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The Mission of the Growth Team

At its face, yes, the growth team is charged with growing revenue. That is what they should do. But that's not their only thing. When we really look at what should the growth team be doing, they really need to own the entire customer journey. If we're gonna say what is the growth team charged with, what do they really own? They own the journey. Now at Digital Marketer, we have the value journey framework. All right, we have the value journey canvas. I have another Creative Live class that I taught on building a digital marketing plan where we covered the value journey canvas in excruciating depth, but excruciatingly fun, I'd like to think. But we covered the value journey canvas in great, great depth. I would highly recommend that you also check out that class if you wanna go through it. But the basic idea is pretty simple. And the idea of mapping a customer journey is nothing new. I'm not gonna pretend like we invented this here. But our framework goes something like this. It starts w...

ith awareness, that's stage one, right. That's somebody seeing your ad. Generally somebody seeing your ad. Maybe they find you on search or through referral, right, so awareness. Somebody becoming aware that your brand, your product exists. State two is engagement, right. Awareness is a glance, engagement is a stare. Just because somebody sees your ad doesn't mean that they're now fully engaged. I was driving down the interstate in Texas, and I don't know if you have these out here, but there was a billboard that said, and it was an ad for the billboard, like an ad to get people to run ads on the billboard. And it said, "Does advertising work? Just did." As if because I saw it, that it just worked, right. That doesn't mean that it worked. That doesn't mean that it worked. I was like, oh, I saw it, therefore it worked, huh-uh. If they don't engage, they're not progressing through the journey, it didn't work. When we get into the subscribe stage, this is when the prospect is opting in to receive some type of gated content, right. This is when you have their email address. You have both the ability and the permission to follow up. That's stage three, that's the subscribe stage. Then we get into the convert stage. This is when a subscriber becomes a prospect, a qualified lead. This particular stage right here, that convert stage, that's where it's most critical that everyone agrees what that is and what it is called. So in some organizations, they're gonna distinguish between a subscriber and a prospect. Some of them might distinguish between a prospect and an opportunity. In some cases, it's a marketing qualified lead versus a sales qualified lead. Maybe it's a product qualified lead, right. There's all these different ways of speaking to where are these leads in a particular sales pipeline. We wanna make sure that everybody's on the same page. And it's gonna vary from company to company, right, depending on what you're selling and what you're offering and the length of the sales cycle, it's gonna vary. Doesn't matter what it is, just make sure everybody's on the same page. We'll talk in just a second exactly how you do that. So convert stage, that's when a subscriber moves beyond being a subscriber and they make that micro commitment, small commitment of time, small commitment of money, and they become a qualified prospect or in many cases a customer. Then we have the excite phase. This is when the prospect has that ah-ha moment. This is when the sale sticks. This is when the product or the service makes that shift from a nice-to-have into a must have. A nice-to-have into a must have. That's at that excite phase. And then we get into what we call the ladder of ascension. They're purchasing your core offer. Maybe they're shifting from a trial into a full pay. Maybe they're going from a demo and they're actually registering. Now maybe they're adding some different seats and things like that or whatever your ascension is. What we're looking for here is an increase in average customer value, average order value, whatever that metric is. Then we get in to advocacy. That's successful customers giving you a testimonial. Telling a customer story, right, which feeds into some additional content marketing. And then a promoter, that's when your customers become your marketing partners, okay. This is the value journey canvas as we like to think it out. This is the framework that we utilize at Digital Marketer at the companies that we work with and we own and that we teach to map the process of strangers becoming friends becoming customers becoming raving fans. That's how we map it. So we find this framework to be very helpful in doing just that and mapping that process. But it's also very, very helpful in helping your team to understand where do they fit. Because remember what I said, the growth team, they own this. The own this from beginning to end, all right. So if you recall the four roles, remember content, acquisition, monetization, and success. If we say, okay, growth team, and everybody in one of these four positions, you own this. This is what you own. Then we're able to talk to people individually and we're able to say now here's the part that