🔦 Spotlight - Definitions
In this article I walk you through why definitions unlock business growth
Every experienced Biz Ops person that I know has gone through a similar situation: team A comes to you with an issue. Team B has a point of view.. that team A should be doing this and that. Team A disagrees. Chaos ensues. A biz ops person steps in as an “arbiter”, only to figure out the root cause of the dispute is a definition of one or more of the building blocks of the issue. Fix the definition = fix the issue. Done.
When I talk to peers about “definitions” and being an “arbiter” they think of legal matters. And yes, in previous tech roles legal teams were my best friends. At Uber I brought them in early on a strategy project because they could set the guardrails (remember the employee or not so employee legal battles?); at WeWork I brought them in because they could help us do business in new types of product lines; at Hopin I brought them in when we were entering a new territory, often full of unknown unknowns. I have loved working with my legal teams! Why? Read on…
Every single time we were faster, stronger, and more efficient because we were crystal clear about our definitions. Definitions of everything.
If you are a little OCD like me, being awfully precise with definitions is how you work. But I find details matter for faster and more accurate decision-making.
Want to analyse your marketing effectiveness? Get the definitions for your messages straight. Want to analyse your sales funnel? Get the definitions of your funnel steps straight. Want to analyse usage of your product? Yes, you guessed it: get the behaviour definitions straight.
What I mean by straight I mean three things:
conceptually distinct
building a holistic picture
measurable
Now that we know what a definition entails, why do I claim it leads to growth?
Let’s take the sales funnel example. You have a well defined funnel if the definitions of the steps in your funnel show with high confidence who is in there, what do they care about, and what are their blockers to buy. If you define the steps, you can test how to help move them along the funnel. And that.. is growth!
Build a qualification tree, with milestones you can’t go back on, and focus your effort on the upside:
🌳THE QUALIFICATION TREE: break down all of the steps - from landing on your web site, to signing a deal. Build the tree and its branches - that’s customers who are within a step, or are dormant, or are disqualified. The qualification steps should follow a logical journey, with escalating commitment and engagement on the lead’s part. Each step can have multiple buckets (i.e. you could qualify people through various channels) but again, they should be fully MECE.
The steps’ definitions are distinct, and build a holistic picture.
🗿THE MILESTONES: draw out what you know about your potential customers at each point. When do you know they are a recorded lead, then an ICP; when do we know these ICPs know what to do in our product. They can get to a specific milestone through various channels. Once they reach a milestone, if they were to go dormant or get disqualified, we could nurture them back to that point.
All customers should live in one, and only one, bucket at a time.
🧗🏼♂️THE UPSIDE: you need to know where to focus. Put numbers to the funnel: absolute numbers and conversion rates. Then, modelling which conversion rates would obtain the biggest change on the bottom line, you get clear view of which step you should tackle first.
Model the tree and see which branch needs water to grow your tree!
Then the fun part begins! Proactively you can decide when you want to do an outreach and have potential customers “skip a step” or two. You can run experiments. You can play with your sales model. You can do this with confidence because you are crystal clear about who you target, why, and what you test to move them along the funnel.
Without a definition, you got no funnel, you got no movement through it, and no growth.
And a thank you to all the legal teams who have worked with me over the years!
To continue the conversation, connect with me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ignatova/