AdRoll, a technology company that specialises in Retargeting, which allows advertisers to buy AD space almost instantaneously based on information such as browsing history, is valued at $1.55bn. Just like Google, AdRoll is already “the most widely used redirection platform in the world.”

Just as in China, people ask you what BAT does what you do, and AdRoll does what Google does, competing in a market with such behemoth is AdRoll’s toughest challenge.

As Aaron Bell, CEO of AdRoll, put it in a startup story: “I’d heard stories about Google killing 100 companies with one small move, so it gave me a preconceived fear that Google could knock us out.”

In order not to be eaten by Google, AdRoll focused on creating differentiated value for its customers, meeting new customer needs repeatedly and quickly, and providing customized solutions that Google couldn’t. Staying calm and sticking to your course during these tough times is now paying off in the long run. Today, AdRoll serves more than 25,000 brands in 150 countries, making it “the most widely used redirection platform in the world.”

In addition to adhering to differentiated values and Quickling, AdRoll’s growth team has also played a big role. Just as Dropbox continued to grow in the years following The launch of Google’s CLOUD Drive, AdRoll beat Google in the same manner. Not by brute force, but by using the best strategy — by relying on growth teams to grow small.

“Pioneers” who rely on growth teams to survive

Usually mention “pioneer” is tragic, because go too far ahead of the result died. But that’s not how Adroll’s playbook was written. It was a pioneer in redirected light technology, but it moved fast, steadily, and beat Google. Today, AdRoll, the redirected advertising technology pioneer, has reached a stage of “scale” growth.

According to Sean Ellis, the father of growth hacking, during the “scale” phase of a tech company, usually after the Product/Market Fit and organic growth phases, attention needs to be focused on optimizing product elements to maximize returns.

The difficult part of growing at this stage is implementing new tools and processes. That could be a challenge for a company the size of AdRoll, which has grown to more than 500 employees. However, AdRoll has done a great job of adopting a new growth regime, an effort that is largely due to one team: the growth team.

Patrick Mee, VP of r&d at AdRoll: The growth team was established to ensure that AdRoll continues to deliver great products to marketers in more regions. As AdRoll’s corporate philosophy, we hope that small and medium business advertisers who use our business will grow with us as we grow ourselves.

The number of sites using AdRoll in each popular site group over time

When Adam Berke (CMO and general manager of AdRoll) first heard about the trend toward “growth teams,” he probably had the same reaction as most people: “Isn’t everyone on the sales and marketing team on the growth team?” And then, of course, I have this question: “And the product managers, aren’t they always thinking about how to increase usage?”

Now that Adam has created his own growth team, he’s more mature about the term “growth team.” The growth team has become a key partner for AdRoll’s marketing team, making it easier for each salesperson and helping to bridge the gap with product managers.

Origins of the growth team

Companies like Airbnb, Facebook, and Uber have popularized the concept of a growth team — a hybrid practice of technical marketers, engineers, analysts, and product designers that work together to create multiplier forces for a business. In short, growth teams solve problems to achieve further growth through a process of trial and analysis. So what is the growth team? How do they work?

What does AdRoll’s growth team do?

Growth teams help improve customer acquisition, retention and revenue by optimizing products and developing new marketing channels. Most organizations have separate departments — such as sales, marketing, and product — that work together to drive growth, but don’t always interact perfectly with each other, and growth teams jump around with rules and fill gaps. Growth teams typically consist of engineers, designers, data scientists, and analysts who constantly validate and try out potential experimental opportunities. For example, while the customer support team is trying to best solve problems that arise, the growth team is thinking about how to solve problems while encouraging customers to sign up by creating supportive trials and applying tools and technologies.

What is the growth team accountable for at AdRoll?

Growth teams do a lot of things to drive growth. Identifying new growth channels and helping to acquire customers is a unique responsibility of the growth team. The discovery of these growth channels may be small details but the impact is profound. For example, when Uber changed the “share” button in its app to “free ride,” it led to a surge in new customers, showing users the value they could get from bringing in new drivers.

The standard unit for growth teams is growth trials, which vary in length, from short to long to as short as a few days. The practice of changing the design of landing pages to determine which factors lead to higher traffic, often called A/B testing, can be considered A growth test. The growth team works towards goals, such as converting website traffic or increasing product registrations through partners. “10x instead of 10%” is a common mantra that straddles growth teams, but it’s important to know that while growth teams aim to achieve incredible results, they often create meaningful growth through incremental change. Therefore, it is also effective for a growth team to focus on a series of 5 percent increases that add up to huge gains. Because the growth team conducts experiments that involve and affect different parts of the business (not just marketing), we expect it to achieve and measure results.

How responsible?

Growth teams often assume responsibility in the form of internal agreements with informal contracts. The department head needs to set expectations that the growth team will significantly change its course of action. Growth teams can work in any department and change whatever they want, but they have SLAs (service license agreements) with the departments they affect. If the growth team fails to provide optimized results, as agreed between the two teams, the pilot scheme will not be adopted and the previous approach will be reverted.

Growth teams are the future of corporate marketing

Growth teams may have originated in Silicon Valley, but their approach to sustainable growth is spreading around the world. Domestic consumer brands such as ConAgra Foods, Tyson Foods and Kellogg have all brought in chief growth officers to drive innovation and align their teams around growth targets. As large companies and startups look for ways to move beyond traditional marketing tools, growth teams will increasingly become the norm, just as product and customer support teams have become the norm.

So, what does your company’s growth team look like?

This article is compiled by Zoran @Shout Technology.

venturebeat.com/2016/11/19/what-the-heck-is-a-growth-team/

tech.adroll.com/blog/adroll/2015/07/27/how-we-built-the-adroll-growth-team.html

techcrunch.com/2016/06/21/to-compete-with-google-think-small/?ncid=mobilenavtrend

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