Grow your business faster This guide has been developed to equip marketing leaders with the strategy and tactics required to deliver sustainable business growth. In this guide you will learn: How to calculate and use Unit & Growth Economics. The prerequisites which provide the foundation for growth. The core activities that deliver growth.

Unit economics can be hard to calculate, often requiring a notion of customer lifetime value. We've stripped it back and created a template on Google Sheets and Excel with step-by-step explanations to make it simple, quick and easy to calculate your business’ unit economics. Check your unit economics are profitable Forecast how profitable your business will be over a 3 year period, with graphs Understand the effects of acquiring different volumes of customers on your profit Use the projections and charts to supplement pitch decks and play around with the numbers to understand how changing variables will impact your overall profitability. Get started straight away by adding your numbers into the calculator to see how profitable (or not) your business is on a per unit basis. The template is print-ready.

Nuno Santos, MD at We Accelerate Growth explains how you can clearly demonstrate that your venture will lead to accelerated growth, using growth economics.

Growth Marketing Health Check Prioritising where to focus on growing a business isn’t easy. There are a hundred and one directions you could take, so knowing which will make the largest impact on performance can be a challenge. Try our free growth marketing health check, which helps to quickly identify the areas that require most focus, and recommends strategic and tactical action points. The 7 Fundamentals of Business Growth This guide has been designed to equip marketing leaders with the strategy and tactics required to deliver sustainable business growth. The guide draws on our experience with high growth businesses from the perspective of VCs and from within startups and distills 7 fundamentals of business growth. Download Growth Economics Calculator To decide on the right growth strategy and demonstrate your team’s contribution, you need to understand and measure the impact of different marketing tactics on profits. A Unit Economics analysis helps you do this. Easily calculate and forecast your business' unit economics with this free template on Excel and Google sheets. Access the calculator How to demonstrate solid Growth Economics Impressive revenue forecasts look great, but what an investor really cares about is whether the unit economics will be profitable. In this 7 minute video, Managing Director at We Accelerate Growth, Nuno Santos, explains how you can improve your chances of securing investment by demonstrating growth economics. Recorded at a We Work Labs session on Investable Growth Marketing Frameworks. Watch What it takes to reignite growth in your organisation Leap Quotient EvaluatorTM is an appreciative process that benchmarks your organisational capabilities against the best practices of leading brands. You receive a comprehensive, evidence-based report and a bespoke action plan for creating and delivering preference-driving value to accelerate your company’s growth. Learn more

Leap Quotient Evaluator Deliver market share growth with a prioritised action plan to improve your company’s value creation capabilities. In an era dominated by short-termism and all its downfalls Leap Quotient Evaluator is the only predictive diagnostic tool that gives ambitious business leaders a clear, specific and prioritised action plan for creating preference-driving value, reigniting market share growth and attaining a sustained leap in marketplace performance. What’s your business’ Leap Quotient (LQ)? Through a digitally enabled appreciative process your team will learn about the 100 performance drivers that need to be in place to deliver organic growth. We’ll benchmark your company’s internal capabilities with respect to insights generation, ambitions and strategy, operating culture and customer centricity to assess your company’s LQ score. You’ll receive a comprehensive, evidence-based report and prioritised action plan. Contact us to schedule your Leap Quotient Evaluation today.

As a growth marketing specialist agency, we have experience working with lots of fast growth companies and have distilled 7 fundamentals into a guide for marketing leaders. This is the second in our series of 7 blog posts, each detailing one of the growth fundamentals. The marketing team needs to produce a solid growth plan to warrant investment in the form of either budget or resources. To deliver an impact on business growth, investment is essential, and it comes in the form of either budget or resources (even if growth is organic, it isn’t free - a lot of time and dedication has to be invested to create content and tools to drive organic growth). It can be hard to convince stakeholders to invest - according to CrunchBase data from 2003 - 2013, just under 50% of the companies that raised a series A funding will not raise a series B (which is normally used to accelerate scaling). To convince stakeholders to invest, you should put yourself in the shoes of your would-be investors to produce a clear growth plan which is both compelling and feasible, given the level of investment required. Including a growth economics analysis is a powerful way to illustrate how the investment will be used to impact on profits, which is ultimately what your investors care about. In our experience, a lot of businesses tend to underestimate the level of investment needed to hit promised targets, so a growth economics analysis also has the benefit of illustrating the potential outcomes on the profit line under different customer acquisition or cost scenarios, helping to frame the range of investment necessary for the growth strategy. Download The 7 Fundamentals of Business Growth and learn how to calculate, enable and drive business growth.

As a growth marketing specialist agency, we have experience of working with lots of fast growth companies and have distilled 7 fundamentals into a guide for marketing leaders. This is the third in a series of 7 blog posts detailing each of the growth fundamentals. When choosing elements of a growth stack, integration should be prioritised to promote accurate analysis and decision-making. The growth stack has two functions: to carry out activities for delivering and maintaining growth, and to provide access to the right data for clear analysis and strategising. While many software solutions are able to deliver the functionality required, it is much harder to bring together a clean collection of data for meaningful analysis. Generally speaking (it is somewhat dependent on the business model) having a growth stack which can generate a “single customer view” will provide the best insights, because all engagements with a customer are tracked. This means you can clearly attribute success to marketing activities and on a macro level have an overview of the entire funnel performance, which is essential for decision-making. In our experience, the businesses who have this level of visibility are able to make the right strategic decisions, faster. Some software solutions, like HubSpot, provide an all-in-one growth stack, making it simple to achieve a single customer view. The other option is to involve a developer to stitch the growth stack elements together so that data can be collated and meaningful insights made. To smoothen this process, you should opt for software with an open API. In this case, there should be a central CRM component, which updates contact records with data regarding their interactions, collected from the other elements of the growth stack. Download The 7 Fundamentals of Business Growth and learn how to calculate, enable and drive business growth.

Culture is king for scale-ups - that’s because the cultural fit is a result of fundamental aspects of a person’s character. Whereas lacking skills or knowledge can be improved upon, it is hard (not to mention, unethical!) to impose a character change. People who fit the team culture are more likely to integrate well, care deeply about their work and increase morale - and those attributes are very important in a small team where each individual has a big impact on the group. If there are skills gaps in your team, it is much more efficient to hire an agency or freelancer who can cover those in the interim while the team upskills. The team can also learn from the external party, with a view to taking over the work once the engagement comes to an end or until they become competent enough. Due to the nature of fast growth, it’s likely that the skills and expertise required in the marketing team will change at some point as the team pivots to adapt to changing priorities. Placing more importance on hiring a team with a good cultural fit will work in your favour. Priorities change, for example, one of the scale-ups we’ve worked with realised early on their team of generalist marketers lacked the specialist knowledge required for growth. Rather than losing team morale by firing and re-hiring they upskilled the existing team, who were happy to embrace change. It takes time to see whether someone is a good cultural fit, and once the team starts to grow bigger it becomes easier to spot. For a scale-up marketing team, the base behaviours and capabilities to look out for when assessing cultural fit are: Motivation to deliver in a faster, more efficient or more sustainable way. An understanding of the larger goal that small-scale objectives contribute to. Receptive and open to feedback and self-improvement. Inclusive and collaborative. Able to work in an agile and flexible way. Capable of taking ownership of projects. Download The 7 Fundamentals of Business Growth and learn how to calculate, enable and drive business growth.

Having an inefficient funnel very quickly undoes any acquisition work from a growth standpoint. To compound that, there is only a 5-20% chance of selling to a new customer, compared with a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer. Excelling at customer success is not just nice, it’s essential for sustainable growth. While there may be a team already dedicated to customer success, carrying out responsibilities like one-to-one support or custom implementations, it is important that your team owns or at least has a direct input into larger scale customer programmes and initiatives which aim to promote customer lifetime value (like upselling, product updates and onboarding). A quarter of CMOs say leading the customer experience is the biggest expectation their CEOs have of them. The skillset in your team makes this a natural choice, as similar principles to acquisition apply when identifying customer opportunities for upselling. Marketing can also ensure communications are meaningful and consistent with the experience customers were promised higher up the funnel. Moreover, the team can be more responsive if they oversee communications for the entire customer journey. Ultimately happy customers are likely to buy more and tell their friends. In addition, this close union between the two functions promotes better transparency over what makes a good customer, which can be fed back to refine acquisition efforts. Download The 7 Fundamentals of Business Growth and learn how to calculate, enable and drive business growth.

