Top Marketing Priorities of Founders Looking to Gracefully Navigate Scale-Up

Congratulations founder. You’ve reached a critical growth milestone with scale-up clearly in sight. This is a big deal! You’ve just done something that only 1 in 200 companies achieve in their lifetime. Most likely, if you’re like me, and meaning is one of your career goals, you’re also excited that you’re having an outsized impact on job creation in times of economic uncertainty. According to a new report from Insight Partners and Wakefield research, scale-ups, or companies that have reached a minimum threshold of $10 million in revenue by their fifth year, are a significant driver of economic growth. During the economic downturn of 2006-2009, when US unemployment skyrocketed, ScaleUps (2% of all companies) created 35% of job gains. What’s more, over the past two years, these companies showed the most resilience, acting quickly to overcome COVID impacts, shoring up revenue, and maintaining a healthy growth trajectory through 2021. To me, this is even more reason to get excited about the impact of businesses in scale-up! 

To achieve scale-up status, startups must demonstrate that they are robust, able to survive challenging conditions, and sustain high growth. This is no easy task with only 1 in 200 startups actually making it here. The report shows that leaders consider scaling up one of the biggest challenges in the life cycle of their business, trumping even the start-up or maturity phases. “CEOs are much more likely to say scaling up (42%) is the most challenging phase of the company life cycle compared to starting up (31%) and maturity (27%).”

In our work with founders, CEOs, and investors, we’re often asked what we see as the top priorities for marketing as companies look towards scaling. Our answer isn’t an easy one because marketing is not a discrete discipline. It relies on connections across the organization from product and IT to sales and customer service. If you’ve got a great product that serves a large target market, starting with a growth play is critical to prove viability and demonstrate an ability to scale rapidly. But as most leaders experience at some point these days, the market gets saturated, and growth begins to flatten. Hypergrowth tactics get new products, services, and markets going, but it’s not what keeps them at the forefront.

Most of our clients preparing for scale-up are focused on acquiring and retaining customers and moving quickly towards critical revenue targets. But with scale up on the horizon, they’re also strengthening their product portfolios, leaning into differentiated technology, hiring a multitude of key talent, and developing operational processes and systems that will support sustained growth and minimize the inherent chaos of hyper-growth. Suddenly, things that could be set aside in the early growth stages become significant; Things like culture, organizational structure, actionable goals, connecting the dots between disciplines, or having a strategically-oriented marketing team. These capabilities are not often a core strength of early founders or their leadership teams, often assembled from a network of highly capable individual contributors who are on their own developmental journey as business leaders.

Instead of telling our clients what their top priorities should be, we challenge them with three priority questions and dive deeper from there.

1. Are your leaders aligned and leading across a connected organization with Trust as their north star? 

2. Can you tell a clear and compelling story of your brand, and are your teams bringing it to life across your products and your customer touchpoints? 

3. Do you know how every touchpoint in your digital ecosystem is connected and how it is contributing to the value of your business? 

These are obviously loaded questions. Clearly, a yes or no answer might arise, but not often. What generally comes up is enough to fill a mini-workshop. So why these three? Because if you think about how really great companies evolve, their founders are focused on purpose and customer trust. They believe in their mission (or story) and empower their teams to bring that story to life in everything they do. They consistently monitor and track the quality of engagement across their brand’s ecosystem from the point of awareness to their customers' experience of the product and use what they learn to continue building and refining something truly great.

If our questions have piqued your interest, here’s a little more detail on each of them and why they matter now.

1) Are your leaders aligned and leading across a connected organization with Trust as their north star?

Today’s leaders are being challenged like never before, both internally and externally. Not only are they dealing with “The Great Reshuffle” and motivating remote teams, but also staying in tune with changing consumer and business buyer dynamics. According to Deloitte’s 2021 State of the Consumer Tracker, 72% of business leaders (for products and services) ranked trust over price and ease of use, up 30% since last year’s report. We live in a post-trust world, and consumers are getting more and more discerning about where they invest their money and rethinking their values around work and contribution. In this new world, disconnected leaders focused solely on the bottom line, or with inadequate skills to connect teams are losing both the talent game and the customer game all at once.

Now is the perfect time to ask yourself and your leadership team, “What kind of leaders do we need to be now?” “Are we focused on the right things?” “Do we understand what our employees, partners, and customers need from us?” Companies competing for top talent are investing in culture, leadership development, and creating environments that provide the one thing people want most now, meaningful co-creation. Relentless drive, sleepless nights, and cult-of-personality environments won’t cut it anymore. What’s required now is a diverse aligned team focused on purpose, with people empowered to create and deliver together in a hybrid work world.

