High-level ways to drive growth

Put all the growth strategies, tactics, experiments etc aside, and when you zoom out there are only a four high-level ways to grow your business overall. Many marketing teams or entire startups focus on just one or two of these levers and miss out on huge opportunities for growth.

The 4 high level ways for any startup to grow

1. Expand the pie (or test new pies)

Go after a larger part of your market, enter new markets, try new segments, etc.

2. Capture more of the same pie

Gain more market share in your existing market or market segment

3. Capture new pie more efficiently

Increase conversion rates or lower acquisition costs

4. Get more money from your slice of the pie

Raise prices or drive expansion

Breakdown for each way to grow

1. Expand the pie (or test new pies)

• Go after new markets or segments (verticals, geos, etc.).
• Note: If you’re very early-stage, you likely won’t have an existing market or audience segment you’re successfully selling to, so expanding the pie really just means testing new segments to try to find product/market fit.
• Sometimes when moving to new markets you can use the same channels you already use to drive growth; other times you need to try completely new channels (i.e. add in outbound or partner marketing).
• Create new "fuel" (content, messaging) tailored to the new “pie”.
• Test new markets or segments first before going all in (i.e. try paid search and a tailored landing page or try outbound driving to a webinar with speakers from the same segment).
• To determine if you should double down on this market or segment, make sure you have similar or higher conversion rates throughout the funnel (even though the sample size might be small). Once you get to this point, expand your efforts.
• Once you can drive higher full-funnel conversion at a larger scale, expand your efforts in this market even more.

Ask yourself:

• Is there another audience you know will love your product but aren’t yet targeting?
• If you have a free product, are there people who you are surprised to see using the product? Unexpected use cases?
• Is there demand for your product from other teams or people at your customers’ companies?

For more on audience analysis, read this article.

2. Capture more of the same pie

• Continue to expand on what’s working, while adding in tests and big bet projects to jolt growth.
• Watch out for diminishing returns, especially on paid efforts when you’ve been going after the same market for a while (especially if it’s a niche market).
• Just don’t wait too long to expand from your original pie; it may take longer than you think to expand.

Ask yourself:

• Do you have a product-market fit with just a portion of your audience? 
• Are you seeing diminishing returns from paid search?
• Have you signed most of your initial set of target accounts?

For more on selecting growth channels, read this article.

3. Capture new pie more efficiently

• This method is related to capturing more of the same pie, but involves driving more revenue with the same amount of top of funnel volume.
• When top of funnel stays the same, but you improve conversion rates, revenue goes up.
• When the budget stays the same, but you lower your customer acquisition cost or increase the quality of leads, you can drive more volume for the same cost. Revenue goes up.
• Increase conversion rates AND decrease acquisition costs and you're really cooking with gas (to mix metaphors just a bit).
• Focus on improving web conversion, sign up or request a demo flow conversion, and optimize paid efforts to drive growth in this way.

Ask yourself:

• Do you feel confident that if you get the right lead to your website, it tells the effective story?
• Have you optimized paid campaigns to the fullest extent?
• Do you have landing pages? Do your landing pages convert higher than the homepage?
• Do you have clear packages, plans, and pricing listed on your site (yes, even pricing for your lower tiers need to be on there)?
• Are you minimizing friction from the time a web visitor hits a CTA button until they see the product (whether they self-serve into a free version or get on a call for a demo)? 
• Do you make people email to book a meeting or can they do it right there in the flow?

For more on the impact of conversion improvements, read this article.

4. Get more money from your slice of the pie

• Drive more revenue from existing customers (or soon to be customers) by promoting new features or changing perceived value through messaging or social proof.
• Expand revenue per account by driving customers to pay for new features, increase the number of seats, or increase product usage. Lifecycle marketing, in-product marketing, and well executed product launches are the best way to do this.
• You can also expand revenue per account by raising prices, this will impact new customers too. It’s hard to do this without increasing perceived value (especially when your audience is tech companies in this economy).

Ask yourself:

• Have you done pricing or packaging research?
• Are you confident in your pricing model?
• Have you done any lifecycle marketing to nurture leads?
• Do you get support requests for features you already have?
• What do your most successful users all have in common?
• Do you know which of your customers use the product the most? Has someone talked to them this quarter?

For more on pricing and packaging, read this article.

How to use this framework

• Each quarter, prioritize these high-level levers. Your priorities will likely change quarter over quarter.
• Hypothetically, you could focus too much on going after new markets one quarter, so your growth in proven markets stalls.
• The following quarter, you should swing back around to focusing on that lever as your top priority.
• Or you could drive so much new web traffic in a quarter that you realize you desperately need to fix your leaky bucket before you continue to accelerate top of funnel growth.
• It’s important to have these prioritized—and get buy in on these priorities across your company.
• Try using the questions in planning meetings, in discussions with your founder, or just by yourself to get your engines revving.