GrowthHackersHandbook SalesforceEdition

T H E
The Growth
Hacker's Handbook
Salesforce Edition
G R O W T H
H A C K E R ’ S
Columbia Road
H A N D B O O K
The Growth
Hacker's Handbook
Salesforce Edition
Columbia Road
2019
Editors
Patricia Åkerman,
Pirkka Kaijanen
Photography
Nick Tulinen,
Francisco Delgado
COLUMBIA ROAD Design

columbiaroad.com Ramsankar
Edition 4/2019 Muraleedharan
Contents
1 INTRODUCTION
Prologue 8
Our definition of growth hacking — it’s holistic! 10
2 HOW TO ACHIEVE DIGITAL GROWTH
Growth hacking is the new agile 14
Growth hacking is how to run a digital business 20
Every business needs a growth owner 24
Growth hacking is not the silver bullet 31

3 PLANNING AND PREPARING FOR GROWTH HACKING
Budgeting for digital growth 36
The overlooked and misunderstood:

customer-centricity and customer lifetime value 40
Customer Data Platform — a revenue engine or

just another buzzword? 46
Columbia Road’s growth hacking model

for marketing 54
4 GROWTH HACKING IN ACTION
A three-step CLV focused channel strategy 60
Use growth hacking methods to elevate your

marketing automation 66
Optimising conversions in customer acquisition 72
Optimising conversions in digital sales channels 78
Three growth hacking business cases

for B2B context 83
How to create a digital age B2B buying experience 92
Epilogue: growth hacking with Salesforce 97
Tools for growth 102
Contact us 103
1
Introduction
8 THE GROWTH HACKER'S HANDBOOK
PROLOGUE
YOU MIGHT WONDER why we felt the need to create an edition of

the popular Growth Hacker’s Handbook from the perspective of a
certain technology.
In the original 2019 edition of the Growth Hacker’s Handbook

Professor Risto Sarvas from Aalto University set the scene by
stating that growth hacking is the way to run a modern digital
business. It is the natural way to create digital businesses and
business models. And it is also the way to advance the digitalisation
agenda in a concrete way by focusing on business results.
The reason why we wanted to share learnings from the perspec-
tive of the leading customer engagement technology, Salesforce,
is because we feel that companies should have a clearer focus on
growth and impact when investing into digital business ventures.
The message of our Growth Hacker’s Handbook has found its way
on the agenda of most progressive companies. With this edition of
the book, we want to help companies make sure they get the most
out of their current or future investments into Salesforce.
The digitalisation of sales is not about building tools and solutions

but rather it should be about building a profitable and growing
digital business.
At the same time, we need technology to enable growth. Plat-
forms like Salesforce which are geared toward customer expe-
rience and engagement are tools that fit the growth initiatives
perfectly. Still, on itself, technology is only an enabler. We must
push ourselves to make sure we are putting the technology to work.
To generate growth.
In the early days of customer relationship management, some com-

panies focused on hoarding customer data without really utilising
the data. Similarly, we must be sure that we are not creating great
solutions for the sake of having a solution, but that we are harness-
ing it for a continuous and growing business impact.
I NTRODUCTION 9
We believe that today’s digital marketers, designers, developers and

ecommerce shopkeepers are the saleswomen and men of the dig-
ital world. The main goal of this Salesforce edition of the Growth
Hacker’s Handbook is to challenge all modern salespeople to
focus our work efforts into creating amazing, concrete and every-
day increasing results via continuous improvement, analysis and
optimisation of all the digital channels - regardless of your title
being a software developer, program manager, product owner or
business development manager.
So go on, be a true trailblazer and continue to push yourself towards

greater impact!
OUR DEFINITION OF
GROWTH HACKING —
IT’S HOLISTIC!
Eero Martela
THERE CAN BE VARIOUS DEFINITIONS for the term ‘growth hacking.’

For example, people who come from marketing, typically have a
marketing point-of-view on the topic. And for small entrepreneurs,
growth hacking can be more about tips and tricks for acquiring
more users and conversions.
We, in business and in this book, have a holistic approach for
addressing the topic. The aim of this book is to provide the reader
with an understanding of all possible means through which an
organisation can benefit from growth hacking.
Basically, the impact of growth hacking can be split into four levels:
1 GROWTH CULTURE AND MINDSET
In short, growth hacking is all about getting shit done. It requires

a distinctive mindset of constantly identifying and testing growth
opportunities — and having the ownership and empowerment to
push for growth in a particular context. Growth mindset can take
place on an individual, team or organisational level, where it ulti-
mately becomes a growth culture.
2 WAYS OF WORKING
The core of growth hacking is a certain way of working, including

the team’s roles, responsibilities, and skill sets as well as certain
processes and practices that are applied. This is where the verb
‘growth hacking’ typically refers to. The context can be basically
anything: Growth hacking ways of working can be applied to soft-
ware development, marketing, service design, product launches,
strategy, and content, to name a few.
I NTRODUCTION 11
3 OPERATING AND ORGANISING AROUND DIGITAL SERVICES
Successful growth hacking requires that certain kind of teams

are in place. Those teams should have clear ownership of what
they are doing as well as resources (i.e. budget) for perform-
ing the required activities. So, shortly put, in an organisational
setting growth hacking requires certain ways of organising and
operating. Getting these right from the start are the key enablers
of digital growth.
4 GROWTH HACKING ACTIVITIES AND HACKS
On a hands-on level, growth hacking consists of various activ-

ities. Only creativity is the limit here. For inspiration, go to your
browser and search for ‘growth hacking tips’ — you’ll find plenty to
start with.
2
How to Achieve
Digital Growth
GROWTH HACKING IS
THE NEW AGILE
Eero Martela
WHY AND WHEN TO DO GROWTH HACKING?
Agile development practices, user experience focus and service de-

sign are great approaches for creating digital services and features
customers love. Those traditional software development practices
are great for developing high-quality software and customer expe-
rience, but they are not fully optimised for an environment where
software is a core source of continuous revenue.
HOW TO ADD THE REVENUE LAYER INTO AGILE

AND CUSTOMER-CENTRIC SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT?
The set of solutions are called growth hacking. Growth hacking

practices can be applied in three different situations:
In the first situation, you might be running a business, service
or revenue channel, which happens to have a digital context; for
example a webshop, online portal, mobile application, SaaS prod-
uct, or in-store sales tool. In this case, the focus should be on
activities that improve sales instead of merely building features
and performing pre-planned campaigns. Marketing and develop-
ment should be deeply interdependent instead of being separate
activities.
A second scenario could be with you building and scaling new
sources of digital revenue; for example, online services, mobile
apps or digital products. Here, tangible revenue impact should be
sought as soon as possible. And customer acquisition and digi-
tal marketing should be integrally included in the development
already at early stages. Following the first release, each backlog
item should focus on growth.
HOW TO ACHIEVE DIGITAL GROWTH 15
Thirdly, your focus may lie in constructing digital backend capabil-

ities that enable enhanced revenue generation in digital channels
and services; for example customer data platforms, customer rela-
tionship management, and API gateways.
With these capabilities, rather than first building enormous back-

end solutions with multiple integrations, you should instead create
each solution, one vertical at a time. In other words, test with one
use case at the front-end with minimal backend capabilities, data
and integrations.
A GROWTH TEAM IS THE CORE OF GROWTH HACKING
The core of growth hacking is a cross-disciplinary team, which is

motivated by shared business goals and strong ownership with a
mandate to make independent decisions. So, instead of building
software and strictly focusing on marketing tasks, the team owns
a business function (i.e. a product, service, customer segment, or
business unit) and related business targets.
For growth hacking to work, the team must collaborate seam-
lessly and sit in one shared room. Typically, a team consists of
software developers, (digital) marketers, UX designers, and data
16 THE GROWTH HACKING PROCESS LOOP THE GROWTH HACKER'S HANDBOOK
KPIS
GROWTH
NEW GROWTH
SPRINT
OPPORTUNITIES
BUSINESS
OBJECTIVES
MARKETING
TECHNOLOGY
STRATEGY
DESIGN
Scale &
automate
Growth
backlog
NEW GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES FINDING TRACTION
Days to Weeks Weeks to Months
1 Continuous identification of 2 Business case-based backlog

new growth opportunities — or task list, which is updated
through data analysis, on a weekly basis. Each
interviews, surveys, business backlog item is a ‘growth
model analysis, micro- opportunity,’ which can
segmentation, etc. involve software development,
marketing, service design,
copywriting, UI design,
process improvement, partner
collaboration — anything
required for achieving growth.
17
NEW GROWTH NEW GROWTH

OPPORTUNITIES OPPORTUNITIES
Scale &
automate
Scale &
automate
Kill & learn
Kill & learn
Kill & learn DATA
CONTINUOUS GROWTH HACKING

INSIGHTS
Months to Years
3 Rapid incremental 4 Constant data-based business

implementation — each release impact measurement —
has to validate the business and scale or kill decisions
case further and generate for growth tests based on
revenue (or validate revenue the results.
potential). Each release is
5 Re-iteration of backlog and
treated as a test that validates
the service based on data.
the growth opportunity —
A/B testing is crucial.
analysts. In addition, a growth owner looks after the whole picture,

pushing tasks forward within the organisation and stakeholders. In
order to reach the business targets, the team should oversee driving
the growth hacking process.
Matti Liski from Elisa, one of the largest telecommunications com-

panies in Finland, has experience in what it means to pull leader-
ship onto your side.
“We’d had the digital sales team up and running for a few years
and we were at a situation where we had made some gains, but not
at the level that was expected. So, we reorganised, made a pilot
proposal for management and were given three months to make it
work. We selected a few of the ideas we had in mind to increase
sales on our website and started experimenting. Within the first

month, we’d found and tested enough concrete improvements
that would cover the costs of our pilot. After that, we quickly got
enough internal buy-in to ensure the continuation of our work,”
says Matti Liski.
WHY A GROWTH HACKING PROCESS INSTEAD OF

A STATIC RELEASE PLAN?
Foreseeing what kind of solutions and features will increase rev-

enue is practically impossible — this goes for anything between
small UI tweaks and radical new product launches. In fact, we have
seen that most of the small improvements that were predicted to
have a positive sales impact actually fail.
Unfortunately, all too often we have seen the same logic
take place with large software projects, for example, renewing an
ecommerce platform, which ends up having no effect on sales.
If predicting the impact of a small tweak is difficult, how can you
be certain of the business case of a large project? Therefore, growth
hack your way forward with constant small revenue increments in
order to produce a fast impact on revenue, reach the target busi-
ness case earlier, minimise investment risk, and have more moti-
vated teams due to higher ownership.
And still, never forget agile ways of working, customer experience

focus, and holistic service design principles. Just bring the revenue
layer on top of them.
GROWTH HACKING IS
HOW TO RUN A DIGITAL BUSINESS
Eero Martela
LEAD YOUR DIGITAL REVENUE GROWTH ALWAYS BUSINESS-FIRST
What’s the best way to generate digital growth? It’s a question more
and more people want an answer to. Traditionally, the solution has
been building new expensive digital solutions and features. How-
ever, in our experience, the achievable, low-hanging-fruit solution
is to run and launch your digital businesses in modern ways. Here’s
our illustration of the rationale behind our claim:
Revenue from
An ever- Your digital service
digital channels is
increasing share of development and
dependent on digital
companies’ revenue sales funnels need
service development
is acquired through to be optimised for
and customer journey
digital channels revenue growth
optimisation
How? The solution: From a leadership point of view, growth hacking

is a state-of-the-art approach for operating and developing your
digital services business-first. Simply put, growth hacking is the
universal best practice for acquiring more revenue and more cus-
tomers in digital channels.
BUT MY DIGITAL SALES ARE GROWING NICELY