As the pressure to grow increases, so too will the pressure on your team to generate new leads. The problem with this rationale is that it puts an unfair emphasis on quantity over quality, which unnecessarily increases the cost of acquisition. To give an example; imagine a typical sales process with four steps (consideration, evaluation, selection and negotiation). At each step, 50% of leads are lost. Generating one lead costs £10, and a further £10 is spent at each step (in terms of sales team time). Here’s an example for 100 leads: By improving the quality of leads acquired (largely through a better understanding of buyer personas) the conversion at each stage is improved. The example on the right shows the effect on the cost of acquisition following a 20% improvement at each stage which ultimately represents a 42% decrease in the total cost of acquisition, bettering unit economics and accelerating growth. Download The 7 Fundamentals of Business Growth and learn how to calculate, enable and drive business growth.

It’s amazing how often we see startups that neglect to provide a strong and compelling follow up to prospective customers interested in their product or service, or they move on and drop prospects who are not ready then and there. They let would-be customers just slide through the cracks. The two main reasons for this are: Lead nurture is not seen as a priority. It takes a backseat to acquisition or marketing hands are washed of further responsibility once an interested lead is identified. The right technology to give the marketing team control to easily build automated nurture programmes is not in place. The idea behind lead nurturing is to deliver the right information and answers to leads according to their stage of the buyer journey. Since 50% of leads will not be ready to buy, yet are still qualified, investing time in a nurture programme can significantly increase the chance of customer conversion and reduce the cost of acquisition, therefore having a positive effect on your unit economics. Download The 7 Fundamentals of Business Growth and learn how to calculate, enable and drive business growth.

Years of experience working with private equity and venture capital funds has taught us how important gaining a full view of target companies real growth potential is when assessing an investment opportunity. To help teams do this we have developed a Growth Potential Assessment focusing on evaluating the effectiveness of a company’s growth activities through indicative proxies. The Growth Potential Assessment helps private equity and venture capital deal origination teams to quickly build a more detailed understanding of the potential for growth of an investment. It identifies the areas that need to be further investigated and validated to support the investment thesis. The assessment combines advanced software tools with the experience of our growth experts to deliver a detailed analysis of a business’s growth potential, focusing on the three key components of growth maturity: Customer Success, Lead Conversion and Lead Generation. Download the Growth Potential Assessment product sheet here The Growth Potential Assessment reveals the target investment’s: Ability to acquire, convert and keep customers Maturity and proficiency of marketing performance Potential to achieve short and long-term growth To discover how our Growth Potential Assessment can help you to quickly understand the growth potential of a target company contact Tom Goddard: tom.goddard@weaccelerategrowth.com

Once a new venture achieves product to market fit, devising the right economics for the future of the business, it should look for capital to grow as fast as possible. Yet, Josh Lerner, Harvard Business School's venture capital guru, estimates that 90 percent of new businesses can't bridge this gap and end up shutting down because of it. As a London based growth marketing agency, we looked at a number of fast growth companies - clients and non-clients - trying to distil what makes that click from product-market fit to an accelerated venture receiving continued growth investments. We distilled the learnings into a guide The 7 Fundamentals of Business Growth. This is the first of a series of seven blog posts detailing each of the growth fundamentals - which you can also download from the Growth Tools page. Growth Fundamental 1 - Be ready to scale The marketing team is well placed to validate whether the business is ready to scale. Ultimately, the decision on when to scale the business should be heavily influenced by your team because you are the ones with the best understanding of whether there is a big enough market for the product, if the product is well-enough liked by customers and whether enough customers can be acquired at a price that delivers good unit economics metrics. “No market need” is widely cited as the number one reason for scale-up failure. There are plenty of horror stories of businesses that chose the wrong moment to rapidly scale up before they were ready. Homejoy was one - billed as the Uber for home cleaning, the company began with a period of explosive growth, but abruptly collapsed after 2 years. A large contributor to their demise was aggressive expansion into markets which had not been thoroughly researched - and weren't a good fit for their product. The questions you should be able to answer are those that any VC would ask when deciding whether to invest in a business: How big is the pool of potential customers? You need to research: Current size of the market. Growth drivers (economic, political or social for example). Competitors and their market shares. Untapped groups are similar to existing customers. What sets the product aside from its competitors? You should assess: How well the product meets potential customers’ previously unmet needs. How different the offering is from similar products on the market. How the product could be developed further to resonate more with the market. What will it cost to acquire customers? You should assess: Suitability of different acquisition channels. Channel cost comparison. When will acquisition efforts become profitable (using growth economics forecasts). Once you have answered these questions affirmatively, in an unbiased way, you may assume the company may be ready to scale. Download The 7 Fundamentals of Business Growth and learn how to calculate, enable and drive business growth.

Many of the startups that sprang up in the on-demand space over the last few years haven’t fared well. Take Homejoy, for example. Billed as the Uber for home cleaning, it began with a period of explosive growth but abruptly collapsed after 2 years. The reason for their failure? They prioritised user growth over revenue growth. According to the Founder of the research firm Crowd Companies, each individual home cleaning was simply not profitable. Unfortunately, they suffered from poor customer retention and a crippling cost of customer acquisition. In the end, their unit economics got the better of them. I meet with businesses all the time that haven’t got a solid handle on their unit economics, and it has a marked impact on their ability to understand and prioritise activities that will grow their profits. Because they don’t accurately project their profitability over time, they can’t see clearly which levers they need to pull to make a positive impact (by levers, I mean customer acquisition cost, pricing model, product to market fit, cost of production etc). The basics of unit economics Unit economics help you to understand if you are getting enough value from a customer to warrant the costs you are spending on acquiring and retaining them and creating and servicing your product. A unit economics analysis will help you to project how profitable your company may (or may not) be, identify when it can expect to reach profitability and distinguish which strategies will work best to influence that. The accepted definition for unit economics is “Unit economics are the direct revenues and costs associated with a particular business model, and are specifically expressed on a per unit basis” Most startups will begin with inefficient, negative unit economics and take a few years to end up with profitable unit economics (and some unicorns may never get there). Above is a typical growth curve for a startup - which starts to see profitable unit economics at year 3. For a startup to reach this point, changes will have been made to a combination of factors, like reaching a critical mass of customers, reducing the cost of acquiring those customers or reducing the cost of producing the product. An easier way to calculate unit economics Most unit economics calculations require you to know your customer lifetime value (LTV). Since this can be quite difficult to calculate, we suggest simply looking at revenue over a single year period instead. A year provides enough time to accurately observe the natural rhythms of your business - for example, customers can unsubscribe or churn, new competitors can enter the market, or you could develop new products. You can look at a retrospective year, estimate numbers for the current year, or do both. We also advocate thinking in terms of product units (think of a product unit as a software license or a single month from a monthly subscription or a single product) as this offsets your customer acquisition cost (CAC). For example, acquiring 1 customer who purchases 3 products from you effectively divides your CAC by 3. It is surprising how often startups fail to factor product units into their calculations. Here are the numbers you need to know to start the analysis (all numbers are over a 1 year period): A) Total cost of acquiring and keeping customers B) Projected number of customers C) Total cost of producing & servicing products D) Projected number of product units sold E) Average number of product units sold per customer F) Product unit price Now to start the analysis: Cost of acquiring and owning a customer unit: A / B (= G) Cost of producing a product unit: C / D (= H) Cost of acquisition per product unit: G / E (= I) Profit by product unit: F - H - I Here’s an example for Alto Co., a fictional company with a SaaS product. Projecting unit economics This is the fun part. By projecting different scenarios based on hard variables, you can begin to get an idea of how your unit economics will shift in particular scenarios, AND what you could do to best prepare for those challenges. In the diagram above, different customer acquisition volumes have been projected over a 3 year period to demonstrate how the unit economics would change in each scenario. It’s important to take into account the efficiencies you expect to gain over the years when projecting your costs for the next few years. For example, you might expect to become more efficient at acquiring customers or reduce costs by getting a better supplier deal. For a step-by-step, easy and quick way to forecast and visualise your unit economics, try out our Growth Economics calculator.

