How to Hire Your Growth Marketing Team

Originally published on Growth Marketing Conference Blog by Sujan Patel

“Growth hacker” might be overrated as a professional designation, but many businesses are becoming increasingly aware that traditional marketing alone isn’t enough to stay competitive in today’s changing business landscape.

As a result, the terms “growth marketing” and “growth team” are being thrown around more and more frequently as business goals – even though many of the people using them have no idea what a growth team is or how to build one.

In this article, I’ll break down the difference between growth and marketing, as well as describe what growth teams look like and how to plan for one based on your company’s unique needs.

GROWTH VS. MARKETING

Before we get too far into this discussion, it’s important that we define what the difference between growth and marketing is:

• Marketing is top-of-the-funnel, and typically involves looking at the impact individual promotional channels have on performance metrics like leads, traffic, email opt-ins and sales.
• Growth involves a broader scope, encompassing the product or service itself. Sometimes that means changing the offering to better align with what’s needed for effective marketing. It might also involve adjusting the positioning, onboarding or activation workflows, or business structure at a high level to increase the odds of success.

Basically, growth is company-wide and encompasses the full funnel. Marketing is more tactical. As Alex Birkett notes on the ConversionXL blog:

“In the past, marketing teams focused primarily on the very top-of-the-funnel, measuring impressions, mind share, leads, etc. A growth team, however, is largely overlapped with product, engineering, and design as well. A growth team is made up of many different skill sets and can more easily push through ideas and experimentation that crosses traditional silos and boundaries.”

Hiring a Growth Team strategy #1: Knowing the roles you want filled

Knowing that a growth team should be more cross-departmental in nature than a marketing team gives you some insight into the kinds of roles you’ll find on each. Once you understand the different roles you may want to consider, as well as your options for filling them, you can plan your specific growth team based on highest impact or biggest bottlenecks.

Hiring a Growth Team strategy #2: Finding Bottlenecks and Highest Priorities

When it comes to building a team, a lot of people focus on where they want to be. They don’t look at where they are right now, where they want to go, and what kind of people they actually need to get there. When building a growth team, the first things to understand are the bottlenecks in a business and its funnels. That tells which growth roles need to be filled first, as well as what it’ll take to create an effective team.

Hiring a Growth Team strategy #3: Prioritize bottlenecks

In a perfect world, your company’s bottlenecks – as well as their solutions – would be obvious. You’d crunch some numbers, spot the challenges immediately, and either pull internal resources or hire out to resolve them. Actually prioritizing your bottlenecks and taking action on them is rarely that straightforward in the real world.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Ultimately, building a growth team comes down to understanding where your company is strong, where it’s weak, and which of these disconnects must be overcome in order to facilitate sustained growth.

Want to know more about hiring a growth team? Read the full blog post here.