WITH AN OLD-SCHOOL APPROACH!
The sales of traditional businesses are run with, for example, nu-
merous retail stores or huge teams of sales representatives, which
are supported by a marketing team. In that setting, digital sales

typically consist of an IT platform (owned by IT, run by vendor)
which is supported by digital marketing (owned by marketing, run
by agency). Often an ecommerce manager is responsible for driving
sales, but through emailing with a multitude of vendors and having
to continuously negotiate with internal stakeholders about budget,
resources, products etc.
Is this kind of a setting optimised for reaching snowball-
effect-like revenue growth? Not really. Your digital sales may be
growing, however, in many cases it’s not because you’re doing a
great job, but due to a rapid change in the market or purchasing
behaviour of the customer. In fact, your digital sales numbers might
be somewhere just behind the industry’s standard for share of
revenue from online sales.
GROWTH HACKING IS A METHOD FOR FOCUSING ON

CONTINUOUS DIGITAL REVENUE GROWTH
When applying growth hacking methods, you replace all tradi-

tional structures with a team of data-enthusiastic developers, UX
designers and digital marketers who have a full profit and loss
ownership of your digital sales and related customer journeys —
including a shared budget. Instead of focusing on their own silos,
each individual of the team collaborates at every touchpoint of
the whole customer journey in order to meet or exceed a shared
business goal.
Growth hacking is the common denominator for practices and
processes through which this team should optimally operate.
Now, you might be wondering if that’s really the case. At least

the first digital success stories, such as LinkedIn, Zalando,
Amazon, and Spotify, operate their digital businesses this way.
More importantly, we’ve recently seen numerous, forward-thinking
clients adopting these operating practices as well — and reaping
the rewards.
“
Growth hacking
is both a mindset
and a proven
way of conducting
performance-
driven business.
— Eero Martela
EVERY BUSINESS NEEDS

A GROWTH OWNER
Krista Palmu
A GROWTH OWNER DRIVES GROWTH HACKING

IN AN ORGANISATION
As mentioned in our definition, growth hacking has an holistic

impact on an organisation. It stems from the organisational culture,
gets re-enforced by the company’s vision and goals, is actualised
by concrete, hands-on activities, and drives business results and
revenue. Growth hacking is both a mindset and a proven way of
conducting performance-driven business. Essentially, it brings
about monetary (direct) and non-monetary (indirect) business
outcomes. All actions are guided by higher-level business goals
that all growth team members acknowledge and strive to fulfil
in practice.
Growth hacking places the customer at the center of all
work. By doing so, growth hacking is a powerful way of seeking
revenue growth — either through acquiring new customers or
strengthening the relationship with existing customers. Herein,
a multitude of tactics can be employed depending on the client
stage, including A/B testing, search engine marketing (SEM),
social media marketing (SMM), or marketing automation (MA). Refer
back to our growth hacking model for marketing [p.52] for further
details on the optimisation of the growth hacking funnel.
The role of a growth owner is to identify new business
opportunities, guide and continuously prioritise growth ideas (a list
of items called the backlog), and ensure that all stakeholders are
heard along the way. Especially in the context of ecommerce, the
extended role of a growth owner involves talking with development,
design (UI/UX, visuals), content, marketing, and teams: bringing all
separate streams together to form a single entity, where everybody
speaks the same language and works towards a shared goal.
Thus, a growth owner not only strives to identify bottlenecks for

digital sales, but also works on increasing collaboration throughout
the entire sales funnel. Moreover, a growth owner ensures that
fast-paced, customer-oriented, data-driven growth hacking meth-
ods and a minimum viable product approach (MVP) are followed in
order to gather instant feedback and eventually bring about rapid
growth in sales.
As growth hacking strives to produce both tactical and strategic
results, it should be considered as an integral part of the entire
organisation and other functions. These functions, to name a
few, may be IT, marketing, and business development. Essentially,
a growth owner should be the glue holding the different units
together — and even better, converges different business units to
avoid a siloed approach altogether.
Equipped with data, a growth owner can make or provide justi-
fied recommendations and business insights to top management.
WHEN SHOULD I GET A GROWTH OWNER?
The pursuit for growth becomes central to a company, when a

product-market-fit has been established. In other words, there’s
a fine line in getting into growth hacking mode too early in the de-
velopment process of a new service or start-up. Whereas a growth
mindset should be prevalent from the very first stages of service
development, actual growth hacking activities and its fruits are
best to be reaped only after proven initial customer validation and
market traction.
Growth hacking introduces a systematic, cross-functional way
of working and enabling growth. It involves looking at an identified
problem or bottleneck from various viewpoints, gathering feedback,
and iterations in order to find the best possible way forward. Fun-
damentally, building, measuring, and learning through small growth
experiments or sprints becomes a common way of conducting busi-
ness. Typically, this type of approach is needed, when a company
faces challenges, such as the launch of a new product, service,
channel, or market, stagnancy in sales, increased sales targets,

lack or ambiguity of growth means, and the need to rapidly justify
growth opportunities or change daily working practices.
Growth hacking allows for rapid reaction times, feedback, deci-
sions, and results. It can help the company overcome certain strug-
gles, such as IT, marketing, business unit-specific, or process and
IT architecture related challenges. Growth hacking — in the best
case — provides answers to some of the very fundamental ques-
tions and problems undermining a company’s growth, such as re-
lease cycles, DevOps, new software, control, budget, commerciali-
sation, customer lifetime value, and core operations.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF HAVING A GROWTH OWNER?
The role of a growth owner involves overseeing actual growth

hacking activities and collaborating with a range of stakeholders
(internal and external) in order to create the best foundation for
success. In the best-case scenario, a growth owner ensures that
the sales funnel is optimised both from a strategic, technical, and
design perspective, relevant webshop and marketing technologies
and tactics are utilised, and growth hacking is understood and
fully recognised as the key business driver in upper management.
This involves seeking to either change or foster the organisational
structures, culture and attitudes — or ways of doing business.
It is paramount that the growth team is placed in a central po-
sition in the company, and its efforts should be valued. This means
that the growth team — involving the growth owner — should have
both the mandate and autonomy to act as well as have budget
to fulfil those actions. Without one or the other, growth efforts
are likely to go to waste. The removal of all friction between de-
partments and unnecessary hierarchy is needed for growth hacking
efforts to be truly actualised and its benefits to be greatly realised.
Moreover, in an optimal scenario, the growth team should consist
of multiple roles and disciplines, thus being cross-functional at
heart. Besides having key people from its own company being part
of the growth team, the team may — and should — be extended to

include key members from all vendors and other partner organisa-
tions. Thus, in addition to the core growth team, the growth team
might rather become a growth network, where expertise can be
leveraged to the fullest.
When executed with the help of a dedicated team and a passion-
ate, driven growth owner, growth hacking can lead to an efficient
and flexible way of conducting business: identification, validation,
and execution of growth opportunities in a very short timeframe.
Growth hacking helps to understand a company’s growth potential,
growth trajectory, customer experience, and ecommerce and web-
site possibilities better. It should applied for building the capabili-
ties of digital sales both in-house and with partners in the context
of a larger growth network.
Growth hacking that is conducted in an ongoing manner instead
of a single stint can enable an even more steady growth operating
model and culture (“the bedrock”) and bring more focus to the
ways of working. While being guided by company strategy and vision
(“the North Star”), growth hacking introduces increasingly more
data-driven, lean experimentation methods to daily work with the
purpose of improving digital sales. Essentially, it involves learning
by doing and understanding real customer needs. Growth hacking
introduces or re-enforces a strong growth culture, tools, and ways
of working. It allows for better marketing ROI, overall measurability
of actions, increase in ecommerce sales, and more successful cus-
tomer retention.
NO GROWTH OWNER, NO GROWTH
Business growth should be a collaborative effort of various parties.

Without growth hacking practices or a growth owner in place, an
organisation is likely to miss out on profitable business opportuni-
ties that otherwise go unnoticed. In other words, taking on a full-
time growth hacking team and a growth owner, the company can
safeguard itself against stagnant, non-innovative, instinct-driven
behaviour and decision-making. Having a growth owner ensures

that you’re alert to changes in the business environment and are
continuously evaluating all possible venues of revenue.
Oftentimes, it is exactly the cumulative small wins that make a
bigger impact. Constantly optimising your ecommerce sales based
on data and analytics as well as monitoring and further improving
the digital sales channels based on customer expectations and to-
wards improved customer experience. Massive breakthroughs, such
as industry dominance, don’t typically occur overnight. Rather, they
require blood, sweat and tears: hard dedication and an on-going
growth path instead of pursuing quick wins in the hopes of breaking
through big time.
By starting investing in growth hacking now, small victories can be

reaped already tomorrow. Like the saying goes, it’s not the destination,
it’s the journey. Taking the first step is always the hardest but most
certainly rewarding. The impact of growth hacking is multifaceted,
and its results last for a long, long time.
GROWTH HACKING IS
NOT THE SILVER BULLET
Antton Ikola
MANY OF THE ACTIVITIES organisations participate in to increase

sales and improve customer experience are not best described as
growth hacking, even though the actual activities might be mod-
ern, optimal, and relevant for growth. We, as constant explorers of
new ways to grow digital businesses, should not limit ourselves too
much on terms.
On a practical level, growth hacking is all about doing rapid ex-
perimentations to grow revenue or acquire customers. By definition,
this contrasts an approach where growth is achieved by patiently
crafting experiences, brand and meaning.
The terms are ambiguous, have slightly different meanings on
different levels and are interpreted differently by people (if you
want to know Columbia Road’s definition, refer to [p.14]). On the
other hand, growth hacking is not a patch to put on any type of ac-
tivity that is not actually directly focused on revenue impact.
IT’S ABOUT THE BUSINESS —

NOT THE TOOLS
Growth hacking itself tries to challenge the traditional thinking

of “everything that can be digitalised — will.” Instead of build-
ing solutions for the sake of digitalisation, it aims at directing the
spotlight on actual measurable business impact for business.
However, growth hacking is not a one-size-fits-all solution for dig-
ital growth. Putting too much emphasis on growth hacking and
diving too much into the details of it can all too easily lead to
Maslow’s Hammer problem: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only
tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
(Maslow’s Hammer)
GROWTH HACKING IS ABOUT SOLVING PROBLEMS
The truth is, many business problems can be solved without build-
ing anything. Services and products do not function in a vacuum.
Rather, they are parts to a bigger journey. For example, we can think
of a simple customer service situation. What makes a service fail?
Where is the weakest link? In these technology-driven times the
problem is this: We might be more eager to deploy chatbots on our
websites instead of deeply understanding our customers’ problems
and the context that they use our products and services in.
BALANCE FAST EXPERIMENTATIONS WITH

A BROAD UNDERSTANDING
Even if growth hacking would have an immediate business impact,

it’s important to understand that some things may take a few
years to show results. Broad understanding requires a broader
range of research methods than web or customer analytics data.
We need to be ready to go out there and ask about customers’
motivations and whether we have prototypes or just plain paper as
the first build.
However, what growth hacking must give to development
requiring longer cycles, is the mindset of rapid experimentation.
While patiently, for example, building an identity for your service,
it does not harm to keep in mind all the time, how any sub-items
could be experimented and validated as well as what tiny pieces
of your work could help you to reach some business goals already
next week or month.
BALANCE EASY TRANSACTIONS WITH BRAND AND MEANING
It is important to understand that tools that are included in a growth

hacker’s toolbox, such as conversion rate optimisation, are not a sil-
ver bullet solution and have their limitations. While these tools can
provide actual data about what works for getting more online tran-
sactions, they will always fall short of explaining why a specific
something works. A/B-testing tools allow you to only know what
you can measure, and even measuring has its limitations. At the end
of the day, doing things that you cannot measure matters as well.
What we’ve learned in our growth hacking teams early on is
that a conversion optimisation approach cannot replace the needs
for differentiation and conscious creation of meaning for the end-
customer. Creativity and data must work hand in hand. What makes
the difference to the traditional advertisement world? Having the
world-view, you are presenting to your potential customers results
that have been validated with real data and in real-time.
3
Planning and Preparing
for Growth Hacking
BUDGETING FOR
DIGITAL GROWTH
Sampo Hämäläinen
THE HUMAN MIND IS SIMPLE. People tend to allocate money to tangible

things like products or development projects with clear delivera-
bles. However, before you release your sales channel, product or
service, it produces zero revenue for your company and you can
only guess what the potential ROI might be.
Investing in growth is the opposite. There is a lot of uncertainty
of what the tangible outcome will be and, instead, you will con-
stantly act towards impact on revenue and ROI.
Why is it so much easier to invest in building than growing?
THE BIG PICTURE:

