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Lesson 7 of 28

How To Establish Communication and Accountability



Lesson 7 of 28

How To Establish Communication and Accountability


Lesson Info

How To Establish Communication and Accountability

Alright, let's talk about some of the growth team metrics. Alright. Growth team metrics. On the content team they're typically looking at organic visitors, social growth, social shares, podcast downloads, whatever it is. Those are the broad-based content things. I just kind of want to throw these out there. They're gonna vary a little bit from company to company. I wanna give you again, the guide posts, so you know where they go. Acquisition: number of leads, number of converts. Converts I put in quotes 'cause that is "What are you defining as that lead, as that prospect?" What gets handed off to the monetization team? Is it a subscriber? Is it a demo? Is it a marketing qualified lead, a product qualified lead, like what it is? What constitutes a convert in your organization? And of course, return on ad-spend. These people are generally managing a budget. How effectively are they managing it? Monetization: general revenue. Product unit sales, right. If revenue's going up but product un...

it sales are going down that means were doing a good job of increasing average order value, average customer value, but we know long term this is gonna be unsustainable. 'Cause our units are going down. Saves and recoveries in dollars. Interestingly enough, I don't put saves and recoveries in success, we have monetization on that. Average customer value or average order value, churn. And then success. Tickets answered, average response time, customer satisfaction scores, net promoter score, how many customer stories are they generating? Alright. These are the broad-based aspects that go into ... The broad-based metrics that are gonna drive these teams. Okay? Now lets' go into establishing communication, alright. How do do you go about establishing communication? How do you make sure that when things break down, that the finger pointing is kept to a minimum and used strategically? Alright? So I want to show you how to establish a balance of power, or what we say a balance of blame. 'Cause it's going to happen, okay? It is going to happen. To assume that you have all these people working together and that conflict isn't going to happen, and that somebody isn't going to drop the ball, and somebody else isn't going to blame somebody else, it's gonna happen. They're gonna fight. How do we make sure that when they fight and when it happens that it's actually productive finger pointing? This is how productive finger pointing works. First of all, they're hugging it out. Remember that? Now, what I'm gonna look at as if I'm the growth lead or if I'm the C.E.O, generally I'm looking at revenue. Right? Or I'm looking at some lagging indicator, right? Now I'm gonna have lead measures as well, but generally I'm looking at how much money we making? How many sales did we make? Are we reaching the goals that we have set forth in terms of growth, whether that's a unit goal, a revenue goal. I'm basically asking the monetization group, where my money? Alright? Where my money? You guys watch Family Guy, seen that Stewie when he goes after Brian, "Um, where's my money?". It's not quite that violent but "Hey, where's my money?" Now the monetization team can say we're just off this month. We're a little bit off, we had some promotion we were doing, we were trying a new thing on the sales team, it didn't work out, we know why, we're making adjustments. Okay, that's fine. Sometimes the issues is fully self-contained and all I want to see is they take ownership of it, they know the why, they made the decision, they're owning the results and they're documenting their knowledge. I'm gonna show you in just a little bit how we bake that into our culture. Right, but at Digital Marketer you can screw up. You can screw up as long as you know why you made the decision you made, you own the result, and you document and share your knowledge. If you hoard your mistake, you pretend like you didn't make your mistake, we'll fire you and make fun of you after you're gone. Not really, but where's my money? Now, sometimes we're doing everything we can, our metrics, our numbers, they're all holding where they would, lead flow is down. That's an appropriate finger pointing. We're doing everything we can, lead flow is down. We don't have the same number of converts. Or lead quality is down. The leads suck. Now that's a little bit of back-and-forth but we can talk about it, so acquisition where are my leads? Okay? Now acquisition says, "Ah, we were doing some tests, "We were trying some new targeting at Facebook "And it didn't quite work, we've made some adjustments." Same thing I said before, sometimes self-contained. A lot of times it's our campaigns are just getting stale. Our ads aren't converting as well. We need more content. Hey content team, where's my top-of-funnel content? Where's my middle-of-funnel content? Give me new lead magnets. Give me new reports. Give me new things that we can do to drive more leads into the top of the funnel, right? Give me fresh ideas and fresh things that are gonna allow us to rank for different keywords. Like, what's going on there? Right, and sometimes content, hopefully they don't say this, but sometimes they're like, "We don't really know what to talk about." That's fine even if they say that. Hey success department, what do our people want? What are they asking about? You know the vast majority of the blog posts that go on Digital Marketer today are posts that are based on questions that people asked into the customer success line. What do they want? And of course success is still a check on monetization to ensure that monetization isn't making promises that they can't keep. So they're the check there. So this is what we call the balance of blame. This is what we call appropriate finger pointing. Now, I take the time as the growth leader, right, at these different companies, or I teach our growth leaders this process, this framework. I say, "This is how I'm gonna ask questions". "This is the direction that the poop "Is gonna flow down the hill, right?" That's how that's gonna work. Now that everybody knows this, it would probably be appropriate for you to ask one another these questions before I ask. And this is what encourages communication. And generally the way that it goes is, "Hey, where's my money?" "Yeah, lead flow was a little bit off "But I already talked to Molly over on the acquisition team, "We got it worked out." "Okay, cool." "So we expect to be back?" "Ah, we'll be under, we'll be down about 10% this month "But we'll be back up next month." "Okay." It's simple as that. Because everybody understands the direction that the fingers are pointing, everybody has the conversations before a finger ever gets pointed. That make sense? Alright, action items ... And we'll close out this session. First, establish new roles and ideally new titles. I know that title changes within established organizations are painful. There are lots of people who would rather receive a pay cut than a title change. That's the power of status. So I understand you need to use that title one very, very, very delicately, but to the extent that these roles have not been entrenched yet. If you haven't done it yet, if you're mapping out your organizational structure moving forward, I would highly suggest some title changes. Right, not hiring a Director of Sales, hiring a Director of Monetization. Now when you interview and when you prospect for these people you can say, "We're looking for a Director of Sales". 'Cause that's what they call it. But when they come through the process explain to them, "Here's why we call you this." Right? "Here's why we're gonna call you that." Names matter. Align your team to the value journey. Literally get them on the same page. Take the time to break down your value journey, to get everybody to agree on it and then say, "Okay, where does everybody land on this?" "Where do we fit?" "Who goes where?" "Where do you think?" Make it a team process, make it a collaborative effort, and get everybody to agree. So it's technically a convert when, even though they're getting money, it's technically a convert when they sign up for the first one 'cause they haven't gotten to the "Ah-ha" stage. Right, kinda like what we talked about, right? It doesn't matter, just they all have to agree, right? They all have to agree. It doesn't matter like, that this is blue, it could call it green as long as we all agree, right. That's the way that language works, we just have to agree on the variable. So get 'em to agree. Align metrics, establish that balance of blame. And teach your team, explain to them if you are the growth leader, if you're the C.E.O, if you're the person doing it, here are the questions I'm gonna ask, here's how I'm gonna ask them, please ask them of each other first so I don't have to. And then commit to cross-training. Establish that shared vocabulary. Cross-training is not about making sure that somebody can go on vacation, that is a nice little extra. It's about better communication. And it's not about fluency, it's about conversancy, if that's even a word. If it's not a word, I just made it up. Now get your people conversant.

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
