Thinking Like a Growth Team Part One
How a small change in mindset can make a big difference in results
Hey folks.
Welcome to the first post from The WBB Playbook. This is actually a two parter to start us off, with part 2 coming soon.
I really hope you find it useful. If so, it would be great if you could forward it on to any friends or colleagues who might be interested.
Ok, onwards…
Time to Adopt a Growth Team Mindset
This post feels like a good starting point for The WBB Playbook as it’s all about adopting a new mindset to your sales strategy - a growth team mindset to be precise.
And it’s applicable to both sides of the audience - sales and marketing.
By the time you’ve finished reading, I want you to be throwing out the old silo-ed ways of working and embracing a whole new team structure within your company.
Because, like it or not, marketing is selling and selling is marketing.
What I mean by a Growth Team
A quick contextual note: I am framing all of this as it relates to B2B trade sales.
The growth team concept is a pretty simple one, and is borrowed from the tech startup world.
Rather than having separate sales and marketing departments, a growth team unifies them with a vision of working towards the shared goal of driving revenue growth.
But this single banner of “Growth Team” is more than just a line on an org chart; it’s a state of mind.
It aims to address the all too frequent problem that many companies have whereby teams that should be working hand in glove, are too often silo-ed off from one another.
Doing their own thing, barely talking to each other.
Marketers hate to think they’re sales people.
But they are.
Sales people hate to think they’re marketers (well, actually this is less true). But like it or not, they are.
Typically, brewery marketing teams focus on the consumer side, whilst sales teams focus on the trade side.
Marketing teams are all about building the brand & DTC - they’re not interested in getting their hands dirty with ‘the trade’.
Sales teams are out there pounding the streets, trying to secure listings for their beer in the on and off trade.
And this separation persists to the detriment of the overall goal of driving revenue growth for the business.
A growth team on the other hand is unified, focused and collaborative.
It sets a sales strategy together and then works closely to help deliver it.
It acknowledges that a sale starts much earlier than the sales call.
And whilst the sales side of the team is ultimately still responsible for bringing in new business and closing sales, a growth team mindset acknowledges that incorporating marketing into the strategy makes it far easier to hit targets.
As such, growth teams achieve much better results.
What this means in practise
Part two of this post will delve a bit deeper into a few specific examples of growth teams working perfectly N’Sync 👨🎤.
But at a topline level, I’m referring to the following:
Trade focused content: blogs, podcasts and video aimed specifically at your target trade customer. Produced by marketing, utilised by sales.
Press - making sure your PR strategy is targeting trade publications as much as consumer.
Social Media - engaging target accounts on social media, ahead of approaching them for the sale.
Samples - sales & marketing working together to give your sample outreach some WOW factor 🤩
Social Proof - using your marketing insights to tell prospective trade customers how much your drinkers LOVE your product.
Educational Resources - the craft beer industry is still young so a good way to stand out is to provide useful resources that help venues improve their sales or processes.
Quizzes - Wait, what? I’ll explain this one a bit more in part two. But essentially I’m referring to how marketing can use quizzes to build a pipeline of warm leads to pass over to sales.
This isn’t an exhaustive list but hopefully illustrates the point.
All of the above examples work best when there’s input from both marketing and sales.
With each side bringing different inputs and skills to the equation, with the hope that 1+1 = 3 📈
One final point…
I’m aware that not all breweries have both a sales and a marketing team.
If you’re lucky, you may have at least one person per function, but it’s also quite common for one person to be doing everything. I get it.
But this doesn’t change the need to adopt a growth team mindset.
If you’re doubling up as sales and marketing, then you still need to be thinking about how both sides of your role can work together to deliver on your targets.
If it helps, get yourself two hats - one with sales written on it, the other with marketing. When you’re in growth team mode, you can just wear both hats at the same time 😃
That’s a wrap on the first edition of The WBB Playbook. In part two of this post, I’ll delve a bit deeper on a few specific examples of good growth team working. Look out for that in your inbox soon.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading, I really appreciate your support.
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