[WMD 2016] Reforge, Brian Balfour "How to (actually) become elite at growth"

what I'm gonna talk about today is actually kind of a different presentation than my last two WMD presentations but before I jump into it all these slides are gonna be available at this URL Co elevate dot-com slash WMD 16 so don't feel like you need to scribble a bunch of notes it's all going to be there I'd prefer you just kind of sit here and pay attention so what I want to talk about today is that interesting that would this presentation is coming after nears talk because I think our industry of growth and customer acquisition we've got an addiction we've got a really bad addiction right and that addiction is to this need around searching for this one tip in trick and hack and tool and tactic that's gonna like cause an explosion of growth in our business right and if this sounds familiar it should because this was the start of my presentation two years ago and last year right and then again but I'm gonna talk about this in a little bit of a different angle and the reason I think it's an addiction and a problem is because these hack --tx are basically prescriptions they're trying to prescribe the solution to all of our growth problems and as we know with prescriptions they're good in small doses every now and then to help fix some problems but when we regularly take them it never solves the underlying problem and so my urging to you is just say no right just say no to all of these tipsters they're good in small doses right but what we need to really be focusing 80% of our time on or other types of things that I want to talk about today so there's a kind of one problem with this right with these prescriptions and the big problem with it is that problem solving really requires new approaches and by definition a prescription is not going to be a new approach we learn the most and we create the most value by solving unsolved problems right so when when we face our companies right once again when we're facing a problem the unsolved problems tend to be we unlock the most growth both personally and professionally for our companies and our products and you know while this presentation is mostly oriented towards people on teens individual contributors I also want leaders and managers who might be listening to this to also pay attention because I firmly believe that it is the managers and the leaders jobs of today to help facilitate the right things in train the next crop of future marketers and growth of customer acquisition experts so today what I'm gonna walk through is five of seven I didn't have to I couldn't fit all of them things that I wish I knew when I started my career and so you know this like I'm not saying like I have a long way to go myself in terms of growing and learning around this subject it is absolutely a continual process but I want to make sure that nobody else kind of makes the same mistakes that I did and really can build off of the things that I feel like I've learned along the way the way that I'm gonna do this is I'm gonna walk through a timeline I'm not gonna bore you with kind of the the really early days of birth but I'm gonna walk you through the timeline of my career and the huge lessons at every single step of the way and where I'm gonna start is college so I was lucky I went to the University of Michigan a great college go blue by the way and you know while I was in college right you know I was pretty diligent student but I had my fun too and this is a picture of me holding a fully grown man on my shoulders after losing a game called wizard staff so I don't recommend it and anymore but while I laughs having fun I was also pretty good on the GPA but I like I like I worked really hard to get a GPA and the reason because was because all through kind of middle school in high school I was trained that the GPA was the most important thing right that's what got me into University of Michigan in the first place and so when a court when I got there I kept pursuing that same goal I got to get the same GPA and so what that ended up causing was basically I ended up loading half of my class with easy classes to kind of keep my GPA high it was really big mistake but luckily along the way thankfully I also started a bunch of different projects I started the social network called party campus I was uniquely qualified as you could see from the previous photo family which was another social I put in the blog and the reason I say I'm lucky to start this is because these three things led to three really important other things I learned 10x more than any other class I created something of value and most interestingly because of these three things nothing I did in my classwork I got my first job and so my first lesson was that basically we're moving to a world where credentials don't matter anymore they still matter a little bit but they're getting less and less appropriate over time and the reason is an approved point of this is really interesting is that the SVP of Ops at Google probably one of you know Google probably one of the best hiring organizations in the world right they did a bunch of studies and they found that the pedigree of the college education told them nothing about how they were gonna be successful at Google and so they actually got it rid of it during their screening process and I think the reason is is because our work is becoming more transparent with tools like github dribble behan SlideShare medium Squarespace it is so much easier to take what we've done that work our actual outcomes our actual accomplishments and put them out there in the world and that is fundamentally more important than any credential that you will ever receive and so the first lesson that I wanted to share is focus on accomplishments not credentials moving on my first job out of college was at a company called zoom info it's in Boston it's still around today I was hired as a product manager the manager found me from my blog and starting out I was a terrible employee by all measures of the equation I was terrible I would have fired my own ass if I was my manager at that time and my manager told me as much he pulled me aside and told me I was doing a terrible job it was a pretty like strong dose right you know from the get-go and it wasn't because I didn't work hard but it was because I didn't