The secret ingredient to high performing teams: the ‘growth hacker’

Ask any commercial organisation to list its main focus areas and it’s likely that growth will be near the top. Other goals will also figure, such as customer service, customer experience, engagement and so on. Isn’t ‘growth’ the most self-evident; the raison d’être?

And yet … organisations may know everything they believe it’s possible to know about their customers, but not necessarily use their accumulated, and often expertly curated, knowledge for the practical contribution it can make to growing the business.

Well here’s an interesting sounding job role for you: ‘Growth Hacker’. These are the self-appointed experimenters, the agile (even restless) innovators who look for the quickest way to affect the most number of people, in order to short-cut to the fastest impact and growth.

The concept of the role (or the calling) first came to prominence in the start-up arena around 2010, in hungry organisations where there was a lack of formal structure about who did what. These so-called Growth Hackers picked up the challenges of hot-wiring growth (something digital), which quickly implied calibrating metrics through data analysis:

“ Growth hackers have a passion for tracking and moving a metric. Without metrics or data, a growth hacker can feel out of place and uncomfortably exposed. This strong bias towards data drives a growth hacker away from vanity metrics towards metrics that will make or break the business. Data and metrics are paramount to the scientific way a growth hacker discovers a path to growth. Rather than looking at metrics as strictly a reporting mechanism or data as a way to geek out, growth hackers view both as inspiration for a better product through a process of theorizing and testing.” [1]

Organisations can learn from this no-nonsense obsession with growth to make people sit up and pay attention. We all want a Growth Hacker. That’s the person that will get us on track to building our customer base and shaking up the market; some hard-hitting, future-thinking, fixed-direction super-hero whose every waking hour produces results.

To drive growth consistently, through every action a company takes, every communication it sends and – more to the point – with every customer it has or intends to have a relationship with, everyone has to be a growth hacker. We all need to be part of a super organisation, not depend on a super-hero. As I’ve written about in a previous blog, sales, marketing and customer services teams (SM&C) need to acquire the skills together, share initiatives, and bind in obsessing about growth.

Integrate to dominate

Simply having a vast quantity of information doesn’t amount to much unless an organisation makes sense of it. They need to see the links between insights, being able to get a vision of the bigger picture – the complete customer life-cycle – by evaluating every tiny detail within it.

This unified view will allow teams to spot new customer trends, and new opportunities for innovation and growth that may once have lain dormant in disconnected reports due to nobody having seen how an interaction in channel, for example, had implications for the way in which a service or process may be improved in another.

This was back in the days of the silo, back when those responsible for reporting on website traffic (normally the web management team) or email, social, paid media and advertising traffic acted independently, tinkering here and there, seeing small gains and being pleased to have done what little they could to move things along.

A unified SM&C team is 4.2 times more likely than underperformers to leverage predictive intelligence or data science to create personalised emails [State of Marketing 2016 Report, Salesforce]. Being more than four times more effective is a major leap along the growth curve.

Of the 4,000 marketing leaders responding to the Salesforce survey, only 54% were able to attribute a growth in ROI to their email marketing, but a year later that rose to 79% – highlighting the power that data intelligence can still deliver on an established channel such as email.

The same report highlights that 83% of high-performing teams used customer data, website behaviours and demographic data to segment targeted ads.

Data-driven product development

Data is not just about honing communications. Organisations can discover opportunities, get predictions and stop problems before they surface. Companies are making smart use of data to redesign and relaunch products, for example.

Business Intelligence is a fine art. One recent customer engagement of Canpango’s was a global predictive analytics provider in the hospitality space who used their solution to improve customer experience through staffing and inventory management and visibility. They needed to run smarter (and above all much much quicker) systems internally to give them better reporting and up-to-date visibility.

We built new reports for them so that what used to take five people four days each can now be done at the click of a button. We saved them 20 days – in other words, a month of work, every year. We helped them manipulate and rethink their data to create lenses to view sets in a new way, enabling them to make smarter choices in how they spend their money to direct growth – i.e. to “growth hack”. The new thinking we’ve enabled may ultimately reform nothing less than how they go to market.

New skill-sets

With the right tools and the right mind-set it is no great struggle for businesses to become great performers. As teams come together more, their functions don’t overlap but their ability to generate ideas, based on data, amplifies.

It’s about having the courage to experiment and disregarding any fear about failure. Learning flows from experimenting, and success flows from learning. That’s how growth hackers used to achieve.

On the road to becoming a super organisation that isn’t dependant on super heroes, a ‘growth accelerator’ is close to fruition that will enable the organisation to go deeper, faster and farther into its data than ever before, almost without knowing it: Artificial Intelligence (AI) or ‘machine learning’ is set to massively scale how teams can experiment, learn and innovate.

“ AI promises to re-architect business models from the ground up — enabling companies to get closer to their customers, design hyper-personalized experiences, and deliver relevant (even pre-emptive) customer engagement in real time.”

I’ll be covering the AI opportunity in my next blog, but in the meantime, I’d be delighted to hear what you think about a company-wide obsession with data. Will it change the commercial world?