An answer to "What's your growth plan"
A mini-course deep dive on one approach to your business growth strategy
(2,800 words and 14 slide images - If reading in email, this post may be truncated, please view online or in app for entire post.)
GSD is about getting stuff done. But what stuff gets done and why it gets done is a matter of strategy, priority, resources, and goals.
What questions do you ask and what position do you take?
What choices do you make?
How do you create clarity and a prioritized plan?
I often consult other product and service companies – especially in the B2B category that are trying to either open a new market, launch a new product, or scale. I do this holistically as a growth concern which includes product, operations, sales, marketing and support.
Because I’ve worked in E-Commerce, FinTech, PropTech, and consulted in security, blockchain, and startups I get asked a lot of the same questions. There are common patterns across these businesses. There are common challenges and scale motions.
But they all come to one primary question up front…
What’s your growth plan?
And as you can imagine, there are many variables at play in a question like that. This is why we do discovery and assessments to understand the current state of the company, category, product, etc.
Blah blah blah, right? I know that’s an uninteresting answer.
So here is the flipside to the question as a view into my brain.
Economic engine
Growth flywheel
Growth team
Growth enablers
Clarity on customer
Irresistible offer
Differentiation
Problem we solve
Repeatability and scalability of customer acquisition
Buyers journey and their decision making journey
Table stakes versus right to win
Trusted advisor
Believability and confidence
This is what is really going on in my mind. Like a slot machine rolling, these are the things I’m considering.
As a GSD person, we drive growth based on the current foundation of the business.
This is our realistic baseline we must work from and forecast out from in order to see into the future and imagine a better foundation and work toward filling the gaps – that process is stepwise change while pushing the flywheel of growth and eventually scaling.
A recurring theme is around where are now, what’s next, what’s valuable? That’s because a GSD person is constantly asking these questions.
GSD people are not narrow minded, they are looking at a wide field of view.
GSD people are activating meaningful work to create growth at all levels.
So back to the question “what’s your growth plan”?
I want to use this question as a jumping off point to a mini-course based on a few pages our of my growth playbook.
What I hope you get out of it is insight into good questions, how things can be framed up, and most importantly how growth is many things working together and knowing the right things to work on when.
The following is a sub-section of how I get grounded in the current state of a company and attempt to communicate that back as an assessment to dial into what matters and why with regard to a growth plan.
There are many things to look at, so this is being shared not as a definitive list or template but a set of plays in a big playbook. And in this case, I’m keeping some context in place as it related to an early stage tech startup who had a product but no growth engine.
Pick the parts that are best for you today but be open to being inspired by what’s here if its not exactly applicable to your situation. Find the patterns that apply to you.
Activate this based on your current context and what is relevant to your situation right now.
How can you apply one or several of these ideas?
What you need to do next may be acting on just one question on one slide, or several entire slides, or the whole thing.
One last thing, these are described in steps, but that is just to help guide you logically through this material, feel free to reorder as needed in your context.
Step 1 – Your high level view of progress to date
This is essentially a simple summary of findings and perspective across six major areas that inform the economic engine and what is in place for growth (or not).
The goal of a slide like this is to frame your perspective on the overall map.
GSD people are map makers, and everyone needs a map. This helps give context and this is essential in laying out your plan.
Step 2 – Your picture of the customer
It’s important to share your view of the customer. This is an area that is most frequently unclear and especially the case in larger companies who have multiple products, divisions, and offerings.
We need to have clarity on the ideal customer and there are many tools available to build a persona and your ideal customer profile. In our situation I want to express the customer dynamically and in motion with our brand, our product, or offering.
We want to inspire the reader to see a process as it lays the groundwork for ongoing discussion on the customer journey and the buying process they go through. This is always a multi-touch process and yet most companies will minimize it down to the transaction steps which is a major mistake.
We use questions on purpose.
It’s activating a problem in the mind that needs an answer. Where there is no answer or fuzzy answers, we can be certain it’s true with the customer as well.
