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What Is a Growth Team?

Lesson 3 from: How to Hire, Train and Manage a Rockstar Growth Team for Your Business

Ryan Deiss

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Lesson Info

3. What Is a Growth Team?

Lesson Info

What Is a Growth Team?

The old model, if we were to think about the older structure of a sales and marketing team, you basically had marketing, you had sales, and you had support. Those were your three groups. Marketing was responsible for generating awareness and leads. Sales was responsible for closing those leads. Support was responsible for making sure that the customer stuck when they were happy. Marketing blamed sales for not actually closing the leads. Sales said the leads suck. Support hates everybody. That's generally the breakdown. It's generally the breakdown, and we know this. You ever watch Glengarry Glen Ross? "The leads suck." "No, you suck." I'm not gonna go into the whole monologue, but it's so ingrained in our culture that they've been able to do... They've been able to write dialogue and movies on this concept, so we all get that. With the new model, I really want to do away with this idea. I want to do away with the categories, if we can, of sales, marketing, and support. I want those cat...

egories, if at all possible, to go away. When we create growth teams from scratch, we do not have a sales department. We do not have a marketing department. We do not have a support department. We've actually banished those terms. We have a single growth team. Now, I want to speak to the different roles that are on this growth team. First is content. Content. Content has become more and more critical. Content is of two forms: Entertainment and Information. Generally, when people think about content and content marketing, it's information. It's putting out blog posts, whitepapers, lead magnets, but it could also be the team that's producing your viral video, for lack of a better term. We think about the Dollar Shave Club videos, and a lot of these brands that have really blown up. It's because they had really great content. They had really great stuff out there, so content is now a critical component of that team, as well as social. You can't ignore that you need to be out there and present in social, and generally, that's gonna fall under the content category. Then we get into acquisition. Acquisition. In a lot of organizations, it's thought of as demand gen, demand generation. They're running your advertising, doing landing page optimization, and in some cases doing some email promotions, although a lot of times, email promotion falls on the next category, which is monetization. Monetization. Sales, copywriting, running any partner affiliate monetization. If it's an e-commerce business, they're doing the merchandising on the e-commerce site. That's where also, if it's e-commerce or some type of online sales, that's where you would have the promotions department might be in there, and business development. And then, success. We don't say support; we say success. We believe that it is our job. Ultimately, the product that we produce as a company is not additional revenue. We need to make sure that we are producing successful customers. We have content, acquisition. They're bringing in that initial... They're turning that awareness and the raw material that is content, bringing it in in the form of leads and initial converts, monetization is closing it, and success is making sure that people aren't just happy, but they're successful. Again, if we go back to the old model, you had marketing, you had sales. We're essentially changing marketing to acquisition in terms of how we think about it. We think about it in terms of an acquisition team. Your job is to acquire. Go out and get. Instead of sales, it's monetization. Turn what got got into money. Now, there is also customer care, customer support. We now think about that as our success department. Don't just make them happy. Don't just placate. Make them successful. Help them. Then we add the fourth one, the new one, which is content. Now here's the biggie with this particular structure. I highly recommend that you make them hug it out. Now what do I mean by that? I have four kids. Similar to this model, where we have four different groups, I have four children. What is always happening, a hundred percent of the time in my household, at least one of them is fighting with someone else. It doesn't matter. Any time, any day, someone is fighting with someone else. It could be the little guy fighting with his big brother. It could be the sisters fighting. Someone is always fighting. That's what happens when you've got a household full of four kids. Now what we used to do is separate them. "You go to your room, and you go to your room." That made things quieter, but it didn't fix anything, and then one day, out of frustration, and maybe a little bit of just maybe being a touch masochistic, I said, "Okay, don't go to your rooms. Hug. Hug. I want you to hug each other and hold it for a minute." You know how long a minute is when you're hugging someone you're super pissed at? It's a long time. Hug, and if they broke away, I'd add another minute onto it. Hug. What I found is in that moment, by the end, they're laughing, and it's over. It's over. Now, that might be good parenting advice. Feel free to try it at home. It's worked for me, but what I thought is, if it works with my children, surely it will work with adults, because frankly, they're kind of about the same. A lot of the people that we work for, kind of about the same, so we said, "You know what? We're gonna make these groups hug it out." We're not going to separate them. We're not going to silo them. We're not gonna stick them on separate sides of the company. We're going to bring them together under one roof, under one team, that is the growth team. The new idea, the concept, the big framework that I want to suggest to you is not that these are separate teams. You don't have a sales team, or a marketing team, or a marketing department. I'm going to heavily encourage you to stop using those types of words and phrases. These are not different teams. These are different positions on the same team. One team. If you played any team sport... As a kid, I played baseball. I played baseball. The infielders didn't say, "Hey outfielders, we don't need you." As an infielder, you know. A short pop fly in the outfield, if there's nobody back there, it's a home run. If you play soccer, you can't be like, "I'm a forward. We're the best. We don't need goalies." No, you're gonna lose. Football, same. Every team sport, they get this. They get this concept. One team, multiple positions, one team. As you're building your growth team, it is a team, ideally. It is a single team with different positions. A single team with different positions.

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Ratings and Reviews

Scott Nelson
 

Course was amazing! I'm a startup founder & the content was perfect for stage of our company. Ryan is a fantastic presenter & I found both his delivery as well as his ability to answer pointed questions to be extremely helpful. I'd recommend this to any company looking to build a growth team!

Marvin Liao
 

This was an incredibly helpful class & i found many of the frameworks & suggestions immediately useful. Well worth it.

Ato Kasymov
 

Amazing class !! Really complex issues are simplified and put together in a systemic and practical way !! Just take into work and reap the benefits !!

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