The military industry is one of the world´s leading industries. No wonder, since the security of nations depends on it. That is why competition within the industry is fierce. To beat the competition and sell our products we must apply the best and most advanced techniques at our disposal, among which is growth hacking.

Growth hacking seeks to perform small tests, called experiments to check which strategies work and which do not. These tests are characterized by their low cost and short execution time. This allows testing a large number of strategies in a very short time without wasting resources. In this way, the best ones can be selected and focused on for growth.

First of all, it is necessary to be clear about which are our key metrics, i.e. those that allow us to grow more. In the military sector, examples of key metrics could be: number of government contracts, public tenders won, sales to groups of military contractors, sales to private individuals...

Once we know our key metrics we should set objectives to increase or decrease them as we see fit. These objectives should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound). Winning two public tenders annually could be a SMART objective.

After this, we will study what our growth drivers are, i.e., how we can achieve our objectives. In order to check whether we are actually getting closer to our objectives, we will conduct experiments.

In the military sector, adapting to the customer is vital. Depending on the geographical area, political situation and rules of engagement, there will be products that fit perfectly or, on the contrary, will be useless. In order to experiment and discover ways to grow we must ask ourselves questions such as the following

• Are our products generalist or niche-focused?
• Do niche products work better than generalist products?
• Do we meet the necessary requirements to enter public tenders?
• Do we have the ability to win contracts with private security companies?
• Can we sell our products to police departments?
• Can we sell our products to civilians in certain countries?
• Can we modify our products to make them legal for civilian or police use?

Answering these questions through experiments will lead us to learn what works and what does not. We should record and document the learnings so that we can refer to the results in the future and see which actions work and which do not. In the long run this will lead to a large bibliography where we will be able to develop more effective strategies than the previous ones.

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