Funnels need more people supporting back-end operations to ensure funnel effectiveness

Funnell Team

52% of team working and supporting funnels are between 6–10 people.

22.7% of teams are launching more than 10 experiments per month according to The State of Growth 2021

Background

A third of companies that have 201–1000 employees are launching more than 10 experiments per month. Companies with 10 employees or fewer are also launching 10 experiments per month on average as well. There is a gap between highly developed teams and highly motivated smaller teams. Keep in mind, that those working on funnels are not alone. There are supporting team members who play a vital role both in development, and operations. Seeing this in its full 360-degree perspective is important. This enables a more productive growth team, shaping growth as a mindset and culture within the organization.

Context

Growth teams require a diverse set of skills. That said, they will all need to understand, manage and contribute to the growth funnel. Whether this is direct or indirect, it will have to happen. Here is a breakdown of skills needed:

LEVEL 1 — skills and capabilities for a T-shaped growth hacker

1. Front-End Code
2. Service Design
3. UX Design
4. Behavioral Psychology
5. Stakeholder Management
6. Augmented / Virtual Reality
7. Finance
8. Omnichannel Marketing
9. Distributed Ledgers

LEVEL 2 — skills and capabilities for a T-shaped growth hacker

1. Analytics
2. Conversion Rate Optimization
3. Experiment Design
4. Funnel Marketing
5. Automation & APIs
6. AI & Machine Learning
7. Branding / Storytelling
8. Copywriting

LEVEL 3 — skills and capabilities for a T-shaped growth hacker

1. Paid Social
2. Organic Social
3. SEO/SEM
4. Tools Marketing
5. Marketplaces
6. Sales
7. Email Marketing
8. Content Marketing
9. PR / Influencer
10. Qualitative Research
11. Virality
12. Retention
13. Mobile Optimization
14. Landing Page Creation & Optimization
15. Lead Generation
16. Revenue Testing
17. User On-Boarding
18. Lifecycle Marketing

The better your internal processes are at managing this process, the better the outcomes are in utilizing your team and optimizing your funnel. Aligning skills in the T-shaped growth hacker

g model with the pirate AARRR funnel approach is important. A growth hackers goal setting is different from other goal-setting strategies because they focus on the growth aspect exclusively. A chief growth hackers role is to ensure that this exclusive focus becomes cross-functional. This is one of the biggest challenges with growth hacker goals that are too narrow. Therefore, growth hacker strategies need to shift from a singular executive approach to a wider cross-functional strategy.

Takeaway

Organizations will need a diverse set of skills on their team to directly manage their growth funnel and also support members. Support members will enable the funnel across other functions. Cross-function growth hacking is vital in ensuring growth takes place, especially among larger organizations

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ABOUT — Growth Thinking

Growth Thinking is a design methodology for growth hacking by the bestselling author of Ready Set Growth Hack, Nader Sabry. It has been applied as a book and a $1 million challenge known as the 10-day growth hacking challenge, which has generated $138m in revenue. This methodology has been adopted by universities like Harvard and Stanford, fortune 500s (Google/Microsoft), and unicorns.