The Wrong Ways to Go Fast (and How to Do It Right)

If you want to go fast, you can't just wing it.

Speed is important for startups, but if you go about it the wrong way, you will achieve the exact opposite.

If you want to create momentum and reach a point where things are all moving along quickly and your growth feels unstoppable, you need to take the right approach.

When you don't, your company will struggle with:

• Tactical errors: wasted ad spends, buggy code, improper tagging, etc.
• No learnings: unable to say why something worked or didn't work
• Disjointed efforts: tactics, campaigns, and channels don't work together well
• Overlap: lack of role clarity causes duplicate work or more time in meetings

"Do more, faster" wasn't the answer.

There was a pretty long period at Sprout Social where the acquisition team I led was still pretty small and mighty. There were 4 or 5 of us total and we each had clear roles and understand how our work mapped to performance.

Once we raised our Series C, things started to pick up more.

The goals were getting bigger and the Sales team was growing, so we need to ramp up to keep scaling our inbound engine.

In the moment, every new role we hired for and every new tactic or initiative made sense and nothing was reckless.

However, our processes didn't evolve fast enough, which made our quarterly plans and to-do lists turn into "do more, faster."

As you can imagine, this lead to more of the pain that I noted above.

It took time but we eventually worked out a lot of the issues and I came away with some significant learnings on how this can be done better.

Which is why I want to share this with you.

Understanding how to prioritize activities with the greatest leverage is the best way to go fast.

If I were to go back in time, I would focus a lot on these four ways to create more leverage and truly generate more speed and momentum.

Rule of 78

Startups tend to talk about revenue numbers in terms of run rate, but actual revenue and when it is received matters.

The Rule of 78 (read more about it here) is a very important detail for all go-to-market teams to understand. Even if your company isn't fully GAAP compliant, there are impacts.

In terms of leverage, you can see how pushing an initiative back a quarter, or letting little things get in the way of doing the right things can have a big impact.

Put a lot of focus on the tactics and initiatives that will help bring revenue earlier in the year and benefit from the leverage you have created by having 10-12 months of that MRR instead of 6-8 months.

Structure for learning

It doesn't matter if you're talking about ad targeting, positioning, pricing, comp plans, or process — you have to structure what you are doing to make sure that if it doesn't work, you will learn something from it that can be carried forward.

It may take a little more time upfront, but the learnings create leverage.

For example, if you run a webinar and it doesn't do well in terms of engagement, leads, and revenue, but you don't know why, you will be inclined to test new topics, experiment with duration, time of day, webinar platform, how you follow up, and so on.

But, what if you learned early in the process that your ideal customer doesn't have time to be on webinars, or the type of content they want doesn't fit that format?

By learning this and shelving all webinars, you create leverage by focusing more time and resources on proven areas of the business and testing new ones.

Failing is okay, but not learning anything from your failure is not.

Create space for strategy & planning

You can't go go go all of the time or your team will spend all of their time heads down, creating more issues.

To make sure everyone is working on the most important things and that everything works together for a 2+2=5 result, you need to create space to build strategy and plan on both a quarterly and monthly basis.

If you are an agile marketing team, 2-week sprints will also be helpful to map out priorities and create clear tasks for everyone.

Without a strategy and good planning, you are just winging it and hoping that the right things are being done in the right order.

Less wasted time working on the wrong things = more leverage.

Establish role clarity

Role clarity is tough because teams are dynamic.

People move into new roles or take on part of someone's role when they leave.

Others come in to have a healthy redundancy and avoid a single point of failure, but don't know where the line is between their roles.

When your team knows what they need to be working on AND everyone understands exactly the role they are playing in the bigger picture, you create leverage to do more with fewer people.

Wrapping up

As I said earlier, the biggest challenge with a lot of this is that at the moment, each new role or tactic can feel logical but over time, you can become less leveraged and start working against yourself.

Work through any of these and change the mindset of your team to focus less on "do more, faster" and more on creating leverage.