Why does it make sense to create an acceleration team within your corporation!

Traditional org. charts are pretty straightforward. Based on its position within the corporation, each department is split and labeled. Product development creates the product, marketing generates leads, sales seals the transactions, and operations ensure that everything runs smoothly for the customer and the company as a whole — hopefully.

If you're used to this mindset, the idea of forming an "acceleration team" may seem unnecessary. After all, aren't all of the team members and individual departments accountable for the company's growth?

One of the marketing department's responsibilities, for example, is to find new ways to grow their reach and gain market share. Product managers are always looking for ways to improve acceptance among potential consumers, and the sales department is frequently all about helping the company's numbers go in the right direction.

Unfortunately, our experience indicates that this is not happening. Especially in large organizations like a “tragedy of the commons” scenario, when everyone is responsible for the acceleration, no one is responsible for it. As there’s no one to take the lead on the issue, there’s no way to direct the company’s collective action in a singular direction to drive the company’s acceleration.

Good ideas for innovation and growth are often buried under the day-to-day processes of making the business work. What’s worse, separate departments too often operate in siloes, serving their own interests above the interest of the collective. Even in the cases that they are linked by technology, that doesn't change the fact that each team has its own set of goals, objectives, and interests.

Furthermore, when the company's acceleration isn't guided by a steady hand, it generally happens in spurts. For example, if your marketing team achieves breakthrough success and your SaaS product gains a wave of new clients, that's fantastic! What if you don't have the necessary infrastructure to support those users? What if your marketing team is concentrating on acquiring new users/customers when your product is almost — but not quite — finished? If those new users become unhappy with the glitches in their experience and abandon your product, all of that successful momentum could be to waste.

At Vesquad, we believe that after building a solid product with a satisfied user base, you will need a dedicated team of experts to lead the acceleration of your venture to grow and evolve.

Our approach of the acceleration team is very much inspired by the “growth teams” that were created by tech startups like Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb. Initially, these businesses were primarily concerned with perfecting their products. They turned to marketing strategies to advertise their solutions after they had a solid proposition. However, they discovered that product development and go-to-market were inextricably linked. Product development and marketing couldn't proceed independently if they wanted to achieve the type of acceleration they wanted (what is widely mentioned as a "hockey stick" success). By formulating a growth team, they could assign some of their experts to focus on the nuanced aspects of growth and overall company acceleration.?

Acceleration teams are easier to imagine in terms of a software or SaaS product because they originated in the tech industry. An acceleration team can be made up of marketers or salespeople, but in the tech world, it's more likely to include developers, data analysts, and UX/UI experts who work under the supervision of an acceleration manager.? Acceleration teams must utilize the company's most creative and innovative individuals because they need to be able to challenge the static quo, think freely, and experiment on how the company acquires and retains customers. An acceleration marketer, for example, isn't just concerned with day-to-day marketing activities. They search for new ways of driving results through experimentation, gaining insights from their analytics to draw conclusions.

What does an acceleration team do?

The daily activities of an acceleration team depend on the company and the industry they find themselves in. In general, once you've identified a market for your product, you'll engage the services of an acceleration team to utilize data analysis, qualitative research, and testing to figure out what's preventing people from buying and using it, and how your company can eliminate those frictions. In parallel, an acceleration team must create an innovation playbook that consists of tools, training materials, services, data sources, funding opportunities, etc that can be utilized by relevant stakeholders.?

Other departments are frequently hampered by their day-to-day responsibilities, but an acceleration team may bounce back and forth between departments, employing data-driven insights and experimentation to find and exploit acceleration possibilities wherever they occur. At the same time, the acceleration team must enable other departments and individual stakeholders to better perform and deliver upon their objectives.

An acceleration team, for example, would want to know why your product's new feature is causing so much trouble for users. They can start with a theory and then utilize experimentation to arrive at a conclusion and examine the data. The information gleaned from the analysis will aid the relevant product or business owner in developing a solution to the problem.

They could also help you improve the effectiveness of your go-to-market activities. This could entail learning about and experimenting with new marketing channels, as well as coming up with novel ways to leverage existing ones. Ideally, they'll uncover repeatable methods that your digital marketing team can implement, resulting in the creation of an accelerated marketing template that you can use in the future.

