About This Episode
Pierre is a B2B SaaS marketing consultant based out of Paris. He helps SaaS companies generate more revenue through growth marketing. So far he has helped 60+ companies achieve business goals.
In This Episode…
We speak to Pierre Lechelle about his experience as a marketing professional and discuss the nitty-gritties of growth marketing, which include:
i. Fundamental tenets of growth marketing
ii. Solving growth problems at the product level
iii. The difference between growth hacks and growth marketing
iv. How to build growth teams from scratch
v. Differences between B2B and B2C growth functions
Here are our top 3 picks from this episode:
1. The definition of Growth Marketing and how it’s super relevant in the business of 21st Century
Avlesh: What is Growth Marketing?
Pierre- Growth Marketing is basically identifying what is broken in your business and then launching small tests, from the product standpoint, to see what improves the results. You basically experiment with various things and identify what is moving the needle by looking at the data.
Data is one of the most important pillars of Growth Marketing. Because, it’s the data which is going to inform your decision- tell you whether or not your experiment is working.
Avlesh- We hear this term a lot- ‘Growth Hacker’. People from marketing, product, and tech are inclining towards the role of Growth Hacker in the organization. How does one define a growth hacker?
Pierre- Growth hacking can be seen as a myth. Most people look at big companies doing tons of stuff and see their growth rocket. And then they are like “I want that growth as well”. But that’s not the sustainable way of working on growth.
To work on growth, Pierre has stressed on the need to have a formalized process in this blog of his. He mentions in the blog, the essence of which he iterates on the podcast too, that “most people will start experimenting tomorrow and never start an experiment again.” Not the great way of working on growth.
Growth marketing is about finding the customer-centric ways to deliver value. When you hear growth hacking, for most people it is actually about scrapping mailing lists and doing similar stuff but that’s not growth marketing.
2. The significance of product and marketing teams in growth marketing
Avlesh- How are product and marketing roles blending when it comes to growth?
Pierre- Product and marketing are definitely blending. In this age, more and more products are being built in such a way that it is doing the marketing for itself. For instance, some SaaS products have such good onboarding, UX, attention to use-cases etc that the client gets on boarded himself and signs the contract without speaking to the Sales team.
So we can say that they are definitely blending. There is a huge overlap between them as most the experiments that you are going to run are going to be product driven. For instance, if you want to introduce a new feature or a minor change in the UI you are going to need product’s consent and help.
3. The difference between B2B and B2C Growth Marketing
Avlesh – Are there any significant differences between B2B and B2C in terms of growth function?
Pierre: The tactics and strategies that you are going to use in B2B and B2C are going to be vastly different but what matters is the commonality- which is that you have a process in place, you are able to iterate tests and constantly help your business.
If you are a good growth marketer then you should be able to adapt yourself to every type of business- be it a traditional hairdresser or a strong hardcore SaaS product.
Avlesh- The reason I asked that question is that in B2C there are multiple touchpoints. There is mobile, website, social as opposed to B2B where there is just desktop. Yes, there are other touchpoints as well, like Success and Support but the complexity changes at a whole different level between these two domains. Does that also reflect in the Growth function?
Pierre- If you have an issue in your business, say, the conversion is better on desktop than on mobile then you would do “hey! We need to improve conversion rate on mobile”. But it’s not because you are a B2C business that you are going to improve mobile but because it’s a pressing issue. I was recently working with a B2B business whose clients were most reachable on facebook messenger. They don’t spend their time on email as much as they do on Facebook. Should we have aligned with the B2B rule which means stick to email, slack channel etc? No. We reached them via the most fitting channel.
Closing notes
The conversation with Pierre Lechelle presented us with tons of first hand principles of Growth Marketing and how to scale when you are starting small and when you are aiming big.
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