Get my free new Biz Jumpstart Kit!<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nStep #4: Not holding their growth team accountable<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The fourth mistake that I see that growth teams often make is that they don’t hold their growth teams accountable to having clear smart outcomes. Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-sensitive. If you have something where your general goal is to, for example, increase social media presence, you’ve already failed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is no clear outcome as to whether or not you guys were successful in achieving the increase of social media presence. Aside from some anecdotal evidence, you’re not going to have a clear yes or no answer. Growth can mean a lot of different things at startups, but ultimately typically we’ll go back to one of your north stars as a business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It might be something like the number of new customers you’re adding on, or the number of customers that are moving to multi-year accounts. Or the churn going down for your business. Whatever it is, there’s some sort of clear north star that your growth team should be focused on tackling at any point in time when they’re working through their different tests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For many companies, growth is simply going to be something as simple as prioritizing the number of qualified leads for the business. The reason why is because more qualified leads means more qualified opportunities for their sales team, which means more opportunities at bat to generate revenue for the organization. But there should be a clear understanding of exactly how the growth team is being held accountable to the outcomes and the growth of the overall business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mistake #5: Not hiring for experience<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
If you’re a startup, that’s listing one of those job descriptions, talking about wanting a growth lead with only two or three years of experience and your budget for that is half of the market, then you’re not approaching this from the right lens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sure. You might have the chance of hitting the gem or the diamond in the rough, in terms of somebody who’s a young whippersnapper marketer and wants to just become really good and test out different things and there’ll be successful just because they’re intrinsically motivated enough to do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in most situations, what I found is that growth comes from actual experience of being in the trenches and knowing enough different strategies to drive growth itself. And what that means is that too often, I see that startups under invest in their budget for the growth team. They’ll set aside a budget where they have decided that they want to invest in growth, but they’re not actually investing in ample enough into the experience level that they want for leading growth. And as a result, they get disappointed with their outcomes in six to 12 months. And they scrap the idea of a growth team altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, that’s not to say that this cannot work. You might come across like I said, somebody who’s an absolute rock star that just needs their shot but in most situations, you will find that experience pays, especially in this world, because what an experienced growth hire is able to do is just pull from their past playbook of what they’ve already tested in an adjacent industry, and then transfer it over into your industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And that’ll allow you to cut corners in a very productive and healthy way as opposed to having to figure everything out and discover every learning through every literal experiment. Even if you can’t find somebody with exact growth experience, what you want to look for is transferable experience to the channel that you want to be investing in next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If for example, you’re really trying to expand out your cold email approach, well, then that might be a situation where you’ll look for folks in the candidate pool that come from an extensive account executive background, where they cold emailed a ton of their prospects and built up their own pipelines. I cannot emphasize this point enough. Once you have enough budget for experienced hires, make sure you do so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve been in startups that both have not invested in growth in this way, as well as startups that have. And it makes all the difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you liked this article, be sure to\u00a0check out my YouTube channel<\/a>\u00a0to get new videos every single week. I\u2019ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you think might benefit from learning these startup mistakes and how they can avoid them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n