Ultimately, the better we know the customer and how we help them, the better we are at earning the customer.
Step 3 – It’s always a about GTM
You’re never done sorting out your go-to-market situation as it is a progressive and continual process of learning, adapting, and iterating based on the results you generate.
You are in the business of Getting and Keeping customers.
This is the lifeblood of all business.
And it really is that simple. The getting and keeping of customers should be a concern for all employees and teams and departments, not just product, sales and marketing.
TIP – The question about a growth plan is answered across these 12 dimensions. And we can do even more as we see fit, but this is ideal for an early stage product or startup that is not scaling yet.
We present these as questions because they need answers. It’s a mistake to present them as a to-do list as it minimizes the importance and impact on growth and comes across as project items and invites debate on if it’s important or not.
If the product and offering is in startup or MVP mode, you’ll have wording like this. If it’s a more mature product, you’ll reframe accordingly. I’d still suggest you still ask the same questions during your assessment of current state.
TIP – This also acts as a progress dashboard where you can show which of these are being prioritized, worked on, and solved. And these things are in a big recursive loop over time being tested, refined, and improved because you are in the getting AND keeping customers business and you have a long way to go before it is truly bullet proofed and no longer needing attention.
Step 4 – Ladder up to a NorthStar
At every stage you have to have a NorthStar to pull you forward. This is a strategic item and may have many voices shaping it.
In your case, you want to assert a simple four box perspective. This is your POV of what makes sense as the big NorthStar items that reflect your assessment and the progress you seek to make.
Notice the questions again.
GSD people ask good questions that prompt discussion that’s valuable.
In this case we are looking at an early-stage company where branding, messaging, the offering, and customer acquisition model are very unclear. So these four questions on category, problem to solve, job to be done, and new/different help point us toward a bulls eye target that benefits all disciplines involved who have to create value that resonates with the ideal customer.
As these items are addressed, a new set of NorthStar items would emerge based on the new foundation you create by solving these first four, then moving to your next items.
My point here is you have a lot of options for these four boxes. Orient it to growth enablers or strategic removal of growth disablers. Always prefer differentiation and the customers problem you solve.
Because we are in the getting and keeping customer business, we are always aiming to show the customer we know them, their problem, their job to be done, and that we are the obvious choice.
Step 5 – A go-forward plan
Implementation phases help chunk down work, scope, and things you need to test and learn.
We often stall out on plans and committed action. There is no perfect plan. There is only movement toward the future each day and its up to us to make each day count. As a result we do our best to provide a plan that is concerned with value creation for the customer, for the business for the team.
Our plans should reflect pushes on the flywheel of growth.
If you have ever seen a person water skiing, you have no doubt seen them awkwardly bobbing in the water with their skis pointed up waiting to go. Turns out this is a very fatiguing and frustrating position to stay in for a long time because you put a lot of energy but has zero value – because it’s the going that matters, not the continued focus on keeping your knees and skis in the right position being ready to go.
You are the same way, provide a reasonable plan and prioritize early focus so you can get going and adjust as you go. In this example, you need to be a skier being pulled forward by great questions and value to create.
Step 6 – Initiatives that orient to income, business value and customer value
Detail is useful until it’s not. So it’s up to you how much detail you provide. In the end, the details matter as they are calibrated by impact, value, effort, and dependencies of what must be done first to get to the next thing.
In this image below, there is a story being told about work to do over time and which departments (product, sales, marketing, support) are in focus. While its not being illustrated, there are dependencies that are practical. For example, you don’t want to hire a large sales force if you have no offering, no value prop, no understanding of how you sell and win customers. You need to get some things in place to support that phase of staffing and measuring their performance.
Chunking this by department is a way to help organize by involvement and impact. In this case its in list form, but could be organized in a few ways.
The goal here is to illustrate the kinds of things you know need to be done to enable the growth engine and put pushes on the flywheel of growth.