TACTICAL AND ENABLING GROWTH INVESTMENTS
In many cases, we have seen companies make large investments

in renewing, for example, complete ecommerce ecosystems or
marketing automation solutions due to legacy technology. Because
that’s how you’re supposed to play the game today.
However, these are investments in assets and capabilities rather
than growth itself. Many times these investments are indeed nec-
essary, but presuming that a new online sales channel or marketing
platform will automatically generate sales for you is an assumption
you do not want to make.
You need to invest in actual sales. The massive revenue potential

of these kinds of investments that keep you waiting for results, for
months or years, make you feel like you are investing in sales.
As a solution, we often advise our clients to map their
digital sales resources and investments into two levels: tactical
and enabling.
PLANNING AND PREPARING FOR GROWTH HACKING 37
€ €
Launch / Release Launch / Release
Revenue
Investment
Revenue Investment
INVESTING IN DEVELOPMENT INVESTING IN GROWTH

PROJECTS
Investing in traditional development projects vs. investing in growth
1 TACTICAL LEVEL
Continuous growth activities, which typically aim at attracting more

customers, converting them more efficiently, up and cross-selling
to increase average purchase and avoiding churn. The scope would
be a newly launched or current service or solution.
2 ENABLING LEVEL
Constructing building blocks that are enablers of revenue, while

the investment in these does not directly impact sales or there is a
major gap between investment and revenue accumulation.
Very often, most of the resources (including internal and external

people) are allocated into the enabling level, which do not generate
direct revenue. Enablers are of course needed, however harvesting
the revenue potential of those investments should be driven by ac-
tual growth teams, not by IT vendors, as is too often the mentality.
Make sure to invest enough on tactical growth that brings in the
revenue — often the optimal level of tactical investment is on par
with the enabling investment.
SALES
DATA MARKETING CONTENT
CHANNELS
Inbound
Conversion campaigns Tactical
optimisation and Web, app campaign
Lead generation
and digital content, landing
TACTICAL A/B testing
marketing Productisation pages, email
Up-selling and analytics bundles marketing,
cross-selling and pricing SEM & Display
experiments
Customer and Campaigns

Data Management focusing on Informative/
Ecommerce Platforms brand static content
ENABLING platform (CDP, DMP, CRM) awareness as a part of
development Sales & marketing core service
Brand
architecture guidelines
development
Examples of growth investments on tactical and enabling levels
SALES
DATA MARKETING CONTENT
CHANNELS
TACTICAL One growth budget per service or sales channel
Campaign and
ENABLING Project budgets Project budgets Content budget
brand budgets
Budgeting on tactical and enabling levels of growth requires different approaches

BUDGETING FOR TACTICAL GROWTH
The core of tactical growth level are cross-functional growth teams,

whose KPIs are driven by sales revenue for their particular con-
tent — no matter if they are developers, copywriters or analysts. A
well-tuned growth engine is also your best insurance for down-turn
economy; sales and marketing cannot stop, but the engine must be
efficient.
For growth teams to operate efficiently, it’s critical that all their
work come from a single budget. This budget should be free from
detailed plans and roadmaps. Where the budget is used should be
decided on a weekly basis based on what activities at any given time
are able to most positively affect the key metrics. The activities
funded from this budget may be anything between software devel-
opment, advertisements, marketing, content and customer care.
Budgeting tactical growth activities from various different tabs
means challenges. As an example, all too often we have faced
situations, where our client has set up a growth team, but the digi-
tal advertising budget has been handled by another unit and, there-
fore, the hands of the growth team are tied regarding customer
acquisition and awareness.
Finally, tactical growth activities can be utilised to validate
enabling investments. We, for example, have created manually
written sales emails that looked like automated ones, in order to
test whether personalised email marketing was something our
client should invest in. After A/B testing the copy text with enough
iterations, we reached a high enough email-to-purchase conversion
rate to validate our hypothesis that investing in lightweight market-
ing automation would improve sales efficiency.
THE OVERLOOKED AND

MISUNDERSTOOD:
CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY AND
CUSTOMER LIFETIME VALUE
Lauri Eurén
COMPANIES OFTEN STATE they’re customer-centric, but a quick look

under the hood quite often reveals spurious activities that are far
from actual customer-centricity. Companies might use customer-
base-wide averages to form their strategy on and end up trying to
feed a generic brand message to all their customers, or they might
be valuing each customer’s opinion equally disregarding customer
heterogeneity, and that not all customers’ feedback simply is as
valuable as some others’.
In reality, all customers are different, and no customers are cre-
ated equal. Some customers are good, some are worse, and there’s
only so much a company can do to try to turn the less valuable
customers into better ones. Some customers are bargain hunters,
and some just spend more on average, without an excessive need
to nurture the relationship. The solution is to try to optimise the
business based on the needs of those customers, who’ll likely be
the ones bringing in the most profit in the long term. On top of only
being able to retain those customers, it evidently means to be able
to locate them and to acquire them.
FIND YOUR FUTURE BEST CUSTOMERS
The future best customers are the ones with the highest custom-
er lifetime value (CLV). Customer lifetime value can be considered
the present value of all variable profits and costs attributed to a
customer, including customer acquisition cost. To put more simply,
it’s the customer’s historical and future revenues subtracted by all
the costs attributed to the customer. Essentially, it is an estimate

of the customer’s value to the company, and it can tell us whether
it turned out to be profitable to acquire the customer or not and
by what margin. Here, the important thing is to understand that the
concept of CLV is predictive, and not simply a historical value. CLV
takes into account the potential future purchases of customers.
DO YOU HAVE AN UNDERSTANDING OF YOUR CUSTOMERS' CLV?
Understanding CLV on an individual level is something every com-

pany should try to strive toward. For instance, having an estimate of
CLV on individual level enables companies to divide customers into
groups based on their actual value to the company. This is wonder-
fully helpful in decision-making, as it becomes easier to allocate
resources to nurture the high CLV customers and to free resources
from activities that likely will not turn relationships profitable in
the long run.
Additionally, CLV can act as an upper boundary for customer ac-
quisition cost, as you surely would want for the customer relation-
ship to be profitable. Also, the sum of CLVs can even act as a proxy
for the valuation of a business. If one thinks about it, a business is
only as valuable as the future cash flows of all the customers (on
top of the cash flows of the yet-to-be-acquired customers).
CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY DOES NOT MEAN THAT

EVERY CUSTOMER IS IMPORTANT
Understanding CLV is mandatory for practising a customer-centric

strategy. Customer-centricity is a probability game, where compa-
nies try to invest in the customers who’ll bring in profits even years
after the acquisition. If you knew the CLV of all your customers, is
there something you would do differently?
The difficulty of acquiring future best customers lies in the fact
that only a fraction of acquired customers will actually have a rel-
atively high CLV. Generally, the Pareto principle applies in the profit
distribution of customers, meaning that “20% of customers bring in
80% of profit”. Many times the distribution is even more exaggerated,
as in some businesses 1% of customers may bring in 99% of profit.
Number of
customers
Customer lifetime value
Generally, this is what the value distribution of customers look like:

there are very few high CLV customers (on the right), as opposed to
the low CLV customers (on the left).
To be able to acquire the future best customers, the company must

have an idea where they’re found. When finally locating these cus-
tomers, the acquisition efforts should be very targeted and done
with a quality-first mentality. However, the more precise and tar-
geted marketing is, the more expensive it also tends to be. There-
fore, broader customer acquisition must also be exercised to fund
the more expensive and targeted marketing.
Finding the balance boils down to how much the company wants
to put effort into finding the best customers. The more the com-
pany does targeted marketing, the more it needs the steady flow of
smaller profits from the customers acquired from the broad acqui-
sition campaigns.
IT'S A MARATHON, NOT A SPRINT
The fact is, optimising a business based on customer lifetime value

is a marathon, not a sprint. The payback period for an acquired
customer might be long and the customer relationships may turn
profitable after months, or even years after the acquisition. Hence,
a company needs less profitable customers that bring in short-
term profits to fund the evolution of more expensive high CLV
customers.
Theta Equity, a company valuing businesses based on publicly
available data, mention in their article on Slack’s unit economics
that the average buyback period for a Slack customer is a staggering
three years. As the average CLV forecast of Slack customers is highly
positive, this is a prime example of a customer-centric acquisition
strategy that might seem like a miss at first, but will most likely pay
off in the long run.
Notable is that while 1% of Slack customers have an estimat-
ed post-acquisition value of $4.9M, it’s only $56K for the rest of
99% of customers. This is an extreme case of observed customer
heterogeneity. It’s clear where Slack should be focusing most of
their efforts on.
FIVE WAYS TO BRING CLV INTO YOUR TOOLKIT RIGHT NOW
Whether you’re reading this as a manager of a B2B subscription

business, or a marketing director of a B2C fashion brand, there are
key takeaways you can take into your daily toolkit, and they are as
follows:
1 Customers are not equal. Businesses should be optimised based

on customers with the highest customer lifetime value (CLV).
2 Customer lifetime value is an estimate of the customer’s present

value to the company, thus including all the historical and future
costs and profits attributed to the customer.
3 There are very few future best customers compared to less

profitable ones.
4 Companies need broad customer acquisition to fund the more

expensive targeted acquisition that aims to find customers with
high CLV.
5 Customer acquisition is a marathon. It might take a while for

customer relationships to turn profitable.
CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM —

A REVENUE ENGINE OR
JUST ANOTHER BUZZWORD?
Ville Loppinen, Hannu Saarinen & Hannu Isopahkala
MARKETING LEADERS who were interviewed in Gartner’s 2017–2018

CMO Survey said that they invested two-thirds of their budget in
supporting customer retention and growth. With so many custom-
ers oscillating between phones, tablets, game consoles, desktops
and laptops, many marketers are desperate for a unified view of
the customers. They seek an effective way to efficiently collect,
manage and use their first-party customer data.
Yet, like unicorns and yetis, the elusive unified single view of
the customer is easier found in dreams than in reality. The tech-
nology systems identifying as Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have
yet to settle on standard capabilities.
WHAT IS A CUSTOMER DATA PLATFORM?
CDPs hold multiple definitions with slight variations, but usually,

one is defined as a platform that:
→ Aims to bring together all customer data and combine the data
together into unified customer profiles
→ Is managed and used by marketing, but can also support all

relevant stakeholders (e.g. sales)
→ Should include behavioural, transactional and profiling data an

organisation has on its customers, which can also be
enriched with 3rd party data.
Most often, it’s either a single platform, or a combination of tools

and microservices, with the main objective of helping marketing and
sales to utilise customer data more comprehensively. The main

needs for a CDP can usually be divided into three categories:
1 MARKETING AUTOMATION AND CRM NEEDS

Marketing automation and CRM tools need to have the best possi-
ble customer and lead data in use for lead collection and nurturing,
customer retention, activation, up-selling and building great cus-
tomer experiences.
2 DATA VISUALISATION AND REPORTING NEEDS

Data visualisations and reporting tools need to have all relevant
and correct data from all possible sources to analyse, predict and
forecast business.
3 ONLINE ADVERTISING NEEDS

Using owned customer data and audiences for more effective on-
line advertising
DATA SOURCES CUSTOMER DATA CROSS-CHANNEL

