The actual secret to growth in SaaS
It's pretty simple.
I have led growth at Unicorn companies, companies growing 5x, and also at companies that struggled to grow at a healthy rate.
So what’s the main reason some struggled and others crushed it?
It wasn’t the product.
It wasn’t the funding.
It wasn’t the competition.
The biggest difference was who owned growth. At the companies that scaled like crazy growth wasn’t owned by anyone - it was a company initiative, not just a departments. The onus to grow didn’t just fall on marketing or just on sales.
It was on everyone.
Recruiting was laser focused on how long it took to hire and get key roles filled.
HR and Training was obsessed with how quickly we could train reps to ramp and start having an impact.
Finance seemed to spend half their time on pricing and negotiating terms with customers.
Engineering was prioritizing and building what sales and our customers were requesting.
The CS team obsessed over churn.
Account managers carried a quota and felt just as much pressure as Account executives to hit their number.
The truth is if you don’t have a culture where everyone feels tied to the growth what usually happens is two things:
The teams being held responsible (usually sales or marketing) feel all the pressure of the business being solely put on them. Resentment grows towards other teams that they feel aren’t being held to similar standards or even worse that they feel they are a blocker to them achieving growth. This leads to burn out, high turnover and a pretty toxic culture.
The teams that aren’t being held to the same similar standards don’t prioritize the things that will help the business grow the most. Instead they focus on the things that they are being measured on.
As Eli Goldratt said “Tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I will behave.”
Now more than ever in start-ups you better make sure your teams are being measured by things that are having a direct impact on the growth of the company.
Thanks for reading!
Adam
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