How Monterail Achieved 30-40% Y-o-Y Business Expansion With Growth Marketing

Lately, adaptability has become an essential competitive ingredient for any organization, regardless of industry. No more playing the waiting game, it’s all about being proactive. In a disruptive world, one cannot wait.

We do not want to end up having a Kodak moment. Remember the film photography giant? They sunk into oblivion because they resisted change. More so, they even invented the digital camera, but didn’t push it because they focused on film photography! And when they finally went to market, it was already too late. They ended up bankrupt in 2012.

Being flexible and adaptable is the base for today’s growth marketing.

Strategic Flexibility – The Key Ingredient For Growth Marketing

In a world where there’s a lot of competition for clients’ attention, where the pace of digital marketing innovations is overwhelming, one’s secret weapons is a fast and strategic reaction.

How can you ace flexibility?

• Don’t get stuck to concepts, embrace new ideas
• Understand that systems that you built are not cast in stone, everything can change!
• Constantly scan your competitors
• Be conversion-centric
• Short decision-making cycle
• Smoothen the cooperation among different teams

When dealing with growth marketing, the borders between the sales, marketing, product and event customer success teams are slowly vanishing. In the end, everybody’s working for the same goals.

An Inspiring Success Story

In our quest for finding inspiring growth stories from the tech world, we are bringing you a new interview. This week’s question is: how did Monterail, the Wroclaw-based software development company, achieve 30-40% Y-o-Y business growth?

Through proper goal alignment, flexibility, transparency and collaboration among teams, all under the umbrella of growth marketing. We’ve interviewed Marta Klimowicz, Head of Growth at Monterail, to find out what’s the secret sauce behind building a successful growth team.

What is your definition of Growth Teams?

The Growth Team is responsible for the realization of the key business goals of an organization. In Monterail, we need to attract new projects and gain new clients, therefore our Growth Team’s job is to create the need for our services and gain and maintain clients.

On the other hand, the Growth Team is also responsible for the healthy growth of the whole team, i.e. activities related to employer branding (designing recruitment campaigns, winning of recruitment leads).

How is your team structured and why did you choose to structure it this way?

The structure of our Growth Team is related to the goals we have to achieve. Therefore, we have people who take care of lead generation (this would be the Marketing Team), and after acquiring sales-qualified leads those contacts are then taken over by the Sales Team.

When the projects end, the Customer Success Team takes over. Its purpose is to maximize the client’s satisfaction when it comes to project delivery. The team members look closer at the client’s business needs in order to offer them better product functionalities or additional services.

What is your team’s main goal?

One of our biggest goals is connected to sales goals. We have a yearly growth ratio goal. It is about 30-40% YoY.

We realize this goal by generating both sales and recruitment leads. Signing more projects means having more people on board. Therefore, the main goal is for the whole organization to grow, but for our daily practice, this translates into lead generation.

How should a minimum viable growth team look like in terms of people and their responsibilities?

The minimum viable growth team would consist of one marketer who will be able to realize key goals, depending on the specific character of a given organization.

How do growth teams change depending on the phase of the business: from startup to mature?

When an organization is in a startup phase, a growth team needs people who will be able to do everything.

On the marketing side of things, they should be able to produce content, perform analyses, run PPC, social media and email campaigns, create simple landing pages.

Similarly, salespeople should be able to answer all inbound emails, actively win clients, close deals, build relations with the customers and work on upselling.

In Monterail (who’s already a mature organization), we have a team responsible for content marketing. We are now in the process of creating a team responsible for digital marketing (including analytics and PPC campaigns). We have also divided our Accounts Team into Sales and Customer Success Teams. At this point, we need people who specialize in the given areas, not ones having broad but sometimes superficial knowledge in many various areas.

How do you retain and engage the team members?

We want Monterail to be a healthy organization that focuses on the long-term.

For us, healthy growth means that we do not hire people too fast, or accept projects too quickly. But, this growth should help our people maintain mental wellness. Retaining and engaging our team members is highly related to our company values.

All the team members are given a lot of autonomy: everyone has an area to be responsible for. They should become experts in this area and propose the most efficient solutions with the assistance of professional tools, support of the People Team, Mentors and Personal Growth Framework that guide them.

In terms of communication, we promote transparency. As a company, we meet at weekly roundups to share insights and celebrate all victories, from smaller to bigger ones.

In the Growth team, we have bi-weekly standups to discuss current matters. Meaningful communication drives better project engagement because our employees can see the effects of their hard work.

We have recently introduced paid sabbatical leaves for anyone who has been with the company for at least 5 years. We added this to older perks: flexible working hours, home office or company retreats in order to try to enhance the work-life balance of our teams.

Although we are headquartered in Wrocław, Poland, our clients are spread worldwide. Some of them employ us for very unconventional projects (driving lots of excitement for the team), e.g. we built an app for people in Africa suffering from diabetes.

Job-hopping – how can you fight it?

In the Growth Team, we are currently working on introducing a Personal Growth Framework (PGF) inspired by how the developer and designer teams work at Monterail. Thanks to the PGF, our colleagues are aware of their development perspectives and on which stage of development they are currently at. Transparency helps a lot in retaining people in the team.

The Roundup Meetings I mentioned, contribute as well to fight job-hopping. During such meetings, our co-founders stand before the entire office and discuss current matters, sales outcomes, the company’s vision, the growth perspective for the next 3 years.

People don’t always understand how the sales or marketing teams are contributing to organizational growth. This is why we have a Sales Dashboard, where everyone can see the sales results for the previous months and understand where teamwork is leading us. We believe this motivates people and makes them care more, so, as a result, they want to stay in the team.

Where does the growth team fit in the company structure?

The Growth Team supports the activities of the development team and cooperates with the Sales Squad and the Business Analysis (BA) Team.

The BA team is a hybrid of developer and business roles, responsible for preparing project pricings. They are consultants, whose main goal is to understand the clients’ business, but, at the same time, they are developers. Thanks to their expertise they can help in understanding how much time a given project may take, the tasks included, how time-consuming and cost-consuming such a project can be.

We also cooperate with the People Team in the area of recruitment marketing and employer branding.

Growth, product, marketing. How do they overlap, how do they differ?

For most companies, Growth encompasses Marketing. This is Monterail’s case as well. The Growth Team looks at the overall company’s goals eg: increasing the number of clients, the number of employees, etc. On the other hand, our marketers are responsible for communication, brand creation, campaign management, etc.

Is there a workflow you use, a certain methodology? Agile, Scrum?

Monterail has been on the market for 9 years now. After delivering 200+ projects our approach changed and adapted. We become humble and prioritize the clients’ needs over our company’s needs. We’ve always chosen the best-suited methodology for a given context. So, we adjust Agile or Scrum guidelines to the actual needs of the client.

Inside the Growth Team, we apply best practices, but try not to become their prisoners, and keep an open mind.

What is your opinion: one metric at a time versus more metrics? Why?

What helps people work at Monterail is the overall alignment of the company’s main goal: 30-40% YoY healthy growth.

Keeping in mind the goal, understanding how everyone contributes to it, can get people set up priorities for own work.

Conclusion

For Monterail, the Growth team is not only responsible for customer acquisition, retention, and delivering revenue, but also for the employer branding and company growth in terms of no. of employees. This makes total sense, right?

While acquiring new projects, you need to get more people on board to deliver them. The hiring issue is no longer an HR-only task. Slowly but surely, the teams in a company are getting more connected and aligned towards the same goals. And the Growth Team lays at the core of all of it.

If you’d like to read other inspiring growth stories, you’ll find them on our blog.

 

 

___________

Sharing is caring!