PLATFORM ACTIONS
Web
Activities
Demographic
Paid and Personal Website
Advertising Data Personalisation
Clean Data
Email Engagement Transform Ad Campaigns
Campaigns Data Data
Email
Live Events Behavioural Campaigns
Unify Data
Data
Social Push Messaging
Enrich Data
Interactions IOT and
Device Data Segment Social
Mobile App Campaigns
Users
Data Transactional
and POS Direct Mail
CRM Data Data
Other Data
”
Growth hacking
is not a one-time
trick shot but
more importantly
a new, agile, way
of working and
building entire
businesses.
— Antton Ikola
HOW IS A CDP DIFFERENT FROM A DMP,

MARKETING AUTOMATION TOOL OR A CRM SYSTEM?
There may be a misconception about a CDP providing the same

functions as a Data Management Platform (DMP), marketing auto-
mation tool or a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool,
but this is not the case. Organisations typically use CDP together
with DMP & CRM tools.
A DMP allows organisations to target anonymous audience
based on 3rd party data. It helps to identify potential individuals
based on demographic data including age, gender, salary, etc. taking
into account the behaviour or data provided on third-party sites.
This data is not permanent data (i.e. you can’t pull up past data), it
is temporary and contingent upon the lifespan of a cookie, which
usually is around 90 days. DMPs usually have limited ability to inte-
grate with first-party data.
CRMs are one of the most frequently used customer engagement
tools containing processes for sales enablement, customer service,
and field service, and they do capture permanent customer history.
However, like a DMP, they only capture data from a limited amount
of transactions, usually direct transactions and interactions. CRMs
are typically not managed by marketers.
Marketing automation tools are, in most cases, based on fea-
tures which automate lead, retention and up-sell processes using
customer and lead data. Usually, marketing automation tools have
their own data models to store entity and property data. To get
most of the functionalities to work, companies have to streamline
their own data models to work with the tool. This usually means
data integration projects from backend systems, including various
data cleaning and arrangement processes.
CDPs, on the other-hand, store first-party data that is gathered
from various first-party sources such as web and mobile, CRM
and other offline data sources, transactions, and other behaviour-
al data. CDPs can also integrate with third-party data platforms
in order to further create a 360-degree view of the clients. CDPs
(typically owned by marketers) are real-time and allow marketers to
MARKETING
CDP CRM DMP
AUTOMATION
MARKETING
OWNED Yes Yes No Yes
TYPE OF 1st party data 1st party data 1st party data 3rd party data
DATA (Known IDs) (Known IDs) (Known IDs) (Anonymous data)
STORAGE Permanent Permanent Permanent Temporary
Yes Some
(e.g. website/app (Depends on
REAL-TIME No No
automation tool marketing features)
DATA
behaviour)
Limited view
360-DEGREE Yes (ability to (marketing
PROFILE integrate data from automation tool Limited view No
VIEW various systems) data model)
Salesforce DMP,
Salesforce Salesforce,
Salesforce Google Audience
Customer 360, Microsoft
Marketing Cloud, Center, Oracle DPM,
Tealium, Lytics, Dynamics,
TOOLS HubSpot, Marketo, SAS Data
RedPoint, Segment, HubSpot,
Adobe Campaign, Management,
Treasure Data, Pipedrive,
Eloqua Adobe Audience
Blueconic SugarCRM
Manager
take action immediately when a trigger occurs. Also, since the data
is permanent within the CDP, marketers can look at past data and
create custom audiences as needed with a lot of flexibility.
When a CDP is integrated with a DMP, it can provide significant

value to organisations not only to understand customers based
on first-party data, but also on third-party data. Examples of var-
ious profiled data that can be leveraged for campaigns when CDP,
marketing automation and a DMP are combined, leading to highly
personalised customer experience:
→ WEB BEHAVIOUR DATA

Page view, location/time zone, CTAs/buttons/links clicked,
number of visits
→ SOCIAL CONVERSATION DATA

Social shares/likes/followers, link shares
→ CAMPAIGN METRICS
Emails opened/clicked, ads clicked, ads shared, landing pages
visited
→ CRM: CUSTOMER SERVICE DATA

Tickets, complaints, inquiries, customer feedback, NPS
→ CRM: SALES TOOL DATA

Leads, opportunities, lead times, lead values, lead scores,
customer lifetime values
→ DEMOGRAPHICS DATA
Age, address, hobbies, interests, industry, buyer persona, etc.
→ APPS AND IOT DATA

App usage statistics, screens visited, actions performed,
purchases, location data
HOW TO ENSURE BUSINESS GROWTH ALONGSIDE

THE CDP VENTURE
A CDP project and the related areas of operation (customer data-

base, marketing automation, vendor tools, other customer services)
could be easily managed separately, in their own entities. However,
this is a mistake in terms of business and architectural develop-
ment. The end result often is a long system development project
that slowly yields value to the customer interface.
Instead, why not organise the CDP project to be jointly engi-
neered with the marketing automation, DMP, CRM or sales tool pro-
ject, so that the first CDP implementation and first microservice or
integration service experiment of the CDP will serve the first MVP
implementation of, for example, the sales tool or marketing auto-
mation care model?
Therefore, the CDP project should not be completed at the same
time, but instead have the CDP layer develop according to how
customer data is needed in marketing automation, CRM or DMP
use cases.
53
Learning and getting value from each stage of an implementation

project can be achieved best when growth hacking teams have a
direct communication connection with the data science team, who
in most cases are responsible for CDP implementations. Each CDP
development item, such as data collection, cleaning, integration or
enrichment, should be confirmed using a valid growth experiment
hypothesis.
This approach makes also smaller data integration experiments
possible, which can be seen as the development of a CDP in baby
steps. These experiments will give a lot of insight in the CDP plat-
form investment and make needs clearer when comparing CRM
ecosystems to CDP platforms.
GET VALUE EVERY STEP OF THE WAY
1 Describe use cases for data usage — remember to involve all

relevant stakeholders. You may be surprised how many stake-
holders have CDP needs.
2 Prioritise use cases based on the business value those can

achieve
3 Identify existing first-party customer data sources
4 Audit the existing data: do you have data in quantities and in a

quality needed for the use cases?
5 Plan data quantity and quality improvement actions based on

prioritised use cases
6 Create a roadmap for the CDP development process —

which actions have the best bang for the buck?
7 Get started!
COLUMBIA ROAD’S
GROWTH HACKING MODEL
FOR MARKETING
Krista Palmu
HOW DOES GROWTH HACKING CHANGE

THE LOGIC OF MARKETING?
Sales,
marketing
&
customer
experience
From a marketing perspective, growth hacking refers to a paradigm

shift, wherein old marketing methods and tools make way for new
channels and ways of working. In this rather unconventional and
new business context, growth can be obtained through novel,
experimental means — as aspirational growth marketers and en-
gineers seek to first-handedly grow or attain market demand,
or traction.
Demand for a product or service can be generated organically
(with actions such as content marketing or SEO) or through paid
advertising (for example, SEM or social media marketing, also
known as SMM). From an analytics viewpoint, demand translates
to marketing qualified leads (MQLs), sales qualified leads (SQLs),

and conversions.
Regarding content marketing, the increase in traffic volume
depends largely on the extent to which content can be tailored. This
content should be produced for particular — segmented or hyper-
targeted — clients (aka buyer personas). These ideal customers can
be built based on real market data or, regarding a novel offering or
start-up, be hypotheses of customers whose interest in the
offering can be tested with experimental campaigns. Only when
relevant, persona-oriented content is in place, can online forms be
used to capture lead information, and only then can sellers
expect conversions to occur. The key metric to monitor here is con-
version rate (CR).
This is the basis on which sellers can, later on, build drip nur-
turing, lead nurturing, workflows, and scoring programs, as well as
seek to grow revenue through up-selling, cross-selling, and cus-
tomer care models. This can be efficiently accomplished with mar-
keting automation methods.
Optimally, a customer’s use case and stage in the buyer’s jour-
ney would be considered throughout the process and A/B testing
would occur to weed out non-optimal audiences. Herein, client’s
pain points and urgency are addressed with custom-designed,
funnel-focused top-of-the-funnel (TOFU), middle-of-the-funnel
(MOFU), or bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content.
A customer-centric strategy is paramount for growth hacking. As

a matter of fact, studies have shown that while the majority (88%)
of B2B marketers use custom content marketing, nearly two out of
three don’t know which type of content is effective.
A SELF-SUSTAINING FUNNEL OF GROWTH AS THE TARGET STATE
With inbound marketing platforms, such as Pardot or HubSpot,

marketers can collect vital prospect information in stealth mode.
Equipped with this data provided by marketers, salespeople can
act and engage with the prospect in a meaningful way, and at an

appropriate time.
With all the lead and customer data, growth hackers are like
magicians performing small “charms and incantations” — micro-
campaigns — to the right people at the right time. They can tap into
the ever-growing pool of data and design measures to grow the
business even further. Hence, growth hacking essentially is just-in-
time marketing (JITM).
Using this approach, sellers and marketers of the modern age
can avoid pushy and obtrusive cold-selling tactics. Especially,
with the introduction of marketing automation tools into growth
hacking, the functions of marketing and sales merge into a unified
process and become a joint effort. They no longer represent the two
ends of a spectrum but, rather, make up one holistic process with
empowered individuals.
Other disciplines will also merge to serve the client in the best
possible manner. This process preferably has no endpoint. When
each team works together towards a common goal, they can truly
grow the customer lifetime value (CLV) and lower the churn rate.
Thereby, the typical challenges of cross-functional teams may be
bypassed.
The depicted growth funnel lives off of traffic, digests conver-
sions, and produces brand advocates that speak well of the
company — and it does so willingly on its own accord. The positive
word-of-mouth (WOM) or goodwill of these referees, in turn, builds
a loop that feeds the funnel with traffic. These leads are likely to
be warmer for sales engagement, making the funnel shorter.
Moreover, with these new leads becoming referees, the fun-
nel becomes self-sustaining; the growth cycle becomes a self-
reinforcing one. Success can be measured with the net promoter
score (NPS).
Systems thinking, essentially, forms the very heart of growth hack-

ing. For the seller, this means raising the bar. As more and warmer
leads flock in with high hopes, continuous learning and iteration
become a necessity.
GROWTH MARKETING IS A PIECE IN THE BIG PICTURE

OF BUSINESS CHANGE
By relying on digital channels and experimental techniques, all

growth hackers can be seen as multidisciplinary digital business
designers, who are in search of not only instant gains but also long-
term business results.
From a ways of working and operative perspective, growth hack-
ing is not a one-time trick shot but more importantly a new, agile,
way of working and building the entire business. Growth hackers
are key performance indicator (KPI) -focused, tech-savvy wizards
with a licence to fail by using the minimum viable product (MVP)
approach. With this mindset, they seek to bring about more sales
and attract more customers.
In the big picture, growth hacking is a company culture or strategy

that seeks to attract and engage with relevant audiences through
cost-efficient means for a lower cost per action (CPA) as well as
improve the current system and/or processes through continuous
conversion rate optimisation (CRO). If executed well, growth hack-
ing can bring about competitive advantages.
Delighting the customer and exceeding expectations repeatedly
is key for successful customer lock-in.
4
Growth Hacking
in Action
A THREE-STEP
CLV FOCUSED
CHANNEL STRATEGY
Lauri Eurén
WHILE EXECUTING a customer-centric strategy, and acquiring and

retaining customers, it’s not enough to merely focus on one group
of customers. While it’s true that the business should be optimised
based on the customers who bring in most of the profit in the long
run, there’s more to the rule than it might sound at first.
As the payback time for some of the highly profitable customer
relationships might be long due to higher acquisition costs or initial
nurturing costs, businesses need other customers who don’t nec-
essarily bring in that much profits in the long run, but whose pay-
back time might be shorter. As different kinds of companies have
different customers, different channels should be used to serve
each type.
If one thinks about the statement “customer-centricity is about
optimising the business based on the needs of customers who
bring in the most profit in the long run,” nowhere does it say that
these are the only customers one should focus on — but rather
that business should be optimised based on their needs and wants.
The means to do so are not clarified in the above statement itself.
Suddenly, the whole ethos of focusing only on the best customers
sounds very wrong!
To make the most of customer lifetime value (CLV), companies

shouldn’t only focus on the best customers and the channels they
use. A simple reason for that is that there aren’t usually that many
of those best customers. While you should not focus solely on
these customers, losing or not acquiring a single one of them will
nevertheless be a big hit for the company. Which, intuitively, means
that the company’s best efforts should be put into giving everything
for acquiring and retaining these customers.
GROWTH HACKING IN ACTION 61
IT'S OK TO HAVE JUST OK CUSTOMERS
As the search for future best customers is inevitably hard, a

company should have additional channels to bring in the kinds
of customers that you are merely ok with — and who return the
sentiment about your services. They might not buy the most, and
they might not turn out to buy that often, or for that long, but they
bring in a steady flow of revenue.
Your cash flow statement will like these customers. When you
think of it, these are the kinds of customers who need help in find-
ing the right products, sometimes return them, but mostly are just
ok with your services, and they bring in a small amount of positive
net return.
Additionally to the previous two types of customers, there are the

ones that are not necessarily the right fit for you. No matter how
many retargeted ads, emails, or nurturing care models you target to
them, the marketing euros don’t seem to pay off. These customers
are not the right fit for your company.
Don’t fall into the pit of thinking that every customer will mag-
ically move through your state-of-the-art care model and come
out as a true brand ambassador from the other side. Sometimes
it makes sense to simply acknowledge that some customers aren’t
the ones to develop.
HAVE DIFFERENT CHANNEL STRATEGIES FOR