HubSpot have released their list of the top digital marketing agencies, and we’re delighted to announce that we have been featured on it. We Accelerate Growth has been named Top Digital Marketing Agency in London. This recommendation comes from our success working with a number of other businesses using HubSpot. Honestly, we are proud as punch. Who are HubSpot? HubSpot is a leading global inbound marketing and sales software that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. Why HubSpot? Integrating Sales and Marketing is crucial for successful growth but getting this alignment in place isn’t always easy. HubSpot offers a great solution, bridging the gap to give both departments transparency on activity throughout the buyer journey as well as end-to-end reporting, helping to effectively optimise for growth. HubSpot works best for small-medium sized businesses who typically have a longer sales cycle and a focus on inbound marketing. As a Gold Partner, we have in-house specialists who excel in HubSpot integrations, management and optimisation. Find out if HubSpot is right for you here.

Businesses are either growing or stagnating. It may look like things are ticking along but unless growth is being actively pursued, shrinking is inevitable. Growth is a journey, not a destination, so you should keep up momentum in continuously measuring, iterating and improving throughout the go-to-market process. Effective growth marketing is dependent on a holistic approach to all stages of the funnel. Below is a basic funnel with the 4 keys stages of engagement between a consumer and a brand. It is key you consider their experience at all of these stages. To kickstart your growth marketing, don’t wait for perfect but focus on ‘quick wins’. Here are 5 growth hacks you can start using today that will optimise your customer experience (CX). 1. Give your content some colour Studies continuously show that effective imagery and visuals can supercharge engagement. Just take a look at these stats: 81% of people only skim through content. Video posts are 300% more attractive than regular posts. Posts including images are 650% more effective than their text-only counterparts. (Statistics source) Go beyond standard stock imagery and use visual tools to depict data such as charts and diagrams. 2. Talk to the sales team Too many marketing and sales teams are working in silos and according to Hubspot companies with good sales and marketing alignment generated 208% more revenue from their marketing efforts. Good persona development is key for content strategy, and a quick way to build up accurate personas is by talking to your sales team. They spend all day chatting to prospects, leads and customers, so understand better than anyone their pain points, needs and desires. Take your head of sales out for a coffee today and find out who your customers are and what they’re saying - a quick conversation could save you a lot of time independently researching what your sales team already know. 3. Let your customers sell you ‘Social proof’ is outlined by Robert Cialdini, a prominent thought leader in the world of business and psychology, as a key tool in validating your offering to prospective clients. In ‘Influence’, Cialdini uses the example of how sitcoms use laughter tracks to entice real laughter from the audience. And it works. The same is true of marketing and using testimonials can increase conversion by 58%. Engage with your customers and ask for testimonials you can use to enhance your marketing materials today. 4. Get social Social media can be a great way to find out about your customer's experience and pick up points for improvement. Use social media to ask your customers for feedback on their experience and on how they think you could improve your services and offering. 5. Don’t lose people along the way Effective lead nurturing throughout the funnel can generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost. Marketing automation allows you to build an effective lead nurturing campaign and save time on otherwise manual processes. Using a customer relationship management tool (CRM) like HubSpot ensures you stay on top of prospects and convert them into customers. Map out your funnel and lead nurture process today, identifying where prospective customers may be dropping off.

Gone are the days when private equity stirred up connotations of financial engineering and little else. Today people recognise that private equity firms improve underlying business functions and operations, increasing their value and chances of success. In recent years, many private equity firms have set up in-house teams of operational specialists, who have evolved from traditional investment banking and strategy consulting backgrounds. This has paved way to a healthier, and frequently more collaborative, approach between CEOs and private equity operational teams, where CEOs welcome the intervention and help from the firms. Where are CEOs looking for support from private equity firms? According to a study from ATKearney, out of fourteen different choices, "Business and Growth Strategy" is the area where CEOs are asking for the most support from private equity firms. This is not surprising. The Gartner 2018 CEO Survey looked at responses from 460 CEOs and C-level business executives to pinpoint goals and concerns from the C-suite. Respondents ranked "growth" as a top priority. But are private equity firms prepared to deliver support on "growth" to CEOs? Over the last few years, with the acceleration of digital as the major source of disruption and transformation across industries, growth is becoming more complex. With digital audiences, digital transactions, digitally enabled products and digital collaborations, acquiring customers and maximising their lifetime value efficiently involves the orchestration of multiple practices and areas of expertise. With CEOs looking for deeper structural sources of growth, and to develop disciplined ways to exploit digital opportunities to grow their business, private equity firms must evolve their skills in four different areas: Evolving skills in all these areas, which is essential to effectively drive growth, can prove challenging for private equity firms. Different investments will require different skills and approaches, and very quickly firms will need to grow their teams significantly if they want to be effective. A faster and more cost-effective alternative to driving value creation in investments is to partner with growth specialist firms. Growth specialist firms who have the expertise to cover the four critical areas, and who can focus on growth outcomes to quickly align to the investment business goals, will help CEOs while keeping the firm's headcount and costs under control.

If you can demonstrate solid growth economics to investors, you can prove that investing in your venture will lead to accelerated growth and deliver a return. 4 elements contribute to demonstrating solid growth economics: Ability to target a big market Product to market fit Evidence of a growth engine, or a plan to build one Favourable unit economics How to demonstrate solid growth economics This video was recorded at a We Work labs event for startup founders. Targeting a big market The market you target must have a large enough potential for growth, with the ability to sustain delivery on the investment multiples. According to Alejandro Cremades, author of The Art of Startup Fundraising, the market must be in the billions to make the investment opportunity attractive enough. But you also need to be realistic, no new startup will ever gain a 100% market share. Tx Zhuo of Karlin Ventures says “If it's 1 - 5% of the pie, you have a realistic plan.” Getting the right product to market fit The easiest way to understand if there is a product to market fit is to ask the question “Can I sell this to someone I don’t have a relationship with?” If the answer is yes, you likely have product to market fit. Your friends and investors don’t count. Product designer Josh Porter takes this a step further, saying that you have achieved product to market fit when your customers begin to share their positive experience with others, and you can replicate the experience with every new user who your existing users tell. Evidence of a growth engine Don't think of marketing, think of a growth engine instead. Just like the components of an engine work together to efficiently convert fuel into motion, the components of a growth engine work together to convert prospects (the fuel) effectively into sustainable growth (forward motion) Read this post on why investing in a growth engine is an essential criterion for success. Favourable unit economics Investors want to see that you have a grip on your numbers and understand the business. This is the purpose of unit economics. In a nutshell, they help you understand if you are getting enough value from a customer to warrant the acquisition, retention and product costs. A unit economics analysis helps to forecast how profitable your company may (or may not) be, identify when it can expect to reach profitability and distinguish which strategies will work best to influence that. Here’s an easy to use unit economics template that we created.

