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Lesson 23 of 28

Auditing Your Existing Capabilities



Lesson 23 of 28

Auditing Your Existing Capabilities


Lesson Info

Auditing Your Existing Capabilities

Audit your existing capabilities. Okay? Audit the existing capabilities. We want to kind of pull together this grow team, we go back to the eight critical core disciplines. What do we have and what don't we have? So think about who you can kind of assemble on this growth team. Right? And remember, we're not thinking individuals, we're thinking roles. So I'm not saying you have to have eight people. There's going to be some overlap. So what we do is we go and we do a quick audit. So let's think about strategy and conversion funnels. Let's say that's you. Right? Let's say you're director of marketing. If you're CEO you're gonna encourage your director of marketing. You know, or your CMO to really drive this initiative. Right? So from a strategy and conversion funnel perspective maybe you'd say, "I'm about a seven out of 10." Okay? We're pretty good at that. We're pretty solid at that. We've got a good sense of that. Content marketing, maybe that's Jane. You say, "Ah, you know, "Jane's ni...

ce, but Jane's about a three out of 10." Seen some deficiencies there. Digital advertising. You've got good old Fred. Fred's working with an agency and I guess they're doing okay, they're maybe a four. You know, not great. You know, spending a lot ROI (mumbles). E-mail marketing. Here's Jane again, part of the reason Jane's not able to really crush it in contents because Jane's focused so much on e-mail. She's about a five in that area. Bob. You got Bob over here. Bob's about a four. On the search side, that's that stupid agency that took all of our money and didn't do anything. They're at negative 873. Marketing and analytics data science, nobody really knows what that is. And when it comes to testing and conversion rate optimization, that's you, Jane, Bob, Fred. We're establishing a culture of optimization. And as a team, you're about a two. Now, these numbers funny enough, were the averages of when I asked some of the people that were going through our training certification at the start, "How would you rate your team?" These were the numbers. They were the average. To start off with. So if you go through this and you're thinking, "Phew, we are deficient." You should know that you are not alone. Okay? Most teams don't have a lot going on in this particular area. So. But have a sense of where are you deficient and where are you doing okay. Maybe you look at it and you say, "You know, we're great at content. "We're great at content." Now, in the areas where you can afford to be a little bit weak, it kind of gets less important initially as you go down. Reason being, you gotta have a sense of what you're selling, who you're selling it to. Obviously. Content is what's going to trigger a lot of stuff, so you gotta have some content. Advertising demand generation. Again, gotta have it. If you're not sending e-mails you're kind of crazy. Hopefully, again you have somebody who can pull that one off. When you get into social and community management, until you have a following and an audience, there's nobody to be social with. You have no community. Expertise in that area, generally, can wait. Same with search marketing. Right? If your goal right from the get-go is to crush in organic, that's fine, just know that's going to take some time. Okay? So you probably don't need that. Marketing. You know, analytics. Data science. Until you have something to measure, you don't necessarily need that person. But I do recommend, even if it's like an intern to help, that you do get somebody sooner or later in here. They don't have to be a data scientist but an analyst would be good. And then testing conversion rate optimization. I don't believe you need a special person to do that. You just need to work the process that we've discussed. Generally we're talking about a grow team. Initially. To start off with. One, two, three people. Had a growth. You got somebody who is helping out with some content and maybe they're managing an agency to work on the traffic side. And then somebody to help out with the analytics. That's where I see a lot of grow teams begin. If you already have a marketing team in place, it can be interesting to measure your people based on these standards. Who does what? Often times you find, "Wow, we have "a lot of people doing the same thing." This sounds kind of mean, but sometimes you need to reallocate budget. Which means, "Gosh, do we really need "that many people doing that thing? "'Cause we're kind of deficient in this area." Make sense? Again, I'm trying to give you some objective standards to address something that's inherently subjective. Yeah? I have random question. You said until you have a community, a social community, you really don't need someone interacting. To you, what does that number look like? I mean, I don't think there's like... So it looks like 12. No, I'm just kidding. I think initially, when you're thinking about social, the founder should be on that. Looking in it on an almost daily basis. You should be listening to people talking about your brand. You should be interacting and communicating with customers. It's not so many that a founder can't handle it. When it gets to the point that you can't handle it and still do everything else, then by all means bring somebody in. So I think that's when it gets to that point. I still look at and respond to just about anything that comes into me, you know, personally via social. Right? I don't manage our brand accounts anymore because they're more regular and a lot of customer support type requests come in at that level. So when that's happening then that's when you need to get somebody else to do it. But look, in the early days of a company you should be responding and at least looking at all your support tickets until you just can't do anymore. That's incredibly valuable insight. So I think that's the number. Whenever you're just kind of over it. And you just can't keep up anymore. When you're beginning to do a bad job and your other work is suffering. And it's the same on the e-mail side. You should probably be writing the e-mails that go out. Because you should probably be signing all the e-mails that go out. Right? So you don't necessarily need somebody running that. Or you know, the head of growth could do that. Right? On behalf of you. So, that's the general structure. Great question. Any others? Does it help if you take this audit analysis into your ice core calculation for the growth ideas? For the ease part. Basically, if you're really strong at e-mail, you would mash it with the idea that you want to run and you would prioritize it based on the ice core. Yeah, I think that's a great point. Or should you keep it separately independently? No, no, I think, I mean. So, I probably wouldn't create like a matrix kind of thing, where it's like, we're going to determine ease based on these things over here and create a separate spread sheet. I have no doubt that somebody much smarter than me could and would do that. Who's really good at running that, because what you're really talking about is an algorithm right? In determining ease. What we do is we go... "Seems like it's going to be frickin' hard. "We don't have anybody here who knows how to do that." So, absolutely, you're taking this into account. The ability and the skills that you already have baked into your team, are 1000%, they should factor into ease. That's a really, really great observation. Right? Ease is, "Do we have the resources in place? "Including, but not limited to, the abilities of the team." So yeah, if you're gonna, we wanna do this, you know, really awesome e-mail followup campaign and write all this stuff. Okay, do we have anybody who can write those? No, not well. Okay, that's hard. It's hard because we're all terrible at it. If you have people on the team that are writing really great e-mails and if you have a founder that's pretty solid at communicating. Some founders are great communicators, other founders, you know, less good at communicating. That's absolutely going to factor in. So that's kind of the area. Generally. These top three, getting a checkbox there, and you can have one person managing both of those if they help from an agency. And some help down there and you're good to kick off a growth team. So I like to tell people, you know. One to three. I'd really like for it to be at least two. Could you have a head of growth handling this with some outside help? Sure. Get them some help down here though. Alright. Get them some help on the data analyst side. Get a data analyst before you get an office manager or something like that for sure. If you've got an executive assistant before you got a data analyst. Come on, man. Priorities. Good. So we got a sense of who we got. Or who we need. And if you have nobody and it's you, right? If it's just you, then it's your name on all of them. Now you know why you're going crazy. Right? If you're a team of one and you're doing this and you're also doing the product, that's why you're not sleeping. Welcome to entrepreneurship. Welcome to startup land. But what are the areas, score yourself. What are the areas you're pretty good at? You know? And if you're terrible at something you got a sense of where you need to go first.

Class Description




In this class, you'll learn how to:

  • Audit your existing team and fill in the gaps.
  • Structure your team to maximize communication and accountability.
  • Launch a growth team in both new and legacy businesses.
  • Eliminate the conflict that's inherent between sales and marketing teams.
  • Improve internal communication.
  • Identify the metrics and KPIs that actually matter.


Scott Nelson


Marvin Liao


Ato Kasymov
