Driving Growth w/ Short & Long-Term Planning (w/ Amrita Mathur, Superside)

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Learn how Amrita Mathur (VP Marketing) has helped Superside grow to $45m in 4 years, using a combination of short and long-term planning.

How They Move The Needle

Amrita drives predictable growth by maintaining a short-term and long-term growth plan at Superside. 

For Amrita, the purpose of the short-term plan is to hit this year’s pipeline goals. She’s been able to build 3 programs (performance, content, and ABM) that drive consistent, proven results. She’s also got a firm grasp on the performance the company can expect at each stage of the customer journey. So each year, when Superside sets revenue and pipeline goals, she works backward to identify how many qualified leads they’ll need to hit their pipeline goal. She plans 6-months in advance, and much of the plan is simply tweaking the existing programs that have proven to drive pipeline.

However, she relies on long-term planning (1+ year out) to ensure Superside can grow well into the future. She knows that she can’t simply take her current programs, double the investment, and expect double the output. For example, her performance marketing efforts will eventually saturate her audience and start to plateau in efficacy. Social platforms can throttle your organic reach and force you to pay to continue getting in front of your audience. So while the short-term plan focuses on driving predictable growth this year, Amrita works with her team to test moonshots: big bets for future growth. 

The key difference is in how she sets expectations and measures performance. For the short-term plan, just about everything is expected to drive a certain result – fairly accurately – based on historic performance data. But for the long-term plan, she tells the team not to expect any pipeline or revenue for at least 1 year. If it drives some, that’s great. But it’s not expected to. Instead, her team measures leading indicators to start to get an idea of what kind of performance the new program ( = moonshot) might end up driving. For example, while her three primary programs are busy generating pipeline this year, she’s making a long-term bet on YouTube. She’s invested in hiring someone to own it, and 1 year to creating content on the platform. To date, it’s generated 1 million views. Whether it’s effective for generating pipeline remains to be seen.

The real beauty of her system is the way she balances the two. By putting in the hard work to build 2-3 revenue-generating programs, she’s earned the trust to make bigger, longer-term bets. The short-term plan gives her team the runway they need to test wilder ideas. She knows what kind of performance she can expect at each stage of their marketing and sales funnel, and can fairly accurately set and hit pipeline goals 1 year out. But Superside’s long-term growth and ability to continue expanding and differentiating will come down to investing in long-term programs. Channels that other competitors might not have the perseverance to perfect, or that take a long time to generate results. Ultimately, she feels it’s these long-term bets that will ensure Superside continues to grow far into the future.

Links

• Superside
• Amrita’s LinkedIn