We recently spoke at an event for startup founders about forecasting realistic customer growth. At the end of the talk, a founder asked: “what is the top priority to maximise customer growth?” This is a very valid question and in our experience, it’s not asked enough. 8/10 times, the conversation with a startup founder focusses only on questions like “is my budget better spent on Facebook ads or PR?” Essentially, “how can I get in front of the most people?”. It’s easy to see why filling the top of the funnel as fast as possible is often the priority. Both investors and the competition encourage a “grow at all costs” mentality. It’s much less common that we get questions about keeping customers happy, and this is a problem. While on the surface it might look great to have acquired a tonne of new customers, when you dig deeper and look at the profits, that falls away fast. Take the on-demand cleaning start-up Homejoy, for example. After starting out with a period of explosive growth, they abruptly collapsed after 2 years. Amongst a slew of other factors, a fundamental contributor was poor product-market fit. It pushed up the cost of acquisition and heavily affected their profits. Focussing on growth above all else meant that any efforts to address retention fell to the wayside. There’s a great article which goes into more detail about it here. Rather than thinking about marketing as just piling leads into the top of the funnel, startup founders should think about the entire customer lifecycle. To illustrate this idea, here’s the difference in output when the top of the funnel is prioritised compared to the bottom of the funnel. A useful framework to support this thinking replaces the idea of “marketing” with that of a “growth engine”. What is a growth engine? This video was recorded at a WeWork Labs event for startup founders. Much like an engine consists of a number of parts that work together efficiently to convert fuel into motion, the growth engine components also work collectively, to convert prospects (the fuel) effectively into sustainable growth (forward motion). Here’s a brief overview of each part of the engine. 1. The customer success component Whilst it’s tempting to give more attention to prospective customers, making sure existing customers value your product or service should always be the first priority. If your customers aren’t successful, you won’t survive. Your customers are the ones who will become your advocates and help you grow; a paid search campaign alone isn’t nearly as impactful. Finally, your customers will provide insights to refine your growth strategy and improve product-market fit. 2. The lead generation component We’ve seen a lot of approaches to lead generation that follow the spray and pray philosophy (although it’s never admitted). By leveraging insights from customers, personas can be validated and improved upon. That means more accurate targetting and lower acquisition costs. In other words, fewer, but highly qualified leads are more likely to convert and turn into successful customers. 3. The customer conversion component Freshly generated leads are not always ready to buy. For the best chance of converting into them into customers, they need to be kept engaged through messages that resonate with them and their buyer journey stage. It’s amazing how often this function is covered by just a sales team with a limited capacity to manage the needs of each lead. By using insights from the customer success component, the right tactics and messages can be used. None of these individual concepts are new, but thinking of them together as a growth engine promotes joined-up thinking. If you can fluidly connect each of the 3 components, you have a much better chance of growing your customer base and increasing customer lifetime value. Here’s that diagram again: How to move towards the growth engine model Anything worth having takes time. Transitioning to a growth engine model requires a commitment to undertake two fundamental long-term projects. To balance that and help build momentum, here are some quick win suggestions too. Fundamentals: Long-term projects Implement a flexible CRM: In an ideal world, a CRM holds all relevant customer and lead data. It should map basic behavioural information like site visits, email opens, ad clicks and video plays to a contact. For this to happen, it must have tight integrations with all relevant touchpoints (that’s where an open API becomes very important). This information builds a strong picture of where a contact is on the buyer journey and therefore how best to interact with them. Most importantly, a CRM tracks the transition of leads into customers. This facilitates accurate attribution and the CRM can be mined for insights and trends. A CRM only needs to be as sophisticated as your business; there are plenty of free or low-cost options. We like HubSpot and Salesforce. Validate personas: It's common sense to understand the people you’re trying to sell to. It’s also remarkable how often this is lacking, considering it underpins the entire messaging and positioning strategy. Identifying the traits and drivers of your best customers so you can find more of them is a piece of live research to regularly add to. A well-maintained CRM comes in mighty handy for running this kind of analysis. Once you have a list of objective demographic and behavioural characteristics of successful customers, you can apply them further up the funnel to target, score and qualify leads. Quick wins: short-term projects Set up a review programme: Online reviews have a high impact on sales. Set up a simple automated email asking customers to leave you a review on your chosen platform. Assign personas to new leads: If you already have a good sense of your personas, you can ask leads to self-identify through a form or chatbot. For example, add a field asking “What is your biggest challenge?” and provide pre-set answers which correspond to different personas. Then tailor the follow-up using the new persona knowledge. Collect customer feedback: Set up a pop-up survey visible only to customers on the website or in-app to take a quick pulse check. Limit to 3 closed-ended questions. More about website survey best practice here. Find out why customers leave: Ask customers to provide a reason for leaving your product/ service. An automated email will work, or it can be built into the subscription cancellation process.

Tom Bloomfield. You know, the guy that heads up Monzo - that bank that now has more than one million accounts in the UK. We never worked together, but I kind of wish we would at some point. I wish Monzo could keep its independency and continue to develop great banking products. It will be a challenge. While the number of users has trebled over the last year at Monzo, it seems like costs are growing at a faster rate than the monetisation of these customers. This would be enough to sound alarm bells at the plush offices of any VC firm. Failing at customer economics is normally the beginning of the end. Tom knows he needs to fix it. He knows he needs to focus on instilling growth coupled with cost control at Monzo. He knows what could happen if he doesn't. Monzo would need to borrow more money - ergo raising more capital in another round. Which would mean he would progressively lose control of the business. This would mean the business could be sold to entities that could try to address the cost issue through economies of scale. Therefore Monzo could be sold to another bank who wishes they had the guts to create coral colour cards; Monzo's uniqueness will be diluted, and they would become just a small part of "another bank". He knows that raising capital is just borrowing money, and his focus needs to be on fixing the business fundamentals: develop great products that (at least some) that people love, and find a way to keep costs under the expected customer revenues. That's why when closing a round of £85 million yesterday, Tom was refusing to celebrate. With his superior clarity of vision he knows that borrowing money should not be celebrated, rather focus needs to be on customer metrics. And he voiced this when commenting on the round. This sends the right message to his investors, and more importantly, to his own people. Guess that's one of the reasons why he is so successful doing what he does. Kudos.