Altogether, an acceleration team works to capture knowledge, enable all stakeholders to measure their success, reinforce the company’s culture, uphold the motivation of individual team members, and increase the sustainable growth of the organization.?

How does an acceleration team impact business??

There are numerous advantages to forming an acceleration team. However, formulating an acceleration team has a direct impact on what matters most to leaders when it comes to their companies: the bottom line. An acceleration team, in particular, can assist your organization in increasing its net income.?

Align your teams. You've definitely heard a lot about the need of aligning sales and marketing teams. It's nearly impossible to move forward with ideas and achieve actual outcomes when your teams aren't fully aligned. While technology can help you coordinate your departments, it isn't enough to get your people to work together. In the worst-case situation, teams are divided and working on separate projects. There may even be antagonism between teams, which is frequent among sales and marketing teams that are both complaining about lead quality, lead quantity, and low close rates.

An acceleration team can serve as a link between your teams as well as a change agent. This function is occasionally filled by agencies, which act as a link between the company's sales and marketing teams. Acceleration teams, on the other hand, aren't exclusively for sales and marketing. They can assist in identifying chances for upselling existing clients, generating referrals, and improving UX/UI by working with product developers and software engineers.

Focus. It's not uncommon for an internal project to gain traction before becoming stuck at a certain stage/level. This is because acceleration and innovation initiatives are frequently pushed aside in favor of other objectives. Misalignment among your teams, silos, and other issues typically compound this.

Your acceleration team serves as a catalyst for discovering and resolving solvable issues, as well as steering the company toward attainable goals. To accomplish this, your teams must alter the way they make decisions, often through the use of data and experimentation.

Let's imagine a large number of your prospects are inquiring about a feature that your product does not yet provide. Your sales team might contact your development team and suggest that implementing that feature is a smart idea. What, on the other hand, motivates the development team to work toward implementation? There isn't much.

Instead, your acceleration team may take that data, do tests, and then create a template for your development team to follow. They could even be able to demonstrate how introducing that feature might affect the bottom line. Not only do you have a goal that you can achieve, but you also have a reason to strive toward it.

Growth. Many businesses face difficulties in establishing long-term growth. Sure, it's about momentum — marketing, sales, and so on — but it's also about how businesses deal with failure.

You're essentially starting from the beginning every time you develop in spurts, creating gaps of time where your firm is merely sustaining itself. As a result, failure is a long and costly process. This frequently occurs when teams are forced to shift their focus from day-to-day operations to a new accelerated endeavor for which they are not prepared.

Because you never accept stagnation when you're part of an acceleration team, you're never caught off guard. Your acceleration team isn't doing its job if you're stuck in a rut.

Your acceleration team, on the other hand, will continually run experiments, fail, and try again. They fail faster and smarter, causing less damage to your other departments as a result. They'll be able to keep your momentum going as they develop insights and ideas, allowing you to attain maximum growth.

Often, sustained acceleration is achieved through a series of tiny increases over time, rather than by leaps and bounds.

New perspective. While it's true that experts within the acceleration team are "ideas people," they're not the same as artists, writers, or designers. They are more data-driven, and they are drawn to the minute details that add up to a significant difference.

You're undoubtedly already aware of the term "growth hacking," and, like many others, you're probably sick of hearing individuals call themselves growth hackers. Regardless, growth hacking is the mentality that distinguishes an excellent acceleration team. They may provide you with a fresh perspective on your company, ask tough questions, and present you with data-driven results.

?Should every cooperation have an acceleration team?

At Vesquad we believe that forming an acceleration team is an extremely productive approach. However, not every company needs an acceleration team - at least not yet.

You must begin with the fundamentals. Essentially, you should concentrate on your product, your market, and the avenues through which you communicate with your clients. You may start thinking about optimizing acceleration and developing an acceleration team once you have a working product that people love and a mechanism to reach your client base.

If you don't address these issues first, you risk marketing a product that no one wants to purchase or selling your product to individuals who aren't interested in it. Acceleration is necessary because in big organizations there is always a waste of resources and space for efficiency.