Growth and growth hacking, by nature, are disruptive to any business. They are the exception and not the rule, turning the fundamental into experimental across marketing and product channels and experiences.
Because of this, they aren’t always warmly received by the marketers, product owners, developers and engineers, or anyone else with skin in the game that are primarily focused on maintaining one of those experiences or managing their performance.
In this way, making growth strategic for your brand or business becomes even harder.
At IBM, I was tasked with introducing, evangelizing, proving, and scaling growth hacking and a culture of experimentation within a highly complex, matrixed, and relatively complacent and conservative enterprise organization. And, not surprising, it was far from easy.
For the first half of my three-year IBM journey, it was about finding a proof of concept – was there a technology stack and an approach that product teams could take to become more data-driven, highly agile, and run experiments that would directly impact users, usage, and revenue? And, more important, who would be those early adopters with the right growth mindset and motivation to embrace and explore this concept alongside me?
An entrepreneur at heart, proving and scaling growth hacking within IBM became not only my mission, but also my internal business. It was my own personal startup, with so many milestones, and challenges synonymous with the typical startup, along the way.
Pitching the growth hacking concept to product teams felt much like outbound sales. Through exploration and prospecting I would find my “leads,” seek out the perceived decision makers, send a blind calendar invite, drop the same people a message on Slack, and cross my fingers they would take my call.
When I got lucky and didn’t end up sitting solo for that initial conversation, I learned quickly that most around IBM didn’t know or understand growth hacking or its differences from basic marketing or A/B testing tactics. Teams claimed they were already doing it or didn’t have time, or, even more often, didn’t even understand the point. Others felt threatened; that I was there to expose flaws in their work, implicate underperforming channels, or flat out take their jobs.
It was these early rejections and objections that forced me to rethink my sales pitch. In a sense, I was growth hacking my own business. Through trial and error, three common patterns emerged in subsequent exploratory discussions; leading to a matching series of ways any growth practitioner can warm stakeholders, marketers, product owners, coders, and anyone else to becoming adopters.
No matter your organization’s acceptance for the disruptive and transformative concept that is growth hacking, you can establish a compelling position. The ones I’ve shared that worked for myself and my team at IBM took us from a scrappy and determined internal startup to a highly profitable, scalable and, most important, strategic pillar of digital business at one of the largest and oldest technology companies in the world.
Want more growth inspiration? Curious about how your current growth hacking efforts stack up or interested in introducing the concept for your product, marketing, or business in general? Visit our Growth Hacking Services page, email me at jbarbato@orangepegs.com, or sign up for a free 30-minute growth assessment.