Optimizing Your Growth Process - A CXL Institute Review

Here at HALOS we're currently in the midst of "execution mode".

We're marketing, we're holding demos, we're onboarding clients and we're growing.

Our growth process is in full effect.

I'm sure some of you reading this are in the same boat.

Your company exists, you're a sales person, marketer, even a founder and you're in optimization mode.

Here's the thing there really isn't much difference between the building phase and the optimization phase.

Both are hypothesis and experiment driven.

Both still require knowledge and constant iteration of your ideal client and both are still crucial to your growth.

Your GTM strategy, or your initial growth process is a bit more blind, but as you grow, as you build out the analytics, your optimization phase becomes a lot more fine tuned.

The only real difference becomes the amount of tests you run, the quality of those tests and the people that you have on board.

Your optimization phase really allows you to be more cross functional in your decisions and drop the silos, that really should have been dropped long ago.

Today I'm going to give you the exact steps I'm using as we speak to fine tuning our growth engine that is running pretty smoothly.

Copy/Paste whatever you like and enjoy.

Tuning Your Growth Process

There are two major ways we are tuning our engine here at HALOS, the first is using the data we find from our existing experiments to build better experiments that bring larger results.

This could be digging deeper into the metrics that we find from running a conversion rate experiment.

For instance, last week, I tested an ad that the conversion rate went up on the add, but the demographic that actually booked the demo wasn't the right demographic.

That lead to more demos booked, a higher conversion rate on the demo, but when the demo was held it wasn't a win in my opinion.

So I'm taking the learnings from that, to build bigger experiments, more quality experiments to bring larger results.

And the second is we've started to run more experiments, closer together so that our learnings are quicker and more frequent.

As you grow, and evolve as a company what got you to where you are won't get you to the next phase.

This is why it's important to step into the next phase of testing and experimentation.

As we enter into this second phase we're also taking time to go back to the "failed" experiments and find the small wins that we may have potentially overlooked.

This will allow us to better choose the experiments moving forward.

As you experiment and test more, you'll find that you know what works and what doesn't, but, and this is a big but.

Never get biased to your own experiments.

Make sure you go back and find other small wins that could potentially add to the success of future experiments.

This step is extremely important because the type of experiments is far more important than the amount you're running.

Don't just go for speed before you've got quality down.

Once you do have the quality of tests down, speed really comes down to one thing, front load your experiments.

Stop testing as you go.

When I first started here at HALOS, I would test as I went and it would take our focus off of things we needed to really be focused on.

This coming week will be our quarterly testing session. We will front load this quarter's tests based on the data from last quarter's.

This makes the quality and the speed of the tests improve over time.

Analyze Your Tests

I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not a patient person.

I'm actually very impatient.

Ask my wife, If impatience was an olympic sport, I'd be the Michael Phelps of Impatience.

Analyzing tests is a very time consuming process and I have skipped that more times than I like to admit.

I'll be very vulnerable here, but if I see a test fail, I've found myself look at the down arrow and just toss the rest of the analysis.

I won't dig the way I'm supposed to because I'm so focused on getting to the next win instead of learning from my failure.

You can't optimize this way.

If you want to optimize your growth process you've got to get away from the high level tests of "If we update the color of our 'Book a Demo' button, then conversions will increase".

That's easy, the answer is yes or no right?

If you want to get into the more robust tests such as "When we ran that test, this demographic improved in one category, but decreased in another" or "Our conversions went up, but our clicks went down." etc.

You've got to really dig deep on the analysis.

This is my Q3 goal. Dig deeper into all of our tests to find the small wins and the tiny nuggets of learning.

This is actually why the last step of our optimization phase is so important, but don't skip there just yet.

Play Nice With Others aka Cross-Functionality

I've said this for a while and my tenacity about this statement has only grown over the last few months.

No longer are there sales teams, marketing teams, product teams, customer success teams etc.

It's all a revenue team.

And at the core of it, the nucleus of this revenue team is growth!

There I said it.

I truly believe that at the core of any company they want up and to the right growth, how they get it, they don't care.

They want to increase revenue, margins and decrease churn, but who does it, doesn't matter.

That's why the revenue team is so important.

This cross functionality allows everyone to come together and focus on what the priorities are in increasing revenue.

Each week our Revenue Team gets together. Myself (I run sales, marketing and customer success), our COO, and our Head of Product get together to build out the priorities of the week to downstream.

It is a very strategic meeting and I come to them with client questions, or prospect inquiries. I talk to them about the interesting conversations I've had, some good ideas, some not so good ideas, and we riff.

We then dig into the tests and updates for the week and whether they're truly feasible to action on in a week or if we need to push the ideas.

For instance last week I brought up a few questions about Health Plan Agnostic Data that came up.

After talking through it with our revenue team, we realized that it wouldn't make sense to divert resources from far more important tasks to building something like that out for one client.

The goal of this meeting and this team is simple.

What do we need to get done this week across our revenue team to move up and to the right.

If it won't move us up and to the right, it gets pushed to the side.

Building Out Your Team

Like I said up above, because of my goals in our growth team of analyzing our data at a more granular level, this phase is extremely important so that we can continue moving forward.

The last phase of optimizing your growth process is actually building out your weaknesses.

When you get to this phase, you probably have some revenue flowing in which means that you should be investing it back into your business.

Here's how you invest it.

Take a look back at what areas are generally weak or maybe you've been spread a bit thin in those areas, go and hire those areas.

It doesn't have to be a full time hire, but maybe even contracting someone.

For me, I've found our team to be spread thin in a lot of the day to day stuff.

I run the demos, I do the prospecting, I'm building our marketing, hosting our podcast, writing blogs, running our onboarding and our account management etc.

I'm blessed to have a creative director on our team who took blogs off my hands and all the creative stuff I'm not good at, but still that's not enough.

So for us in this next phase, I'm looking for acquisition, engagement and fulfillment people on my team.

Where most teams go wrong is they double down on what they've already got in house.

If they've got 2 SDR's, they go and get 4 more to increase volume when in reality the conversion issue is probably not the amount of volume in calls, it's the lack of product marketing or brand.

So if you are crushing the engagement phase, yet the acquisition phase is lackluster, fill the gap.

Always fill the gaps prior to doubling down on what's working (in business that is).

Go Get Em Tiger

So there you have it.

What I'm doing at HALOS and what you can start doing in your company as well to optimize your growth.

It's not easy, but it's simple.

Start focusing on the quality of your experiments before you start shipping them faster, start analyzing the deeper results, not just the high level stuff, build out your revenue team, and fill the gaps in your team.

What I'll leave you with is this:

Take the time to look at your business.

Where are you weak, where are you strong?

Where is there really room for improvement?

Go and test those gaps, analyze the results, bring in other people to scrutinize the results and then fill the gaps as necessary.

If you do that over this last quarter, I can promise your 2021 will dwarf 2020.

Until Next time.