Having the right growth marketing tools at your disposal transforms the speed and effectiveness of your marketing. Here's a list of the top 10 tools we recommend marketers incorporate into their growth strategies. We’ve split the list into Acquisition and Retention tools as these are two core areas marketers are always trying to improve. Understanding how each of these tools can help you acquire more users, and drive your retention strategy can help you transform your business. Customer Acquisition Growth Tools 1. HelloBar As growth marketers, one of the biggest tasks (and challenges!) we face is lead generation. Acquiring traffic from PPC or social media is one thing, but getting anonymous visitors to sign up to your product - often trading their personal data in the process - can be a tricky feat. HelloBar enables you to create slick and simple pop-up modals which have proven to convert website visitors. The tool allows you to create everything, and launch within minutes thanks to their easy to navigate UI. Plus, it’s easy to install on your website either directly in the source code or via Google Tag Manager. The best thing is it’s completely free for under 5,000 views per month. To avoid going past the 5,000 views, we suggest only implementing the HelloBar tag on your high value or most relevant pages. This ensures the best conversion rates and avoid impacting your website bounce rates by having pop-ups running across your whole site, which likely annoys users visiting pages such as ‘FAQs’, ‘About’ or ‘Terms and conditions’ - or even your homepage. Chances are these users aren’t as likely to respond as well to a pop-up as a user that clicked through from a tailored advert around a relevant topic or product. You can also A/B test your modals, which gives you the ability to work out which messaging, imagery, call to action, and landing page delivers the best results. 2. Sumo Sumo is a fantastic e-commerce tool, designed to turn visitors into customers. Sumo’s platform is particularly excellent for helping with the following issues: 3. Hotjar Hotjar is an effective user journey visualisation tool that connects all the dots with one powerful solution. The ability to understand how your potential customers are interacting with your website is a valuable insight that can help you to optimise your site’s user experience, identify ‘leaky pages’ and parts of your conversion funnel, as well as gather user feedback. The user heatmaps give you a really clear understanding of what elements (buttons, images, links etc.) are most engaging. Hotjar also has the ability to give you more data on how users scroll and move on your key pages and you can break it down by devices - which in the age of mobile traffic is definitely something we recommend focusing on.  4. Unbounce Unbounce is an excellent support tool for marketers who are looking for easy ways to implement landing pages and forms for their campaigns without needing a developer. On top of this you can A/B test landing pages to help make data-driven optimisation decisions. As a growth marketing agency, we often use Unbounce Landing pages across our PPC campaigns as they give us the ability to quickly set up and test impactful landing pages, ultimately improving the performance of our client's marketing campaigns. Key products to consider if looks to improve your data capture methods or tracking (AdWord, Google Analytics etc.): Landing Pages, Pop-Ups and Sticky Bars. You can get started for as little as $79/month (including a 30-day free trial) for their Essential plan 5. Optimizely To ensure your website is working as hard as it possibly can to drive customers, you might want to consider using the hugely popular Optimizely. The tool is designed to improve user experience and customer acquisition through experimentation. Plugging Optimizely into your website can allow you to A/B test anything from call to action button messaging / links, imagery/landing page designs as well as the forms you serve to people - without needing to code! The ability to quickly learn what works best from an acquisition standpoint is invaluable for improving website conversion rates. See the full list of current plans here Customer Retention Tools 6. HubSpot Although HubSpot’s tools also support acquisition, the product is centered around a powerful CRM tool, which focuses on enabling business growth. On top of the completely free CRM system, you can add HubSpot’s marketing, sales and customer service hubs to drive better performance across key business areas: For further information around pricing for each of the Hubs, see the official HubSpot pricing page 7. Marketo Marketo is one of the leading marketing automation tools and is powered by its extremely robust database system which includes a single customer view. Marketo’s system puts your known users/customers right at the centre of your marketing efforts and gives you the ability to track every web or email interaction. These types of insights can then be applied to your marketing automation efforts, whether you’re a subscription business that needs to send regular automated messages to subscribers or an e-commerce business that needs to target users at every stage of the buyer funnel. Marketo has an easy to use email builder and you can use smart complex segments for your email marketing lists based on previous behaviour or demographic data you may hold. As a bonus, Marketo also provides clean and concise email marketing dashboards. Marketo is powerful lead management and reporting tool that can be used to pass leads to most CRM systems. For marketing teams that pass leads on to sales, this makes it easy to track lead progress through the entire sales funnel. Moreover by connecting marketing efforts to actual sales data in your CRM you’ll start to be able to report on, and improve overall lead quality as you continue to collect data insights. 8. MailChimp MailChimp is an email service provider that works particularly well for small businesses and start-ups due to its pricing model and ease of use. The key reason we like the tool is because it allows you to create effective, well designed emails without any coding knowledge and for those of you with email lists with less than 2,000 contacts you can send up to 12,000 emails for each, every month. That means that you can implement and test your email marketing strategy for no cost until you’re ready to invest more. MailChimp’s drag and drop email builder is simple to use, and the system comes with some great out-the-box templates that you could use for inspiration. MailChimp also does some great work prevent your emails hitting spam filters, ensuring you don’t get blacklisted which hurts your brand perception. There’s also the ability to automate emails, enabling you to create simple multi-stage email campaigns to engage your customers. 9. LiveChat LiveChat’s software enables growth marketers to connect with their website visitors. In practical terms, customers are given the ability to speak with you (or a member of your sales team) in real-time, to solve any issues that they are having. So if a customer is on your site, and can’t find what they are looking for, they can use the LiveChat widget (usually in the bottom right corner) and let you know that they are stuck. This gives marketing or sales the chance to turn what would typically be ‘bounce’ or ‘cart abandonment’ into a transaction. The tool also gives you the ability to survey the users at the end of the chat, allowing you to accumulate actionable insights for optimisation. The software is really easy to implement, you can install the Javascript tag directly onto your website (again, we recommend Google Tag Manager) and then simply create and launch your LiveChat modal. Here’s an example of the LiveChat modal appearing on a website: Pricing for LiveChat starts at $16/per month (with a 30-day free trial). 10. Customer.io This is an automated messaging tool that you can connect directly to your marketing databases (Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo etc.) to send emails, push notifications and SMS messages to your leads or customers. Messaging can be set up in an automated fashion to save marketers time manually building and running campaigns. You’re also able to segment customer campaigns, so depending on the data you have available you can deliver the most impactful messages to the most relevant people. All data is provided in real-time to give you the best chance of spotting key trends and implementing the best growth marketing strategies. Having a marketing automation tool that you can rely on to perfectly execute against your marketing goals is essential for growth marketing teams. Automation - and by this we mean, sending the right automated messages to the right people at the right time - can transform the way organisations communicate with customers and Customer.io is an exciting tool that can be ideal for a lot of businesses, particularly those in the consumer marketing, education, marketplace and app spaces. The Basic package ($150 / per month) allows you have up to 12,000 profiles in the Customer.io system, send unlimited emails, SMS, push notifications. There is also a Slack integration which could help galvanise internal sales teams by actually seeing the impact of your marketing in real-time.

There’s nothing like rapid disruption to create the space for rapid growth. Whilst newspapers are dogged with gloomy forecasts of what a post-Brexit Britain will look like, investment in the Startup sector has peaked. In the wake of Britain’s decision to leave the EU there has been plenty to raise alarm. Huge corporations such as JP Morgan, HSBC and Barclays have opted to move a substantial amount of their workforce to a new European base and the value of the pound has plummeted. For the startup scene however things are looking up. On average there are now 69 deals struck per quarter, compared to 45 prior to the referendum outcome. There has also been a rise in the amount of funding secured since June 2016, at approximately £739 million per quarter compared to previous figures of around £605 million. Seed-stage investments have slowed but there is a mushroom effect wherein ‘unicorn’ companies such as Deliveroo and Monzo have seen growth and investment at a later stage. In 2017, investment from Silicon Valley topped £1 Billion for the first time ever and jobs in the digital tech sector are growing at 5x that of the broader UK economy. It is unwise to attempt to predict the impact the UK’s withdrawal from the EU in March 2019 will have on business growth, but one thing’s for sure and that is that blind pessimism isn’t productive. Traditional industries are constantly disrupted by new technology and innovation; Brexit or not, stability is no longer something we can rely on. The only control we can maintain is an agile attitude wherein we see the opportunities, not the losses and continue to find new, better ways of doing things.

Introduction Along the last three years, we have devised a go-to-market structure that increases the likelihood of success and growth of new businesses. This structure is aggregated around ten areas of focus which demonstrated the most impact on business growth. Depending on the stage of the venture, its market and product, you may need to adjust some of these, but has a baseline, it has done quite well. 01. Growth Fundamentals To grow fast, businesses need to understand the fundamental elements of accelerated business growth. This involves a mix of skills and abilities such as knowledge of why people buy, the principles of persuasion, being great communicators and ambassadors and people management and development. 02. Defined Product Proposition Having a defined and clearly articulated proposition - as one voice within the company - is critical for growth. The elevator pitch needs to be perfectly rehearsed, understood, communicated and expressed with clarity and belief. Too many times we see businesses that fall into temptation and say that their products do ‘everything’, or have their employees communicate different messages. 03. Target Audience Definition A critical element for growth is being able to have a big impact on a small audience, the better the audience is defined - where the business’s products and services are more likely to have a differential impact on the status quo and competitors - the better the chances are of sales success and growth. 04. Compelling Brand The proposition needs to be encapsulated into a compelling brand. The brand is the representation of the fundamental beliefs of the business, expressed visually and through words, intended to be meaningful to a target audience, and permeating every form of communication of the business. 05. Defined Customer Journeys & Acquisition The venture needs to devise, build and optimise the way customers discover, consider, buy, implement and advocate the products and services of the business. This informs the channels to market and maps different buying behaviours according to different personas and intentions. Growth acceleration depends on the clarity of customer journeys and the ability to improve them over time. 06. Engagement & Content Strategy As opportunities come through the customer journey, the right engagement strategy will help drive and accelerate these journeys. This applies across all channels - more engaged prospects are more likely to become customers. This may involve purpose-built digital properties and landing pages, well-crafted written and video content and illustrations, driving the right engagement and speeding up the journey as customers become more likely to progress to the next stage. 07. Lead Generation, Nurturing & Conversion - Marketing Automation Having the journeys defined to be able to scale faster and better, means that businesses can fill their acquisition funnels with the right marketing leads, which are adequately nurtured through the right communication, with the goal of creating conversion into sales, and successful customers after that. Businesses need a clear idea of how to find their customers. A small business networking, and then progress towards automation - this includes the process of optimising the sales funnel, and scaling it without increasing sales costs substantially. 08. Sales Execution & Optimisation To achieve fast growth, we need to go beyond the myth that if the product is good enough, it will sell itself. Success and fast-growth depend on a stellar sales capability, continuously improving, based on results and data from end-to-end conversion tracking. Building and optimising sales from the right identification of opportunities, defining the right sales messages, and building inside sales capabilities will be a determinant for success. 09. Customer Success & Advocacy Some businesses, naively or complacently, often overlook customer success after the sale is made. The last thing a growing business needs is unhappy customers. This will distract resources and senior management, and may negatively influence potential customers. It is important to make the right sale, and then maximise the value that customers generate from the solutions they acquired from the business, making them as profitable and productive as possible. This will create goodwill that can easily be transformed into advocacy. 10. Growth Optimisation With limited resources for fast growth, it is critical to understand the different alternatives providing the most cost-effective or highest achievable performance under the existing business constraints, therefore maximising business growth and unit economics. Fast growth starts with the ability to measure what is making an impact on the bottom line. If you believe this approach can be improved or if you have a successful experience you are keen on sharing, drop us a line anytime.

