S 01 Ep 21 | Understanding Growth as a Function within Organizations

With Guillaume Cabane, the 'Godfather of Growth' & Co-Founder of Hypergrowth Partners

Guillaume Cabane, also known as G, is 'the Godfather of Growth' in the B2B world. Having previously run growth at high-profile B2B companies like Drift and Segment, G now shares his experience and insight through his platform HyperGrowth Partners, which supports B2B companies in accelerating their growth.

Key Takeaways

(00:08–07:17) Growth Strategies in B2B Evolution

(07:17–19:42) PLG Efficiency and Limitations

(19:42–31:21) Balancing Creativity and Data

(31:21–47:38) Authenticity Drives Customer Value

(47:38–54:30) AI and the Future of Growth

📱 Apple Podcasts | 🎧 Spotify | 🔗 iHeart

From B2B Hacks
to AI Futures

In this episode, Alex and Guillaume Cabane explore the evolution of growth strategies—from the early days of inbound marketing to the rise of Product-Led Growth (PLG) and its modern-day limitations. They discuss the unique challenges of B2B growth, the balance between creativity and data, and the importance of capital efficiency. The conversation dives into how authenticity builds long-term value, and looks ahead at how AI will reshape growth teams and marketing in commoditized markets.

1. Growth Strategies in B2B Evolution

The speakers explore the emergence of growth in the B2B space from the Inbound era of HubSpot to the present day. They discuss Guillaume Cabane’s story and how he got into growth. They also discuss the different types of growth including B2C platforms like Facebook and B2B demand gen growth. Finally, the speakers explore the concept of Product-Led Growth and the hybrid category of Product-Led Sales.

You're just never going to have Facebook volume in B2B. It's never going to happen, which means most of the time you can't run that number of variants. Growth took a different face application in B2B and it's a more growth hacky.
— Guillaume Cabane

2. PLG Efficiency and Limitations

The speakers explore the significance of capital efficiency and its impact on a business's success. They analyze how customer acquisition costs and lifetime value can be used to evaluate a business's success, and how Product-Led Growth has become a way to acquire users without cost. The speakers also examine why growth teams exist and how their incentive structure differs from traditional marketing teams. Lastly, they look into how the success of growth teams is often short-lived due to the risk of failure.

The reason why founders love conceptually PLG is because users acquire other users, they acquire themselves for free. Conceptually it sounds great. In practice, almost every business I work with at scale does a combo of trying some PLG on small, medium businesses and doing effectively some product-led sales on the mini-market and enterprise. Everyone does kind of both.
— Guillaume Cabane

3. Balancing Creativity and Data

Alex and Guillaume discuss the importance of having a combination of creative and analytical skills to succeed in the business world. They examine the value of experimentation and recognizing opportunities, as well as taking risks. They also consider the need for postmortem analysis. They look at the benefit of having an outside perspective and how it can help identify areas of potential arbitrage. Finally, the speakers discuss the need to reduce unnecessary friction from the customer journey.

People are not like very few people, like you know gambling of the gambling mindset. Every time you take a growth experiment, you're running a hypothesis, a number game on likelihood of failure and likelihood of success.
— Guillaume Cabane

4. Authenticity Drives Customer Value

The speakers investigate how to create a high-value, engaging experience for customers that is also scalable. They examine how tactics and strategies that once worked can be abused and desensitized by audiences, and how artificial intelligence can be used to create an even cheaper arbitrage. The speakers also explore how to create true value and reciprocity for customers who feel authentic.

True reciprocity always works because, as humans, that is like thousands and thousands, or tens of thousands of years of evolution that have taught us to elicit reciprocity.
— Guillaume Cabane

5. The Future of Growth and AI

Alex and Guillaume tackle the challenges of setting up a growth team and the buy-in needed to take risks. They also discuss the future of the discipline and the potential emergence of AI-driven buying and selling. They examine how commoditized areas are more likely to be automated and the need for breakout innovation to engage the human spirit.

It takes competitive pressure and willingness to do something different. All right, then you're coming to say, if you're not willing to do that, you're not going to have a growth team and that growth team is not going to succeed.
— Guillaume Cabane

Check the episode's Transcript (AI-generated) HERE.