Building Treasury's Sales & Marketing Engine from Ground Zero
Situation: I always like to say that I joined Treasury when it was just “a deck and a dream”.
I joined as a Sales & Marketing Manager to help the founder develop and scale a marketing and sales strategy from zero to 1 as a relatively unknown startup with no website and absolutely no inbound.
Task: I knew my role would be to support the founder with building out an Ideal Customer Profile and rapid iteration of content and messaging so that we could reach Product Market Fit as fast as possible.
Actions: I got started by reviewing a preliminary ICP doc that the Founder had developed and dove deep into the product. This gave me a better idea of what the product was and who the target audience was. After some edits of the ICP doc, I helped develop the website, reviewing copy and site architecture with the help of the founder and an outside agency. At the same time, I got to work building out a database that would power our outbound efforts.
This database was compiled by meticulous research of news, press releases, and more, to develop a long list of potential customers on both sides of the market. Once this database was developed, we worked quickly on a first draft of messaging and content types, such as decks, a whitepaper, and outreach templates – then got to work sending outreach to our long list so we could rapidly iterate.
Result: It was a long road, but our constant iterations led us to develop a strategy containing content and channels that worked for us – with the result being we not only received responses to our outbound efforts, but actually started generating leads!
Learning: While the result was ultimately positive, it was a very bumpy road and I do think it took longer than it needed to.
At times, I think we overemphasized process refinement at the expense of execution speed. In the future I would strive for a better balance between strategy and action for such an early stage company where runway is rapidly decreasing.
Growth: I have learned to work even faster to uncover my weaknesses in any given strategy and confront them earlier so that I can refine processes at a quicker pace.