It’s not about being perfect, its about going from nothing to the “best something” you can do right now based on what you know and resources available because you need to make every day count and use it as a way to learn and grow iteratively. Remember, we are in the getting and keeping customer business so don’t get stuck bobbing in the water holding your skis up – get skiing.
Step 7 – Know what MUST be true
Many things are subjective. So, think about it across these categories:
Must have
Should Have
Could Have
Won’t Have
This helps you organize your thoughts and communicate your thoughts clearly if there is discussion or debate you can explain why you think something is a must have or not.
And in our case, wherever you are now in the business, you need to have a point-of-view with clear objectives and a level of understanding why you are doing what you are doing.
Do not be thrown off my Q1 and “alpha challenges” as it is a logical continuation of the previous image. What it’s doing is the important part. Label how you see necessary.
It explains why the first 90 days is in focus, what activities are involved, and most importantly indicating the sidebar challenges to must be addressed to enable the getting and keeping of customers.
It’s ok to debate the left side as strong voices my think something else could or should be done. But the right-hand side is the core you must address. As a GSD person, you are not just getting random things done, you are getting the right things done!
Remember your goal is to provide clarity and shared context.
Not everyone knows what you know. This helps others see what you see and why that matters.
Step 8 – Standing up a sales process
As the other sections demonstrate, your current baseline informs what is relevant. This section is one way to think about sales and how you generate outbound sales opportunities. It is not the only way, it is one play in the playbook. The key here is that you are thinking about sales and how you acquire customers.
In this case, its an early-stage product and does not have strong inbound assets and seeking to drive customer validation and learning by engaging in prospects directly using a discovery and demo approach. If you are a product company, you should explore “disco demos” or “disco calls”.
In any event, the next few slides should inspire you to think about the end-to-end process of earning a customer in systematic way which enables you to iterate and improve the process over time – testing and learning as you keep working the process with new prospects.
GSD people are map makers and appreciate most things are a journey. How can you express your current state in a journey and anchor it in clear goals and things to test and learn?
Because you are standing up a new process, you are setting up tools / systems, you are testing a sales process that moves customers through a decision-making process, and you are testing each step of the process and how to message accordingly.
A very simple way to dial in your list building effort is to write out a clear “we believe” statement. And if you have multiple persona’s you can reflect each person accurately by repeating this statement as much as needed.
This informs how you build and segment your list. Many tools are available, this is just one way to get a list and work it.
Outreach is necessary for customer validation and a variety of typical business building efforts. Knowing what you want to do and how you measure it will help you improve as you go.
Discovery is where and how you learn. Continue to refine your message and understanding of the persona and their most valuable drivers.
Don’t just demo your product, emphasize the aspects that matter to your persona.
Think of this as a Rubik’s cube. Some customers must see the red and yellow side but don’t care about the other sides. Others may only care about the green side. Few will care about all 6 sides but happy to know they are available. We often get caught up in trying to show it all off, when we should instead be showing how we solve a key problem they care about and value.
Do a retrospective at the end and assess how the process went, what you learned from the prospect, what the early outreach seems to be doing to shape who gets to a demo and so on.
How can you apply those learnings to further improve the message and have better outreach, offer and more?
From here you might put this through its paces for which teams do what, the anticipated costs and timelines in higher detail, and much more. But you want to encourage it to get moving. Good plans can be marginally improved, but execution is what really matters. Its in the action and the doing that you learn more and can improve as you go.
The GSD Way is about progress not perfection.
I’d love to hear from you on this, leave a comment and share this with a leader or entrepreneur you think could benefit from it.
Note – I am including a link to an editable version of this deck . This article is an example of the paid subscriber level, but I have set it up as a free for everyone article for your consideration.
Here is the link to download and edit yourself.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nq1Wi9p9bzBkse0BnfOwpMS6zqgOfJlxjHD3R7CxCQo/edit?usp=sharing
#GSD
Appreciate you,
Justin