Unleash Your Inner Growth Hacker — Wait, Maybe You’re Already Doing It
Years ago, they put it more simply: There are only two jobs in any company — sales and sales support.
If you weren’t involved directly in going out and selling something to someone, your job was to support those people who were. Whether you were designing and building products, writing computer code, doing marketing and sales promotion, building and running financial models, it was all subordinate to, and in the service of, sales — the “king function.”
Now read how Growth Hacking is described in the article What Is Growth Hacking And Why You Need To Know About It:
“Growth Hacking is the concept of focusing entirely on the growth/rise/scaling of a startup. Growth hacking doesn’t have roles assigned to people, even a programmer can be a growth hacker. In the startup world, growth hacking is the revolutionary action where even a programmer or a designer works for the growth of the startup.”
“For now, growth hacking is limited to startups, as corporate companies and Fortune 500 companies couldn’t alter the traditional foundations they were built on. But it is the estimate that future companies would be built around this concept of Growth Hacking.”
But is it really new? And does it really have unique applicability to startups?
Whether or not you’ve heard the term growth hacking, you know that any kind of business is typically founded by someone with an idea and a tool or product designed to help a customer do something better or do something they couldn’t otherwise do at all. Everyone working in a new company in any capacity knows that no matter how slick the product is, nobody gets paid unless someone buys something.
That concept may seem revolutionary when cloaked in new-sounding terms, but whether it’s called growth hacking or “shared accountability” or any other name you want to give it, it’s certainly well-established that everyone working in any business must have a stake in sales, regardless of the specific role they play in making that happen.
Workers in all parts of big, establish organizations have, for quite some time, had at least a portion of their compensation tied to company goals, like sales revenue.
People who have come up through sales and marketing readily see the connection between their work — and their pay — and the revenue that comes through the door. Others — perhaps with technical or financial backgrounds — may not.
Recognizing that everyone has to be on the same page on this important connection, management makes it a point to reinforce it — in words and compensation consequences. Here’s an excerpt from a hypothetical management presentation of the type that’s been going on for decades in larger, established companies:
“Every person’s contribution here is a little different, but achieving our company goals is a shared responsibility. Regardless of our specific jobs — building products, finding ways to get our name out there, encouraging certain kinds of behavior from customers, writing code or building and running our financial models — everyone has a stake in seeing to it that we get the results we’re going for. If the company wins, we all win. If not, nobody does.”
Or, in the updated version:
“As developers you understand the concept of hacking, right? Well, here the thing that’s to be hacked isn’t computer code, but the growth of our company. So, in addition to our regular jobs, we’re all responsible for finding ways to grow the company, and that makes every one of us a growth hacker. And if enough growth gets hacked this year, we can all get bonuses. If not, nobody will get one.”
It’s true that bigger, more established companies have a history of separating functional areas, and giving each one its own distinct responsibilities. But experience over the last few decades or so has shown the dark side of that kind of “accountability.” The “silos” that grow up around these divisions are less conducive to the kind of adaptability and cooperation needed in a more dynamic marketplace.
It’s every bit as important in established companies as it is in startups to have these units talking and working together, and having at least a significant portion of their compensation depend on success in bringing in revenue and other company goals.
What incentives do you have in place to foster communication and cooperation across functional areas? Is there a substantial component in everyone’s comp plan that’s dependent on achievement of the company’s growth goals?
Whether or not you use the term “growth hacker,” there’s no reason in the world you can’t implement shared responsibility across teams — right now — regardless of the size of your organization, and design your incentive plans accordingly.