Search LinkedIn and you'll find hundreds of thousands of people with a top skill of 'growth hacking'. But what does it actually mean? Coined by Sean Ellis, CEO & Founder of GrowthHackers.com, growth hacking refers to marketing activities aimed at growing customers or users as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. Easy to see why it’s an in demand skill… ...But despite this popularity, there isn’t a singularly accepted definition of 'growth hacking' and people continue to be unsure of what it actually means. Google defines growth hacking as “a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most efficient ways to grow a business”, but this definition in itself is extremely broad. ‘Growth hacks’ are generally thought of as unconventional methods that quickly and cheaply grow a company’s customer/user base; making it a favourite of startups and scale-ups due to its fast and cost-effective nature. But how do they do it? Dropbox and Airbnb are two famous examples of companies who have leveraged growth ‘hacks’ to achieve accelerated growth To gain accelerated growth, Dropbox, a storage space hosted in the cloud, used a referral programme that gained them 4M members in 15 months. To incentivise users to spread the word about Dropbox, Dropbox offered free storage space to people whose friends started using the service. This strategy achieved 3900% growth and allowed them to reach 33.9M registered users and an evaluation of 10 Billion dollars (as of 2019). To learn more about how they did it, check out “How Dropbox grew 3900% with a simple referral program” at growthhackers.com. Similarly, the founders of Airbnb, an accommodation rental platform, turned their attention to finding new ways to grow their business, as opposed to relying solely on paid acquisition. To do this, they looked to where their target audience was going to research accommodation options beyond standard hotels, Craigslist. Co-founder Joe Gebbia explains how they “didn’t want to post on Craigslist because we felt it was too impersonal. Our entrepreneur instinct said ‘build your own site.’ So we did.” To do their own thing but gain exposure on the established platform, Airbnb started encouraging their users to share their property listings on Craigslist, instantly accessing their huge audience. This resulted in accelerated growth. The problem with growth hacking; enter growth marketing Despite the obvious benefits of a methodology that focusses on an explosion of growth, and success of the aforementioned examples, the problem that can arise with growth hacking is that it fails to take a holistic view across the whole business. This can result in a disjointed approach that misses out key markets or offerings. In his blog, Neil Patel notes that despite its success for some, growth hacking can be “a curse”. Neil points out that because it is often perceived as a one-stop-shop it can disappoint smaller businesses who don’t have the resources or systems in place to carry it out. The dot com companies who were successful in growth hacking generally had raised significant amounts of funding, giving them the time and resources to make it happen. The reason growth hacking can fail is that it doesn’t account for product quality; no matter how clever your marketing or ‘hacking’, people won’t buy a bad or useless product. It may sound like a simple thing, but you really need to ensure your product adds value to the end-user - 42% of Startups fail because there is “no market need”. Once the market need has been established (yes, this bit really is crucial), growth doesn’t need the extremely innovative solutions that have made ‘growth hacking’ famous, but it does need a clever and well thought out strategy. This is where growth marketing comes in. Growth marketing is defined as ‘a hybrid of growth hacking/brand development/marketing’ that uses the principle of scaling up quickly from a strategic perspective. It takes a broader approach across multiple channels, testing and evaluating the data to inform future marketing decisions. It retains the traditional 4 principles of - product, price, place and promotion - something that growth hacking disregards in favour of innovation. Growth marketing looks at how the product can evolve to fit the changing market need and aims to connect the brand with the customer whilst also using the sort of clever tactics growth hackers unveiled through their rapid experimentation. This means that the business can hit the ground running, but crucially that the growth will be sustainable. For more on growth marketing (and why you need to be doing it) see here.  Read more https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140918020352-142089-airbnb-s-growth-hacking-story https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/growth-hacking-lessons-from-the-big-guys-daebb2c791d2/ https://www.referralcandy.com/blog/47-referral-programs/ https://neilpatel.com/blog/why-growth-hacking-is-failing-you/

Every early-stage VC has some flavour of go-to-market approach they use with their investments. These approaches vary and can be condensed or expanded depending on the nature of the business and stage of the venture. Regardless of the areas of go-to-market focus, the big question lies on how a VC and their teams can get investments to grow faster and better, maximising your fund metrics, with simplicity and effectiveness. Like everyone else, alongside the cash deal, the VC will offer their amazing experience gained through years of activity in helping countless numbers of successful start-ups. They will also put their amazing connections at the service of the venture, and they will be able to sell to large corporates or partner with the best technology firms. Well, this is exactly what most of VCs offer. I’m still to meet a VC who doesn’t have a great experience and amazing connections. If the “product” is roughly the same, then how do VCs compete? Well, it seems like "price" is the only way. VCs will get the ventures with the best potential by offering the most money by the least equity. The alternative needs to be a different “product”. VCs can demonstrate that beyond money and experience they have the right tools, processes and people that will effectively help scale-up businesses go-to-market successfully. The other week I had a meeting with an amazing VC, and the first thing they mentioned when talking about the VC was the number of people they have dedicated to helping the invested businesses being successful in the market. More than sixty I was proudly told. A team like that, if they are any good, must cost about 10 million dollars per year. If they work on average on ten start-ups per year, that means 1 million in costs per startup per year. That is a lot of money to dilute. The great thing about it is that they can attract high-quality ventures because they have a differentiated positioning in the market. They are also able to attract differentiated investors that believe in a more interventive model. So, it works for a limited few cases, but it isn’t a model that can be widely adopted. Rather than crushing the start-ups with costs that will be hard to recover, VCs can create a differentiated “product” by aggregating (or bundling) services, provided by third parties, which can have a determinant impact on the ventures: To create these services, rather than growing internal teams whose costs will need to be diluted through invested companies, VCs can create on-demand propositions by having the right partners for each of the specific areas. Some successful VCs are cutting down the number of internal teams as they realise the complexities (and cost) of recruiting, managing and billing internal teams to invested businesses. Naturally, an oversight there needs to exist, along with the right governance from the VC. But ultimately, the balance of keeping a slim structure and still effectively helping the ventures grow faster seems like the right direction.

