From a Lead Generation to a Full Funnel Growth profile
Why and how to do the transition?
Hi Growth folks 👋 It’s Pierre-Jean there!
I’m a Growth Manager at BlaBlaCar and share every 2 weeks Growth articles, inspired by the world’s leading scale-ups.
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In today’s edition, we discuss:
🕸️ The Full Funnel vs Lead Generation growth profiles skills maps
🔥 The 3 main benefits of having a Full Funnel Profile
📈 How to up-skill in different growth areas
Let’s go!
➜ Reading time = 5 minutes
🕸️ The Full Funnel vs Lead Generation Growth profiles skills maps
Most Growth people in Europe focus only on the “Lead Generation”, AKA acquisition, part of the funnel. They generally specialize in cold outreach and/or ads.
While lead generation skills might be useful to land a first growth-oriented role, it’s necessary to upskill in other areas at some point. This is particularly true in fast-scaling companies.
Let’s look at two growth profiles skills maps example:
NB: Those are examples of profiles where skills can vary from one person to another.
The Lead Generation Growth profile has strong expertise in acquisition but lacks competencies in other growth areas. He’ll struggle to drive growth over the whole funnel.
The Full Funnel Growth profile has a deep expertise in activation and retention but also has a good knowledge of other growth areas. He’s going to capitalize on his main strengths, but we’ll be able to drive growth with Monetization and Acquisition levers too for example.
Opting to specialize solely in Lead Generation can be a valid career path. However, expanding your skill set is crucial for those aiming for larger growth roles.
More largely, being only specialized in one channel can be a trap. What if a channel starts declining and is no longer relevant? A channel specialization can become irrelevant in a few years.
Hence, the need to develop a larger palette of skills when working on Growth is key.
🔥 The 3 main benefits of having a Full Funnel Profile
1# Holistic vision of growth and the customer journey
Having a full-funnel profile helps to develop a 360° vision of growth, not being limited to one part of the customer journey.
Putting yourself in the customer’s shoes, your experience with a product is not limited to a specific funnel step and you don’t segment things as companies do it.
To guarantee a great experience and identify the growth opportunities that can be hidden everywhere, it’s necessary to have a complete view of the journey and levers.
In addition to that, a holistic view helps to better estimate which experiments and projects have the biggest impact on your bottom line, and then to better focus on the most impactful ones.
2# More levers to drive growth
Being focused on acquisition only limits you to one strategy: better fueling your top of the funnel (either by having more volume or better converting this volume).
While having a strong acquisition engine is key to growth, it’s not the only piece of the puzzle. Working on Activation, Retention and Monetization can help you drive a significant impact too. Incrementally improving each part of the funnel can lead to a big bottom-line impact.
By being more polyvalent, you can drive results through different growth levers, not only one.
Don’t get me wrong: focusing on everything at the same time is generally not doable/relevant. You should choose your battles. But focusing on different areas along the year or quarter to improve Growth, with a defined plan and timelines, is a great way to have a strong impact.
3# More career opportunities and switch possibilities
A full-funnel growth profile has the ability, due to his large skills palette, to better switch from one growth-related role to another. For example, switching from a Growth Marketing role to a Product Growth role will be much easier when you already have a good knowledge of Activation and Monetization topics.
Having a full-funnel profile is also a great asset when it comes to leadership roles. Head of or VP Growth need to be able to solve several challenges over the whole customer journey. A big part of their day-to-day work is also in collaborating with other teams (Product, Customer Care…), then understanding their domains is key to working with them on driving growth.
📈 How to up-skill in different growth areas
Practice at work
The best way to acquire competencies in a specific area of growth is to work on a project related to it. Either by proactively building it or by proposing to contribute to an existing project. It should be aligned with the company priorities, but people generally love to get support on their projects, and having your help refused is rare.
Proposing my help on different interesting projects outside of my defined scope has been key for me to develop several new skills and progress.
Doing this necessitates going outside of your comfort zone and working on projects where you, at the beginning, probably don't have all the skills needed. But that’s the necessary path to grow.
Build relationships with different teams
To have a holistic vision, discussing and working with other teams is a must. It helps to collaborate on cross-functional projects, share visions and feedback, and understand each other priorities.
It’s a great way to find allies and better understand how your company grows globally.
A simple monthly or bi-weekly call or a coffee/lunch with people from other teams to build bridges is drastically helping do it
You can proactively propose to do it. People appreciate it in most cases.
Learn from your peers
Discussing with peers, especially growth profiles already having a full-funnel skillset, is another simple yet efficient manner to learn new skills, but also be inspired by how they arrived at a specific job role or achieved some business results.
I generally try to have 2-3 networking calls or drinks per month with other growth folks. Every time I do it, I always learn interesting things about their journey, their skills and their profile that I can be inspired by.
More globally, it helps you build your network with like-minded people.
You can propose proactively to people to discuss, but also make sure to accept solicitations when people reach out to you.
Consume top-notch content
Finally, consuming content about marketing, product and revenue growth regularly is an efficient technique to acquire a deeper knowledge of different areas.
There is a bunch of really good content everywhere on the internet, with multiple formats (newsletters, podcasts, videos…).
Find one or two formats that best suit your learning style and make sure to consume what interests you weekly.
For example, I consume mainly newsletters in the morning during my breakfast and podcasts when I’m going for a run. I built a habit around it, making it regular and effortless.
That’s all for today folks. Hope you liked this edition! See you in 2 weeks for the next one 👋
If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to share it in the comments or answer by email (I read everything).
Thanks for the great content once again.
Could you recommend any B2B growth/marketing podcasts? I'm having trouble finding my favorites among the many options available.