DIFFERENT GROUPS OF CUSTOMERS
If we use a simplified framework of having three types of custom-

ers based on their perceived future value: high, mid, and low-value
ones, we can start figuring out the problem of what is the role of
different channels in ecommerce.
Important here is to understand the potential of some custom-
ers becoming high-value over time. The simplified division of cus-
tomers could look as follows:
HIGH-VALUE CUSTOMERS
→ Provide a personalised experience (e.g. with custom storefronts)

→ Offer premium value-adding services
→ Form trust by systematically executing account management
→ Give the customers a voice by creating unique customer
communities
MID-VALUE CUSTOMERS
→ Work with traditional customer development activities

→ Automate the top part of the funnel
→ Incentivise to join loyalty programs to add value
→ Personalised discount marketing automation campaigns
LOW-VALUE CUSTOMERS
→ Automate most interactions with self-service and ecommerce

→ Minimise marketing spend
→ Provide “just enough” customer service
→ Avoid acquiring in the first place
As there are different kinds of customers, the odds are that:
1 All different channels a company uses to acquire customers,

attract customers of different value. For example, in a Washington
University study it was shown that customers from Google search
advertising tend to have a higher transaction rate compared to
customers acquired through different channels
2 Once acquired, the channels where to nurture those customers

might attract different types of customers. For example, a custom
storefront or a personal shopping assistant might not make sense
for a customer who’s completed a single purchase. In this second
case, the customers can only be attracted through channels that
are already offered.
LOOK AT CHANNEL STRATEGY USING THE CLV LENS:

THE THREE STEP APPROACH
To approach the challenge of different channels when optimising

your business based on CLV starts from knowing who your best
customers are. Then, based on the knowledge about existing cus-
tomers, one can make predictions of the future value of customers
(CLV) by leveraging predictive analytics.
Secondly, you should look into the various channels currently
used to acquire customers to infer whether the different channels
attract customers with different values. Based on the value of cus-
tomers acquired from a channel, strategic steps should be taken to
define that channel’s place in the company’s channel portfolio. The
questions to ask here for a channel that attracts low-value customers
could be: “why is it so that the customers from this channel have
the particular value, and as it is so, is there anything that could be
done to nudge it higher?” It essentially boils down to the decision
of either raising the stakes, or deciding to scale down acquisition
spend for that particular acquisition channel. An example of the
CLV of customers based on their original acquisition channel is pic-
tured on the next page.
25000 100%
CLV
20000 Share of
75% customers
acquired
15000 through the
50% channel
10000
25%
5000
0 0%
k
M
gl ic
pi gle
lin ld
le ld
oo
SE
oo n
e
ng
s
al o
SaFie
op oo
G ga
C C
eb
Sh G
c
O
Fa
An example chart of customers’ predicted future value based on their

acquisition channel. With only this image as background, how would you
optimise this company’s acquisition channel portfolio?
After a customer has been acquired, it’s time to think of the chan-
nels a company is using to nurture its existing relationships. Here, a
company must think of its different touchpoints for their customers,
and to make a similar inference as above when thinking about ac-
quisition channels: “What types of channels do the customers with
different values tend to use?” and “Do we have the right channels
in place for the different types of customers, and are we utilising
the correct channels for each customer group?” Evidently, it might
not make sense to “waste” hundreds of customer service hours for
a small refund, and it might not make sense to assign an account
manager for a customer with one purchase during the last year.
KNOW WHERE TO ACQUIRE WHICH CUSTOMERS
A company has sets of customers with different future potential

and value assigned to each group. These customers might enter into
a customer relationship through different channels, and it might be
so that while some channels tend to bring in high-value customers,
it might not be so for some other channel. After a customer is ac-
quired, it will probably make sense to utilise different channels to
serve different kinds of customers. There are different touchpoints,

some more suitable for a particular set of customers than others. It
must be decided which particular channels are utilised in serving a
particular group of customers.
Essentially, everything in ecommerce boils down to optimising
the business based on the future high value customers, and chan-
nel strategy is no different. It’s every business’ task to optimise
their channels based on their unique mix of customers. Essentially,
a company must know where to acquire which kinds of customers,
and have the right kind of strategy for each of the channels in all
domains of customer relationship management, be it about acqui-
sition, retention, and customer development activities.
USE GROWTH HACKING

METHODS
TO ELEVATE YOUR
MARKETING AUTOMATION
Ville Loppinen
HOW TO USE GROWTH HACKING METHODS AND TACTICS

IN MARKETING AUTOMATION?
Marketing automation starts to be one of the key elements of every

growing company’s marketing architecture. But what actually is
marketing automation?
It’s hard to define it in just a couple of words. Partly because it
can be understood in so many ways. For some, marketing automa-
tion is a tool and for others, it’s a completely new way of thinking
about customer experience through customer journeys (essentially
buyers’ journeys).
Marketing automation is content and inbound marketing for buyer

journeys’ awareness, consideration and decision phases. It’s also
data-driven marketing and retention marketing in cases where
goals are set for creating great customer experience which turns
into growth. And, it’s personalisation and optimisation for growing
online conversions.
For each of these, you can — and should — use growth hacking
tactics. Marketing automation should not be a waterfall project.
So where to start when you want to move your marketing operations

away from an implementation project approach towards a
lean and data-based marketing automation model? Wait-
ing for the go-ahead decision on strategic marketing auto-
mation and budgeting can cost you the income you could have
reached just by starting with experimenting and then showing the
results and learnings.
FIRST, OPPORTUNITY MAPPING: DECIDE ON

A BUSINESS CASE FOR A GROWTH HACKING EXPERIMENT
How to define a business case? One good idea is to map your buyer
personas and customer journeys and try to find ideas for experimen-
tation. You will surely find multiple ideas on how to get more leads
(inbound), close valuable leads (nurture) or improve your current
customers’ retention.
Selecting the right idea to experiment with might be challenging,
but you can do it. Just clarify the value proposition and you have
a winner: inbound campaign, care model, or data-driven cam-
paign to develop step by step. (Tip: a great tool to validate your
business case is the Concept and Value Proposition canvas from
LEANSERVICECREATION. COM )
Then use specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-
bound goals, also known as SMART goals, to define criteria for your
success. Make those goals clear and connect them to real KPIs.
Only in this way will you pull the relevant stakeholders onboard.
NEXT, ALIGN YOUR DATA AND CHANNEL NEEDS TO

YOUR EXISTING MARKETING ARCHITECTURE
You might have tools and platforms ready — or not. If not, this is
the first phase where you need to use fresh thinking and start a
culture change. With growth hacking there is no time to wait for
quarterly platform updates or cloud investment budgeting — you
need to deliver data-based results, every day, starting now. You
have to act and test your business case immediately. After you
have proven your business case it is much easier to get money for
bigger investments.
OUCH, I DON’T HAVE A MARKETING AUTOMATION TOOL
Niche email marketing tools such as MailChimp, Klaviyo or Active-

Campaign have evolved from plain email services to automated
workflow management tools. Because these tools have already
reached a satisfactory usability level with email marketing features
it is quite easy for them to move forward.
With these lighter (more affordable) tools it’s simple to validate
a concept or business case before heading head-deep into big im-
plementation projects. And it’s also simpler to scale from smaller
business cases with results of actual monetary impact to enterprise
solution implementations.
YES, WE HAVE ALREADY INVESTED IN A

MARKETING AUTOMATION TOOL. BETTER ROI PLEASE!
Of course, in most cases, you’ll already have some tools up and

running. Then the challenge is having the knowledge and inspiration
of implementing your business case. Remember that even a modern
marketing automation tool, such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud or
Adobe Marketing Cloud, is just one part of your marketing archite-
cture. You can decide which features you use and which you don’t.
Many companies already have experience from marketing clouds or

legacy marketing tools. Maybe they have Salesforce Sales and Ser-
vice, Oracle or SAP clouds to serve their CRM, customer service or
ERP needs and they want to redeem cloud possibilities in marketing
automation as well.
Next comes the part where many companies make bad deci-
sions: It is very critical to focus on the decided business case, not
on IT architecture. The easiest — and sometimes the best — solution
is to stay in one cloud and use its own plug-in integrations. Cloud
providers continually look for tools to complete their solutions to
make them the best option for businesses. Cloud integrations by
providers mean that tools are more and more in a plug-and-play
mode for a marketer. Still, always keep in mind that tools are there
to help you. Go for niche tools if nothing else works.
THEN THE MOST IMPORTANT PART:

PEOPLE — YOUR GROWTH TEAM
You need skills and energy to experiment, and to create content,

digital marketing, copywriting, marketing automation triggers and
rules, data analysis and design. So, set up a growth team: We rec-
ommend joining the forces of a growth owner, designer, marketer
& analyst, and developer. Remember to manage internal resources
and time allocations for your team, and if needed, find external help
for them. Try to provide a strong mandate for your team to make
decisions within the company.
So, now you have a growth team, business case, tools, data and
channels selected. Time to start experimenting!
STEPS TO WALK THROUGH WHEN STARTING AN

ACTUAL GROWTH HACKING EXPERIMENT
Have growth hypotheses in place and a backlog ready to work on.

