Pouyan SalehiIn a startup it’s important to understand team context, not just your individual role in the funnel. At PersistIQ, we used to have separate meetings between sales, marketing and customer success. However, this made people unclear of what was going on in other departments. There were a lot of questions being asked, and answering those questions took time. We realized a quick daily standup could reduce those questions and improve team communication.
What is a growth standup?
A growth standup is a 15-30 minute meeting where each department briefly updates the whole team on what they’re doing centered around growth. Growth needs to be a priority in a startup, and having a consistent standup ensures that it never gets de-prioritized.
Key Benefits
- Reduced meeting time
- By having a quick daily standup, we’ve cut down on lots of meeting time. Questions I might have to answer in three separate meetings can now be addressed in one.
- Smoother customer experience
- Talking in a group helps make sense of qualitative data. By adding a qualitative side to data, these standups have helped identify and address problems that have led to a much smoother experience for the customer.
- Stronger team culture
- The team is more confident, more cohesive and understands more of what’s going on. Individual team members have a better idea of what they should be working on and how it fits into the whole.
How it works
- Setup
- Choose a consistent time to have your standup. We chose 11:30 a.m. – right between our morning sales calls and lunch. Establish a hard stop time and stick to it. Our meetings normally last between 15 and 30 minutes, but we never go over. Whatever happens, we stop at 30 minutes.
- Roles
- Each team is responsible for a specific metric around growth, so they are required to give a brief update on that metric. Example metrics: Marketing (leads generated, inbound demo requests), SDRs (outbound leads generated), AEs (opportunities, deals closed), Customer Success (churn/potential churn, customer issues, onboarding process, etc.)
- Move through the funnel
- Start at the top of the funnel and move your way down. Marketing starts with a quick update on their core metric, then move to outbound efforts. SDRs give an update, then AEs, and finish with customer success. Keep each update to 1-2 minutes so there’s room for team discussion.
- Discussion
- All team members are able to raise questions/concerns though the standup, but make sure to table any items that aren’t relevant to the entire team. If a certain topic is less important, take it offline to address later.
Challenges
- Keeping a consistent cadence
- It’s challenging to do it every single day. Things come up, demos get rescheduled, so the meeting needs to happen even if team members can’t make it. You need to just keep going.
- Not wasting time
- It’s easy to get into a topic and burn a half hour. You have to be very good at identifying which questions can wait and which need to be addressed now. Understand what matters to your team, and focus on that.
Tips for success
- Be flexible
- Every team is different, so you need to run these as constant experiments. Keep tweaking the process, changing the order, modifying the format, whatever you need to get the job done in your specific team.
- Go in with a plan
- Think about how many teams need to report, and how much time per person. Work your way backwards and time it. Give each team a core metric to report on, and help them focus on that metric from here on out.
- Always meet, no matter what
- Try to have the discipline to always meet, regardless of who can’t make it. By keeping this cadence, it shows your team how important growth is and the discipline will help to keep growth a priority.
This is a guest post by Pouyan Salehi, CEO and cofounder of PersistIQ. PersistIQ is an all-in-one outbound sales platform aimed to improve workflow throughout the entire sales process.
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