When it comes to growth marketing a Google search will return millions of results. Finding a succint definition however, is a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack. But it needn’t be so complex. In short, growth marketing is any marketing activity that aims to grow the business in a sustainable way. This means growth marketing focusses on attracting more engaged customers, who are more likely to stick around, purchase more and ultimately be more valuable.This differs from traditional marketing, which prioritises the volume of new customers over the quality of new customers. What does a growth marketer do? There are several hallmarks of a growth marketer, but the most important is their purpose, as this informs everything they do. To achieve sustainable long-term business growth, the focus needs to be spread across the entire funnel, rather than just at the top. That means a growth marketer cares about the exit of customers just as much as the acquisition. While they may not be explicitly tasked with looking after customers, they need to plug into customer lifetime insights and apply that to make sure the customers they acquire are likely to be a good fit. A good part of a growth marketer’s day is spent analysing data to uncover which strategies and tactics are working. Following this, they are setting up experiments to refine their approach and finding new ways to achieve their goals. Monzo employed growth marketing tactics to grow from 0 to 250,000 users within 2 years. As a challenger bank built on addressing the pain points caused by archaic banking methods, Monzo used continuous research with prospective and existing customers as they grew to maintain continuous improvement. To encourage more signups, Monzo offered people ‘queue jumps’ for users on the waiting list if they referred to others, which drove even more growth.  What skills does a growth marketer need? Being responsible for the quality and lifetime value of a customer means it is essential to track leads through the funnel to report on the success of acquisition. Naturally, this means growth marketers need sharp analytical skills and a data-driven, logical mentality. The approach a growth marketer takes to marketing challenges is another core area of difference with traditional marketing. Because achieving growth requires a healthy dose of experimentation to find something that sticks, growth marketers rely on a scientific and continuous test and learn approach. The popularity of a growth marketing approach has risen to prominence in recent years, driven by startup culture who can’t afford to ‘spray and pray’. Mike Volpe, a prominent Angel Investor and former Hubspot CEO, sums up how this methodology is changing the face of modern marketing: “Growth marketing is removing the boundaries of marketing to enable every aspect of the customer experience to focus on attracting more engaged customers.” By optimising every stage of the customer experience, not only does growth marketing attract new customers but improves overall customer satisfaction encouraging referrals and repeat purchases. To achieve a growth marketing mindset, begin by gaining an understanding of your product value, how your users will use your product and what will improve their experience. From there, focus your efforts on demonstrating this to your users and prospects at all stages of the funnel, as quickly as possible.

Accelerate Growth is thrilled to announce the launch of its partnership with HubSpot for Startups. In our continued effort to provide founders with the essential tools for their success, we are now able to offer HubSpot’s Marketing and Sales software at a 90% scholarship for the first year -- an average savings of £15,000! HubSpot is the leader in inbound marketing and sales, and its world-renowned CRM, Sales, and Marketing toolset can now be leveraged by our current startups and alumni to grow. To get started and take advantage of this scholarship, apply here. http://hubspot.com/startups To learn more about HubSpot, sign up for their Startup Group Demonstration here. https://offers.hubspot.com/startups/group-demonstration This is a massive milestone for Accelerate Growth and the startups we work with.

People Economics - The fundamentals of growing better faster Being part of a successful VC, we are reminded every day of how keeping the “unit economics healthy” is key to driving performance. And indeed I can vouch for the fact that the best performing businesses are the ones that have this as a mantra in their business. But there is another vector they understand really well: People Economics. Successful fast-growing businesses excel in decisions around “hiring” and “getting the right external partner” when appropriate according to the different stages of growth and purpose. They understand all angles about people, from financial cost to cultural cost. In essence, they excel in understanding the People Economics of the business. In my experience, most young businesses fail at understanding their People Economics well, and as a result, their growth slows down, they need more fixed capital, their burn rates are higher, and their emotional rollercoaster rides faster. Similar to “Unit Economics”, there is a strong correlation between growth and performance and the understanding of People Economics. How to better understand People Economics: Have you ever wondered why really successful companies (Netflix, Airbnb, Google) are extremely collaborative and great at working with external resources? They are extraordinary at understanding People Economics. And more than any company, these guys certainly have the money and brand pull to attract resources. If you understand your people economics well, you will have a much better chance of success in the market. Because you will be a better business.

How do imagery and visuals impact on how your company is perceived? Car advertising is some of the glossiest around. Picture it - the car is blazing through the mountains, water droplets racing off the shiny body of the car, suddenly day becomes night, and headlights are shining bright. Honda has been knocking it out of the park with their creative advertising for years - their Ignition video serves as just one of their many examples. Imagine for a moment if instead Honda had told us about their efficient manufacturing processes, their incredibly qualified engineers, the strength to weight ratio of their alloys, the fact that all the seats are adjustable within a range of 112 degrees. How would that advert make you feel? Not terribly excited. So, are purchases mainly driven by rationality over emotion? The answer is no. The point is that hard facts aren’t enough. Your business needs to look the part. So what is the correlation between brand and imagery? Imagery and brand are the closest of friends, and for good reason. Let’s look at Nike for a moment. Watching their adverts is an overtly visceral experience and it’s primarily about how they make you feel. The quality of their product is completely implied in the quality of the imagery. That athlete is in tip-top shape, that slow motion shot of them jumping over a bench is pin-sharp, that chase sequence looks straight out of a Bourne movie. That’s their brand. They are their imagery. But if you’re not selling sportswear or cars. How does this apply to you? Working with startup brands over the years, we’ve found that businesses often underestimate just how much their imagery says about them and how this impacts on their brand identity. Whether that’s the photos on their website or the footage in their latest promo. If you’re trying to communicate that your company is at the forefront of the market and doing something that no one else is doing, that feeling needs to come across in all of your media including the films you make and the photographs you use. This implied form of communication is incredibly powerful and feelings often trump facts. Feelings make people want to identify with your brand and they build trust. There’s a place for emotion and a place for facts, and sometimes a bit of both is exactly what we need.

In their early stages, B2B businesses achieve their growth goals through a series of deals made through personal connections or some form of networking with partners and investors in the business. In B2C the process may have involved some initial trial customers. This is great as it allows for adjustments and adaptations on product-market fit, potential tweaks on the brand, and other adjustments needed to ‘go-to-market’. Yet most ventures fail precisely on that next ‘go-to-market’ stage, and the main reason why they fail is that founders and leaders don’t evolve their approach and transform the business to be able to ‘go-to-market’ successfully. Or in the words of George Westerman - Principal Research Scientist with the MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy - 'you can make a caterpillar run faster, but creating butterflies needs a transformation process'. A successful 'go-to-market' can only be done through ‘high impact’, which is the combination of the right 'go-to-market' model, implemented by highly skilled people with the time dedicated to implementing it. The ‘go-to-market’ model is the framework - when we work with businesses on 'go-to-market' processes we use one we devised over the years - but any venture can develop their own model according to the specifics of their business case. Regardless, you really need a model to help you. The second thing you need is extremely talented people. You can hire them - if you believe highly skilled people will be attracted to your new venture and if you have the time (and knowledge) to hire them. Or you can rent them from a services provider or agency. The most important thing is not to fall into the mistake of believing an intern or junior can help with tasks that require highly specialised people with the ability to transform the organisation. Interns can help 'make the caterpillar run faster', but to transform into 'go-to-market' you’ll need skill and experience. You need at least the same quality of 'go-to-market' talent your competitors have access to. Finally, whether the talent is ‘bought’ or ‘rented’, you actually need them to spend time at your business offices, so they can gain a deep understanding of the product and organisation. These three combined create high impact on the 'go-to-market' process, delivering accelerated growth for the business. Fail at one of them, and the best you’ll get is a really fast caterpillar.

