Why Most Marketers Suck
5 years ago, a sexy, valuable enterprise software client called and say they wanted to run a Head of Growth search. Boom! This was going to be a great search for us.
We hung up the phone, high-fived each other, then said...wtf is Growth?
After some research and exploration, we figured out that Growth, at least in our client's mind, was the combination of product and marketing; their product was so good, with offered add-ons, features, and amazing customer support, that it sold itself. A well-known example of a similar product might be Slack. It's free to sign up, everybody is on there, and after meeting new people on various threads and loving the product, you might want more access / features / functionality, which drives your decision to become a paying subscriber.
And Slack was one example, but many other companies quickly determined that this approach to selling needed to be prioritized. Why this became so important to companies was because of how measurable various metrics (customer acquisition cost, and how long you’ll have them as a customer, etc.) became. It's super important for an internet-based business to know these metrics.
Thus, Product-led Growth (PLG) became an important way to describe potential revenue streams, and marketers Ate. It. Up.
While the PLG OG’s like Slack, HubSpot and DocuSign led this charge, many other companies caught on to the trend. Growth as a function became the hottest topic in tech hiring circles - and “growth hacking” actually became part of many marketers’ work. Because, of course, new titles are full of intrigue and mystery. Then, HR leaders from companies of every size, age, and industry began to refer to their traditional Digital Marketing team members as "Growth gurus." As a result we've experienced a deluge of 100 year old companies referring to their marketing efforts as "growth" efforts.
So, the PLG phenomenon came on strong. And to be fair, it's a brilliant model that can be applied to everything from deodorant to pergolas to cat furniture. What I take issue with is the fact the model is extremely repeatable. Since PLG’s rise in prominence, hundreds of other companies have sprouted up, championing their Growth teams as the engine that keeps the flame going for the entire company.
Yawn.
Recently I interviewed a candidate who was a growth marketer at AirBnb with 4 years under their belt. A pretty sweet job, I might say. I was stoked to meet him, interview him, and find out some of the secret sauce that has made AirBnb such a valuable community. He shared a lot of interesting insights about capturing search traffic for non-traditional keywords, and keeping an eye on CAC-LTV ratios, and "being all about the data." Clearly, he was thinking of things in a different way than a traditional digital marketer might.
Later, I interviewed someone from an under-the-radar SaaS company who shared similar approaches. This time it wasn't housing rentals, it was food delivery in a small market. She had figured out that if they bought search traffic for "best local restaurants" instead of "food delivery," traffic had a greater likelihood of converting from freemium customers to paying. Cool.
Then I interviewed another person from a media company who shared the same method. The metrics she was evaluated on were the same as I had heard from the two other candidates. A pattern was developing; some might even call this a trend.
Through the course of the 4 month search, it seemed like everyone had figured Growth out. Every candidate had figured out ways to increase a certain growth metric that their boss had developed… because that person had read some article or heard about how to grow their customer base. Or they had seen the method on display at TechCrunch Disrupt, or Reforge, or another trendy Silicon Valley outlet.
To be clear, you definitely want someone who can verifiably show the incremental increase in sales conversions as a result of their work. The problem, then, became that EVERYONE had the same system. Nobody was doing anything terribly innovative. The secret sauce was no longer secret and candidates who boasted about being a Growth marketer became significantly less desirable.
Copycats had been loosed…yet nobody was actually innovating.
And that can be OK in certain situations. As my friend Chris likes to say, no one has meaningfully improved the recipe for lasagna in hundreds of years, because, wait for it.... it's fucking delicious.
But as an executive recruiter, we're looking for business builders who take chances. People who buck trends and experiment with their lasagna. Maybe, in addition to subscribing to the Growth Bible, they developed corporate partnerships or invested into incredible Copy. Maybe they even sent direct mail! Or put up billboards. . Or crafted a brand so bespoke only demographics like your grandmother’s bridge club know about it.
There is a guy with a big Growth presence on LinkedIn. But, man, does he reek. He talks about how many millions of dollars he has generated for companies by applying his Growth HackingTM (barf). His model is fine, clearly, given the fact that it’s been used by, literally, tens of thousands of other marketers in the last few years. He simply has the honor of having worked with big brand name companies with lots of dollars to spend. It's as if this dude thinks all these companies would have gone all FTX and Filed for Chapter 11 had he not been there to save the day. Give me a break.
The marketers I LOVE talking to are those who have a specialty (maybe that specialty even is growth marketing) but do not limit themselves to it. They talk about how brand reinforces their customers, like the one candidate who created a brand ROI model from scratch. They talk about building a community where users feel supported, and they talk about the myriad ways they engage said community along the customer journey. They can also talk about shit that doesn't work, like the one woman who spun up a newsletter that just didn't convert after 6 months. Failure is cool by me.
So, don't be afraid to be critical of some hotshot “Growth-hacker” saying they grew Paw, the new cat photo editing startup from $2-$45m in 2 years' time. Ask what they did. Ask what they came up with themselves, and how they strategized new ways of thinking to keep their feline customers purring for more. Those questions allow you to judge for yourself whether business grew because of a person, or because of a trend.