Growth-Driven Design Applies to the WHOLE Revenue Engine

Meet Host, Mary Grothe

Mary Grothe is a former #1 MidMarket B2B Sales Rep who after selling millions and breaking multiple records, formed House of Revenue®, a Denver-based firm of fractional Revenue Leaders who currently lead the marketing, sales, customer success, and RevOps departments for 10 companies nationwide. In the past year, they've helped multiple 2nd stage growth companies between $5M - $20M, on average, double their MRR within 10 months, resulting in an average ROI of 1,454% and an average annual revenue growth eclipsing $3.2 million.

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Mary Grothe: Hey everyone, this is Mary Grothe - Founder and CEO - and you're listening to the Revenue Radio® podcast brought to you by House of Revenue®. Each week, we'll talk about common revenue challenges and how to get past them, share real-world experiences, and get a glimpse into my life as a CEO scaling my own business. If you're a struggling entrepreneur, or just an entrepreneur looking to be inspired, this podcast is for you. I'll give you honest, unfiltered, and practical insights into growing your business and getting past your revenue plateau.

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Today, we're going to get technical again. I want to talk about Growth-Driven Design and what that means. We're a HubSpot Partner. We saw this term through HubSpot, mostly about building websites that convert. I have grown to love the concept of Growth-Driven Design for all things in your Revenue Engine. The fundamental way of understanding GDD is thinking of a V1 or an MVP - a Minimum Viable Product that goes out upon launch. Then, a commitment to iterate and build on top of it as you grow and scale.

We initially learned the concept of Growth-Driven Design, or GDD for short, when we got into the website business at House of Revenue®. It was surprising when we went holistic and stopped just focusing on sales departments and started focusing on the entire revenue ecosystem. We brought on experts in branding and marketing. We have a new website built for every client. We just became a website shop, which was crazy for us. We had an opportunity to really grow our offering.

Charlie, our COO, brought on as a VP of Marketing started to spearhead the project. How do we build websites to get away from why some people might use a $50,000 custom dev site that isn't set up to convert? Then, it's tough for people to edit because it's all custom. That's not revenue engine friendly when you're trying to scale. We thought, "Well, what if we just make this MVP an excellent, powerful site?" It's simple. It will convert because we'll set it up with pathways to conversion, which is what you want in a website.

I started to get passionate about all things GDD. I realized it's not just the website that should have this MVP. It's the entire revenue engine. If the philosophy is that something starts with an MVP, a minimum viable product. Then, the essence of GDD is that you're iterating based on a data feedback loop. What's keeping you from applying that methodology to your entire revenue engine? As a Fractional CRO, that is something that I'm very passionate about.

Many teams will spend months trying to get something to be in a position where they can launch it. They'll put in hundreds of hours in an audit and research phase competitive analysis. They're working with their tech team and product roadmap. They've got their marketing and sales team in the field. They may hire a third party to do some primary market research. They take all of that and put it to the dev team.

They want to build a website. The website project takes six to 12 months. The market probably changed in the last 6 to 12 months. You launch a beautiful website, but the market has already shifted. The competition has already leapfrogged. What's the point? What if you could get the first iteration of that revenue engine specifically from the website or whatever is touching the market for brand awareness? That first touchpoint for conversion. What if that could be launched in a shorter timeframe, like 90 days? Wouldn't that really help the cause?

I look at that, in essence, for the entire revenue engine. The sales playbook and account managers work with a complete marketing cycle - educating clients, upselling them, working towards retention, advocacy, and client incentive programs. Every touchpoint with the customer from that first one with the brand through the marketing engine, sales engine, post-purchase with ops, and customer success. We should have a V1 to roll it out, iterate and go from there. I think it's paralyzing for some people who want to have a perfect product when they roll out something new. It's just it's impossible.

I am finding a new way to holistically report on revenue. I'm working with a company, building out their revenue engine. I cracked a joke this week that I'm on V35 of the dashboard that's only existed for two weeks. They didn't have this before. Well, it would take me 90 days to have a perfect product. I decided to launch it even though there wasn't enough data and history to show a full picture. Even though day by day, week by week, I have new data coming to me that makes me say, "Okay, my metrics were off, going to change the leading indicators. Okay, we've had this for four weeks. We've missed every top-line metric, which means a metric is wrong."

If we're hitting lagging indicators, results, or outcomes, we don't need this big of a leading indicator metric that we need to achieve or whatever that feedback loop might show. This concept of Growth-Driven Design - launching an MVP, getting something out that you're proud of. It might be simple, but then it starts accumulating data. You start getting a feedback loop and say, "All right, let's add this landing page, build another lead magnet, and reach out to this market with a specific piece of collateral - white paper, case study, or checklist. We need to build new outbound sequences. There's one geographic area where what we sell resonates with them differently. We need to tell a different story, set up a new set of sequences, and add it to the sales playbook.

I was coaching some reps this past week. I rolled out all of their outbound sequences and HubSpot for their first two weeks in the field. Then I said, "Okay, you know how to build sequences. You're the one who's in the field. You're talking to customers or potential customers every single day. You're getting a feedback loop. I don't have, so I need you iterating and editing your sequences. I need you to build new ones. If you find that a specific industry needs to use a different vernacular, please create a different sequence specific for that industry that you would enroll people in.

