The Operational Cadence of Effective Growth Teams
The Operational Cadence of Effective Growth Teams
How to 3x the output of your marketing team without burning them out
In today's market, growth teams are in a bit of a pickle, tasked with hitting bigger targets with smaller budgets. The need for efficiency is at an all-time high, but so is the risk of burnout. With tighter budgets, tougher fundraising conditions, and AI pushing for cost savings, the pressure's on.
Why Most Growth Teams Are Wildly Inefficient
if your growth team's playbook hasn't seen an update in the last 3-5 years, chances are, you're not exactly leading the pack.
When your team's days are chock-full of reporting, drowning in emails, and bouncing from one meeting to another, you're setting the stage for a productivity nosedive — not to mention the morale taking a hit. It's like running in quicksand; the harder you try, the deeper you sink.
A 2023 report from the Wall Street Journal indicated that employees are spending two full days a week on email and meetings, leading to burnout and low productivity. This is especially worrying for growth teams, where creativity, innovation, and speed are crucial for success.
A significant portion of these hours is consumed by project updates and check-ins, which, although necessary, can often be time-consuming and disruptive.
I have seen first-hand calendars get filled with endless meetings titled some variation of “Project Update”, leaving the day chopped up into small 30-minute chunks for you to do the actual work.
It also kills one of the big advantages startups have over more established competition, speed. The ability to go from idea to execution in hours. No big meetings, internal buy-in, legal for approval, or brand guidelines to abide by.
So what is the answer? How can startup founders and marketing leaders reignite their growth teams and drive steady results without succumbing to both burnout and meeting overload?
In this post, I’ll give you 6 ways I have found to work well.
Foster a Culture of Focus, Clarity, and Testing
1. Define a Clear North Star Goal
Establish a revenue-centric objective (e.g. revenue or pipeline, but not MQLs!) that serves as the guiding light for all marketing initiatives, giving your teams a forcing function to optimize their activities for the bottom line.
Ask yourself: “Is this contributing to our bottom line?” If not, move it to the backlog.
It is far too easy to get tied down to projects that drive leads or traffic without any meaningful impact on your revenue goals.
There are a lot of things right now your marketing teams spend time on that just aren’t adding value. One of the best ways as a leader to help your team is to give them the right goals so they have the permission and confidence to say no.
Say no to you as the leader.
Say no to the founder.
Say no to meetings that should have been an email.
“This is definitely something we could explore but right now we are focused on these 3 big projects to help drive more revenue this quarter. Would be happy to discuss if we still want to pursue but for right now I am going to move it to the backlog unless you think otherwise”.
What Founder or CMO says no to that?
2. Empower The Team to Take Bigger Risks
When you build a team culture focused and obsessed with hitting goals, you need to also help them be fearless in trying out new things. Markets are crowded. Everyone is doing paid advertising, creating content, posting on social media, podcasting, sending emails, etc.
If we sell a marketing automation solution we aren’t competing with the other 300 companies selling the same thing, we are actually competing with all 12,000 martech solutions going after the same buyers. That one buyer is being crushed with emails, ads, and cold calls from hundreds if not thousands of other companies all vying for their time.
The easiest path to success isn’t to try and be better at running paid social than 11,999 other companies. The easiest path is to do it differently.
That could mean your creative, your offer — really anything. And that’s the fun part of growth — figuring out what can set you apart.
A great real-life example — during my time leading growth at G2 we invested heavily in Direct Mail. Now direct mail certainly isn’t a novel approach. However we did something wildly different, we sent people Pinatagrams with the message “Beating this cute pinata isn’t nearly as fun as beating your competition on G2. We coupled it with BDR outreach and saw a 20% meeting booked rate.
This also means being okay with failure. If companies are operating at a high speed, rapid failure is going to happen. And that is a good thing if you are learning from those failures. They should be celebrated and help you find your wins faster.
3. Hire Talent with a Growth Mindset
When I sit down with founders, a big part of our discussions revolves around the art of hiring growth marketers onto their teams. It's a tricky area, and I've noticed it's where many stumble. So, why is it so challenging?