you own. So when we're thinking about awareness between the four roles, right, who would kind of own that? Anybody wanna wager a guess? Remember there's content, acquisition, monetization and success. Who's generally gonna own awareness? You're looking at me, so I'm gonna call on you. You've got the microphone right there. Who's generally gonna own-- she's like, I'm never looking at you again. (laughing) Who's generally gonna own awareness? Acquisition. Acquisition team is generally going to own awareness. The content team, also. If you have a heavy, organic, search-driven strategy, you could see that content could own it too. Yeah, but generally it's acquisition. Buying advertising, going out and getting it, right. So now you could say to your acquisition person, not just this is what you do, this is generally where you live, right. Now we get into the engage stage. That's also content, right, 'cause we're engaging with content. But also acquisition kicks into this a little bit, right. So if anybody's familiar with re-targeting as a strategy, re-targeting is generally gonna be run by the acquisition team 'cause they're the ones that are handling the ads. But re-targeting is also a re-engagement strategy. So they're living in that box too. Now we get into the subscribe stage, again, acquisition and content, right. So acquisition is gonna be working-- content's gonna be providing whatever that gated content is. You've probably heard of tofu, mofu, bofu. Top of funnel content, middle of funnel content, bottom of funnel content. Top of funnel content is the un-gated content at the top. Middle of funnel is usually the gated content, your lead magnets, right, special reports, those types of things. So the content team is gonna need to produce that, but then the acquisition team is usually gonna need to create the landing pages that offers it. So that's where they're kind of working together. But notice again, there's no silos here. In every single box that we're gonna go through, spoiler alert, there's two teams, right. Oh, see what I did there, not two teams, to positions. Sometimes you've gotta check yourself. Feel free to throw a shoe at me if you hear me say "team." Actually don't throw a shoe at me, that would hurt. Okay, content team, I'm sorry the convert stage. Acquisition and now monetization. This is where the handoff occurs. And figuring out that handoff piece, right, figuring out that handoff spot of where does a prospect shift go from a lead to a prospect or a prospect to a qualified lead. That's why it's so important. But you can see here on this bottom row, the prospect phase, these bottom rows, it's generally acquisition and content working together. Now we have the handoff, we go into the excite phase. The content team sending out middle of funnel content, making sure that it actually gets consumed. That when people register for that trial that they actually begin to implement certain things. But also the product team, the product team. This is the first time we're seeing the product team enter in. And they may need to put in some type of, if it is a software, maybe it needs a walk-through that they need to code in. Maybe they're working with the content team on how to do that. The monetization team is generally responsible for this, but they're gonna need to leverage the acquisition team as well. The acquisition team in the form of follow-up email marketing. The acquisition team in the form of re-targeting, right. This is generally gonna be leveraged here, all the way up. Now advocacy. Who are gonna be the drivers at the advocacy stage? Anybody wanna wager a guess here? I caught you, caught you looking. Who do you think are the drivers at the advocacy stage? Remember, this is when we're asking our customers to tell a customer story or things like that. Who do you think? Success team. Yep, the success team as well as the content team. So what we'll do, you know, the success team will identify we have a happy person. We have a successful person. Hey, content team, can we do an interview with them? Can we get a customer story? Maybe we should turn this into a blog post. Maybe we should send an entire film crew out to their location to shoot a little customer story about them, right. So the success team is gonna identify it, but the content team is gonna facilitate it. They need to work together. And then we get into the promotion stage. Now you have success again identifying advocates and saying this person might be a good fit to be a promoter. They're already talking to us about it. Hey, monetization team, you should reach out to them. We had somebody reach out to us. Do you know how many business development requests are likely coming in to your company on a daily basis through your customer success and your customer support department? It's tons, and I see it in every single company. At every single company, people don't know who to email. They don't know who to contact, so they contact support wanting to promote your stuff. Happens at every company that I've ever run. Happened at Digital Marketer very, very recently. The way that I found out about it here with some things coming through our success, our customer support team. I had a company that sold industrial water filters for a period of