Scaling Back on Hiring? Invest in Growth Ops to Keep Scaling
Tech is experiencing an industry-wide retrenchment: hiring freezes, cost-cutting, and, yes, layoffs. That last one in particular absolutely sucks.
But being resource-constrained also creates opportunity: As Churchill famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” Now is the time when revenue leaders should be investing in growth ops: data, tools, and automation, so they come out of this crisis with a leaner, high-performance revenue engine.
Naval Ravikant, the Twitter-famous founder of AngelList, describes three types of leverage: labor, capital, and technology.
When capital was cheap, startups raised huge sums. When they encountered scaling challenges, they threw bodies at the problem (using the first two types of leverage). One Customer Success team I work with had poor data hygiene: they weren’t logging customer data in their CRM and were scheduling and recording customer webinars manually. The result: poor visibility into customers most likely to churn, and churn rates that kept getting worse.
Instead of solving the root cause, they used capital to perpetuate bad practices. They papered over the problems by hiring admins to do things manually.
Now in this climate they’re laying off the admins, which means their data could take a step backward. But instead of letting that happen, I jumped in with documentation and training on the way to log data. We implemented more automation to make follow-ups and customer show-up rates automated. Then I used reporting to reinforce the cultural norms we wanted: I made dashboards for the call and webinar attendance data for the leadership team, and created a feedback loop so the CSM team knew the data they were reporting was being surfaced weekly to the CEO.
The result: For the first time in perhaps the company’s entire history, we have real-time data on the customers who are most disengaged from the CSM team, and are therefore more likely to churn.
By employing that third form of leverage to replace the first two—and these are the types of opportunities you should be capitalizing on in your business.
Here, I’ll share some examples of growth ops initiatives that help scale revenue even in a downturn.
5 Ways Growth Ops Can Help You Scale Up Even After Scaling Back
1. Switch From Homegrown Marketing Pages to a Tool Like Unbounce or Webflow
Tools: Unbounce, Instapage, Webflow
Difficulty: Easy (Note: Instapage and Unbounce are easy to implement as they’re typically used for standalone landing pages, whereas Webflow is a much bigger lift: it typically replaces your core website)
If you're building all your marketing pages using engineering resources, one of two things is likely happening:
Either your engineers are working on tedious low-leverage work all the time, or
You're probably not shipping landing page experiments frequently because it requires engineering.
The pushback I get (typically from brand marketer types) is that Unbounce won’t be pixel-perfect, or it doesn’t support some features like tabs or collapsible pages. I'm here to tell you that companies worth $50Bn still use landing page tools—because the agility of experimenting faster is worth the branding tradeoffs.
There’s an impact on culture as well: One of the key drivers of employee happiness (see First, Break all the Rules) is the feeling that you possess the tools and resources to do your job well. When landing page experiments spend weeks or months in an engineering backlog while the team knows tools like Unbounce exist, it can be incredibly frustrating.
The bottom line: Just do it. Make the switch. Your team will thank you.
2. Use Smarter Lead Routing to Prioritize High-Intent Leads with a Smaller Sales Team
Tools: Chili Piper, Five9
Difficulty: Medium
When you reduce headcount in the sales org, you can often draw a straight line to reduced revenue. But it doesn't have to be that way.
We recently set up a more nuanced lead routing approach by creating a fast/medium/slow lane framework in Chili Piper. The most qualified leads get a callback immediately, medium-quality leads can book a demo within the next three days, and the lowest-quality leads are rerouted away from sales to a webinar instead.
The last one is the most impactful as it allows us to actually keep the lowest intent leads completely away from the sales org.
We’re confident this approach works because we know how our Lead > Closed Won conversion rate differs depending on how leads answer qualification questions.
Bonus Points: We also know what our conversion rate is by ad channel, campaign, and adgroup. This allows us to push high-intent search campaign leads into the fast lane and low-converting Instagram leads into the medium lane.
3: Automated Credit Card Dunning
Tools: Stripe, Recurly
Difficulty: Medium
A lot of folks who implemented Stripe years ago might not know about this feature. if a payment doesn't go through, Stripe, Recurly, and other tools can automatically retry payments. I assumed everyone was doing this, but as it turns out, a lot of startups were handling this manually.
Investing in automated credit card dunning can dramatically improve cashflow. It also allows the company to automate lower-leverage finance team work so they can focus on higher-impact initiatives.
4: Fatten the Middle of Your Funnel with Sales Webinars
Tools: Zoom Webinars, LiveStorm, BigMarker
Difficulty: Medium
I'm surprised I’m not seeing this more often in B2B SaaS.
As a frequent buyer of SaaS products, I’ve often been frustrated with the standard SaaS sales funnel. It seems to be geared toward "book a demo"— but then the first call with sales is often an incredibly annoying discovery call where the SDR asks questions and provides little or no information.
This introduces a ton of friction between when I discover a product and when I actually get to see if the product can solve my problem. Product-led growth can solve this, but that’s a herculean investment. But a very direct, powerful step in that direction is to launch some type of sales webinar or product tour.
Most importantly, a sales webinar gives prospects a way to get to know your product in a more passive way. I would test it head-to-head against a “request a demo” landing page—and I bet you’d find the conversion rate is much higher, and the conversion rate from webinar attended to Qualified Opportunity is similar. The net impact, then, is a fatter middle of the funnel.
Another benefit is that it creates a much larger universe of people who are familiar with your product and will remember it for the point in the future when they’re actually able to buy it.
Additionally, there’s a lot of research showing that in the modern app-ified era, buyers (including me) prefer to avoid human contact. We’d much rather order food on an app than pick up the phone. So giving buyers a way to check out the product without the pressure of talking to someone one-on-one helps avoids triggering their social anxiety.
Attending this session shows high purchase intent, making it a great leading indicator for the sales org. It’s also a faster way for prospects to assess if your product will meet their needs. This strategy actually gives you the upper hand: it allows you to put your best presenter forward and ensure the consistency and quality of the product messaging.
5: Automate your customer success function
Tools: Hubspot CRM, Outreach.io, LiveStorm, BigMarker
Difficulty: Medium
A lot of startups I see do one-on-one onboarding sessions with every customer: They schedule QBRs manually, and they handle customer support in one-on-one ways. This makes sense for enterprise, but there are a lot of ways to automate the processes of an SMB customer success team.
The reality is that customers want it to be more self-serve as well: They want to get answers when they're looking for them, not four days from now when you're able to make time for a Zoom call.
Here are three very tactical things you can do:
Value Engineering: I first heard this term at Segment, which has a whole team dedicated to value engineering. One tangible example of what they do: they would create an analysis that could help the customer quantify the engineering hours saved by implementing the product. Then, they would build the analysis in a repeatable way so that any CSM can go into Looker or talk to the customer to collect relevant input, drop them into Excel, and output savings numbers tailored to each customer.
Run recurring onboarding webinars that are open to multiple customers: This is a great self-serve option. Run them at varying times to accommodate as many schedules and time zones as possible.
Run Simulated Live Sessions: In education, we call this idea the flipped classroom: If a school has a limited amount of time with the professor, would you rather spend it having them deliver the same lecture over and over to several classes, or would you rather pre-record the lecture, have the classes watch it, and then get higher-value interactive time with the professor?
So once you get a one-to-many onboarding session working, consider investing in a webinar tool like BigMarker that allows you to run "simulated live" webinars that appear to be live but are actually pre-recorded. That doesn't mean the trainer is entirely off the hook—it only means they can field Q&A questions and do other work while the webinar plays. When the pre-recorded portion ends, they can continue fielding questions live. Most of our customers are pretty happy with this approach.
Once a session is simulated live, it's a lot easier to increase its frequency. You can start running webinars every week, or even multiple times a week. This strategy also allows you to deliver a more polished presentation and decreases the likelihood of technical glitches.
Scaling Back to Scale Up
Being in a downturn isn’t fun. But I’ve lived through one before. Smart leaders will use this time to reevaluate how they’re doing things, and they’ll find opportunities to achieve the same impact with a scaled-back team.
We’re in a golden age of marketing tools. With the right investments in data and tools, you can come out of this downturn with a revenue engine that’s evolved from a Fiat 500 to a BMW —set up to scale up on the other side.
🐐🚨 I have not accepted new clients for the past year, but I'll have 1️⃣ spot opening up in October.
If you know a startup that could use some help, please reach out.