For starters, marketers are natural at selling themselves, especially the more senior they are. They're adept at weaving a narrative with acronyms and industry jargon. Growth is a role that requires a very broad set of skills that expand what any standard marketing questions can reveal. Secondly, startups often hire for positions that candidates haven't exactly filled before, especially those transitioning from larger organizations to a head of growth role at a nimble startup. It's tough to gauge if they're truly up for it based on an interview alone.
Here's my approach to evaluating growth talent:
Test for metrics knowledge. Firstly, during interviews, I pay close attention to the metrics candidates mention. If a candidate says they're gunning for a specific goal, like driving sales pipeline, I jot that down. What's the target? How do they plan to hit it? Understanding their strategy and what channels they're leveraging gives me a clearer picture of their method.
Great: Know every metric of their funnel inside all the way to revenue.
Good: They know the growth side of the funnel but struggle with knowing the broader business metrics like LTV, CAC and how they are impacting those.
Bad: The metrics they share don’t add up to a cohesive story.
Break down the customer journey’s KPIs. Secondly, I delve into their current role's specifics in a follow-up interview. I ask them to lay out their marketing funnel. From lead generation to the final sale, I want the numbers. It's a telling exercise. Those who know their stuff can walk you through their process without missing a beat. The ones who falter, often those who've padded their achievements, their inconsistencies become glaringly obvious.
Test for mental agility. And then there's strategic agility. Can they pivot and scale their strategies when needed? I often pose hypothetical case study questions; if your CEO doubled your goal and handed you a substantial budget to make it happen, where would you invest? This question not only tests their strategic thinking but also their intimate knowledge of their current business and its growth potential.
Great: They have an endless list of big ideas they want to test.
Good: They have ideas they want to test but most are pretty standard approaches
Bad: They only share how they would invest in what they are already doing. If it truly already works for the business, why aren’t they scaling it already?
In my experience, the marketers who truly shine are those who not only have a deep understanding of their metrics but also possess a visionary mindset for future opportunities. They are thinking about bigger growth opportunities. This dual capability is my litmus test.
I've yet to regret hiring someone who could confidently navigate both these aspects, whether they're in growth, demand generation, content, or product marketing. At G2, we used this framework and members of our Growth team went on to lead growth at Ramp, Safe, Help Scout, and some of the biggest companies in SaaS.
Need help hiring the best growth marketers out there? Tap into HyperGrowth Partners’ vast network of growth leaders and operators.
Establish Lean Ops and Continuous Feedback
4. Adopt Shorter Work Cycles
Transition to a two-week sprint model to enhance team productivity and responsiveness, facilitating rapid iteration and course correction based on real-time feedback. This will also help you identify the capacity and bandwidth of the team but also ensure focus and helps you identify possible blockers that are slowing your team down. Speed is one of the most talked about things in startup culture, and shifting to a sprint model helps the team ship faster.
So how do you actually run a 2 week sprint? It comes down to 3 simple things:
Sprint Planning Meetings: At the start of each sprint, conduct a meeting to establish the tasks for the upcoming weeks, prioritize tasks, and set clear goals.
Limited Meetings: Instead of daily updates or frequent meetings, the sprint model advocates for one check-in meeting per week. These meetings serve as a platform to discuss progress and resolve issues. Here is the rough agenda for what that looks like:
Sprint Overview Recap
Recap of the sprint goals and key deliverables.
Review the sprint timeline and any critical dates coming up.
Progress Updates
Update each team member or sub-team on their specific deliverables.
Review completed tasks and progress toward sprint goals.
Spot any tasks that are behind schedule and discuss how to address them.
Challenges and Blockers
Discuss any challenges or blockers encountered since the sprint began.
Collaborative problem-solving to address these issues.
Adjustments to the sprint plan if necessary to overcome these obstacles.
Resource Allocation
Review of resource allocation to ensure it's aligned with sprint's priorities.
