Your First 30 Days As A Growth Leader – The Challenge From Day One

Now more than ever, when growth leaders enter a company, they face unrealistic expectations around the numbers they’re supposed to reach, whether that’s pipeline or revenue. It creates huge pressure to perform out of the gate. Because of that, many naturally want to execute as fast as possible.

That execution, in the era of AI, has become easier and easier. But it doesn’t guarantee success. In fact, in many cases, it runs counter to it.

Part of the reason success lags, despite more execution, is that buyer behavior has changed dramatically, particularly in B2B. It’s important to take a step back and understand the repercussions for sales and marketing channels a company has typically used to build its success.

There’s a new reality in which each channel could shift in its role in driving buyer engagement. What I’m advocating for here is to understand changes in your particular marketplace, and in some cases, look at specific channel needs in terms of retooling it with people, processes, tech, and deliverables that match the new realities of the way buyers now buy.

An Enormous Amount Of Pressure

In a Gartner study, 73% of CMOs call growth expectations high to overly ambitious. Yet their budgets have been flat at about 7.8% of revenue since 2022. At that leadership level, there’s a realization that getting to expected results, given the resources, is going to be difficult.

Spencer Stuart found that the average tenure was about 4.1 years. That’s one of the shortest in the core C-suite right now.

There is an enormous amount of pressure on growth and marketing leaders.

The Hamster Wheel Of Producing More

Deloitte found that 66% of companies reported AI productivity gains, yet only 20% report revenue gains. There’s a huge gap between the ability to use AI for automation and execution and the results it delivers.

As an industry, our go-to-market teams get caught in this hamster wheel of producing more and more. AI has enabled us to do that. Yet Gartner says that 72% of sales orgs report low reinvestment of the time that AI saves.

We produce more and more, but we don’t know how or where, or have the structure around creating something better.

Most Of The Decision Happens Before Your First Call

What’s changed in that buyer equation? Most importantly, buyer decisions are happening before your first call.

In a 6sense study, they found the winner in any selection process was on the day-one shortlist 95% of the time. They also found that 94% of buying groups ranked that list before even contacting a vendor. That puts enormous pressure on traditional B2B marketing, which has typically focused more on visibility and education.

Where do you reach buyers given that reality? Expectedly, Forrester found that 94% of buyers use AI in their buying process.

Given that reality, it’s important to understand how buyers buy in your industry now versus several years ago. If you think a typical education play, where you create awareness volume, drive to an educational PDF, and fill your top of the funnel, will work, you may want to reconsider. Those days are over.

Because of the way people find answers now, that might not be the best use of the specific channels or surfaces you have to convince a buyer to take the next step and interact with your team.

Find You, Believe In You

If some channels in your mix help buyers find you, other channels help them believe in you. Maybe that’s a better framework for how you view your channels now vs. several years ago.

In Pew Research, they found that searchers click 8% of the time when an AI summary shows up, 15% when none shows up. There’s an obvious click-through difference there.

There’s also a big disconnect in what people say they want. Gartner found that 67% of buyers want a rep-free experience, yet 69% want a rep to confirm what AI told them.

There are some really interesting things happening there between finding and researching, then validating and trusting or believing. Understanding that split and how channels interact or promote those things is paramount when you look at what is working and what is not. It also affects what you need to fix when you hit the ground running in an organization.

6sense also found that 62% of buyers need a seller or a vendor to answer AI-related questions that websites don’t. I believe even the role of our websites is now in question. What features, functionality, and promotional copy might be doing on the site now aren’t enough for many buyers who need deeper validation and understanding of a brand.

You may have all of your channels operational. You may have a website operational. You may have paid advertising operational, and you may have other core parts of your go-to-market operation in play, but is it addressing your buyer in the right way? And is it moving them towards an interaction?

Are all your efforts structured to do that?

I recently had a CEO who was reaching out consistently through LinkedIn direct messages in a promotional way. The messages didn’t resonate. When he switched the channel approach to providing value (i.e., industry data and his perspectives), the interactions changed almost immediately.

It’s easy to say a channel doesn’t work. But it’s important to reassess what the buyer needs from that channel and how you might adjust your approach.

Does A Channel Have The Right Assets?

You’ll run into a huge consistency problem as you approach your work and as resource constraints tighten over time. McKinsey found that inconsistent information across teams is the top reason buyers switch vendors or suppliers. Knowing that changes the game even further.

Do you have the resources necessary to create that consistency, especially when those channels aren’t targeting buyers in the right way?

Channels that help buyers find you are typically best served by strong product marketing and content leaders who enable ops personnel to produce consistent touchpoints within a channel. If you need buyers to believe you, you need deeper sales cooperation, evidence within your customer base, and top-level thought leadership to power the right touchpoints.

It might be worth pausing when you first join an organization to understand each go-to-market channel, whether it’s BDR outreach, SEO, paid advertising, events, etc. Does that channel have the right assets it needs, the right proof it needs to reach the buyer in a way that’s meaningful? If not, and you just have volume, then why do it?

One asset we found particularly effective recently was an industry report that broke down data and lessons from one geo that could apply to another. Those insights resonated and produced deeper sales conversations in the new geo. It landed at exactly the right time in an event context, heightening the value of the interaction.

The First 30 Days

The first 30 days as a growth leader may be best spent finding out where the buying process breaks. Do you have enough top-of-funnel volume to be seen? Are GEO and paid ad efforts, for example, doing their job in making buyers aware of what you do?

Are you seeing a high bounce rate on your website and not deeper interaction that would indicate buyers are getting questions answered? Are you creating the surfaces that validate the research buyers are doing, and creating moments where trust and belief can take shape?

Are you running events in a way that your salespeople aren’t just telling people about a product they already know, but are instead enabling them to answer deeper questions? Are buyers who are ready to engage getting validation, and do they trust you in those moments to buy?

As a fractional marketing leader, I was recently asked to help a company get its first 10 customers in a new geo. A key assessment I did helped me understand what channels we had available, how the sales team was interacting with buyers, and what we could do to build top-level thought leadership across the board to drive better results.

Telling that thought leadership story in email and social, combined with effective BDR outreach and a central event to drive buyers, produced a much better result. It’s enabling us to hit targets. If we just did a traditional approach of spending paid ad money or leveraging BDRs separately, we wouldn’t have gotten the same result.

Thinking about channels from the perspective of the new buyer reality helps you shape marketing channels, create better sales experiences, and produce better outcomes. Use those first 30 days to assess your channels and design new buyer interactions that will enable your company to scale over time.

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