What Does Head of Growth Mean?

Spend enough time on LinkedIn or at startup incubators and you’re bound to come across the term “Head of Growth” as a title for a senior executive. As a firm that provides Head of Growth services, you can imagine we get asked what it means to us quite often.

We also see a number of articles ranking on Google organic search that seem to have defined it without actually understanding how the term is used in practice. And guess what happens when ranking articles have incorrect information… AI gets trained incorrectly.

Google’s top result for “Head of Growth” is a Gemini synopsis on 12/23/2024 that doesn’t conform to the way the title is actually used.

So we arrive at an even more confusing definition that includes “growth marketing.” Is there any other type of marketing? Luckily we’re not seeing “Director of Non-Growth Marketing” titles yet but maybe they are around the corner?

But in all seriousness, like so many sales and marketing terms such as CRO, Head of Growth is not used consistently so hopefully this article helps you understand.

For a number of reasons, startups and tech in particular tend to steer away from using senior titles with “Chief” in them until some imaginary line for revenue or head count is reached.

The CEO uses the title “Founder.”

The Chief Financial Officer uses “Head of Finance.”

The Chief Operating Officer uses “Head of Operations.”

The Chief Marketing Officer uses “Head of Marketing.”

The Chief Revenue Officer (the other meaning of CRO) uses “Head of Sales.”

But the reality with startups is a lot of these roles don’t actually exist yet. Fullstory started with 7 software developers and a CEO who did essentially everything sales, marketing, admin, payroll, fundraising, etc.

If there is a “Head of Operations,” that person is likely sharing the administrative load with the founder across many non-operations functions.

What Head of Growth Actually Means (Usually)

So imagine you come across a company with a listed Head of Growth on their About page. That usually means they are comfortable signaling to the world that they are in startup mode.

Growth usually refers to two main categories:

• Customer count
• Revenue

If you’re a frequent reader here at Sales Funnel Professor, you already know that startups can be more successful with a marketing-driven go-to-market strategy if they are within a known category.

On the other hand, startups that are creating their category are much less likely to be able to channel demand because their audience isn’t educated yet, so their GTM has to be much more sales-driven and focus on educating the client about the pain they are experiencing and the category of product or service that solves it.

A Head of Growth should be equally adept at both. They should have C-suite level sales and marketing skills and more specifically, be able to teach.

A Head of Growth Needs End-to-End Sales Funnel Skills for that Particular Business

Business by business, the price point and way a particular deal becomes Closed-Won varies greatly.

A Head of Growth for a B2C e-comm product could reasonably put together a stable of influencers with strong TikTok and Instagram followers in relevant demographics. “Closing” happens in a hand-off shopping cart to checkout process that runs through a major card payment rails like Stripe or similar.

A fintech Head of Growth who is bringing a totally new class of software to consumers via bank marketing needs ABM as top of funnel expertise. The product isn’t a known category so PPC and SEO would only ever be attracting adjacent phrases so outbound prospecting or LinkedIn targeted ads would be better choices.

A Head of Growth Needs to Be Compatible with the Method of Closing

Some businesses offer a very low-risk, high-volume, low-margin product. These types of sales funnels often end in a self-service checkout experience. We’re actually running some experiments for a company selling Bitcoin shirts and similar to see if we can get even higher cart to purchase numbers, but that’s a specialized type of CRO.

For a company that sells annualized contracts above $10k or professional services engagements of over $100k, a Head of Growth needs to be able to understand high-ticket, relational closing (lots of meetings, multiple decision-makers, longer sales cycles).

Some Heads of Growth may actually be the closer or one of the closers in scenarios like this. Otherwise, they’ll certainly need to be able support the closer with the right website, collateral, ads, & more.

A More Accurate Head of Growth Definition

To summarize what a Head of Growth really means, think about these characteristics:

• C-level executive at a startup
• Has both sales & marketing skills
• The company has not started using “Chief ___ Officer” yet
• Their job is to focus on the whole revenue cycle from end to end
• They should know funnels that are appropriate to the product or services: B2B vs B2C, high-ticket vs low-ticket
• They should be a multiplier for everyone else
• They should be a great teacher…startups need to learn as fast as possible.

What About a Fractional Head of Growth?

Many startups that are coming out of the ground need a lot of people “baking the cake” and that costs money in the form of labor: service providers, software developers, customer-facing staff, etc.

A Head of Growth should be filling in lots of knowledge gaps and actively training the team as those people work.

But in a well-structured startup where there are good systems in place: CRM, project management board, etc., a Head of Growth plus eager-to-learn individual contributors in both sales and marketing can be a great team to carry the company well into 7-digit or even 8-digit revenue numbers.

How Do You Find Out More?

While we build and manage hands-off PLG and ecomm funnels for global companies, the way we work with clients is purely relational.

To find, we request you take a look at our Getting Started page. Then come up with all the tough questions you’d like to cover in an introductory call. You’ll be vetting us and we’ll be vetting you. If we think your product or services isn’t ready, we’ll let you know.

If we’re not vibing, we’ll politely do our best to steer you to a different resource. Our relationships work best when both parties can be candid and working in unison. The work is a lot more enjoyable that way. Make sense?