The sales team has wings. They can fly. They can go do this on their own. That's a sales playbook. Two weeks into rolling it out, it's evolved drastically into something new. That is what Growth-Driven Design should be. The marketing website we launched for this specific company we had, we even had to do a V.5 because we couldn't wait for V1. The original website wasn't telling the right story to set up for conversion, so we decided to do a V.5. It's like a landing page with a great inbound funnel. Then, we could pick a date for our V1, which is coming up here, Zoom.

I've got another company that I've had the privilege of working with. I'm going to have the CEO of that company on Revenue Radio® with me in just a week or two. I'm really excited for you to hear her story and learn about this company we've been working on. I know I've been a little vague over the last couple of weeks. Just been talking about the second company that I get to scale. I told you all about Spotz and the backstory on that.

It's been a while since I've been in client work, as you remember in the story. I was out of it. The last time I worked with the client was in 2020. I was focused on scaling House of Revenue® and had my head down. I got bored and said, "Hey, I want to get back scaling companies." So, I joined Spotz as a Fractional CRO and an investor. It has been incredible. I have a second company which I'm a Fractional CRO for. I cannot wait to introduce you to them. You'll get to meet the CFO here in the next two weeks. She's incredible and fun. Anybody who listened to last week's episode about the CFO, I was referencing the CFO of this amazing company.

I want you to know that this is a real, raw, and firsthand experience scaling a company today. This isn't knowledge I had five years ago, and I'm just regurgitating here. I am in the field. I'm in the weeds. As we speak, I am building a live revenue engine and setting a goal to scale a company from 1.5 million to that 3, 5, and 10 million mark. It is tremendous to be on this journey.

Let's sum up Growth-Driven Design (GDD). I fully believe in getting an MVP out to market, whether it's a website, your social media strategy, or your ad strategy. You must stop paralyzing yourself and planning everything to get the perfect thing out. You need to get something out that can start accumulating data, something you can put into play and see how it performs. It's the initial playbook that you prep your sales team with.

You're looking at your dashboard; with all the metrics, lead magnets on your website, and inbound funnels you've created. You did your Customer Success Strategy. Maybe you're rolling out a new account management strategy and getting people who haven't done upselling before now in an upsell role. Whatever it is, you must start somewhere. The longer you spend on planning, it's going to cause potentially that analysis paralysis. It's going to delay your time to market. Get something out. Don't make it soppy to something good. Then, the good out, get the data, evaluate, and iterate.

A great Growth-Driven Design website should be edited three or four times a week. We are constantly revising and iterating our websites at House of Revenue®. The Spotz website at FindSpotz.com probably has version 10 since it launched on the first of April. It's crazy how many iterations, but we're getting a feedback loop. We are just making changes, changes, and changes to enhance the experience on the website and encourage conversion. We would have avoided a ton of conversion had we delayed launching this. What would we be driving traffic to?

You must get something out. Get the feedback loop internally and externally. Please fall in love with your data set. Iterate on your dashboards. Make sure that you are being held accountable to metrics that matter, not metrics for the sake of metrics. That's infuriating. Then iterate, continue to grow, and develop it.

Once you start seeing a consistent pattern in the data consistently exceeding or meeting expectations, just leave it for a minute. You can just chill. Let it perform. You might slow down that cycle of changes and iterations and get more into a monthly process. But while you are in that scaling phase and launching the MVP, no matter what part of the revenue engine is currently an MVP state, you should be in constant iteration.

I hope this helped explain Growth-Driven Design. It's not just for websites; it's for your entire revenue engine. Stay tuned. I will have a fun announcement. I'll have a CFO joining me here in the next week or two, also planting a seed. We have some changes coming to Revenue Radio®. This is very exciting in the evolution of what we're doing at House of Revenue®, what I'm doing as an investor and entrepreneur, and our team. I'm not the only one with stories to tell. I've got the whole brilliant team with revenue scaling strategies and how-tos. You're going to start hearing a lot more from them.

I will take a little more of my non-CEO, non-entrepreneur hat. It's more of the Mary Grothe hat. I have some episodes on Revenue Radio® that are very personal and talk more about just me as a human being and being on this journey in life. We're going to separate that out. You're going to be able to find a little bit more of the personal side of me on a different podcast. Yes, they do. That's going to be launching soon. I've got a whole personal brand in the works right now, so stay tuned.

At Revenue Radio®, we are about to turn up the heat. This is turned into the go-to podcast for all things scaling revenue. We have grown tremendously in downloads and listenership. We've had amazing feedback coming through from the audience. We know it's time to take the podcast to the next level. We love you, our audience. Thank you so much for being loyal and always giving such great feedback. Talk soon.

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Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're interested in being on our show or want to learn more about how we can help you scale your company, connect with us at houseofrevenue.com or with me Mary Grothe spelled G-R-O-T-H-E on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.

Connect with House of Revenue® on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

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