How to Build a World-Class B2B Growth Team (Our Playbook for 24x Growth)

It’s 2025, and growing a B2B company has never been more challenging. Building product is easier (thanks to APIs and AI), but getting in front of customers is harder than ever – paid ads, cold outbound, and even SEO are all far more competitive and saturated. That’s why having a dedicated growth team is becoming mission-critical. Rather than relying solely on traditional sales and marketing, many of today’s fastest-growing companies (Slack, HubSpot, Ramp, etc.) have small, agile growth teams driving experimentation and new revenue opportunities.

At Unify, we embraced this early. Our growth team – just two full-time people (!) – now drives nearly $10M in pipeline per month, giving us a huge edge against larger competitors. Here’s our playbook on why and how to build a world-class B2B growth team:

Why build a growth team now?

Simply put, a great growth team lets you achieve outsized results with a small headcount. Modern tools and automation (from product analytics to AI outbound platforms) mean that a couple of creative generalists can do the work that might have taken a dozen specialists a decade ago. Instead of throwing budget at diminishing-return channels, you empower a focused team to continuously find new ways to drive revenue.

We’ve seen the difference firsthand. With just two people focused on growth (working hand-in-hand with our sales and marketing), we grew Unify 24x in 2024. Those two people produced $9.7M of pipeline in Q4 alone. Meanwhile, competitors with larger but more traditional teams often move slower or get stuck using the same old playbook.

Bottom line: if you’re a B2B startup looking to break out, building a growth team – even a tiny one – can be your secret weapon to beat bigger players.

Who to hire for a growth team (and in what order)

A world-class growth team usually includes a few key roles or skill sets. Think of it like assembling a versatile sports team, where each player has a position:

• Head of Growth – The strategist and leader. This person sets the growth strategy, coordinates with other departments (sales, marketing, product), and keeps the team accountable to targets. Often, in early-stage startups, a founder or a very entrepreneurial early hire plays this role. They need a mix of analytical skills, creativity, and leadership. (In our case, I took on this role as a founder.)
• Growth Manager (or Growth Marketer) – The experimenter and executor. This is the person running the day-to-day growth experiments and campaigns. They launch A/B tests, set up automations, spin up outbound campaigns, trial new channels – whatever it takes to move the needle. Great growth managers are scrappy, data-savvy, and not afraid to get their hands dirty across marketing and sales tools. Both of our growth team members at Unify function as growth managers (among other things).
• Growth Operations – The systems and tools specialist. This role is similar to a Revenue Operations person but focused on growth initiatives. A growth ops person might wire up CRM workflows, integrate new data sources, clean and segment prospect lists, or build dashboards. They make sure the growth machine runs smoothly under the hood. We added a part-time growth ops resource to help support our team, and it’s been a force multiplier.
• Growth Engineer – The builder (optional early on). Not every growth team starts with an engineer, but having access to one can unlock things like custom growth tools, scraping scripts, or deeper product changes to drive growth (growth-influenced product features). At larger scales, a growth engineer on the team can be a game changer. In the beginning, though, many teams borrow an engineer part-time or make do with no-code tools.
• RevOps (partner role) – The CRM and process enabler. This isn’t a growth team hire per se, but you’ll want a strong relationship with whoever handles Revenue Operations. They’ll assist with setting up Salesforce (or your CRM) to handle the influx of leads and ensure data flows correctly. In our case, our RevOps lead works closely with growth to implement tracking and keep our sales data clean.

For an early-stage startup, you might start with just one or two people – say a Head of Growth (who also acts as a growth manager) and a Growth Marketer. That duo can lay the groundwork. As you see traction, you’d then hire a dedicated Growth Ops or analytics person to streamline execution. Later, bring in more specialized talent (like a growth-focused engineer) as needed.

Also, don’t get too hung up on titles. What matters are the skill sets: analytical chops, creative marketing instinct, technical know-how, and an experimental mindset. We’ve seen effective growth hires come from non-traditional backgrounds – our growth leads have backgrounds in computer science and even finance, not typical marketing resumes.

How a small growth team can win big

It’s not just who you hire, but how the team works. (In fact, we’ve written a separate deep dive on how we operate our growth team.) In brief, we give our growth team a lot of autonomy, set aggressive goals, and encourage constant experimentation. They run weekly sprints, document experiments, and measure everything. And we arm them with the best tools – from analytics software to an AI-powered outbound platform (Unify, of course) – so they can do the work of a much larger team.

A huge advantage of a growth team is that it cuts across silos. Ours collaborates daily with marketing (on content and ads), product (on onboarding optimizations and product-led growth ideas), and sales (on outbound plays and sales enablement). By not being confined to one function, they can spot opportunities in the gaps between departments. For example, our growth team noticed a lot of sign-ups were stalling after using our product tour – so they worked with sales to implement an automated follow-up (Play) that emails those sign-ups within an hour, offering help. This boosted our conversion from trial to demo significantly.

Final Thoughts: Building a world-class growth team is one of the best investments we made early on. It’s helped us create a repeatable, scalable revenue engine and outpace competitors with far more resources. If you decide to build a growth team, empower them with clear goals, give them room to experiment (and fail), and hire for that rare mix of creativity and analytical thinking.

The companies that win in 2025 and beyond will be those that crack distribution. A small but mighty growth team – armed with data, tools, and a mandate to experiment – might just be your unfair advantage in the race for growth.