A few days ago we held the last webinar of our summer series on how to get up and running with Heap in just a few days.
In this last session, we talked about the importance of setting up Growth reports and dashboards to help align all of your EPD and GTM teams around what to track and how your motion is doing on a regular basis.
In the first 10 minutes of the webinar, I covered the following:
1. What is “Growth”?
Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot about “Growth” in different contexts - from “Growth Marketing” to “Growth Levers”, “Product-Led Growth” and many more. Before we dive into reports and dashboards, we want to quickly clarify what we mean when we say “Growth”.
In the context of today’s session, growth refers to a scientific, or data-driven methodology for running experiments rapidly and at scale - to optimize business metrics that ultimately drive revenue growth.
While there is plenty of thought leadership, books and courses about relevant frameworks out there, I particularly like the one mentioned in the book “Hacking Growth” by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown.
Over the years, as I have become more exposed to and experimented with different frameworks, I have gradually defined the versions that work best for me in specific contexts - and I encourage you to do the same.
2. Common Growth Levers
Growth Levers refer to business metrics that support your overall revenue growth over time. The most common and well known levers that are relevant for all types of digital services or products are:
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Acquisition - discover the most cost-effective ways to acquire new customers, and optimize these efforts (by better targeting, picking the most effective channels etc.) to drive growth.
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Retention - the deciding factor in achieving strong profitability for any kind of subscription-based or repeat-purchase company. It is not a standalone metric, but rather an output of your activation, adoption, ongoing product engagement and resurrection performance.
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Monetization - This growth lever focuses on the mission of earning more money from the base of customers we have (paying or not paying). Input metrics for this lever are: conversion to paid, renewal, upsell/cross-sell (expansion), and resurrection.
To learn more about Growth visit this glossary.
3. Why is the Growth methodology so important?
Adopting Growth methodologies, frameworks and best practices is becoming more and more table stakes for digital teams of all sizes, and in different organizations - from small startups to large enterprises, in order to drive business growth.
There are several reasons and trends that have led to that - including market saturation of apps and digital services over the last decade. This surge has been accelerated with the pandemic - forcing more business to go through the digital transformation even faster.
Over time, a disproportionate demand in paid digital marketing efforts - that are being sold to the highest bidder, became less and less sustainable or cost-effective for small businesses and large ones.
The above, alongside additional trends and changes in the industry - such as access to commoditized data platforms and tools - are just some of the reasons why we are seeing a lot of SaaS businesses pursuing the Product-Led-Growth (PLG) motion these days.
Using the product as a more differentiated and defensible mechanism, they no longer need to outbid competitors to get leads. In addition, similar investments in other areas of the product, that drive frequent engagement and long-term retention, can help optimize the efficiency and reduce the cost of the renewal and expansion motions. Enter “Flywheels” or “Loops” as some call these, digital user flows that encourage invitation, referral or additional, more frequent product usage. To read more about market trends and loops you can visit the blogs of both Openview VC and Reforge.
And so, to drive these motions and stay competitive in this day and age, digital builders, marketers and sellers - need real-time visibility into the entire customer journey, quantitative and qualitative data points, be able to quickly identify the friction points and growth opportunities - at their fingertips.
This is exactly where Heap comes in, and in this session, we will cover how the Heap dashboards can serve all of these teams, across the entire customer journey.
4. Live Demo: Growth Reports and Dashboards
Still reading? You can now skip to minute 14:07 and just watch the demo about our out-of-the-box growth dashboards and reports here 😆
Have any questions or feedback? Please drop them below!
Until next time,
Shelly 🌸