Map your care model or campaign so that it’s accessible for everyone.
It can be an inbound campaign or a data-driven customer retention

program. It’s your business choice. Define the triggers, content, ac-
tions and your own tasks to complete the needed marketing opera-
tions. Align your value proposition for the customer (buyer persona)
you selected for this business case.
Make sure you’ve installed data analytics. You get what you
measure, so be precise to have clear goals. Configure KPI metrics
to follow your success. Use room walls and analytic dashboards to
make everything visible. Next, start a continuous growth process
(define hypotheses, test, measure, grow/kill, learn, update backlog,
show results at bi-weekly demos). Develop the first trigger, content,
action verticals. Learn — and do it better.
Align everything with your company’s other marketing actions in
necessary channels. If possible, A/B test right from the beginning
and remember to measure and share your learnings. Lastly, make
sure you invest time into developing your marketing architecture
on a regular basis. It’s the only way to ensure future business case
opportunities go live.
The focus needs to always be on growth and getting data-based

results, but at the same time you should see the big picture and
look for new opportunities. Make sure you follow marketing tech-
nology trends and success stories.
OPTIMISING CONVERSIONS
IN CUSTOMER ACQUISITION
Krista Palmu
WHAT ARE CONVERSIONS AND WHY DO THEY MATTER?
Conversions are a way to determine a certain goal or action that

was fulfilled by a user on a given landing page. There are many
levels or types of conversions. A conversion may well be someone
downloading a PDF checklist from a blog article by submitting a
form, or an actual purchase.
Depending on the goal of the marketing effort, conversions can
either bring the company new leads or direct new sales. Conver-
sions can, thereby, fall into different parts of the sales funnel:
awareness, consideration, or decision — also called as top-of-the
funnel (TOFU), middle-of-the-funnel (MOFU), and bottom-of-the-
funnel (BOFU) conversions.
Conversions can be given a value that allows you to assess the
business impact any given conversion type has. Typically, more
branding-oriented TOFU conversions are not as valuable for a busi-
ness as closer-to-the-sales BOFU conversions. This is something to
keep in mind when driving conversions; not all conversions are equal
and should not be treated that way.
HOW TO TRACK CONVERSIONS?
Conversions are typically verified with a thank you page on a given

website. By placing tracking codes, such as global site tags and
event snippets, onto the thank you page, information about a con-
version occurrence can be transmitted to different systems, such
as Google Analytics or Google Ads.
It’s our recommendation to use Google Tag Manager for im-
plementing codes onto a website. It’s the easiest way to add and
manage conversion tracking in a centralised and technologically-

scalable manner for a website.
Each platform where conversions are expected to happen needs
to be set up individually. Think of Facebook, LinkedIn and other so-
cial channels you might have in use. Each paid advertising platform
needs its own conversion tracking setup, but when you have Google
Tag Manager in use, you can manage all conversions from one place.
Once tracking is in place and functional, paid advertising campaigns
can be optimised towards conversions, by setting up campaign
goals to match conversions or CPA, on the campaign level.
HOW TO OPTIMISE FOR CONVERSIONS?
Conversion optimisation, or conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a

systematic process that aims to increase the number of conversions
and the percentage of visitors converting into leads or customers.
A/B tests of marketing campaigns on different levels is central
when optimising for conversions. Especially in paid advertising, this
means either running two alternative options side by side or con-
ducting a split test to determine which version performs better.
In A/B testing, it’s vital that only one part is altered at a time.
Thus, when changing — for instance — the heading copy or image of
an ad, all other things should be kept unchanged. Alternatively, when
changing the form or body text on the landing page, the ad elements
should not be touched. You get the idea. Importantly, colour, size,
and font matter. You might be tweaking an individual ad’s copy and
visuals but forget to account for usability and user-friendliness in
the next steps at the point the customer lands on a page.
User experience (UX), as well as user interface design (UI design),

are essential in conversion optimisation deeper in the funnel, and
those should not be bypassed or neglected by a marketer. Ulti-
mately, a cross-functional approach to conversion optimisation is
highly recommended: so that a sales funnel A/B-tester and digital
marketer would be sitting next to each other.
USER
Ad Landing Thank you
Emails
TRANSMISSION page page
Facebook,
SYSTEM LinkedIn, Adform, Shopify, HubSpot, Wordpress, MailChimp
Google Ads, etc.
PAID
Impressions &
MARKETING Visits Conversion Emails
clicks
FLOW
POSSIBLE Nurturing,
Landing Thank you
OPTIMISATION Ad up-selling &
page page
TARGETS cross-selling
A simplified process of conversions in the case of paid advertising
In ecommerce, the number of conversions depends — besides the

actual landing page — also on a multitude of other things, such as
price, shopping cart size, search and payment methods to name a
few. Moreover, the checkout process should be made as easy and
understandable as possible.
Ensure your landing page is simple and easy to use. A landing
page should have only one main goal, and that is to drive conver-
sions. Should you have other goals, consider producing alternative
landing pages for those needs. Limiting access to the navigation
and footer (in other words obstructing the user from clicking else-
where) is recommended in the case of content downloads for in-
bound marketing.
While the conversion occurrence is the goal, by no means is it
the end point for a marketer. Actually, the conversion should be
seen only as an intermediate target that allows for the client
account to keep on growing. Conversions — or customers — should,
at this stage, be further categorised according to their buyer per-
sonas and use cases, or business impact (average order value and
amount). In particular, those may be weighted and prioritised by
their importance and business impact resulting in a tiered custom-

er approach and a structured customer communications plan.
Regarding the content download or purchase form on the land-
ing page, make sure you ask explicitly and in accordance with Eu-
ropean GDPR rules the permission to approach visitors with emails.
Should you forget to do this, you will not have the opportunity to
upsell or cross-sell with emails. Also, you lose the chance to nur-
ture your leads towards purchasing.
CONVERSION OPTIMISATION CHECKLIST

FOR ONLINE MARKETERS
As a starting point, make sure you know your target audience or

preferred target segment. Then tailor your message accordingly
throughout each buyer’s journey. It’s good practise to design a spe-
cific pitch for each stage of the sales funnel.
As for the actual conversion optimisation:
→ Have one landing page per campaign goal
→ Optimise the different elements of the ad
→ Optimise the landing page elements
→ Ask for marketing permissions on the form (GDPR)
→ Consider selling more on the thank you page
→ Nurture and grow the account for future conversions

through emails
And most importantly, do not change everything at the same time.

Change one item at a time.
“
By starting
investing in
growth hacking
now, small
victories may be
reaped already
tomorrow.
— Krista Palmu
OPTIMISING CONVERSIONS
IN DIGITAL SALES CHANNELS
Antton Ikola
CONVERSION RATE OPTIMISATION (CRO) is an important part of growth

hacking, but it’s in no way all that a growth hacker does. Conversion
rate optimisation aims at increasing conversions in some part of
the funnel — typically in a purchase funnel. Conversion rate optimi-
sation is approached with A/B testing tools and methods.
The main idea is to be able to validate new ideas with data and
metrics that actually matter to the business, such as revenue im-
pact, instead of trusting the trendiest tricks in the book or going
with the highest paid person’s opinion.
In A/B testing the idea is to put two variants compete against
each other and measure each variants impact on sales, or whatever
you wish to measure. Variant A represents the current state, and
variant B is a challenger that is based on an educated hypothesis
of how it might affect user behaviour and the metrics, such as con-
versions, we’re trying to optimise.
A/B TESTING IS HARD, BUT OH SO IMPORTANT
A/B testing allows you to take small steps when gradually develop-
ing a service into the right direction all the while reducing uncer-
tainty. When you’re trying to optimise a service, digital or not, you’re
essentially dealing with a huge set of unknowns. The truth is, more
often than not, we have a very fuzzy picture of how a service should
be developed. Making far-reaching development plans is not usually
the best, because the underlying needs might develop faster than
you are able to develop.
Being data-driven can be gruesome for people who design and
implement the actual tests because you need to be prepared to
throw away the poorly performing variant-based on the data.
When a test has gathered some data to show a meaningful differ-

ence, whether statistically valid or not, the test is usually concluded
for the win of either A or B. In a simple A/B test of just one chal-
lenger variant, you’ll still waste at least 50% of your work. But that’s
exactly what you want to do: separate the wheat from the chaff.
If done by the book, an A/B test challenger should only change
one variable in the original at any one time. If you want to test, for
example, the placement of an element and a different copy text at
the same time, you have to do four different variants (2^2). If you’d
like to test three different variants, the amount of test variants is
already eight (2^3).
WITH DATA, YOU GET WHAT YOU MEASURE
Data can have its limitations: it might be impartial and have errors.
Google Analytics data isn’t perfect, and make sure you adopt a cer-
tain level of a paranoid attitude before you start acting on that data.
The data is always modelled in some way, and we need to under-
stand that we get what we measure.
At the end of the day, you have a sample of data which repre-
sents only some limited selection of customer behaviour, not all of
the customer base. Thus, all results are probabilities, not absolute
truths, and cannot be extrapolated over the whole customer base.
50% of customers might prefer the variant B while 5% actually have
an adverse effect to it. The total impact rules here.
BASIC PRINCIPLES OF CONVERSION RATE OPTIMISATION
→ Decide what is important to measure
→ Know what you can actually measure
→ Understand the limitations of measuring and data
The possible sources to ideate new hypothesis are many. You might
check the analytics data and recognise a bottleneck in some phase
of the checkout process, for example. Then you might wonder why a
drop in conversions occurs: Are there obvious conversion killers?

What should be added or removed to convey more trust? What
might annoy the customer? You might look for benchmarks inside
and outside your specific industry from known high-performing
purchase processes. These sources might be the quick wins.
Once you have figured out an important element or phase of the
buying process to test, you want to create a measurable hypothesis,
for example with the following template:
Based on ⟨ THE CONVERSION RATE IN ONE PHASE OF THE PURCHASE JOU-

RNEY ⟩, we believe that ⟨ A SPECIFIC CHECKOUT ELEMENT ⟩ is causing
⟨ MISTRUST AMONG CUSTOMERS ⟩. By ⟨ PROVIDING A TRANSPARENT WAY
TO SHOW PRICES IN THIS PHASE ⟩, we believe we can raise ⟨ THE OVER-
ALL CONVERSION RATE OF THE BUYING PROCESS ⟩. We will measure this
with ⟨ AN OVERALL CONVERSION RATE ⟩.
Limiting the influences of variants you cannot control is important.

Usually, this means that for A/B tests the traffic is randomly dis-
tributed for each variant. Other things to take into consideration is
that the test time-period should be long enough. Seasonality of the
business and marketing activities happening in various channels
might have a big impact on the quality of traffic.
Once the test is made, it should be considered that the change
should be so big, that it actually creates a measurable impact on cust-
omer behaviour, but so small, that only a single variable is changed. It
doesn’t make sense to make an A/B test of a 3-step purchase funnel
against a 20-step purchase funnel. Even though you would get meas-
urable results, you would not know how exactly what happened,
because you changed too many things. The worst thing that can
happen is that you get an insignificant result in a poorly constructed
test and don’t continue with A/B testing further.
Learning from the results is easy if you have a well-defined hypo-
thesis to start with. Once the results are in, you generally run with
what has worked in terms of expected impact. You don’t change
the criteria later, although there’s always room for speculation. Of
course, you should learn more about making better hypotheses as
well. Once you know which variant works, you can build on that and
make new hypotheses. Why did the new variant work better? Can we
scale that dynamic even more? Use the learnings and new insights
to create new hypotheses and more A/B tests.
ACTION STEPS OF CONVERSION RATE OPTIMISATION
1 Design an educated and measurable hypothesis
2 Limit the influences of variables you cannot control
3 Make the test and wait for interpretable results
4 Learn from the results
5 Use learnings to design a new hypothesis
GET THOSE TESTS GOING
You can usually run only one test at a time in a given purchase
process and a decent test period might vary from one to four
weeks. If you have enough traffic, you might be able to make 50-plus
tests per year. Just imagine the cumulative effect of 50 A/B tests
on your revenue.
How about making your first educated and measurable hypoth-
esis right now by using this template:
Based on ⟨ DATA/FEEDBACK ⟩, we think that ⟨ CHANGE X ⟩ will cause an

⟨ OUTCOME ⟩ which we will measure with ⟨ METRICS ⟩.
For example, your hypothesis could look like this:
Based on ⟨ QUALITATIVE FINDINGS ⟩ in the current checkout flow, we

think that ⟨ CHANGING THE PLACEMENT OF THE PURCHASE BUTTON ⟩ will
cause ⟨ AN IMPROVEMENT IN CONVERSION RATE ⟩. We will measure this
by the ⟨ NUMBER OF ACQUIRED CONVERSIONS ⟩.
THREE GROWTH HACKING BUSINESS

CASES FOR B2B CONTEXT
Ville Loppinen
WHILE GROWTH HACKING IN the consumer business starts to be old

news, many companies in the B2B field are only now formulating
their processes and teams for experiment-based sales and mar-
keting. Sales and marketing in B2B is complex by nature, and many
companies have recognised that there aren’t easy answers to how
and in which business cases to use the growth hacking method.
When comparing B2B growth hacking with more traditional sales
and marketing teams that have structures and defined roles, the
biggest difference is the team setup. A growth hacking team is a
multidisciplinary team with a shared goal and backlog. The team
most often consists of digital marketers, UX and UI designers, de-
velopers, customer data analysts, CRM experts and salespeople
who work together with strong ownership of the business and a
mandate to take action.
Let’s take a look at three business cases:
→ OPTIMISED MARKETING AND SALES ALIGNMENT IN LEAD GENERATION,

