Driving Hyper Growth Through Human Centric Leadership

Eric Eden: 1:00

All right, all right. All right. Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Rachel Anderson. Rachel has been doing marketing for over 15 years, helping companies achieve hyper growth, so she's going to share some stories with us today about how she does that. Welcome to the show.

Rachel Anderson: 1:23

Yeah, thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

Eric Eden: 1:25

We appreciate it. So I think you actually have two stories you can share with us today and excited to hear these, so why don't we just jump right in?

Rachel Anderson: 1:37

Yeah, sure. So one is really about how to set up your team itself for growth, and then one is an example of what that growth looks like once you put it into the market. So the first one is my personal kind of favorite thing to do, which is when you get into that marketing organization, or you get into that team or you have that new marketing responsibility and that can be both as a consultant, that can be as a full time marketer corporate, small businesses, it really doesn't matter. The first thing is to really look internally. Do you have the right processes in place? Do you have the right people aligned to the roles that they need to have, and have you protected their time? I like to call it creative margin. Have you created a creative margin for them to really do their best work? So in this one company I was at where both of my examples will come from today, so you can see that before and after effect I took on a really small team and we started with just one part of the marketing department and we looked at how that affects all parts of the marketing process, because it's so tightly wound together. You can't have good awareness with your brand campaigns and then get down into the webinars and get down into really qualifying those leads that come through without all of that being together and relying on each other and really in parity. And so we started looking at a full process of what it means to have an idea, to put it into market, and from there we worked on just fixing that process. Where can we shorten things up? Where can we make things align better? I have this example I like to use, where I say there's this building back in LA, when I lived in LA and the architects put it up and aimed it at LAX and they were like this building will represent all who are welcome, but when the actual people constructed it it was like 0.5% off and so by the time you actually did the hour drive or flight or whatever to the destination, it just pointed into the ocean. So where can we move the building versus sending that helicopter into the ocean to get people over to the airport and put up these band-aid on right? So we fixed all of those things and in that process we started to grow and so another team came on and we started managing them and getting them aligned. And then another team came on and started growing that and getting them aligned. And in tandem to that, you're asking a lot of people to stretch and grow and do different things, and so we made sure that their amount of work didn't exceed the amount of hours that we were really asking them to work, and we were very careful about making sure our planning roadmap aligned with what their actual working time was. That included rest, and so in that way, we created creative margins so that when they leave work, when they leave their tasks, their brain has room to think and expand and grow and come back to the table the next day with great ideas. So that full process meant that our team grew from one to, I think, four different teams. We had 300% growth internally, and that included assets that we produced or things that we put into the market, as well as team members themselves.

Eric Eden: 4:30

Wow. So having the right team is pretty foundational to achieving hyper growth. I think the research that I've seen and the conversations I've had with other CMOs over the years, it almost always is that 50% of the investment is in people and 50% of the marketing investment is in programs. So it's interesting it's almost half of the amount being invested in marketing is in the people. So getting that people component of it is the first thing. Getting it right is the first thing. The other piece of it is that I think about the overall marketing investment as people, programs, process and technology. So if you put those four things together, people is the first part of it, because if you don't have the right people, you can't run the right programs, you can't use the technology in the right best ways and you can't have the right processes. So it's really the foundational thing is having the right people to do all these things. The third thing that strikes me is some of the best companies I've worked for recognize that in building marketing teams but more broadly, sales and marketing and customer success as a group, it's really about having people on the team acquire skills and people should be acquiring skills every month, every quarter and when you think about it broadly in marketing you could probably categorize there's 80 different types of skills that you would need to have a full stack marketing team and a lot of people. What they do is they'll hire some people and then they'll use agencies for the skills they don't have in house, which is fine. But I think working with like you said in your story, working with the team, understanding what skills people have, helping them develop new skills to align with the things that you want to do, is really where the rubber meets the road and how people can achieve hyper growth right.

Rachel Anderson: 6:42

That's exactly right and really a great summary. We talk about it now and we call it human centric leadership or human centric team grow, and you're really just looking at okay. So we have these individuals that we want to nurture, that we care about, on our team. They're good culture, fit with that 80 different kinds of skills you could use to be a good marketer. It's impossible for one person to really have all of those skills. So, as a manager or as a leader of an organization, how do you ask, not just can you do this, but how can I provide you with the tools you need and that tool could be an actual class or a course or a mentor how can I provide you with the tools you need in order to be able to sustain what you do and give your best? Here and we've seen time and again that comes directly back into the bottom line. There's a lot of statistics about anything from happy employees that cost or save technically companies trillions of dollars to being able to do better output when you have all of the resources available to you and the space to do that job well. So, yeah, all those things really have to be aligned.

