3 Bites & 1 Track #3: Growth, Know your business, Subtract and Dance.
1 post, 1 article, 1 show and 1 music track, weekly.
Hi
This was finalized on the 19th, just before I switched off to go on vacation with the family. If the world doesn’t end in the meantime - whatever that means for each of you - this will still make sense.
If the world ends, you’re probably not reading this anyway.
Each week, I’ll share three insightful links with comments. I’ll give you a few exciting bits to check out, ignore, or build upon. We'll focus on Growth but mix it up to keep it fun and fresh. To spice things up, we end with a music track.
This week, some people obsess about Growth vs. Marketing. If you think this is too light, dive deep into a primer on SaaS Metrics. The podcast episode talks us about doing less (even if you’re not on vacation).
Finally, a summer groove will put you in the right mood.
Anyway, see you on the other side.
Enjoy.
1 Post
Marketing is not Growth; Growth is not Marketing, Marketing includes Growth, Growth inlcudes Marketing…
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Who cares?!
I confess that I never understood how we have Growth Marketing. Is that any marketing that doesn’t care about growth?! It is like Revenue Marketing - don’t tell me there is also Cost Marketing…
Why do we need a Growth team in Product, doesn’t other Product care about growth?
Of course, the issue is with the name. Growth is a goal, not a function. Generally, you can assume that a business wants to grow revenue and profitability.
Enough with semantics.
I like to think of Growth as a workstream, not a function. Growth understands and acts on how the business grows revenue across the customer life cycle, including acquisition, retention and expansion.
It combines and orchestrates marketing, sales, product and customer success (account management) to diagnose and solve for efficient revenue growth.
Why do we need a Growth workstream? Because the siloed approach reached its limits, we can only improve by working across functions. That’s what’s hard, but that’s where magic happens.
1 Article
https://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/
SaaS Metrics – A Guide to Measuring and Improving What Matters
This is a classic. Those that should be on everyone’s “bookshelf”, especially those in SaaS and subscription business in general.
If you understand your business model and its metrics, you’ll be 2 miles ahead of everyone else because most people know their craft but don’t know their business.
This article is a primer for SaaS - software as a service, subscription model - but the principle applies to every business.
To be a successful growth, marketing, sales or product executive, you must understand the business. And I mean not only the customers but also the numbers, the math, and the business model.
You can’t possibly contribute meaningfully to the business—either the top line, costs or both—without understanding what goes with that.
Some people talk “marketing,” some “sales,” and some “product.” But there’s one common language that everyone needs to speak: the business language.
I’ll give a couple of reasons why:
To understand priorities and be able to influence them.
To understand how the different components of the business are connected and influence each other. For example, the type of customer you acquire will impact churn and expansion in 6-12 months.
There’s no way around it. It was important before, and it is critical now because CFOs are gaining more power in this tight economic climate.
Know your business, know your numbers.
1 Show
https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/do-less/
We all heard “Less is more,” but we still find it hard to do just that—to curate, to prune, to remove excess, to choose, to pick one thing.
If you had absolute certain that the one thing would be the one, would we choose to get distracted and waste energy and time with other things?
Is the difficulty of choosing a symptom of our lack of confidence?
And if we go all-in on only one thing, isn’t that risky? What about diversifying and betting on “several horses”?
I find that we sometimes confuse goals and tools and that is what puts in trouble - research is different than communication, and exploration is different than execution.
The latter means that while exploring means looking at different options, when we decide to execute, we would benefit from focusing, from going all-in. This means that brainstorm could help us explore possibilities but shouldn’t be used to 10x our to-do list 😱
This episode of Hidden Brain explores the often ignored power of subtraction in problem-solving and innovation, highlighting cultural, economic, and psychological obstacles to this approach through insights from engineer Leidy Klotz - author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less - and various illustrative examples.
1 Track
Keeping the dance vibes, but now in a different setting - it is late afternoon, warm, in a beach bar. The deck spins ”The Balearic Sounds of Faze Action Records” - track 6 - Quando Tu Dances - Micky Millan w/ Willie Graff Edit.
It is a version of the original “Quand Tu Danses (Y'a Tout Qui Bouge, Qui Balance !...).” It’s not easy to track down Micky Millan, so if you want to dig deeper, go here.
That’s all for this week. See you next week.
Thanks for reading.
Hugo
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