NURTURING AND CLOSING
→ ACCOUNT BASED MARKETING PROCESSES TO CREATE AND OPTIMISE

CONTENT AND CONVINCE STAKEHOLDERS AND INFLUENCERS
→ ACTIVATING CUSTOMERS TO USE DIGITAL SERVICES AND BUY MORE
OPTIMISED MARKETING AND SALES ALIGNMENT IN

LEAD GENERATION, NURTURING AND CLOSING
In B2B lead generation, quality content plays a critical role in

clarifying the company’s value proposition for potential buyers. Whe-
ther the content is whitepapers, e-books, Slideshare decks, sales
scripts, blog posts, case studies or webinars, it is important to make

sure to create the best possible content that answers the target
audiences’ most pressing questions and pain points. Spend some
time on finding the most valuable leads and the perfect channels
to reach them to make the most of optimised content.
Continuous optimisation and SEO for content and landing pages
are the most effective ways to do regular growth experimenting. If
your content strikes the right chord with your potential clients, it
will automatically increase the chance of a conversion.
In traditional content marketing, the marketing channels are typi-

cally pre-defined in the planning phase. However, it's impossible to
know beforehand in which channels the content gets preferred at-
tention. Growth hacking is based on data and experiments: Content
is first published with small measurable experiments in different
channels — successful experiments are scaled and others killed.
In many cases, we have experienced that generating referral traf-
fic through social media marketing has proved the business case in
B2B as well — but of course, this is not the case in all B2B contexts,
the only way to find out is through continuous experimentation.
A great way to collect a broad range of data is by using different
marketing and advertising channels. In the B2B context, social me-
dia plays an important role in generating referral traffic to content
marketing assets, so it is important to stay up to date with changes
of algorithms on the various social media platforms you use. There
are lots of other channels that drive high-quality B2B traffic and
leads, such as native advertising, search advertising and more. The
more diverse channels, the more opportunities there are to capture
disparate audiences and to maximise the growth hacking results.
GET YOUR SALES TEAM EXCITED ABOUT LEAD GENERATION
It’s important to get sales experts to understand the growth hack-

ing based lead generation process as soon as possible. Knowing
how leads are collected helps sales in the business critical in-
bound sales process. Warm leads are the best way to get sales
people excited to join a lead generation growth team. When the
roles are clear, both marketing and sales need to have the best possi-
ble marketing automation tools to operate actual nurturing activities
and share learnings and results using clear reports and dashboards.
Usually, these tools have CRM data and integrations in place so
that all the members of the team have full visibility of the potential
sales that can be achieved. Lead nurturing and profiling algorithms
should be optimised all the time. One growth team member should
take the role of a Sales Development Representative (SDR) whose
job is to qualify leads and nurture them through the initial stages
of the buyer's journey.
From a growth hacking point-of-view the elements of B2B lead

generation success are:
→ The lead generation growth team needs to contain both marketing

and sales experts. So bring a salesperson to sit, for example, one
day per week with the marketing expert. Work together to make
the best possible inbound sales script. The same story can be
reused in your content.
→ Define and share levels and structures of leads (MQLs and SQLs)
to every member of the growth team. This is a continuous process.
→ Don’t stick with one tool’s limitations. Use landing page tools and
lighter options to get leads. Integrations from lead forms are
mostly needed when you know well enough how to get leads.
Then let the marketing automation tools do lead nurturing and
sales integrations.
→ Share sales successes and failures ASAP using communications

tools. Be ready to scale successful activities or kill failures.
→ Try to scale lead generation as soon as possible to be part of the

CRM sales process.
ACCOUNT BASED MARKETING (ABM) PROCESSES

TO CREATE AND OPTIMISE CONTENT AND
CONVINCE STAKEHOLDERS AND INFLUENCERS
ABM, or Account-Based Marketing, is effective in providing a genu-

ine, tailored approach to educating and converting customers. ABM
utilises the best practices in personalising outbound messages
and website content that is crafted for a customer’s industry for
relevance and closing deals. ABM simply means identifying a hand-
ful of potential companies that will likely have a huge impact on
revenue and then applying marketing actions uniquely tailored to
each individual account.
In the ABM context, a B2B growth hacker can plan to make
personalised content (whitepapers, e-books, Slideshare decks,
sales scripts, blog posts, case studies or webinars) for really spe-
cific companies or influencers. And use a strategic account-based
approach to engage with companies who have a huge impact on
revenue. It’s about making the stakeholders feel like a trusted
partner is speaking with them, not at them.
In lead generation, the specific goal is to close a lot of warm-
enough leads or to direct them into digital sales channels, whereas
in ABM the growth hacking team might have just one goal: to close
one opportunity or deal with a closely targeted customer and then
systematically grow the lifetime value of that customer. In the latter
case, the growth team should own the whole opportunity pipeline
and its activities. When the goal is to win one or just a few sales
opportunities the growth team needs to choose the KPI (for ex-
ample, the number of active influencers contacted related to the
opportunity) for the process really carefully. The North Star Metric
will change when the opportunity moves forward in the sales
pipeline. One clear starting point is to find and map influencers of
the opportunity and then start to do experiments for them.
Focus on the influencers within a company: everyone within
an account has a different role and ways they interact with the
company. It may not be the best strategy to only humour the
decision-makers when the end users are fed up. Eventually, their
frustration will bubble up and the account could be lost forever.
To learn who the influencers are and to find the best personalised
ways to communicate with them is a team effort that requires
different roles and tools which collect data to help build a struc-
tured and usable model.
From a growth hacking point-of-view the elements of Account

Based Marketing success are:
→ Map the influencers and try to collect and associate all the data
for the contacts. When opportunities are big, the clients’ organisa-
tional hierarchies are complex. So make sure your CRM tools can
manage complex accounts and site hierarchies — and make
important connections between influencers visible. A CRM should
have the possibility to handle multi-level organisational hierarchies
and for growth hackers, those should be easily modifiable.
→ Be open-minded with the channels and ways to contact

influencers. LinkedIn campaigns, Google Ads, IP based advertising
— you name it! When a growth hacker deep dives into a specific
persona all the potential channels need to be identified and
experimented with.
→ Bring in a designer to really continually highlight the value

proposition of your services in a clear understandable format
for a specific influencer.
ACTIVATING CUSTOMERS TO USE DIGITAL SERVICES AND BUY MORE
For B2B businesses to grow Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) through

customer retention and loyalty, it is really valuable to build digital
services and B2B ecommerce sites where customers can manage
their accounts and buy more through well-designed and person-
alised services. In many cases, these digital self-service channels
and customer communities are underutilised. Too often companies
forget the importance of good onboarding and do not sell the value
of the digital services to the customer and their users.
Many companies have made huge investments in digital self-
service channels and communities when they digitalised their busi-
ness operations. Now, these services need to been seen like ecom-
merce in consumer business: Focus on selling more and continu-
ously optimise the customer experience through business metrics.
The three most crucial phases when building B2B digital services
into a sales machine:
SELL SIGN-UPS TO DIGITAL SERVICES LIKE YOU’D SELL SAAS SERVICES
First, companies need to get their customers’ users to use digital

services. This means that the company needs to promote and sell
its services again and again to current customers to help them see
the added value. CRM data is a crucial source for finding the best
possible channels and value proposition to communicate and sell.
The make-or-break for B2B ecommerce is getting the company’s
own sales team behind the project. Or as Unilever’s Marta Dalton
puts it: “When rolling out B2B ecommerce your own sales team
is your best asset”. The sales team typically has ownership of the
customer interface and are the ones who push the new service into
customers’ daily routines.
HAVE A GREAT ONBOARDING PROCESS IN PLACE

FOR THE SERVICE’S USERS
The maximum churn in digital services happens in the first 90 days

after sign-ups, making the first 90 days the most crucial period for
convincing the service’s impact on the business. It is well proven
that when a user is onboarded the right way and achieves ear-
ly milestones in the first 90 days, they are likely to stay with the
service much longer. All onboarding playbooks should be seen as
sequences of notifications, emails, feedback surveys and direct
contacts to make sure you create value to your users. User behav-
iour data and CRM contact profiles are great sources for prioritising
growth experiments to activate users.
ACTIVATE AND OPTIMISE DIGITAL SERVICES

LIKE CONSUMER ECOMMERCE
Every successful consumer ecommerce site has A/B tests running

and value propositions well defined in order to sell more and to
create a unique customer experience. Usually, consumer ecom-
merce sites also have a sales team, aka growth team, to optimise
the purchase funnel and prioritise growth experiments. Too often
digital services in B2B are developed with only a better customer
or user experience in mind without additional sales KPIs. Growth

hacking adds a new level — revenue — for prioritisation, optimisa-
tion and development. When digital services are well-integrated into
CRMs, the levels of personalisation and growth possibilities are huge.
From a growth hacking point-of-view the elements of successful

customer activation are:
→ A B2B digital service or ecommerce growth team should consist

of people with cross-functional skills in marketing technology,
data, web development, content creation and UX design. The team
should be driven by sales KPIs only.
→ Listen to sales teams but try to also find new ways to contact
current customers to really understand what works in different
contact profiles.
→ Try to align the customer behaviour in your digital service with

your customers’ CRM profile data. This makes understanding the
different needs of customer profiles visible to the growth team.
→ IT and platforms are just sideshows. Instead, to succeed in

ecommerce requires getting the business processes right and,
most importantly, treating ecommerce as a sales unit.
In every one of these B2B business cases, the main learning from
growth hacking is the mindset of experimenting without being
afraid of unsuccessful results and the willingness to bring together
a multidisciplinary team around a shared goal with a strong busi-
ness ownership, mandate to take action, and shared business tar-
gets to guide the work.
HOW TO CREATE
A DIGITAL AGE
B2B BUYING EXPERIENCE
Pirkka Kaijanen
IT IS SAFE TO SAY that the digitalisation of sales will have a funda-

mental effect on all companies and business models. For pretty
much all consumer businesses digital commerce is the new norm
and very few companies can successfully focus their presence only
on physical channels. The majority of successful consumer busi-
nesses are already in the second or third wave of their ecommerce.
The initiatives have moved from online shopping to personalised
and purely digital conversations that are being constantly optimised
and growth hacked.
However, in the B2B market, the situation is far more hetero-
geneous in terms of the maturity of moving into digital commerce.
Also, the prevailing channel strategy for ecommerce has been
focused on transactional integrations with major customers. There
is definitely room for innovators to disrupt the B2B market and win
customers’ share of wallet and mind with more of an elaborate
ecommerce approach.
When you set out to create a connected B2B commerce experience,

consider the following:
→ Traditional business models are deeply rooted in people, culture

and processes
→ Your digital sales channel strategy should be dependent on the

value of the customers
→ Ecommerce should not be considered as a point solution and

must be integrated into customer journeys
DIGITALISATION IS CHANGING THE EXPECTATIONS

