Leena AI’s Chirayu Akotiya: Growth Teams are the Future of Go-To-Market

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Sales and marketing should be best friends. They share the same end goal (growth) and own adjacent stages in the acquisition funnel. 

Too often, however, they work in silos with little communication or collaboration. Sellers accuse marketers of “throwing leads over the fence” with little regard for quality or qualification. Marketers claim salespeople ditch leads too early. Poor alignment plagues go-to-market strategies, hurting awareness, customer acquisition, and retention.

A new generation of go-to-market leaders are attempting to improve alignment by redrawing traditional departmental lines. Chirayu Akotiya, Head of Growth at Leena AI, is among them.

Instead of building traditional marketing organizations, Chirayu designed a growth team. He extended his focus beyond the first few layers of the conversion funnel, consolidating additional functions like business development.

I caught up with Chirayu to talk about how growth teams increase alignment, boost collaboration, and drive better results.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Some people use growth and marketing interchangeably. Can you explain the difference?

If you look at the classic acquisition funnel, marketing organizations have typically focused on the first two layers: awareness and acquisition. That’s reflected in how marketing teams are structured and the goals they operate against.

Today’s marketing tends to focus on KPIs that align with the top two layers of the funnel: leads, signups, new users, downloads. Marketing optimizes for those KPIs by hiring team members who have backgrounds in content, paid, copywriting, PR, branding, and so on. What is not included is people like engineers, designers, product managers, and data scientists. These roles tend to work in completely different silos.

Other teams own the rest of the funnel beyond awareness and acquisition. Product owns activation. Sales owns retention. The nuances change between organizations, but the point is that the layers of the funnel are owned by separate teams.

To contrast this, growth blends marketing, product, engineering, and revenue. Growth teams look at the funnel in a holistic way. Their metrics tell a more complete picture of the business. Growth focuses on daily active users, monthly active subscribers, lead registrations, new users, and metrics that drive the growth of a company.

If growth organizations are so effective, why are they in the minority?

I think it's more related to the evolution of marketing and product-centric companies. If you look at 10 years ago, there was no product management function. It was all project management. If you look at seven years ago, there was no product marketing function. It was Salesforce that introduced that role. It is a part of an ongoing evolution.

People are spending more time on education and awareness, thinking about the type of model they want to pursue. Personally, I think growth marketing will keep becoming a norm in future.

How have you structured Leena’s growth org?

I was the first product and marketing hire at Leena AI. Initially, when I joined, we were looking at achieving product-market fit. Since then, I’ve been able to work on organizational structure. What I've tried to create is a very scalable, yet agile model for the team.

Our growth team has five sub-functions:

1. Revenue marketing
2. Demand generation
3. Brand marketing
4. Content marketing
5. Product marketing

Revenue marketing is a team of SDR, BDRs, and account-based marketing folks. Their primary job is to ensure that there are enough meetings happening between prospects and our sales teams. Revenue marketing is the direct customer of our demand generation team, whose primary responsibility is to create top-of-funnel leads via all the channels that they own. These two functions are joined at the hip.

Brand is self-explanatory. The brand marketing team works on thought leadership content and partners with PR agencies across multiple geographies.

Unlike other functions, we organize content marketing and product marketing by product, not geographies. We are a multi-product company, and each product works like a pod. Each product pod has a product management owner, a product marketing owner, a content marketing owner, and a product design owner.

On top of these five sub-functions, we have a centralized team for field marketing, which supports our demand generation and brand teams. We also have a centralized team for marketing operations. There is a separate team called product adoption, which is shared between customer success, Product and marketing.

What benefit do you get from including revenue marketing in growth versus leaving it in sales?

SDRs should sit with the leader who is best capable of giving them the attention they need to be successful.

Marketing lead gen and nurture people are metrics and process-oriented animals, naturally suited to manage a process-oriented department.

It provides a simple, clear conceptual model: marketing is the opportunity creation factory and sales is the opportunity closing machine.

In short, marketing’s job is to make opportunities.  Sales’ job is to close them.

Putting functions together on an org chart is one thing. Having them work together is another. How do you promote collaboration within the growth org?

If you had asked me this question seven or eight months ago, my answer would have been, “I don't know.” It was only in the last two quarters that we started focusing on collaboration between sub-functions.

We solved the collaboration challenge by setting team KPIs that rely on other functions. For example, our sales enablement team owns the lead-to-meeting conversion rate. They can’t improve that without help from demand generation and revenue marketing. Similarly, product marketing is now responsible for sales velocity and win rate. Product marketing can’t do it alone. They need to collaborate with the sales function.

Once our discussions started to revolve around those metrics, collaboration became an inevitable outcome.

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