Last Updated on June 29, 2021 by Guest
Many startups s understand that nowadays, no matter what you create, you need to have traffic to your website. Imagine you have a brick & mortar store in a corner that nobody passes. You can’t sell anything, right? The same happens with the internet. If you don’t have traffic to your website, you can’t convert any clients to buy or subscribe to your products.
For that reason, some startups have a growth department where a team is responsible for generating new clients or users. So let’s understand what would be a growth team.
What is a growth team?
Growth teams are the ones in charge of customer acquisition and revenue increase.
They are the ones who find ways to develop market channels, create demand, and generate the growth the company needs to survive. Some companies involve people from sales, other use digital marketing specialists. Startups hire experienced marketing consultants that bring knowledge from other similar startups and share past and successful experiences.
The benefit of having a growth team is mainly related to the focus on acquiring new clients, listening to feedback, and having precise and helpful information to improve your product.
Who should be part of your growth team?
There are several discussions related to if the company should or should not have a growth team. The conversation starts from the argument that everyone in your startup should promote growth, and having this isolated department would not be helpful.
This assumption may apply to some big companies, but a startup company will naturally have team members working to grow at the end of the day. Also, focusing on growth can incentivize the other areas to do the same and speed up the income revenue.
Let’s talk about who should be part of the growth area and its function.
Business Development
The business development will assist the product, and engineer teams decide the business model the startup will use. They will research competitions, check marketing opportunities, listen to customer feedback, and suggest changes to help push growth.
Business development usually has an excellent knowledge of the industry and the products and has experience finding the right opportunities for the startup.
Marketing
The marketing team will be the ones assisting in creating a strategy to apply marketing resources for growth. This strategy would separate the marketing investment, optimize and prioritize them.
Let’s say the startup wants faster growth to attract investors. If so, they would instead invest in Google AdWords other than investing in SEO.
On the other hand, if your products are related to business, you would rather push a business social network such as LinkedIn. If it’s fashion eCommerce, you would instead work on Instagram.
Al those decisions and optimizations would be made by marketers who would be part of the companies growth initiatives.
Sales
Depending on the type of business you’re starting, you may be talking about your core area.
Let’s say you have a B2B small industry that needs to find distributors other than final consumers to your products. You would rely on your sales team to be out there selling your products. On the other hand, the marketing team would be more of a support area to assist with marketing materials, catalogs, and branding, if the budget allows.
Wrapping up
It doesn’t matter what your business is; you will be looking for fast growth when you’re starting. The reason is, you want to cover costs and start paying initial debts or at least your salary.
It is known that some companies create growth teams that are in charge of leading the company to the next level. These teams can be multi-functional or a current area in specific, such as the business development, the marketing, or the sales areas.
Here we discuss some of the pros and cons of having such a structure and how each area could apply the growth concept internally.