OF B2B ”CONSUMERS”
We all have heard how Amazon, Uber or AirBnB have disrupted

industries with global and digital business models. The consum-
ers’ expectations for intuitive, personalised and effortless digital
commerce are the norm and anything less might kill the success of
a digital business.
Those same expectations will inevitably follow with the con-
sumers into the B2B context as well. The status quo in a traditional
business might be to work on the established relationships with
traditional B2B sales methods and focus on high-value channels
which typically are considered to be personal sales. Even a tradi-
tionally strong B2B business with a healthy market share will need
to rethink their approach for digital channels and sales.
Traditional industries are already seeing a wave of new gener-
ation buyers who have completely different buying preferences
and expectations. What they consider a high-value buying channel
might be completely different than what is the current norm. Their
benchmark for a great buying experience inevitably comes from the
consumer market.
AN ECOMMERCE CHANNEL STRATEGY IS PIVOTAL FOR B2B
Traditionally, the most common approaches for B2B digital sales

have been transactional integrations for high-volume customers
and self-service portals for long-tail. This can be considered as the
first wave of B2B ecommerce but both approaches have their limi-
tations. Transactional integrations (e.g. Electronic Data Interchange,
EDI) for key customers do not differentiate your company from the
other players. Not being able to integrate to your key buyers EDI can
only be considered a hygiene factor — something that will block you
from success but will not give any competitive advantage.
Modern ecommerce solutions will have to evolve from the trans-
actional layer, although that will need to work effortlessly too. Future
leaders in ecommerce will create digital solutions that are personal-
ised for their key customers and will offer capabilities around high-
level customer customisation, deal sharing, joint business planning
or co-development that will create more value for both parties.
On the other hand, serving the long tail of less valuable B2B
customers can equally be made way more profitable with an under-
standing of where to focus. For a B or C category customer, a val-
uable and profitable ecommerce dialogue will need to be highly
automated from demand generation, onboarding, service to buying
and fulfilment. A big part of the work in creating a successful B2B
channel is activating and onboarding customers to that channel.
Depending on the channel strategy the objective of a B2B ecom-
merce solution might be to either never meet the customers (long
tail customers) or to enable more high-value engagement with the
customers (key accounts). Both strategies will be valid and profita-
ble for all parties if the channel strategy is well thought out.
ECOMMERCE IS PART OF THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY,

NOT AN ISOLATED ISLAND
Digital buying is not an isolated action but an episode connected

to customer lifecycle. The scope of digital channels is, in many
cases, not focused purely on buying but on all steps of the buy-
ing funnel. Inbound marketing and nurturing will have the role of
driving B2B customers to use a service. Marketing automation will
need to support onboarding and activation as well as re-engaging
the customers with the digital channel. Materials and specifica-
tions will need to be available for decision making. The buying pro-
cess will not stop at placing the order; fulfilment and finance pro-
cesses must be able to produce up-to-date information and alerts
on changes.
Ecommerce cannot be an isolated island but must be connected
to the buyers’ journey and the relevant touchpoints throughout the
journey. Creating a connected buying and service experience puts
high pressure on the business and solution architecture: to be able
to connect marketing, sales, service, logistics and finance.
From a technology point of view, you should think from early
on, even from the MVP phase, about how the buying experience is
going to look like in the future and where it can expand to. If you
are planning to introduce collaboration or co-creation and engage
customers with marketing automation care models, make sure that
you are set up to that in the long run.
Finally, if modern digital consumer businesses are reaping sig-

nificant and immediate benefits by continuously optimising and
iterating the digital channels, the same applies to B2B channels.
Make sure that you are continuously ideating and testing out hy-
potheses based on business impact. There is no reason not to reap
rewards of personalisation and optimisation — go and growth hack
that B2B channel!
EPILOGUE:
GROWTH HACKING
WITH SALESFORCE
Pirkka Kaijanen
AS YOU BY THIS POINT PROBABLY KNOW, growth hacking is not spe-

cific to a certain technology or set of tools. However, as a digital
sales or marketing professional, you will consider yourself lucky if
you are working with technology that supports the growth hacking
approach. Many of our customers have chosen Salesforce as a key
technology enabler in the customer engagement space. We’d like
to share with you how to make sure you get the most out of your
investment.
Typically, as a growth hacker, you would want to work with a
technology stack that invites cooperation between cross-functional
growth team members and with the other stakeholders that active-
ly participate in the ideation of growth initiatives.
Once you have your growth goals, KPIs and growth backlog iden-
tified, the technology stack will also have an impact on how quickly
you can roll out your growth hypotheses and test them out. If the
majority of the changes in your customer care models will require
heavy customisations or tweaks to a spaghetti configuration of
point-to-point integrations your growth sprints will be a lot longer
or you will be able to conduct fewer experiments with your budget.
On the other hand, if you can do fast experiments with little cod-
ing and a lot of data is available to you either on your technology
platform or via connectors you can count yourself a bit luckier. In
the latter case, you’ll spend the majority of your time and budget
on creating the actual care models and growth experiments — in-
stead of traditional IT stuff: refactoring code, setting up DevOps
and working with IT infra.
In any data-driven methodology, the data you have available and
the capability to tap into the insight it provides is crucial. This is
especially the case with growth hacking. A typical starting point

for a growth sprint or mapping of growth opportunities is to delve
into available data sources. The data scientist in your team will
be mighty happy if the data happens to be in one shared data
model or available via a customer data platform. Should the tech-
nology natively support data analysis, or even better, data dis-
covery tools that allow you to understand deep and underlying
data patterns, identifying growth opportunities will be massively
more efficient.
WHY SALESFORCE <3 GROWTH HACKING?
If you are working with the Salesforce platform, you have hopefully
found quite a few things in the above paragraphs that resonate
with the setup you are working with (if not, then it is probably
time to look into your Salesforce implementation strategy as well).
In an ideal case, Salesforce as a customer engagement platform
should be an enabling technology stack to work with a growth
hacking mindset.
Let's take a closer look:
1 AVAILABILITY OF DATA
AND DATA INSIGHT WITH EINSTEIN
In the growth hacking method, data is often the fuel for identifying
new growth experiments. This usually requires quite a bit of time,
sweat and in worst case tears to get data sources work togeth-
er to start crunching the numbers. If your data happens to be on
the same platform with out-of-the-box reporting and analytics for
most of the data, the amount of sweat and tears should exponen-
tially decrease.
Beyond working with Salesforce’s operational reports and
analytics, the platform’s AI capabilities will help a growth hacker
data scientist quite a bit in finding the not-obvious trends in data.
Imagine the following scenarios:
“Einstein, give me the potential of this customer growing to reach

the top 20% CLV segment” (Einstein Prediction builder)
”Einstein, give me the top reasons for high CLV”.

(Einstein Discovery)
“Einstein, send variant ‘A’ email to customers with a high

propensity to convert, and move the rest to another branch in
the care model”. (Einstein Conversion Split for Marketing Cloud)
This is indeed a very effective way to find potential growth

opportunities quickly and efficiently!
2 HIGH IMPACT WITH CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMS

AND HIGH BUSINESS INVOLVEMENT
When working with the Salesforce platform you have high level
involvement and collaboration with business stakeholders. Quite
often business is in the driver’s seat when selecting tools and driv-
ing the business’ requirements whether it is digital marketing, sales
enablement, ecommerce or other customer-facing tools. In the

best case, you also have your marketing, sales, customer service
and even fulfilment people working on the same platform with a
shared customer view and sales funnel. This will be very powerful
when creating growth initiatives through the customer lifecycle.
We believe that all digital sales and marketing professionals will
sooner than later have to be quite tech-savvy. Still, it is under-
standable that if the discussion starts with server or gateway set-
ups, enthusiasm from the business’ side might decline. With the
Salesforce platform, the discussion can in most cases start with
the customer journey, right away putting the whole team’s focus
around growth opportunities on the same page.
3 SHORT LEAD TIME FOR EXPERIMENTS
Once you have a team focused around growth experiments, proba-

bly the most important factor in reaping the benefits is how many
experiments you can run in each growth sprint. While tests should
be focused around expected benefits, the effort to implement is a
major factor in which of the tests you can expect to be profitable
and create growth.
The ease vs. effort of implementation usually comes with either
avoiding customisations or not having to create additional bespoke
integrations to get the needed data or automation. In the Salesforce
platform the former can usually be achieved with less code and
citizen configuration (i.e. business users and analysts being able
to configure user experience and make changes to care models
and automation) while the latter can be achieved by using standard
APIs, connectors to most of the modern cloud applications or (the
best scenario!) with data already be on the shared platform.
ENABLING AND TACTICAL ASPECTS
Final thing to remember is that even the most advanced techno-

logy itself is only an enabler — it can help your business to create a
meaningful impact in your customers' lives, but not without actual-

ly using it. So do not fall in love with the features and solutions that
the platform can enable you to build. Rather focus on the tactics
you want to apply, the ones that will have an impact on the value
your customers get with dealing with the company you represent.
Once you have a clear vision of the strategy and tactics you want
to deploy, make sure that the enablers are available. With a clear
long term vision, and the tactical experiments and the technologi-
cal enablers in place you should be well set for a successful growth
hacking journey.
Learn and grow every day.

Tools for Growth
We’d like to offer you access to our stack

of tools that we use with our clients. These
tools have been developed for real cases,
and we use them ourselves all the time.
With feedback from our clients, we’ve
designed the tools to match the needs
of today’s digital business.
→ COLUMBIAROAD. COM / GROWTH101

Contact Us
FINLAND
Eero Martela
+358 40 489 7003
SWEDEN
Hannah Nordenström
+46 70 717 52 73
GERMANY
Helmut Scherer
+49 176 1101 7722
sales@columbiaroad.com
COLUMBIAROAD. COM
T H E
“Growth hacking is both a mindset and a proven way of
conducting performance-driven business”
G R O W T H
H A C K E R ’ S
COLUMBIAROAD.COM
A digital growth consultancy by Futurice
H A N D B O O K

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T H E

COLUMBIA ROAD Design

Our definition of growth hacking — it’s holistic! 10

2 HOW TO ACHIEVE DIGITAL GROWTH

Growth hacking is the new agile 14

Growth hacking is how to run a digital business 20

Every business needs a growth owner 24

Growth hacking is not the silver bullet 31

Budgeting for digital growth 36

The overlooked and misunderstood:

Customer Data Platform — a revenue engine or

Columbia Road’s growth hacking model

4 GROWTH HACKING IN ACTION

A three-step CLV focused channel strategy 60

Use growth hacking methods to elevate your

Optimising conversions in customer acquisition 72

Optimising conversions in digital sales channels 78

Three growth hacking business cases

How to create a digital age B2B buying experience 92

Epilogue: growth hacking with Salesforce 97

Tools for growth 102

YOU MIGHT WONDER why we felt the need to create an edition of

In the original 2019 edition of the Growth Hacker’s Handbook

The digitalisation of sales is not about building tools and solutions

In the early days of customer relationship management, some com-

We believe that today’s digital marketers, designers, developers and

So go on, be a true trailblazer and continue to push yourself towards

THERE CAN BE VARIOUS DEFINITIONS for the term ‘growth hacking.’

1 GROWTH CULTURE AND MINDSET

In short, growth hacking is all about getting shit done. It requires

The core of growth hacking is a certain way of working, including

3 OPERATING AND ORGANISING AROUND DIGITAL SERVICES

Successful growth hacking requires that certain kind of teams

4 GROWTH HACKING ACTIVITIES AND HACKS

On a hands-on level, growth hacking consists of various activ-

WHY AND WHEN TO DO GROWTH HACKING?

Agile development practices, user experience focus and service de-

HOW TO ADD THE REVENUE LAYER INTO AGILE

The set of solutions are called growth hacking. Growth hacking

Thirdly, your focus may lie in constructing digital backend capabil-

With these capabilities, rather than first building enormous back-

A GROWTH TEAM IS THE CORE OF GROWTH HACKING

The core of growth hacking is a cross-disciplinary team, which is

NEW GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES FINDING TRACTION

Days to Weeks Weeks to Months

1 Continuous identification of 2 Business case-based backlog

NEW GROWTH NEW GROWTH

Kill & learn

Kill & learn

Kill & learn DATA

CONTINUOUS GROWTH HACKING

3 Rapid incremental 4 Constant data-based business

analysts. In addition, a growth owner looks after the whole picture,

Matti Liski from Elisa, one of the largest telecommunications com-

sales on our website and started experimenting. Within the first

WHY A GROWTH HACKING PROCESS INSTEAD OF

Foreseeing what kind of solutions and features will increase rev-

And still, never forget agile ways of working, customer experience

LEAD YOUR DIGITAL REVENUE GROWTH ALWAYS BUSINESS-FIRST

How? The solution: From a leadership point of view, growth hacking

BUT MY DIGITAL SALES ARE GROWING NICELY

are supported by a marketing team. In that setting, digital sales