Star Metric Might Be a Shooting Star

A North Star Metric (NSM) is all the rage. It’s one key metric that aligns your team’s efforts. However, too often, companies pick an NSM that's more of a shooting star: beautiful to look at, but gone before you know it. The NSM should not just focus on acquisition but also on activation and retention. It should also come with a strategy (yes I saw your twinkling eyes when I said “just pick a metric”). An NSM isn’t a carrot with which to push employees, but a compass you use daily to see if your current projects are going to drive growth.?

Building a Growth Team for the First Time

The role of Head of Growth needs to be deeply integrated into a multi-departmental strategy. As highlighted by Patrick Campbell, CEO of ProfitWell, effective growth is not a "move fast and break things" only scenario but a carefully choreographed dance between acquisition, monetization, and retention. While having a Head of Growth is a move in the right direction, it's not a guarantee of success, and one of the main issues companies face when forming this role is having high expectations with little hierarchy and actual power to affect other teams, such as Sales or Product.?

Weaponize Branding

For the engineers and early founders out there, the lure of product and tech can often eclipse other growth pillars—most notably, branding. But let's get one thing straight: Branding isn't a cherry-on-top that you add once the tech parfait is assembled. It's a core ingredient that should be mixed in from day one. Your brand encapsulates more than just a logo or a catchy tagline; it's your story, your mission, and your vision.?

I want to buy a car but?I don’t?know much about cars.?It will be my first car ever. Around 16 years ago there was a TV ad of Ricardo Darin, a beloved Argentine actor, for Toyota Corolla.?And that was the first car I could ever recognize on the street. Now that I am older, I researched it and it ended up being a very solid car too.?Long story short, the people who did that ad +15 years ago probably?won’t?get credit for the purchase of a car today, but Toyota has been building a strong brand (with product of course) for all these years.?

Sometimes?it’s?hard to pinpoint a specific thing that leads to a purchase. Brand growth, or recognition, but just like going to the gym, or eating healthy, it adds up. We never know who is watching, who we are inspiring or who is resonating with our message. So, the thing is, branding might not show up in your weekly metrics or quarterly reports, but its power is undeniable. You can't exactly put a number on the impact of a decades-old TV ad, but you know it when you see it.

Truth be told, marketers in tech have been dissed and underestimated for long, so it’s no wonder we, as an industry, jumped at the opportunity to make our jobs more measurable. There’s an ongoing joke on Instagram that you can either be a Marketing Girl???????? or a Marketing Girl ???????. And while I had been a firm believer in the performance aspect of marketing, and it can provide us a safe harbor to measure our impact, I have abandoned that belief, and now firmly believe that performance alone will never be a holistic driver of growth.

It is said that a person needs to hear a word in a foreign language 9 times, at least, to learn it. Just like sometimes people need to see things several times in order to buy. An ad might be brilliant, but the consumer may not have had that need -or the disposable income- for it yet. And the best companies, the ones who do growth the best, understand this.

The role of brand equity is to create customer loyalty and even impact shareholder value. If you think you'll just "get to branding once we're doing great," you're already late to the game. Your greatest asset, especially in those scrappy early stages, is often not your groundbreaking tech but the brand you're building around it. It's not just a name; it's your business's power, provided by its identity, story, mission, vision, and sure, a cool .com. And if that should involve a click of the shoes and a tiny bit of magical thinking, I’m willing to be that Marketing Girl.?

The New Frontier of Metrics

Given these complexities in navigating the metric maze, you might wonder if there's a smarter way to handle growth.?

In a landscape fraught with metric pitfalls, one might wonder how to navigate the complex labyrinth of growth. This is precisely where companies like Synapse demonstrate their indispensable value. Synapse goes beyond traditional recruiting by functioning as a strategic partner for business growth. Armed with cutting-edge AI algorithms and analytical frameworks, it matches you with talent attuned to your organization's current lifecycle and future aspirations. It's more than just recruitment; it's about embedding the right human capital into your strategic calculus. The result? A finely-tuned machine where each cog—be it human or metric—functions in orchestrated harmony, optimizing the likelihood of sustained, substantive growth. This is the antidote to the Metric Fallacy: A nuanced, integrated approach that recognizes growth not as a siloed function but as an organization-wide endeavor.

—Your Local Marketing Girl ???????, with love, & ????????(but doesn’t want to)