How do you design a winning growth strategy?

One that may or may not look great on boardroom presentation slides but does wonders when put to the test on the market battlefield.

The thing about growth strategies is, both good and bad ones require similar resources and efforts to implement.

So, if you are not careful while designing, a bad strategy can quickly eat away your time, resources, and momentum.

But why do you need a strategy in the first place?

Without a strategy, you are likely to do one thing today and another the next day. A lack of clarity will force you to look for something new continuously, a new tactic, a new shiny shortcut - always clicking that new podcast link to search for a magic pill that can solve all your problems.

When you sail without a strategy, you have low degrees of confidence in your actions. You start by doing one thing, then read about something else and do that too, and the next. You are doing fifty different things in no time, from emails to social posts to content to affiliates to Facebook ads. When you are a small team, it is the path of ‘death by thousand cuts.’

So, back to designing a winning growth strategy.

I know it’s tough to be sure about how a growth strategy will perform at the onset. One of the scratch-my-own-curiosity-itch things has been to develop a heuristic for designing a successful growth strategy, and it has led me to a profound realization:

A strategy is as good as the insights it is built upon.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you had a eureka-level insight? Did you act on it? Did it bring out-of-the-ordinary results?

Receiving a one-off life-changing insight with the grace of flashes of genius is one thing, and having a system to generate such insights at will is another.

So how do you come up with impactful insights for business growth?

Well, you can read industry reports, listen to marketing podcasts, borrow insights from the research of industry leaders, and even survey your customers — all these methods have their pros (and cons), and some of them will work for you while others won't.

But there is one way that will always work because it is the goldmine of profitable insights, and if you are in the business for at least a couple of months, you have access to it.

And unlike general advice in books, blogs, and podcasts, it is specific to your business.

And unlike customer surveys, it is not susceptible to the risk of the respondent's mood.

What is it?

It is the Product usage data.

When mined in the right ways, it paints a true picture of your business.

Past data brings forth hidden insights about your product and the market and how they go with each other.

So, how do you dig deep into the past data? How do you analyze it?

I will discuss it tomorrow and introduce you to a spreadsheet-based model that will unearth your most compelling growth levers in no time.

Stay tuned!

See you tomorrow.

Until then,

Ankur

If you liked this, please forward it to a friend! It would mean a lot to me. Or send them to the Organic SaaS Growth newsletter.

Were you forwarded this email? You can subscribe to the newsletter or explore the past editions.

Connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn 🤝