You're about to hire an agency or marketing team to grow your company. It's the first investment you're making in Growth outside of Sales, which has so far consisted of the hustle and grind of networking and cold calling. You have some momentum, and it's time to scale.
Strategically, that means the entire customer experience carries the potential for change. The problems you face right now won't be the same as tomorrow, so having the ability to shift focus is instrumental to scalable growth.
Synergy is about aligning all of your Growth-makers (Sales, Service, Marketing), leveraging their unique perspectives, and maintaining buy-in and adoption for their individual and departmental roles in Growth achievement.
Regardless of where the momentum came from, you know that it tends to be fleeting, so the faster your investment pays off, the better. Things change so fast today thanks to generative AI, that the value of speed cannot be overstated.
There's a formula.
Here's a simple graph to illustrate:
Meaning, it's big picture and considers all aspects of the customer experience.
If you start with inbound lead generation as your first major tactic... or SEO as your first marketing tactic within the inbound framework--what next?
In Growth Marketing, the mark of success is the achievement of your North Star Metric (NSM). Conversely, when you take a tactic-first approach, the mark of success is limited by the tactic's influence.
For example, SEO achievement is traffic and other metrics related to traffic, such as pages viewed, bounce rate, etc.
Another example is inbound marketing, where achievement is measured by the number of leads generated.
Marketing KPIs like traffic and leads are important milestones, but they're not goals. The goal for anybody investing in marketing is always Growth.
Sales.
Revenue.
Growth.
As you can see, there are no tactics embedded in the KPI framework, just milestones that are influenced by tactics.
What do you do if it doesn't work? What if you get no traffic? ... No leads? How long do you wait to respond? What exactly does one do in response?
What does one do next if it does work, but you still don't get any sales out of it? Or, sales do happen, but so does expensive, soul-sucking churn?
In Growth Marketing, we operate in short, 2-week Sprint Cycles. Week 1 consists of analysis, ideation, and iteration. Week 2 consists of development & deployment--ensuring there is always consistency.
This is where speed is born.
By working in short cycles, you:
With typical marketing investments like inbound marketing and SEO, it could take months or even YEARS to achieve more than just a KPI report.
In B2B, Sales is likely to revolt against any Marketing investment made that doesn't include their participation and input. They shouldn't be in charge of it, but they do play a pivotal role and should be part of the planning. They have unique perspectives on the customer experience, and you need them to close the deals that Marketing instigates.
For businesses that have self-service purchase models like SaaS and e-commerce, your Service and development teams have that critical perspective and provide those critical roles in customer success.
The point is, perspective and adoption are key.
With Growth Marketing, there's a formula to this collaboration. Using our proprietary method, Experimental Marketing, that formula consists of bringing Sales and/or Service together for:
Deployment starts on day 1 of week 4.
That's 21 calendar days from the start to the first experiment with a comprehensive strategy that marries your vision with the best available data--and an Agile plan for working through any problem that surfaces.
Planning and prioritization are fluid and rely on tools like ICE and the Pirate Metric framework to ensure you never miss a beat, commit to time-wasters, or get sucked into endless cycles of debate.
Then there's the 2-week sprint cycle formula that's driven by standing meetings and commitments to minimum experiment counts.
By being strategic, agile, formulaic, and collaborative, Growth Marketing leaves nothing to chance.
There are many issues with taking a tactic-first approach to Growth.
Since it's not strategic, even if it does work as intended, what comes before and after is likely to prevent any value from being derived from its success.
Since it's not Agile, it could also be years before you see anything good from it.
You're going to make mission-critical decisions about launch using the best available information--but the best available information isn't any good when you're just getting started. So, the likelihood that you hit a home run with your first attempt is much lower than when you're building on established success.
In those critical first weeks and months, 3rd party advice and verbal reassurances will only stretch your patience so far when you're $20,000 in and haven't published your first anything yet... or 6 months in, and the leads coming from your website won't pick up the phone.
And, since it's also not collaborative, it's likely to create a cultural nightmare. Meaning, your Growth-makers aren't working together or capitalizing on the momentum created by one another.
With Growth Marketing, we're prepared to change direction on a dime when (not if) the signals warrant it because of our Agile framework. We apply our efforts to anywhere in the customer experience that needs attention. We have a more realistic perspective because it involves your other Growth-makers.
And, we're willing to abandon tactics that don't work.
Our customers agree that these are the keys to growing in the age of AI.
Check out what they're saying about us here: