Who's on your growth team?

Who's on your growth / GTM team?

Most people say product, marketing, and sales. But you can be smarter than most people. Instead of fighting over the same few levers – ads, leads, landing pages and flows – think bigger.

The biggest wins I’ve seen came from somewhere else entirely:

• At PayPal our constraint was merchant activation. So we developed (and A/B tested) customer service campaigns to activate high-value merchants, generating hundreds of millions without ads or product changes.

• At SolarCity the constraint was expensive solar panels. So they offered zero-down leases where customers paid less per month than their old electricity bill. The growth team? Finance.

• Spotify was legally blocked from entering the US. So they negotiated revenue share deals to get the record industry to back down. Their "growth hackers" were lawyers and biz dev.

See the pattern? Don't start with your org chart, start with your constraint.

Simple next step

What’s the #1 constraint blocking your growth right now? Who in your org has the power to remove it? They might be the most important person on your growth team, whether they know it or not.

Anyone with the power to screw up your growth has the power to cause it.

Of course, they don't teach "growth" in law school, finance school, or customer service school. These folks are trained to minimize downside. Your job is to show them the upside.