know what I was doing I entered into a situation where all of the projects that basis we ended up on my lap I just didn't know how to do any of it and so one thing that I started thinking about and I've learned in hindsight is that all of our work lives on the spectrum it lives on this spectrum where on one hand we have a hundred percent no and these are the things these are projects that are a hundred percent know and meaning that they're based on safe skills that we've already mastered on the other end of the spectrum we have a hundred percent of the unknown and these are completely new skills in completely new terrain so there's problems with this it's kind of where do we want to place ourselves on the spectrum to focus on learning and maximize progression around our subject of growth in any subject the issue with being too far on the left hand of the spectrum is that if we're a hundred percent in the knowing it's boring right we get really really bored because we're not progressing or if we're not getting bored right and we're just doing a bunch of safe stuff we're not actually learning we're just we fall into this routine and the problem with that is that our world right like our world of marketing is changing so fast right we can become obsolete extremely quickly the right hand of the spectrum was where I was at at the beginning of zoom info the projects that I had started with were completely new skills and terrain I knew nothing about what the heck I was doing right and what that just leads to is a bunch of frustration it's hard to get any progress forward at all as much as possible and so what I learned here and what my manager at the time realized and was really good with is that sorry I I skipped this is that the quickest learners kind of relate the new to the known right and so what that means is we need to be somewhere in the middle of the spectrum we don't want to be too far on the right-hand of the spectrum we always want to be kind of partially in the known partially in the unknown because that way we can kind of build off of the foundation of things that we already know and also be spending a good part of our time on the things that we don't know yet which is what actually causes learning so the big lesson from zoom info is that always find yourself one foot in the know and one foot in the unknown you got to get really good at recognizing when you're on the ends of the spectrum and figure out ways to move yourself back somewhere towards the middle zooom info I basically started my first venture-backed company it was called vixen Mo's during the social gaming boom of the Facebook platform and and and farmville and all those crazy times and when I started that company I was like I was probably 23 years old we raised a bunch of venture capital I had a couple co-founders and I needed to be a Swiss Army knife right that that is the point or that is a huge role of a founder right in the early days is I was doing all sorts of things I was doing customer acquisition I was doing product I was doing BD I was doing sales I was doing all of these things but as we found some success and the company started to grow pretty quickly probably at about 1516 employees I realized that I needed to kind of turn into a laser and that generalist that Swiss Army knife nature of it right started to be way less valuable to the company and I also found that I was not only adding less valuable to the company but I wasn't growing as much myself either and so what I realized at this time and what this calm this turned into was one of my basically one of my most popular blog posts was that you probably heard this advice before which is shape yourself like a tee right basically have a broad set of skills at the top and then go really really deep on something but since I published that post I found that actually most people misinterpret this and so I want to clarify this about what shaping yourself like a tee actually means and it has two parts the first is master the fundamentals and I'm gonna read this real quick this is from a book called the five elements of effective thinking and in the quote and in in the book the author is telling a story and he says he's telling a story about Tony blog he's a super famous composer and trumpet player he said during the class each student played a portion of his or her selected piece they played wonderfully Tony then gave very easy warm-up exercise that any beginning trumpet player might be given super super easy after they played that simple phrase Tony for the first time during the lesson picked up the trumpet he played that same phrase but when he played it it wasn't childish it was exquisite each notes woods rich delightfully sound the students attempt did not even come close the contrast was astounding right so it's interesting here the reason I bring up the stories because the difference between the student in the master here had nothing to do with this very complex piece that they had and had everything to do with this super super simple fundamental which was this simple exercise and the reason mastering the fundamentals is so important is because the fundamentals build your foundation right they contribute to to being able to be getting good at anything within your profession right the second thing is that mastering the fundamentals never ends right most people think they just scratch the surface they they just learn a little bit about user psychology or a little bit about data analysis right but you know 20 30 years into your career understanding the nuances going deeper on these fundamentals is still learning just like tony was when he was thirty years into his music career the third is that fundamentals and growth are not channel related right so it doesn't matter it's not SEO it's not about virality it's not about facebook ads it's not about content marketing they are completely different and so I was trying to think about exactly what the fundamentals were and I kind of have a draft for this and I'm sure all we're finding this over time but I think the fundamentals in growth right now are four things on and they mix between quantitative and qualitative in the lower left hand corner what we have is data analysis data analysis is all about understanding the meaning of data what your users have been doing historically in extracting insights