There are many brilliant ideas and end-goals, top business book quotes and beautiful strategy presentations that can be built depending on the most popular buzzword of the day, be it Chat GPT, community building, growth hacking, omni channel marketing or many others. You may hear about personas and journeys, ABM, full funnel, cross-funnel, loop and other concepts, however, if you want to talk to someone that is able to connect the high level strategy to hands-on execution and tie it to your OKRs, keep reading.
In the first 30 days in your company, I will already have analysed the product, its unique value proposition, and whether it does, or not, have a solid Product-Market Fit. I will ask for Net Promoter Score, read through Customer Success chat and, if possible, speak to the customers and see their reviews. I will study past experiments and learnings, the documentation your team has left, what has been done historically to achieve the KRs that you're trying to achieve and why it succeeded (or failed). Good research is the king, many things have already been done and reinventing the wheel means innovating and that's often risky and expensive (if we have budget, great, but if we need to go after low-hanging fruits, we should focus on what's already been proven). Based on the product and research, both internal and external, I will determine goals and feasibility for short, mid and long term, see whether OKRs are, indeed, SMART (and by indeed I mean achievable and realistic, if we have already validated drivers, than the sky is the limit, else, the growth should be predictable and sustainable based on the past performance and time to scale) and then translate the OKRs into specific actions and experiments that we need to complete in order to make magic happen (meaning: achieving growth goals!).
Next 30 days is execution time! I will prepare drivers and experiments, gather team strengths and fill the gaps. The good thing about a hands-on executive like myself is that I don't need to hire before I act, I can take over any marketing, sales, channel partner... pretty much any startup position that is core to growth before I ask for a headcount. This way I know exactly what profile is needed and what will they need to do to become successful (given, of course, that you have someone already on the team, else, the day only has 24 hours).
I also rely heavily on freelancers (Upwork, Fiverr, depending on the level of complexity involved) to make sure that even while rolling up my sleeves I don't spend too much time on low-impact tasks (like list building, lead research or others). I will execute experiments and set first oops to test, as well as use my deep portfolio of frameworks and powerful tools to design quantitative and qualitative growth model of the business. By that time you should already see tangible results.
Let's say you're a software company selling to a CFO persona. You used cold calling and then had your marketing team test some Meta ads, which worked. You just hired me as your new CMO and you're now asking about the headcount needs. Some growth experiments I would test out before asking for a Social Growth profile would be:
I also rely heavily on freelancers (Upwork, Fiverr, depending on the level of complexity involved) to make sure that even while rolling up my sleeves I don't spend too much time on low-impact tasks (like list building, lead research or others). I will execute experiments and set first oops to test, as well as use my deep portfolio of frameworks and powerful tools to design quantitative and qualitative growth model of the business. By that time you should already see tangible results.
Let's say you're a software company selling to a CFO persona. You used cold calling and then had your marketing team test some Meta ads, which worked. You just hired me as your new CMO and you're now asking about the headcount needs. Some growth experiments I would test out before asking for a Social Growth profile would be:
- Targeting CFOs on LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a popular platform for professionals, including CFOs, however, the cost per click is very high and the key tactics are expensive (CPL of $60 at least). I would run micro tool-based LinkedIn ads targeting CFOs and create a VIP LinkedIn group with tight expertise, to see the engagement rates.
- I would then try partnering with finance industry influencers who have a strong following in the finance and accounting space. I would choose 2 or 3 and test out a promotional post, a webinar and a virtual event. I would then tie it with the following:
- CFO-focused email marketing campaign: a whitepaper, industry report and a case study as a follow up to the event to see whether nurturing campaigns can or not make sense in here. I would look at the quality of leads generated in each stage of the funnel.
- Twitter thread: I would try going after new advertising path on Twitter (conversions are finally in the platform, better late than never) and see how the personas respond to hashtags related with industry news.
Ultimately, it's numbers game. I will create growth loops for the business depending on what works, meaning, what ends up bringing revenue or contributing to revenue in a way. The more loops we have, the safer the business is from sudden threats. Only relying on SEO and inbound traffic? Not bad, but with MOZ weather, any time there's a storm in Google's algorithm, we will suffer thinking that something terrible can happen to the business (like: we may actually loose a big portion of the traffic). Should we, if we do a good job? We should not, but Google incorporates new signals and variables every day and anything can happen. If we have more loops, we are safer, and, you're right, the ROI is in the centre of it all.