time. We were getting loads of requests for wholesalers, people wanting to wholesale our filters coming into our customer support line. Do you what our support people did when those requests came in? They went, oh, that's not our department. I'll have somebody get back to you. (sigh) But we didn't train them. We didn't explain to them that that is your department. You're on the success team, which means you're partially responsible for identifying possible promoters and doing a warm handoff, right. So whether you use the value journey canvas or whether you use any other framework out there to map customer journeys, right, you could use any of them. There's nothing magical about this one. We happen to like it, but admittedly we're bias, right. I think my kids are all cute too. This is how you literally get everyone on the same page. And I mean literally get everyone on the same page. You could actually put names in these different boxes. Okay, Sally, you and Fred are gonna be involved in generating the awareness when this happens, then you're gonna hand it off and that's when Ted's gonna do this part. Ted, you need to come in. But to be able to talk with your team in the same room and explain to them guys, men, women, countrymen, right, this is what we do. This is why we're here. This is what our team is responsible for and now here's where the baton handoffs take place. Just that in and of itself will encourage better collaboration and better communication. They know where they stand. They know what their job is, and they know who they're handing off to next. Yeah, Ryan, so quick question. So I have a software company, so this is gonna be a little biased toward that. Yeah. Where would you say implementation fits into that framework? Obviously you're talking about probably in the ascend phase there. Implementation meaning you have somebody, they're a customer, they've signed up for an initial? Right, so we've sold the product. Now we need to go implement the products. Again, a lot of this is you can kind of decide. And a bunch of it's arbitrary. So what I could see is you could say that-- has somebody paid for the product yet? Right, they have paid. They have paid, okay. So if they've paid, they're now a customer. But I know for us, with a lot of our subscription programs, we don't consider somebody to move from the convert stage to the ascend staged, specially if it's subscription, until they've successfully re-billed at least once. Does that make sense? I'm not getting into how you go about calculating churn and all stuff, right. But for us, we know the first 30 days we gotta work, we gotta move, we gotta grove. We haven't actually earned that customer yet. We haven't truly earned that customer yet. So I would say if they've paid initially, right, even if they paid for the year, but you can't say that they're excited yet. They haven't actually gone through and had that ah-ha moment, that ah-ha moment where they're like, oh, my gosh, I get it, this is the greatest thing ever. Then I'd say they're still living in convert land. You have no expectation that they're going to stick if you haven't been able to say this is what an ah-ha is. This is what it looks like, and this is how we make sure that we engineer the ah-ha. My guess is that you deliver that ah-ha moment during the implementation phase. People sign up, and even if they give you money it's during the implementation phase when something happens and they go, "Whew, now that's freakin' cool!" And if not, you need to figure out what is that and make sure it's baked into the implementation phase. Make sure that it's baked in. And in that case, your product team or maybe your implementation team is actually on the content team 'cause they're responsible for new customer onboarding. Maybe they're on the success team. Where these people sit has a lot to do with where they're going to be getting the most training and help. I always wanna make sure that if I have a team member who's reporting to someone, that the person that they're reporting to has enough knowledge about what they do that they can reprioritize and they also can develop that person. So I don't know who's doing the implementation right now, if they would be technically on your content on the success team or on the product team. I think they could appropriately land anywhere. You could even have the people doing your implementation on the monetization team because during the implementation process you wanna encourage ascension, right. So I think that it's either implementation is here, by one of those four groups, which I know isn't even remotely helpful 'cause you want a specific answer, but that's where you get to figure it out. So I wanna give you a framework for coming up with the answer for yourself. But during that implementation, if they haven't yet experienced the ah-ha, then hopefully that's happening here. And if it is, then that's where they own it. And then ascension is actually more about we got the ah-ha, how do we get them to stick, pay more, and then expand. And then usually it's more your account managers who are on the monetization team in the software world who are responsible for getting that expansion going, that ascension going of the accounts. Is that helpful? Okay, good.