At your business, is your growth benchmark 20% or 2x? Are your marketing, sales and product teams working together or are they focussed on achieving their own goals?
I would have assumed the answer to the first question would have been 2x and ‘working together’ for the second one. However, a recent revelation has proved that this is not always true. We were shocked to find out about the approach used by one of Belgium’s largest corporations.
The way they see their growth is to have a siloed approach. An approach where sales, marketing, and product teams have their own goals that they need to achieve by the end of their fiscal year. There is no communication, no coordination, and no collaboration.
Marketing teams generate leads. Sales teams contact these leads with no information of who they are and where they come from. Product teams deliver the results to the newly acquired customer.
This is a common practice seen amongst a lot of big corporates. The approach works, no doubt (otherwise the corporations wouldn’t be able to survive). But the issue is that there is no experimentation, nothing new being tried.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying these teams need to be replaced. They are there for a reason and they are doing a really good job. The idea is to rather complement it and use these people within the team and form a growth team.
When people hear about growth team, they often ask:
- What is a growth team?
- What does the growth team do?
- Aren’t sales and marketing teams known as growth teams?
- If everybody in the company is working hard to grow their KPIs, then what makes the growth team different?
- What are the problems that a growth team faces? And how to fix them?
By the end of this article, you will have the answers to all of these questions and many more.