Sometimes when we talk to our clients about the opportunity to improve culture, they feel concerned that this will take time away from day-to-day duties. But when we talk about development in the context of getting work done, they start to make the connection between intentionally crafted culture and business performance. One of the most important lessons developing leaders can learn is how to create the conditions for growth, innovation, and execution to happen simultaneously. Now’s the time to develop a team of leaders that understands that culture is your secret weapon for not only navigating the uncertainty of today’s markets but using it to your brands’ advantage as you scale.

2) Can you tell a clear and compelling story of your brand and are your teams bringing it to life across your products and your customer touchpoints?

Starting a business and bringing a vision to life with a small, focused team, can seem relatively straightforward when the founders are intimately involved in the storytelling and experience design. As your business grows and expands beyond your initial touchpoints and team, it becomes more challenging to consistently and effectively anchor your brand story in a wider variety of experiences as your team and community expand. Authentic interactions are the new name of the game with more and more people engaging in multi-dimensional ways.

In order to reach your current growth stage, most likely your marketing teams were focused on building a hyper-growth engine leveraging AI and analytics as a way to optimize channel performance with little thought to authentic interactions and customer engagement. If you’re at this stage of the game you’ve probably noticed that performance has flattened a bit and the competition is heating up. Now’s the time to invest in your brand voice, experience, and impact. This doesn’t have to mean huge investments in brand advertising. It’s more like concentrating the wood beyond the arrow by rallying your team around a brand playbook that connects every aspect of brand interactions from in-product to your influencers, social interactions, PR, and events. Orienting your teams in this way boosts your internal culture which in turn impacts the strength of your voice and influence in the marketing which in turn has a direct impact on growth.

When your teams truly believe in and embrace your brand. When they are empowered to live that brand in their day-to-day work lives. That’s when you’ll start to see the exponential, sustainable growth required to scale up.

3) Do you know how every touchpoint in your digital ecosystem is connected and how it is contributing to the value of your business?

Respond-ability is the new name of the game in our post-trust world. It’s powered by the agile digital ecosystem that puts you and your team in a position to listen and respond effectively across all channels. We’ve seen firsthand the edge that companies that leverage a mature digital ecosystem have on maintaining authentic, high-value relationships.

Chances are you’ve got a pretty hefty investment in digital environments and tools. How can you get more out of that investment? According to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey, CMOs spent 29% of their budgets on marketing technology in 2018. Yet only 33% of organizations feel that their martech effectively meets business needs.

Most marketing organizations are set up with discrete disciplines, all with their own disparate tools. We’re not just talking about your campaign tools or your analytics stack, we mean everything that impacts your company's ability to seamlessly engage with customers. Like, your CRM system, your intent tools, your campaign system, content and project management tools.

Rather than investing in technology strategically, many teams add components to their stack to address a niche capability, often not taking into account the other technologies in place or that need to be added later. Even teams with a more mature technology stack may not have the aligned processes for connecting the dots between data sets, insights, and actions required for true interactive engagement. The result is a disconnected set of tools that, if connected and leveraged to their full extent, could be the fuel that empowers your team to respond quickly in the best interests of the customer.

• Are you measuring what truly matters to the long-term health of the business in addition to tactical campaign tracking?

• Do you have the right tools to achieve your goals and are their key features fully activated?

• Do you have an established set of processes to enable your team to collectively orchestrate a seamless customer experience?

• Do you have a set of rapid decision-making filters and pre-developed responses that enable your team to read the signals and respond quickly across your organization?

• Do you have an actively managed governance model that empowers individuals to act in the best interests of the customer and brand based on a common set of business rules?

In this new era of economic evolution, we’re all learning and inventing the ropes as we go along. We’d love to learn more about your experience and ideas. Let’s chat.  

Ask us for a quick assessment. It’s like free therapy.

If you’re refining your approach to marketing and need help deciding where to focus first, we’d love to chat. Within about 45 minutes, we can get to the heart of your biggest challenges and help you determine where you need to prioritize to up-level your game. Schedule some time to tell us about your “Ready for Anything” challenges.

About Us

InfiniteEdge is a consultancy of marketing and culture experts that helps companies build trust and navigate today’s rapidly evolving market environment while providing all the marketing services you'd expect from a top-tier integrated agency. Invite us in to help you transition your marketing operation from reactive to responsive and develop a roadmap to help you thrive through the coming unknown.

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