Kieran Flanagan - Three growth choices than can scale or kill your business (Turing Fest 2019)

Your ability to go from startup to scaleup comes down to a series of choices. We dive into these choices and cover how to prioritize growth in customer acquisition, the optimal way to organize your teams for growth, and how to focus on the metrics that matter. Throughout the presentation, we'll use examples from our journey in HubSpot, and other high-growth companies.

Transcript

1. KIERAN FLANAGAN @SEARCHBRAT @HubSpot @GrowthTLDR Three Growth Choices that Can Scale Or Kill Your Business Kieran Flanagan @Searchbrat
2. What should I talk about at this growth conference?
3. So many ideas
4. Tactics Hacks Experiments
5. "I mean, this growth thing isn't even that hard, what are you complaining about?"
6. So many ideas How HubSpot Grew Organic Traffic 120% In 5 Months with 4 Simple Steps. How Mindmeister Grew Organic Traffic By 332% With User-generated Content. How Rocketreach Grew From Zero To One Million Users. How Toggle Grew Their Chrome Extension To 135,000 Users.
7. Behind the bravado, growth is a rollercoaster of emotions. Users Time
8. During my time at HubSpot, I've learned growth is about more than tactics, experiments, or hacks. Marketing Hub Sales Hub Service Hub CRM Free Free Paid
10. 1. Language Align teams around a common language for growth.
11. GrowthTLDR - EP46 “NO ONE TEAM CAN DRIVE REAL GROWTH.” - MAYUR GUPTA (CMO @Freshly) Marketing Product Sales Breakthrough Growth
12. Teams need a common language to describe goals.
13. Things can go drastically wrong when people misunderstand each other.
14. Sparketing Model Set team goals and commitments to each other.
15. First, agree on how your model will work.
16. Fit Interest Product Onboarding Touchless Touchless User Success Coach Email, Live Chat All teams should agree on what the user experience will be.
17. Fit Interest Users Touchless (no sales) Touchless (no sales) Active Users PQLs And agree how it will generate revenue for the business. ** Sample Model =
18. An SLA creates accountability between teams. It spells out who is responsible for what.
19. Marketing Number of Users / PQLs / Revenue Sales Speed and depth of account follow -up Product Activation Rate, Revenue Marketing Number of Signup Sales Speed, depth of follow ups, Touched Revenue Product Active Users, PQLs,Touchless Growth (Tools, Data)
20. New Revenue Goal DEFINE THE BUSINESS GOAL Average Sales Price # of Customers
21. CALCULATE THE PRODUCT GOALS New Customers Goal Active Users / PQLs / Touchless to Customer Close % Active Users / PQLs / Touchless Revenue
22. One of the essential metrics to track in a freemium model is something called your activation rate. What’s the core value of your product, and is it growing over time?
23. Core Value Makes scheduling meetings easy Measuring Value #Number of meetings booked Core Value Makes booking restaurants easy Measuring Value #Number of tables booked Core Value Grow sales revenue Measuring Value #Number of deals closed
25. Agree on PQL types and get close rates 19%
26. New Customers Goal Sign-ups to Customer Close % CALCULATE THE MARKETING GOALS Sign-up
27. How do we generate 100 customers a month?
28. Reverse Engineer
29. CALCULATE THE SALES GOALS Meetings 55% Calls 25% Emails 20% How many calls, emails, and meetings do sales need to hit targets.
30. Set-up your key SLA charts
31. A Monthly Marketing SLA
32. A Monthly Product SLA
33. A Monthly Sales SLA
34. 2. Team Align teams around most significant opportunities for growth.
35. At some point in the company's growth, team structure becomes the most impactful growth lever.
36. Source: https://firstround.com/review/lessons-from-coinbases-wild-ascent-four-rules-for-scaling/
37. Cross-team Alignment You should continuously look to realign skills and resources around your most significant opportunities.
38. GrowthTLDR - EP46 AT AIRBNB, WE REALIZED OUR BEST PATH TO GROWTH WERE CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMS DEDICATED TO A PROBLEM. - LENNY RACHITSKYR
39. SEO Specialist Content Analyst Developer Designer Growth Marketer PM Engineering UX Design Cross Functional Teams Drive Real Growth Improve Onboarding by 5% Double Organic Traffic
