Stop the chaos & focus on growth
Do your growth efforts have you running thin in different directions?
If your company has validated product-market fit and is ready to transition to focus on sustainable growth, or has already transitioned, this article is for you.
Whether you’re in marketing, trying to figure out how to scale channels and decrease your CAC, or you’re in product, trying to figure out how to provide more value to your customers, you need a cross-functional and systematic approach to achieving sustainable growth for your company.
1. Value Across the Full Customer Journey
To truly impact growth, your organization needs to evaluate every customer touch point to asses how it best delivers value to users. The owner of the full customer journey isn’t contained to one silo of the organization. Instead, customer service, sales, marketing, product, engineering, and data science ALL need to play a role in improving this full customer journey, together.
“There should be only one silo in any business and that’s the customer silo.” — Michelle Broderick, CMO at Simple
If your organization doesn’t have these silos working together on a regular basis… Houston, you have a problem.
A great way to bring together these vastly different perspectives to improving your customer journey is to establish your company’s North Star Metric. When your entire company adopts the same metric to evaluate progress as an organization, vastly differing perspectives from each department will become a competitive advantage to finding the best ideas to solve specific growth objectives.
2. Growth Inputs
Ideas for improving your product and customer value come in all shapes and sizes, and from every corner of the company. Customer service slacks you a new idea, your boss emails you an idea you need to implement yesterday, someone else drops by your desk with a far out idea (wait, was that serious?) and you get an idea while running as you decompress from a long day at the office.
These ideas are fuel for growth, but without a uniform way to collect and prioritize these ideas in relation to your growth objectives, you’ll spend too much time sifting through half-baked ideas.
Give your team a centralized place to submit thought-out ideas in a uniform fashion and your role can shift from collecting ideas to prioritizing ideas based on their growth impact.
3. Evolving team
Blame it on millennials and call it what you will. Your company’s team will lose and gain teammates as the years pass and it’s inevitable. This leaves untapped progress when an employee leaves the company with all of their insight.
Your company needs a central repository for marketing and growth initiatives. This allows every new employee to get up to speed quickly for what’s worked and hasn’t worked in the past. It also helps you reflect on the ideas that worked and didn’t work so that you can apply those learnings into actionable next steps for the company to take.
4. External experts
There’s going to be instances where your company outsources experiments, channels, or entire departments to third-party experts. And that’s great! By working with third-parties and consultants, you limit the risk of hiring a full-time expert for a growth initiative that may not prove out to work for your organization in the long run.
This means you need to find an efficient way to work these experts into your existing process and capture the learnings from their efforts.
There will be learnings from consultants that can be applied to other parts of the company and you need to ensure you’re spreading that knowledge. For example, if you learn that a Facebook ad performs well for a specific audience, you can then communicate to sales the types of messaging that works for them, to ensure that you’re capitalizing on what works.
A software to help — Projects 2.0
If you’re dealing with any of these challenges above, I recommend giving our new growth software, Projects 2.0, a try free for 30 days.
With Projects 2.0, you can…
Get your entire team focused on what matters for growth using objectives that tie to your North Star Metric.
Collect new ideas and prioritizing them relative to your growth objectives with a standardized template.
Ensure each team member’s and external consultant’s learnings are captured in a system accessibly to the entire team.
Want to start using Projects to manage your chaos and start growing? Request access to a free trial today.
