Getting growth on the right track requires a detailed plan and relentless focus on execution, things I’ve consulted on with clients as early as pre-series A and as big as Fortune 500 brands.
Focused execution means your team is set up to remove blockers that hinder growth. Some of the biggest roadblocks aren’t external factors or force majeure out of a company’s control. Many stem from internal processes—ahem, bad habits—where teams get in their own way.
The good news is with discipline you can control how much these blockers affect your team. Removing them sooner rather than later can have a knock-on effect of helping you grow revenue and acquire customers faster.
Here are a few of the most common roadblocks and how to overcome them:
1. Not talking to your customers
One of the greatest assets for your growth strategy is your customer base. Many team members get to know your customers better than anyone, and often learn in isolation:
Sales and customer support are on phone calls and emails with them all day.
Marketing can see how they interact with your ads and emails.
Product and design know how and when they use your product.
If that information isn’t traveling across teams, you’re missing out on critical inputs for your acquisition strategy.
Sit with those teams to understand your customers, especially your highest value, longtime customers. Questions you should be asking these teams about your customers:
How did they find out about your product?
What is it they love about your company?
How likely are they to refer you to others?
What channels or messaging strategies converted those prospects to clients?
If you don’t know what resonates with your existing customers, you won’t know how to acquire new ones.
2. Letting short-term fires get in the way of long-term plans
What’s urgent is not always important and what’s important is not always urgent. But urgency is so good at grabbing our attention. We get caught up in the frenzy of something that feels time-sensitive, only to realize that it takes time and attention away from long-term goals.
This happens all too often in growth organizations and can result in a haphazard approach. Maybe you’ve seen these things happening:
A board member hears a podcast ad for the competition and wonders why the company is not advertising on podcasts. Next thing you know the marketing team is jumping on podcast advertising without testing that channel’s viability.
Competitor A starts running YouTube ads and performance marketing redirects focus towards a video strategy.
Competitor B launches a new feature that isn’t on the roadmap. Product abandons their current priorities and redirects attention to that new feature.
Being opportunistic is not always a bad thing, but letting distractions get in the way of growth can be problematic. Having a solid growth plan can help your team stay focused. Projects with urgency should be vetted alongside other priorities and slotted into your roadmap after thoughtful consideration.
If what feels urgent doesn’t align with your strategic priorities, learn to be comfortable with passing on that opportunity.
Say no so you can say yes to what’s really important.
3. Not having a data-driven culture
Making strategic decisions without data to back it up is like flying blind. There are two common challenges when it comes to data:
Not having a system for collecting data, making decisions based on gut.
Collecting loads of data without knowing what to do with it.
This is a common problem for growth organizations, given that 87% of marketers consider data their organization’s most underutilized asset. Harvard Business Review recently reported that many big companies are embracing analytics, but many don’t have a data-driven culture.
Having a discipline for data is a complex strategy itself that requires ownership and accountability across the organization. Leadership should reinforce its importance at the highest level.
In growth orgs, creating a data-driven culture means having a clear point of view of what metrics to track and why. Defining KPIs as part of your growth strategy gives you an anchor for monitoring progress. These goals should be strategic, long-range and grounded in data. With a clear view of what you need to track, you need the right systems in place for tracking and evaluating progress.
Be sure to run statistically significant tests so you know the data you’re collecting is meaningful. Teams should share campaign performance openly and often so everyone can see what’s working vs. not.
The good news is there are more tools than ever to help you better track analytics, manage projects and collaborate with teams. The bad news is they create digital clutter and costly context switching for teams.
This brings us to our next common blocker:
4. Systems and tools overload
I’ve worked with many clients whose teams live in various and disconnected tools:
Some are managing projects in Trello while others are in Asana.
One team is tracking analytics in Looker while the other is in Salesforce.
The marketing team can see ad campaign performance in Facebook ads while the data team only has visibility of UTM tags in Tableau.
Be clear about what tools your team is using and what you aren’t. Invest your time and resources to make the best use of the tools that best align with your workflow and KPIs. This requires a level of strategy and documentation with buy-in and transparency across the team.
Schedule a working session to gather the team’s input on what tools and processes best support the team and what can be left behind. Document it in a central location for all to see.
Hold each other accountable for following the process, and embed training into new team members’ onboarding so they’re fully up to speed on how best to collaborate with the systems and tools at their disposal.
Protect your team’s time with a clear point of view on what should be communicated in messaging apps like Slack vs. email vs. in-person meetings. Have clear agendas for meetings and don’t schedule for more time than needed. Often a 15- or 30-minute meeting can be more productive than an hour-long session. Even better: question whether the meeting is really necessary.
Embrace opportunities to introduce new, better tools and ways of collaborating over time, but be thoughtful and strategic about adoption. Include that as a brainstorm or discussion point in upcoming team meetings or offsites. This framework for running an effective team offsite can help your team put ideas into action.
However you go about it, be sure to have a clear operating model to create a high-functioning team.
How you build your team and collaborate across functions brings us to our next roadblock:
5. Not having a strategic hiring plan
Finding the right growth hires is harder than ever. Some questions that come up:
Should your next hire be a generalist or specialist within a certain area?
Should you focus on content marketing or product marketing?
How do you want to grow the team and which hire should you make first?
Whether you’re building a team from scratch or expanding your current growth org, finding the right talent is a constant challenge. And making a bad hire can have negative ripple effects on your growth plan, team dynamic and your increasingly limited time.
Every company is different and building the right team depends on many variables:
Budget
Growth goals
Channel performance
Existing team structure
Your hiring plan should start with your budget. Then analyze your existing growth plan and customer data to figure out how to acquire more of your highest-value customers. That will give you an indication of what channel expertise you need to bring in-house.
From there, you then need to decide what seniority your next hire(s) need to be based on your budget, existing team and gaps in responsibility.
For marketing teams, one of the biggest questions is whether to hire a generalist vs. specialist, and every team differs. In digital marketing, the space changes by the minute. Unless you have the budget to hire many specialists, it’s risky to have a team that’s too specialized.
When working with limited resources, hire what I call “marketing athletes” — generalists who are strong in marketing fundamentals but can comfortably move across paid, owned and earned channels.
They should be grounded in the fundamentals of being data-driven and customer-oriented but nimble enough to work across channels. This creates a better career path for individual contributors who eventually want to run a team or become a CMO. Without understanding cross-channel interplay, it’s challenging to oversee a broader demand generation strategy.
Thinking about your team’s needs and how to mentor and grow a hire will keep them happy and thriving in their role. Not only is it more expensive to recruit a new hire than to retain an existing team member, successful companies are built by high-achieving teams. Having a plan for an individual contributor’s career growth can help your organization foster leadership development from within.
Kickstarting your company’s growth starts with being thoughtful and strategic about:
Your team structure,
How your team collaborates,
Understanding what’s urgent vs. important,
How you evaluate and track goals, and
How you engage with customers.
Once you’ve laid the foundation and painted a picture of where you want to go, successful execution comes naturally. This puts you on a path to faster growth, fewer stops and starts as you scale your business, and creates a high-performance culture that attracts talent.
