One Year as a Growth Manager; The Journey So Far
After almost five years of working across three digital marketing agencies, I decided to pivot into tech. Two opportunities came knocking; both are B2B roles, a fin-tech infrastructure provider and an HR-Tech SaaS company. I choose the latter.
It’s been a year since then. Though a lot has happened within that short span, I wanted to share some of my experiences driving growth in Africa’s leading enterprise HR-tech SaaS company.
How about I start with what my work entails? That sounds right, I guess.
At SeamlessHR, my team is responsible for driving revenue for the business by generating demand for our products and capturing in-market prospects. We leverage a multi-tactic and multi-channel approach to reach our target audience, including ABM, branding, performance marketing, referral marketing, and channel partnership, to mention a few. As the company expands across Africa, the team is saddled with the responsibility of enabling international expansion by working with and supporting relevant stakeholders.
So, let’s discuss a few of my learnings so far. Shall we? Alright, read on!
Collaboration is critical
The age-long, bumpy encounter between Sales and marketing is real. I experience the typical case of “the quality of the leads is poor, but we need more of it”. This statement is a polite request to generate more leads and a defensive explanation for why sales aren’t closing the deals.
Baked in between the statement is a genuine call for marketing to work closely with the sales team to better refine the demand generation and capturing activities, the lead qualification process, and nurturing workflow.
More often than not, these alignment needs to happen from the bottom up (you should know why). The teams quickly realised that, and now the line between the growth and the SDR team is almost nonexistent.
Building a predictable revenue framework
As a member of the revenue team in a start-up, one of the major responsibilities of the growth team is to observe and measure the correlation, trends and association between all the metrics that feed our nascent financial model.
This calls for a mature analytical skillset (beyond CTR and the number of e-book downloads). I had to get myself acquainted with our CRM to track and optimise media activities for the real metrics that matter to the business.
I trust my engineering degree in this regard. Still, the responsibility that comes with flourishing our pipeline with a specific volume of opportunities of specific deal sizes is equally challenging and overwhelming.
Attribution is desirable but complex
Marketing attribution in B2B is desirable, but absolutely a complicated beast. The sales cycle for B2B products is relatively long, mainly because you are often selling to a buying committee rather than an individual. This naturally leaves room for the target audience to get exposed to marketing activities across multiple touchpoints before finally booking that demo. How does one also place the marketing engagements that happen post-demo before the deal is won?
In all of the chaos, it’s important to focus on what matters. Enabling multiple channels and testing quickly. Intuitively evaluate the numbers and listen to the signals. Focusing heavily on perfecting attribution might get you distracted.
Beyond all these, my most cherished experience at SeamlessHR is the feeling of being part of a team building something great. My immediate marketing team has made the rigour worthwhile. The company’s mission rings true, and the goal of building a healthy unicorn draws closer by the day. The journey is undoubtedly a hard one, but the team is well-equipped.
I am learning, first-hand, from the company’s leadership how to run a healthy institution, building and staying true to a culture that empowers the team and breeds innovation.
One year down, a hundred to go!