out of that but data analysis isn't actually worth anything unless you can put it into practice and the best way to put it into practice is getting really really good at building forward-looking quantitative models right these the forward-looking quantitative model is actually what's going to be helping you make decisions about should I do X should I do why is Channel Z going to actually have a big impact right is our retention good enough to keep our growth going three to six months how do we prioritize our resources all of these different things I'm the qualitative end of the spectrum is in the lower right hand corner we have user psychology so actually understanding the motivations around your user problem in your value problem a lot of what NIR was talking about but once again we can't just understand right we need to put it into practice and the way put that into practice is through storytelling right we bring those motivations to life through features through copy through landing pages through emails all of these other ways these are the fundamentals of our profession right now has nothing to do with SEO tricks or the latest Facebook at Google or algorithm change right we need to master these four things and if we do master these four things the better we understand these things we'll be able to pick up all of those channel related things and as the ecosystem changes we'll be able to adapt with it the second part of shaping yourself like it t is to go deep and this is the typical resume I get when I put something out there and I hire they you know somebody says well I know a CEO I know continent I know CRO and / attention I know Facebook Ads I know Pinterest as I know HTML and virality I'm like man like oh and by the way that person's only two years out of college and I'm like I'm like this guy man he must be a baller right like he just like he just knows everything but inevitably what you find out is that these people most of the people most of these resumes they're basically okay at a lot of things but they're excellent at nothing and I think being a lot okay at a lot of things is far less valuable than being amazing at one thing and the reason is when you go deep and you become amazing up one thing it forces you to solve problems with unknown answers right when you scratch beyond the surface and you run into a problem on anything that you're working on that you can't get on some you know blog post with a quick Google search you're solving an unknown problem that's once again where most of the growth happens and where we create the most value the second thing is that value Rises exponentially the deeper we go right because we start is really easy is really really easy to learn the basics anybody can do that but when we go really deep we start putting ourselves in a bucket of people where there's less and less people we stand out more and more and as a result our value Rises exponentially and the third is that if we get great at one thing it is way easier to become great at another and the reason is because we're learning how to learn we're learning how to go beyond the basics we're learning how to get beyond the surface so the big thing here once again I want to rephrase shaping yourself like a tea and say continually mastered the basics and go deep at this point after a vixen I've started another company named boundless but most recently before I started reforged I was a VP of growth at HubSpot and this was the first time that I was in a really really large organization and I got to really interest the really interesting thing that is I got to observe a lot of different peoples and a lot of different professions basically choosing what they were working on and what I realize kind of observing from afar is that people choose things based on a lot of their most of time through their internal motivations what motivates them personally and we're all motivated by different things some people are motivated by the most technically challenging product our project some are motivated by the most creative project some are motivated by you know basically having autonomy and something that they can own themselves right there's a bunch of different motivations but the funny thing is as I as I saw these people kind of working on projects I compared them to the people in the organization that rose through the ladder way faster than anybody else and I found some really interesting differences and that was that they tended to make decisions based on this 2x2 matrix on the x-axis we have the popularity of the project so on the Left it's it's a low popularity on the right it's high popularity on the y axis I have the impact of the project's hello - hi right so in the lower left hand corner low impact low pie popularity right you would never choose those projects those are the projects that are typically given to the interns right on the right hand of in the lower right hand question it's like super high popularity low impact this is what I call glamour projects right they might have like a lot of exposure they might be really sexy and that's why people want to work on them but they actually when you really think about they probably have low impact on the business and but now we get really interesting what about high impact is our high impact high popularity sorry I used my phrasing room but the sexy projects in the right in the upper right hand corner and these are the projects that tends that everybody wants to work on like ever every single person wants to work on right and so it's really hard for you individually right to have a really big impact since everybody wants their kind of hands in the mix so the thing that I realized about the people at HubSpot that really rose through the ladder was that they occupied the upper left-hand corner they chose the really messy they're really hard but yet really important in high-impact projects and their low popularity because they're messy hard and important and the reason that positioned themselves so well is a few things the first is that they learn a lot those projects tend to be incredibly challenging and so as a result if you basically learn the more the more challenging the project is the second thing is that they end up positioning themselves as a rare expert on a very high-impact important thing within the company and so to