Working in a building with sixteen ventures at different stages of maturity, I can assure you that there is no correlation between the number of sticky notes on a white board and venture success. White board proliferation is good for one thing - distracting people from what really matters (which is getting great work done) by giving them a warm and fuzzy feeling seeing different coloured sticky notes on the wall. Actually, the ventures that seem to have a defined sense of purpose and clear articulation of their proposition don’t seem to have lots of sprint boards on their walls. Here’s why a clean desk policy helps ventures grow their business faster and work better:

This is the year of uncertainty. The US has a new president who is sure to have an influence on the global economic scene. The UK is in the middle of their exit process from the EU and no one knows where it will lead. There are elections in Germany and France - which will have a massive impact on how the EU runs, and finally from the east, the news is that there are revised growth targets from China and Japan which will affect global growth forecasts. Overall, be ready for lots of volatility and mixed messages from the markets. Not a crisis, but a rollercoaster of confidence. What does this mean for a growth business? There is likely to be more scrutiny from investors and shareholders, it will be harder to get cash, and you will need to grow faster and better. We have compiled 5 tips that will help you grow faster in 2017: 1 – Avoid the hiring pitfall at all costs. Hiring is probably the worst thing a business can do in an uncertain environment. This could be for many different reasons: When a resource is hired, the business loses track of how much tasks cost - I’m still yet to see young businesses carrying out internal cost allocation. Therefore the resource becomes an internal free-for-all. But it feels okay because the young business doesn’t get an invoice at the end of the month. You will have one of something. And nothing of a lot of things. Can the resource do all the differnet things you need? In uncertain times, talent bets their careers on safe havens (banking, big consulting, large blue chips). You will have more difficulty convincing talented people to join a young uncertain business and may have to pay a premium. Is it justified? How will you and the resource know what great looks like? If a resource is talented, you could have them work in a team of peers where they can learn or lead – because both drive performance. Instead of falling into the hiring pitfall, find alternative solutions that can help you allocate costs correctly. Get your internal employees to use their time wisely, focus on what really matters and think twice before requesting a service. This can be a network of freelancers or agencies (I’ll expand this topic in another post). 2 – Protect the culture. Avoid the yoyo. Uncertain times may need young businesses to adjust costs and be very flexible. Unfortunately, this means young businesess may need to let go of people. This can have a very dangerous effect on morale, prompting the usual downward spiral: you let go of the underperformers, the super-performers will go on to find work in a more stable business, and you’ll be left with average. In times of uncertainty you must protect your culture at all costs and avoid negative propagation. 3 – Do a lot less. Much better. With uncertainty, quality is even more important. Don’t let a “good enough” mentality install itself into the business. Instead, look at your growth plans, marketing activity and budgets. Keep the budget and cut the activity in half. Do less, but do it like a rockstar. You will gain authority and credibility that drives business. 4 – Be a leader. Communicate it until you make it. In uncertain times, people (and businesses) look for leaders. Not only will you build credibility and authority, you will lead by communicating and separating yourself (or getting closer) to your competition. By influencing customers with content that inspires trust in your venture, you will generate better quality opportunities. 5 – Qualify everything. Dedicate effort only where you will win for sure. With resources scarce, it’s even more important to only invest in the opportunities that are likely to close. Make sure the marketing engine is working like a charm on lead generation, scoring, nurturing and closing. It’s easy to feel tempted by the “possibility of winning”. Forget about it. Only invest time and resource when you’re ten times ahead of your competitors. It will be a challenging year, but if your business keeps their head down and follows these rules, your chance of a year filled with business growth is much higher.

Wholesalers can transform their business by mastering accurate inventory forecasting. This guide emphasises the importance of precise predictions, outlines key components for wholesalers, identifies challenges, recommends strategies, and underscores the far-reaching benefits of accurate forecasting for optimised inventory, profitability, customer satisfaction, and efficient supply chain management. Accurate inventory forecasts are a game-changer, not just for optimising stock levels and minimising costs, but also for boosting customer satisfaction and fueling long-term business growth. Think about it: happy customers receive their orders on time, leading to increased loyalty and repeat business. Meanwhile, efficient inventory management reduces storage costs, frees up working capital, and allows you to invest in other areas for growth. But how do you achieve such forecasting mastery? Let's delve into the world of wholesale inventory forecasting. What is Inventory Forecasting Let’s start by addressing what inventory forecasting is. Inventory forecasting, also known as demand planning, is the process of predicting the amount of inventory a business will need to meet future customer demand. It's essentially trying to figure out how much stock to have on hand at any given time to avoid stockouts (running out of inventory) and minimise excess inventory that ties up cash and storage space.

As we all know, user experience (UX) is extremely important, as it ensures that the website is visually attractive, functionally sound and ticks all the boxes in terms of usability. However, what can often be sidelined in the pressures of getting a site launched or re-launched, is the critical part UX can play in driving business growth. UX for growth can be achieved by: understanding the reasons why people will use (are using) your product and identifying the minimum effort needed to deliver your value proposition. It’s then about aligning this information with your website's user experience. Understanding (but not over thinking) your user needs It’s very easy to define personas around demographics and articulate a single need in relation to a solution that your product delivers. The issue with this is that it can create false needs based on the product rather than actual problems users are facing. In fact, personas should focus on actual user problems or needs, the user’s intent, and their behaviours relating to the product. Being honest with yourself about user needs and goals will help you to simplify your value proposition and focus on what’s important. For example, one of the key reasons why customers transact more online with one business over another is because the online and mobile accunts are already fully set-up. This enables you to identify solutions that your product offers, but can also help you develop, position, and articulate your product (having a better product is not always enough). All with the purpose of guiding the user to the “magic moment’ – the moment when the user finally sees the value in your product. However, in order to get to this moment, you need to understand what success is (for the user and the business) and how you will measure this. Aligning website UX with user and business success Once you are able to articulate the user needs and solutions, you can then start to define the key user journeys across the site. These should be developed with a key goal as the end point - with each stage helping the user to reach that goal. It’s often tempting to focus on one big ask for the user e.g. purchasing or requesting a demo. However, not all users will be at this stage of the decision making process and are likely to drop off the conversion funnel, particularly when they are not familiar with the product. A great way of reducing this drop-off, is by funnelling users from low barrier actions (such as watching a video) to high barrier actions (such as registering interest). These barriers or call-to-actions should match the perceived level of value for the user, dependent on where they are in the funnel. Saying this, having different levels of asks on your website should not mean having lots of conflicting goals and messaging. The website should focus on delivering one key goal, with all the content, marketing activity, and CTAs driving towards that goal. Obviously, as the business grows and user needs and behaviours evolve, the goal can and should change. 3 things to consider doing when using UX to drive business growth Create (or review your current) user personas focusing on their behaviour in relation to your product and their needs and goals. These do not need to be complicated or time consuming. These should be documents so that you can easily adapt as your business and user needs evolve. Put together a menu of actions that users can carry out in line with the business objectives, rather than one big ask e.g. from low-barrier to high-barrier CTAs. Having a list of different actions will allow you to test different CTAs and content to optimise the user journey. Ensure that all the content you add to the website is part of an activation journey (focused on a goal) and not a dead end. Understanding your user needs and the solutions your business offers can better define the user journeys across your site so you can set up clear goals. This means aligning your UX so that it is able to adapt and evolve - which is crucial for accelerating business growth.

When young businesses are thinking of growing faster, their first thought is investing in filling up the funnel, piping more leads, and closing more sales. This is great, but not enough. “Business growth”, as we all know, is far broader and more holistic. Businesses need to win new customers while ensuring the existing ones are being set up for success. This is where the oversight tends to happen. To drive business growth you need to ask: Is your product or service having an impact on the customer (or company)? If this is true, you will see an uptake in interactions, and clients asking for features - giving you feedback, championing your PR, and giving you references. Clients will be willing to buy more off you. If not products, they will buy services and eventually participate in product development forums and early adopter programs. A study by McKinsey revealed that ventures that have a lower client (revenue) churn are more likely to grow faster and perform better. Very recently, working closely with one of the group ventures, we became part of the venture success by helping them sell the solution internally to their client and involve the employees of the client company in the process. This was a major success for the platform of the venture, onboarding hundreds of users in a few weeks. Over the last couple of years at Accelerate, what we have learned is critical for customer success. Beyond the usual elements of technical, support, and knowledge enablement you should: In a context where funding is becoming harder, holistic business growth will be key to driving venture valuation up… But this is a topic for another post.