Eric Eden: 7:51

I have to share this one tip because out of the 10 companies that I've been a CMO for, I've only ever had one company that did something I thought was really remarkable, which was they had employees update their role description every quarter. And it seems a basic, perhaps bureaucratic thing, but it really had a magical impact, which was people are always developing skills. Then their role would evolve, and even doing that in an annual review once a year just isn't enough and it creates a disconnect because people feel like they've grown, they're doing a lot more than their job document says they should be doing, and it creates this disconnect. But if people are updating every quarter, then it makes it more clear what skills they are developing, what skills they have developed and where they're going in their career, and I think that more companies should do that. I think it's very helpful to have that sort of documented and it's part of the key. It was the employee who updates their role doc, not their manager, so people should be able to articulate accurately how they're growing, and so I think that's a great way to drive the sort of synergy that I've seen that you were explaining.

Rachel Anderson: 9:19

Yeah, and then that also becomes personal buy-in, which is really what you want as a company from a revenue-generating entity, like taking out the human component. The more buy-in the individual has in the mission, in the values, in the company itself, the more you have commitment to the outcome and that really then goes into your pipeline and your bottom line Absolutely.

Eric Eden: 9:46

And I think you mentioned, retention is part of the equation and turnover is really hard in marketing teams when you're trying to hit hypergrowth goals, because you're starting over in a lot of ways, because the people are the foundation for the programs and the processes and the technology and new people coming in have to, at a minimum, learn how you've implemented all those things and what the strategy is, what you're doing, and it just takes a lot of time. So I think doing some of these strategies to have a very high retention rate is part of the magical impact, right?

Rachel Anderson: 10:25

That's right and I'm so glad you mentioned that, because one of the number one tips that I could give businesses, organizations, teams, is that if you can heighten your retention rate, you can automatically make more revenue. And that's because, just the same as if you don't hit your core goals, you potentially have to look at cutting back workforce in order to show that revenue still increases or you're cutting back cost in order to make up for what you lost. Just the same as that, retention is really important because if you replace an employee, then you're going to spend, depending on how your company is structured, either 75% of their total yearly salary up to 1.5 times their total yearly salary to replace them. And you mentioned a lot of those aspects. That's the recruiting time, that's the executive interviews and the cost of their hours for prepping more than debriefing and then actually doing the interview. That's the training Once they're hired. It's the paperwork, it's the legal parts, it's the HR admin systems, it's everything that goes into replacing not just the tasks but the knowledge base that has to go with that. So retention is a huge way to really focus on what it means to be savvy about hypergrowth.

Eric Eden: 11:41

Absolutely so. You had a second impact story you were going to share with us.

Rachel Anderson: 11:47

Yeah. So this is really what does that look like in the market once you start focusing internally, getting your processes in place, all those kind of good like infrastructure, hygiene. So once we got a lot of that into place, everything started to really roll. We decided to implement a giant out of home ad and campaign in the Boston area for our life sciences customers, and so we had slowly redone our website branding so that it was less about this smaller company and we were able to be a bigger player and how we presented ourselves, how we talked about our products, talking about features previously and now moving to the benefits. Really doing these like small processes and procedure things that kind of helped with the brand. And then we finally put it into the market and so it was more of a governance and kind of data centered campaign and we blended that into the life sciences industry. We started playing around with the way that they talk about their products and their needs and laying that over, how that looks like and data and governance in our software and really starting to put those ads around the area as they came in for this really big conference, and so as we started seeing things funneled through, we could see the direct impact that a year before, the efforts we made all the way through to this now first big out of home kind of campaign that we ran, all the way through to the sales that were coming in from that, and being able to specifically attribute those efforts together and then seeing our revenue grow. And so that was a really exciting kind of case study of when you take time even though it feels like time is money and it is but when you take time to really look at those, there's great outcome and great impact there as well in order to hit completely new revenue goals.

Eric Eden: 13:33

That's awesome. So having the foundation of the right people on the team enabled you to take it forward and really grow the company, because you could execute on all of those programs you mentioned right.

Rachel Anderson: 13:49

That's right, yeah, and I would even double down a little bit and say having the right people on the team is so important, but even more so having the mindset, as a manager, that you can make that person the right person if you take time to train them and really give them the tools they need. And that was really what it took was, as a leadership team, committing to the people that we had because they were good, culture, fit, they were good like workers and providing that for them so that we could see that return of investment much later.

Eric Eden: 14:15

That's awesome. Everyone listening should share this episode with your friends so that they can learn how to build great, human centric marketing teams, so that they can achieve hyper growth Rate. Review and subscribe this episode so we can continue to bring back great guests like Rachel and Rachel. Thanks so much for joining us today and sharing these stories, great insights. We appreciate it.

Rachel Anderson: 14:39

Yeah, thank you, eric, it was a lot of fun.