Telling a Forward-Looking Growth Story with Andrea Kayal

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day, we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Andrea Kale. Andrea is the CRO of Help Scout. She's a career CMO/ CRO for businesses who serve SMBs. She's also the dean of the CMO School, which sounds like a very exalted title, the Dean of the CMO School at Pavilion, formerly Revenue Collective. Andrea, it's great to see you.

Andrea Kayal: You too, Matt. Thanks for having me.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, so when I think about the job of a CEO, I think the job has at its core the ability to explain and articulate the forward path of the company, the forward trajectory of the company, the vision, and do that in a way that's inspiring people. And so much of that is going to be the growth story. How do you tell that growth story to investors or prospective investors, employees and people you're recruiting customers and prospects? My question to you as a growth expert is, what are three effective things that CEOs can do to articulate not just the fact that there is a growth story, but how the company is going to grow forward looking?

Andrea Kayal: Totally. Well, I think first and foremost, I actually think it's, I wouldn't say a gap in some board meetings, but I do think that there's an opportunity to make sure that it's part of every story, because growth is something you need foresight about. You can't just start growing one day. You need to do a lot of planning, whether that's people or investments. And frankly, when you think about what growth means, it means how you are allocating your capital, like a hedge fund, right? The LPs give the VCs money, the VCs give the CEO money. CEO is usually giving the CRO or the CMO the money then to make the bets. And so I think the three ways that you can best show the board what that vision is for growth, I think first is making sure you have a very clear story about the capital allocation. You can start very high level, which means marketing is going to drive 30% of our growth, business development, 20%, paid 50%, whatever, whatever your kind of mix is. I do think being clear on what that mix looks like and how that mix changes over time is important. For example, maybe you have marketing at 30% and you have SDR at 15%, but if you find that SDR is expensive, you want to bring that number down over time, you want to show what this mix looks like in this forward- looking view. The second thing is the forecast for how you're growing should be just as clear and articulate as the sales forecast. Do you think that often gets overlooked in board meetings where there's not necessarily this double click on is it working or is it not working? It's usually an appendix slide or something that gets talked about on occasion. I think it probably should be the topic of conversation every single board meeting, because usually it comes up after the fact when something broke and then you are reflecting on how you plug the gaps. The third I would say is just having a clear picture of what market forces may impact this over time. For example, I was at a company where Apple launched something that was very similar to the product. Well, they're Apple. They have a lot of money, and they can crush you in one fell swoop if they really start putting money against it. I think one way that is continuing to read S1s of competitors or just having a better pulse on what's happening around you, inaudible competitive, I don't want to say ... I don't want to say inaudible, sounds so old school, but you really need to have your finger on the pulse of that stuff. Those would be the three things I think of when I think of growth.

Matt Blumberg: Those are great. I love all three. I particularly like the first one, the capital allocation framework and the through line from LPs straight down to marketing. That's such an interesting way of thinking about it.

Andrea Kayal: Totally.

Matt Blumberg: Andrea Kale, thank you so much for joining me.

Andrea Kayal: Thanks, Matt.