40. WARNING! cross-team alignment doesn't happen overnight.
41. The first time you create ownership of metrics could be FIRE!
42. Yo, your suit is
43. Yo, every team feels like it's on
44. Marketing Signups, PQLs, Revenue Product NPS
45. + + It's why this stuff matters. The Model Ownership Fit Interest Marketing Product Sales SLAs Growth Users Active Users PQLs Touchless (no sales) Touchless (no sales)
46. Team Prioritization Over-invest in a couple of things vs. spreading equally across everything
47. Peanut Butter is your enemy!
48. The HubSpot Lanes Model Full Resources Full Resources Self Sufficient
49. 3. Strengths Lean into existing strengths for present growth, develop new ones for future growth.
50. What's your greatest weakness?
51. "Urgh, this person has put no effort into these questions."
52. "I think it's that I'm a perfectionist. Everything I do is so awesome that sometimes it's ok to be, like, 99% awesome vs. my usual 105%."
54. Lean heavily into your strengths.
55. Doubling Search Traffic How did we near double search traffic in under 16 months?
56. Jan-2106 Feb-2016 M ar-2016 Apr-2016 M ay-2016 Jun-2016 Jul-2016 Aug-2016 Sep-2016 O ct-2016 N ov- 2016 D ec- 2016 Jan-2017 Feb-2017 M ar-2017 Apr-2017 M ay-2017 Jun-2017 Jul-2017 Aug-2017 Sep-2017 O ct-2017 N ov- 2017 D ec- 2017 5,000,000 4,000,000 3,000,000 2,000,000 1,000,000 0 Growth was flat for a sustained period. Maybe we hit the ceiling of that channel?
57. But, after proper analysis, we realized there was a lot of growth left, we needed to swing bigger.
58. We want to win the minds of customers. We create informative content that helps them get better at their jobs. We realigned our content strategy around hearts and minds. We want to win the hearts of customers. We create content that connects with customers emotionally on topics they care about.
59. Search Insights Report (SIR) A framework for identifying what content to created based on keyword insights. We created two near-identical playbooks to create editorial calendars for each content type. Buzz Insights Report (BIR) A framework for identifying what content create based on engagement insights.
60. SEO Specialist Content Analyst Developer Designer We created a full-stack search team to run a series of playbooks to grow traffic.
61. Quarterly SIR Find new keyword opportunities, flag existing keyword opportunities, flag existing URL opportunities Publish SIR Blogging team take SIR and turn it into amazing content Historical Optimization Flag blog posts that drop in traffic, and automate reason why (competition, intent)
62. Jan-2106 Feb-2016 M ar-2016 Apr-2016 M ay-2016 Jun-2016 Jul-2016 Aug-2016 Sep-2016 O ct-2016 N ov- 2016 D ec- 2016 Jan-2017 Feb-2017 M ar-2017 Apr-2017 M ay-2017 Jun-2017 Jul-2017 Aug-2017 Sep-2017 O ct-2017 N ov- 2017 D ec- 2017 Item 25 1-Feb-18 1-M ar-18 1-Apr-18 1-M ay-18 1-Jun-18 1-Jul-18 1-Aug-18 1-Sep-18 1-O ct-18 1-N ov-18 1-D ec-18 1-Jan-19 1-Feb-19 1-M ar-19 1-Apr-19 1-M ay-19 10,000,000 7,500,000 5,000,000 2,500,000 0 Focus = RESULTS!
63. Spend time developing new strengths for future growth.
64. How do you fund new opportunities?
65. Startup Further Investment Proven Channel Canva fund new opportunities by assigning co-founders to them. They were given enough resources to prove the opportunity is viable before they can secure further funding. $ $$$
66. Finding new Growth Levers How did two high-growth companies develop new strengths for growth.
67. Canva extend their product to acquire users from Google.
68. Canva created a library with over 100k+ templates available within in their product, and indexable by Google.
69. All of those templates help Canva to increase their search footprint and rank for a lot of queries around templates.
70. All of those templates help Canva to increase their search footprint and rank for a lot of queries around templates. Also improve user activation rate by 40%
71. TransferWise build web properties to acquire users from Google.
72. TransferWise launched new web properties in related keyword spaces that acquire users who would be interested in their product.
73. LINKEDIN https://www.linkedin.com/in/kieranjflanag an/ EMAIL help@kieranflanagan.io TWITTER @Searchbrat