give you an example of something like this a project like this might be how do how do we basically reconstruct sales comp for a 300 person sales team and implement Salesforce in a way that tracks everything to the tee right man sounds terrible right really freaking important right really important within the company and these messy projects basically require you to get a really deep level of understanding on a really important topic and so you become the expert on this topic and everybody wants that person on their team right which brings me to the third point you make yourself visible these projects tend to have really high visibility in the org right and so you're seen as a leader almost a savior that you're the one tackling this big messy thing so when possible choose high impact low popularity projects all right this brings me to reforge and what I'm working on today and so every single year this is another picture of me I wish it was me but every single year I'd kind of take a retreat and I kind of basically evaluate the past year and ask myself a bunch of questions kind of personally professionally do some you know nerdy goal-setting all that fun stuff but there's one question I ask myself every year and that's what are the 20% of activities that lead to 80% of the value creation and now that I've done this for a number of years probably about six years now there's only one thing that has been in that bucket every single year and that was my blog my very simple blog and what I realized is that I got hired at zoom in because of my blog I met my first VC's the people who wrote me a five million dollar check well on two pieces of paper they were dumb to do it but they did it anyways from my blog boundless met my VCS and my investors through that and reforge what I'm working on today is a hundred percent enabled by my blog so my the lesson of this is not to write a blog but the lesson is that as you go through your career build and be a platform this is probably the highest value thing that you can do so going back to that very first lesson which is focusing on output accomplishments right you need a way to distribute those accomplishments and those outcomes and get some eyeballs on it and the reason for this is a few things one is that when we do this opportunities flow to you so rather than you scraping and trying to seek out all of these opportunities all of these options start to be piled on to your plate and then you're in a much better position if you can be picking and choosing rather than trying tell constantly be selling yourself the second thing because of that is you create leverage right so as you basically build and be a platform you move your leverage point to the right so that you can have a really small you can do something really small and have a really high impact to give you an giving your example the way that we started report all I did was send one email out to my blog subscribers and we had enough people in the program to basically fund the company for the next two years right so something really small having a really big impact but as you once again build and be that platform you're increasing leverage and last but not least you end up building a brand right and we always talk about brand in the context of companies and how powerful it is and the advantage that companies have when they build really big brands well all of their same lessons actually apply to you personally as well right and so as you build this platform you end up being a brand so I just want to review real quick right one focus on accomplishments over credentials to balance the known with the unknown three massive the basics and go deep for work on high impact low popularity projects when you can and 5 be a platform and so my last note is that you know we're trying to instill these principles in reef we're trying to help train the next crop of really awesome growth practices we have a bunch of reforge alum actually in the audience today and so if you're really interested I would really love you guys to join the reforge community we'll be running our next program in January you can go to the site and sign up and last but not least I'll leave this up here so if you want the slides for this presentation feel free to go to Coe elevate and then I'll be taking some questions we'll give that a little bit of time does anybody have any audience questions while it oh okay let's do it all right what would you recommend to an early stage founders struggling with growth marketing one biggie become a league at growth to hire someone who is elite at growth read your recommendation so I actually think well it depends on your current skill set but I actually one of the one of the questions I get is is a ROM like founder and becoming managers and I think one of the best ways to become a founder the best founders the best leaders the best managers actually are an expert in something first right so you look at like the founders of Airbnb or stripe or even like Zuckerberg at Facebook they would really really deep on some kind of subject whether it was design or engineering or something else and so the best path the best path to becoming a really valuable founder has actually become really really good at something yourself first right but once you get into that role typically over time you need to become a generalist there's so many things on your plate like that is your job as the founder and so you need to hire somebody who's good but when you hire somebody once again I don't hire a generalist the best thing that you could do is basically find somebody who has gotten really really good at something become an expert in something hopefully that aligns with the channel you want to use ideally but if not it's basically the second best scenario because if they got really good at something at one channel become be able to become really good at another thing any other questions how long do you think it takes to become an expert at something how do you know so I like not as long as most people think so when I when I gave this a lot of this advice to a lot of my team at HubSpot basically ended up in this analysis paralysis for a lot of my younger team members and the reason was is that it felt like a ten-year commitment to them by like choosing something to go deep on something that felt like a 10-year