How to build a world-class B2B growth team

Hey there, Austin here 👋

Welcome to The Pipeline—the newsletter to help scale your revenue team’s creativity.

Growing a B2B company in 2025 is more difficult than it’s ever been. APIs and AI have broken down technical barriers. Now anyone can build software — not just engineers.

But we grew Unify 24x Y/Y in 2024, grew ARR +25% M/M in January, and produced $9.7M of pipeline (an all-time record by +49%).

So I want to walk you through how we've built our growth team to get us this far. I've done this twice now, first at Ramp and now at Unify. I have strong opinions.

This guide is on why now is the right time to build your growth team and what makes a great growth team.

Let's get into it.

📒 GTM Playbook

How to build a world-class B2B growth team

Right now is the easiest time to build product. But getting in front of customers is 10X harder.

Why?

ROI on traditional distribution channels are dwindling because of how highly saturated everything from paid ads to SEO to outbound has become.

This is happening across the board.

We can see evidence of this in a few places: startups, declining from around 60% YoY median ARR growth in 2020 to 26% in 2024, and in public SaaS companies dropping from 33% to 18% over the last 5 years.

It's still possible to grow much faster than this. But you need a growth team, and can't just allocate dollars to traditional sales and marketing.

Why you should build a growth team today.

Historically, companies have been decomposed into engineering, sales, marketing, and operations. And sales and marketing have always been seen as the go-to's for generating pipeline.

It makes sense. They've been the leaders for growth forever, and growth teams are a relatively new addition to the software company org structure.

But, in the last 10 years, growth orgs have become a critical force in several fast growing companies.

Take Slack, HubSpot, Airbnb, Uber, and Ramp. Their growth teams played pivotal roles in their hockey stick growth. I was fortunate to be a founding member of Ramp's growth team.

And, with how AI tools have transformed the structure, productivity, and operational efficiency, growth teams don't need to be 10-20 people anymore.

Teams of 1-2 can operate like a team of 10 did just 5 years ago.

To put this in context, our growth team is just 2 dedicated people. Together they're responsible for almost $10M of monthly pipeline. This is Unify's competitive advantage in the market.

So where do you start? Your team members.

What makes a great growth team.

Great growth hires come from a variety of backgrounds. Think of your growth team like a soccer team - you're going to need a few different archetypes.

We’ve seen A-players come from computer science, investing, consulting, operations, and more. Growth hires often look different from your traditional sales or marketing backgrounds.

These are the roles that a great B2B growth team has:

• Head of Growth

  • This is the person who sets the tone, the operating cadence, and is responsible for hitting the goals. They're reporting regularly to leadership about attainment to goal.

  • A great growth advisor can be a good place to start. I've worked with HyperGrowth and had a ton of success.

• Growth Manager

  • The person responsible for shipping experiments and delivering results. Growth managers do the work. Responsibilities include launching new automated outbound plays, standing up new paid ads channels, building dashboards, analyzing results, and more.

  • Look for unorthodox profiles - engineers or former finance / consulting backgrounds

• Growth Operations

  • Like Revenue Operations, but specifically focused on growth. Someone in growth operations will be responsible for integrating tools and doing repetitive data cleansing and movement. This function is often missing from teams and adding it is one of the highest leverage ways to get more impact out of your Growth Managers.

• Growth Engineering

  • Someone who sits on the growth team but focuses mostly on writing production code. Not everything today can be done with out-of-the-box tools and having someone who is fluent at coding on your team is an accelerant.

• Revenue Operations

  • RevOps doesn't sit on the growth team, but is an important cross-functional role worth a mention. They'll play a big role in setting up your CRM architecture so that you can scale your campaigns without running into too much friction.

To start, you'll want to make sure you at least have a Head of Growth and a Growth Manager to start making real progress. From there a Growth Ops hire is a great next step.

Here’s a breakdown of the Unify growth team (full-time and contracted) to make this tangible:

1. Austin Hughes, Co-Founder (Head of Growth) - Before Ramp, I was in investing and finance. At Ramp, I was a growth leader. And currently, I'm serving as a growth leader at Unify.

2. Garrett Wolfe, Growth Lead (Growth Manager) - Garrett has a computer science degree and also came from an investing and finance background. At Unify, he owns our automated outbound program and partnerships.

3. Rhea Sanger, Growth Lead (Growth Manager & Engineer) - Rhea also has a computer science background. She owns writing code for the growth team whenever needed, Unify’s website (free tools and experiences that drive conversion), and performance marketing.

4. Victor “Vic” Schwenoha (Revenue Operations) - Vic focuses on making Salesforce and other mission-critical systems run like clockwork. This has some overlap with the work that Garrett, Rhea, and Gwen do, but Vic is responsible for Salesforce.

5. Gwen Lagunero (Growth Operations) - Gwen supports on Salesforce work (e.g., building dashboards) and shipping one-off campaigns. Gwen runs a few scripts and does some weekly data movement using CSVs.

Some attributes that we look for on our growth team:

• Truth seeking - value getting to the truth over being right.

• "That's how it's always been done." isn't an acceptable answer

• An extreme sense of urgency, speed, and grit.

• Creativity - outside the box thinking, and the ability to craft innovative solutions

• Analytical - fluent with reading dashboards and picking up "so whats"

• Strong people skills, work well cross-functionally across the company.

Growth teams are no longer your traditional marketers or product managers, they are tied to revenue goals and bridge the gap between traditional go-to-market and engineering.

Having the right talent is the first step. But that's not all it takes to win.

Your growth team has to operate effectively, align on goals, and ship experiments fast so you can actually find potential winners to double down on (the point of a growth team).

I'll write more about how great growth teams operate in a future newsletter.

Final thoughts

Having a strong growth team means you can grow 2x faster than the competition. This means you’ll raise more money, attract better talent, and ultimately win in your category.

As the barrier to building software has fallen dramatically over the last decade, finding pockets of outsized growth and product market fit is increasingly difficult.

Companies that build high-velocity, experimentally driven growth organizations will thrive in a world where distribution is more important and more difficult than ever.

We're not perfect at this. We're still iterating and optimizing every day. But we've figured out what to focus on and how to operate the right way to build a high-velocity, experimentation-driven growth org that's grown Unify 24x Y/Y and +25% ARR M/M.

Happy to answer any questions you may have. Just reply to this email.

WHAT’S NEW AT UNIFY

Crazy stat: Our automated outbound program booked 188 meetings and $3.3M of pipeline in January.

This was all powered on Unify.

Huge shoutout to Garrett for owning this program. 10+ plays are winning to produce these results.

If you want to learn more about how we do automated outbound, I did a deep dive in this edition of the newsletter.

 And if you want to use Unify to drive more pipeline in 2025, book a demo here.

BEFORE YOU GO…

Thanks for reading, as always.

I have a ton of newsletter ideas for the next coming weeks. But I want to get your input. Let me know what topic below you'd wanna read about next. A few I have in mind:

• What every growth team gets wrong

• What it's like going from employee to founder

• How a great growth team operates

Or feel free to respond to this email with a topic I might have missed.

Thanks a ton,

Austin

PS: If you want to use Unify to drive more pipeline in 2025, get in touch here.