Reassign of resources if needed to address critical tasks or bottlenecks.
Sprint Reviews and Retrospectives: These are conducted at the end of each sprint and focus on evaluating the accomplishments and processes of the team during the sprint.
5. Establish Start-Stop-Continue Retros
Empower team members to identify and eliminate inefficiencies through collaborative retros, where team members can reflect on which activities are impacting the bottom line, fostering a culture of continuous improvement and alignment with strategic objectives.
Start: Team members brainstorm on practices or activities that they believe should be initiated to increase productivity or help you hit your goals.
Stop: This segment identifies what is not working—things that hinder productivity or create unnecessary stress or conflict within the team. Campaigns that aren’t working but are still running. These are actions that need to be stopped immediately.
Continue: This is the affirmation segment, where practices that are working well and contributing to the team's success are acknowledged and agreed to be continued.
This will give your growth team a fresh perspective and a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities. Everyone on the team will now know what are the most important things they can do to hit growth goals. This meeting should include everyone on the growth team.
One thing you will find when you first start doing these is that the team might be timid in saying what they think you should stop. They are worried about stepping on toes, hurting feelings, or saying the wrong things. So you must set the tone as the leader that the meeting needs to be candid and that everything is up for discussion.
One great way to do this is to analyze the projects you have the team working on and suggest cuts there as well.
Are you in to decode the 10 most common GTM myths about early-stage SaaS? Check Startup Business Tips below.
6. Prioritize Speed & Mental Agility
Why is speed even important for start-ups? Working at a startup is like being an explorer or scout. You are in constant search of finding things. Finding product market fit, optimizing acquisition channels, the right verticals to target, and iterating the right messaging to use.
Startup growth professionals must have a scout mindset. They nurture continuous learning, take calculated risks, and continuously update their map of beliefs about their buyers, channels, and products. Some signals of a scout mindset include:
Actively admitting when they’re wrong
Being willing to change their mind on a topic, and be public about it
Actively seek criticism and challenge from others
Keeping close to those who challenge your beliefs
You can use these thought experiments to evaluate where your team members are on the scout mindset spectrum.
Double standard test: are you judging this situation by a different standard than you’d use for another one that you’re less attached to?
Outsider test: how would you evaluate your situation if it wasn’t your situation?
Conformity test: if other people (close to you) wouldn’t hold this belief, would you still hold it?
Selective skeptical test: if this evidence challenged your opinion or beliefs — or your social circle’s — how much would you consider it?
Status quo test: if your current situation was not the status quo, would you still choose it?
Posing these questions to your team members will put them on the spot and encourage them to develop unbiased and genuine mental agility.
The known and predictable realities of your business are often very small. The unknown however is vast and often where all of the big opportunities lie. And this is why speed is so important. Embracing speed allows great growth leaders and their teams to try things at a faster pace — shipping new campaigns, testing marketing channels, testing messaging variations, designs, etc.
The faster you can get to answers, even when the answer is failure, the closer you are to finding success. To discover the big opportunities for their businesses to grow.
Want to level up your experimentation framework and pace? That’s one of our specialties. Contact us to implement the framework to escape velocity.
Conclusion
By embracing agility, prioritizing strategic objectives, and leveraging the right cadence and talent, marketing leaders can unlock unprecedented levels of productivity and drive hypergrowth without sacrificing the well-being of their teams.
If you have followed this model you have now:
Built a growth-oriented culture with the right people in the right seats
Identified the key goals you need to hit
Identified the things you are doing or should be doing to achieve those goals.
Eliminated every other thing that is a distraction to achieving those goals
Eliminated countless meetings and check-ins, giving your team 2 full days back a week to just execute.
I have run this exact playbook with every team I have managed and have always been amazed at how much faster teams can execute, without burning them out.
You must reimagine the way growth teams operate and prioritize a growth mindset, efficient processes, and modern leadership. I’ve led growth at companies that have 10x-ed in a single year and those are the biggest keys.
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