commitment and it's definitely not like that at all all right first of all you can go pretty deep on something with the right amount of focus and the right amount of diligence and like probably like a year to two right if you really really focus most people can't do it in the timeframe because they're not focusing right so so that's number one and number two is that most people put the pressure on themselves once again that if they choose this thing it's going to be like a like a ten year commitment and no like it actually works a little bit more like the scientific method right you focus on something for a period you choose a hypothesis you focus on something for a period of time right you work on some projects see if you like it see if you kind of dig into it and you learn something and if you don't then you kind of informs whatever your next hypothesis is about what you want to kind of focus on next right so once again it's just it's not a ten year commitment don't think about that and it's not like a it doesn't take an incredibly long time to become super super deep bonds come on which either the last two yeah I go to my blog to find out now unless you was get a coach and so-and-so you hear this advice a lot like get a mentor I use a coach the term coach specifically because coaches like by definition I can't play the game for you and I think a lot of times the big problem with people seeking out mentors and coaches it that they're looking for the answers and what a really great coach does is actually don't give you an answer they just help you get to a better answer than you would on your own and they typically do that by doing two things giving you a really unbiased opinion and the second is asking really really good questions and so that was one and I'm actually blanking on the other one so you will have to go to my blog alright hiring tips to find an awesome growth marketer is there a higher calm for growth markers know like hired actually is I think has marketers on there now but no I think hiring marketer like typically typically the way that we hire with reforge is that we put everybody through a screen what we're doing on the screen is we're looking for kind of horizontal values what I mean by horizontal values are things like are they a voracious learner are they impact focus these things that are really important to us our team but right after that if they get past the screen the rest of the interview process is around them displaying their output in their work to us so we give them mini projects or we take some of the work that they've already worked on some projects some previous projects and we try to get them to sort of add to it right and once again I really want to I really want to see what they are able to accomplish their actual output I would rather hire somebody based off of that rather than how good they are at answering interview questions so my two top performers on my team at HubSpot were terrible interviewers and going back to the previous point they didn't come from good colleges either but I looked at their output of their work and I hired them solely based on that and they did freaking amazing right so whatever you do when you hire make sure you're hiring based on seeing their actual work and not I'm kind of like questions or answers to questions alright can you give me an example of your impact of helps I didn't have any impact at house but how do you determine your platform oh that's a great question actually all right so okay so there's so many different mediums now right whether it's blogging or whether it's video or podcasting or whatever it might be and so I think different people are fit with different mediums just like different products fit really well with different marketing acquisition channels right so and so my medium is writing like I'm just a I'm a writer and that's the way that I think the best and and learn the most and this presentation started with all my presentations start with the blog article so so that's my medium and so it's more of just like kind of testing and in seeing kind of what feels the most natural to you if some will feel like a struggle right so like for me video is kind of like a little bit of a struggle for me and so I just feel like a lot more natural and right okay so I alright alright I'll answer that can you give me an example so so basically at HubSpot I joined when we started the sales product division and it was six people when I joined so we were moving from marketing to sales products it was six people when I started about a hundred people when I left we grew a product from a basically single thousands of users to hundreds of thousands of users and I can say this now because they've announced it but over from zero to ten million they are in about 18 months so but that wasn't really my impact that was really the team's impact my job is my job at HubSpot was just to hire and train good people that was it alright one more and then I think I'm done so would you pay a growth marketer a base salary or a revenue share base salary a hundred percent sure a hundred percent the problem with the revenue share is just are any type of incentives like that is that you know basically this also has the same question around like growth teams that just over optimize on metrics right and they don't take all the other things into account well you actually want this person to be doing is to be taking in a balance of both impact and some of the other things that are harder to quantify right so when you actually incentivize them based on something like a revenue share it just like it leads them in the wrong direction it puts the wrong motivations in place you want to hire people who are already impact load that is an inherent motivation to them right you don't need to be having to provide an external motivation for them to be impact focused right that just never as strong as having the internal motivation so so yeah never a revenue revenue share always do base salary and then performance bonuses and stuff that I think that's a different scenario okay that's it thank you very much if you have questions

Channel: 500 Global

Views: 12,640

Keywords: 500 Startups, 500 strong, Silicon Valley, Venture Capital, Startups

Id: 7ehZn-Ma1Ow

Length: 30min 45sec (1845 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 09 2016