Focus resources on high-impact business mechanisms where small improvements generate disproportionate results across the entire customer journey.
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In simple terms, a growth lever is any action or strategy that can dramatically boost a company’s growth when applied. Think of a lever in the physical sense – a small move can lift a heavy object; likewise, the right business lever can produce outsized growth from relatively little effort . A growth lever could be something like improving a sales funnel or streamlining customer onboarding – a focused change that leads to significantly more revenue or users. In everyday language, it’s the high-impact move you can make to quickly accelerate your company’s success.
Growth levers matter because they guide resource allocation in environments where everything seems important but not everything drives results. Most organisations spread effort across dozens of initiatives attending conferences, updating websites, launching email campaigns, tweaking product features without strategic prioritisation. Lever thinking forces clarity: which single improvement would most accelerate growth? This focus prevents the common failure mode of doing many things adequately rather than a few things excellently. For B2B contexts especially, where resources are perpetually constrained, identifying and exploiting the right lever can generate 2-3x returns compared to unfocused activity. The financial impact is substantial: improving a true lever (say, reducing customer churn from 15% to 10%) affects every subsequent year's revenue, compounding gains, whilst improving a non-lever (say, adding a minor product feature) generates minimal lasting impact. Lever thinking also accelerates experimentation: rather than testing random tactics, you design experiments specifically targeting your identified levers, ensuring even failed tests generate insights about core growth mechanisms. Research shows high-growth companies consistently demonstrate lever discipline they identify their primary growth constraint, invest heavily to address it, then move to the next constraint, whilst slower-growing competitors pursue scattered initiatives. Organisations that systematically identify, prioritise, and pull growth levers report 30-50% efficiency improvements in growth spending.
Applying the concept of growth levers in your marketing or growth workflow involves a few key steps: identify potential levers, prioritise the most promising ones, and take action to execute changes. It’s both an analytical and creative process, combining data insights with strategic thinking. Here’s how to put growth levers to work:
Start by mapping the buyer journey and reviewing data for bottlenecks or missed opportunities. Combine quantitative clues conversion drops, churn spikes with qualitative feedback from customers and front-line staff. List three to five candidate levers that, if improved, could unlock significant growth.
Score each candidate for impact, confidence, and effort. Choose one or two with the greatest expected return for the resources available. This focus prevents dilution and ensures the team’s energy targets the most promising levers first.
Build a clear plan: what will change, who owns it, and which metric will prove success. Run small experiments around the chosen lever, measure results, and iterate quickly. Document learnings so the knowledge compounds even if an experiment fails.
When a lever delivers, bake the change into routine processes and dashboards. Move to the next priority lever and restart the loop. Over time, successive lever pulls create a step-change in the firm’s growth trajectory.
Get a grip on what's actually working and what needs course correction. Use data and experiments to make decisions instead of opinions. See how changes in one part of the system affect everything else. Random tactics don't compound, coordinated ones do.
Select tools across your growth stack using clear evaluation criteria. Avoid common pitfalls, ensure integrations work, and build a system that scales with your business.
Uncover specific pain points, validate assumptions, and reveal what actually drives buying decisions. Run research that produces actionable insights, not just interesting quotes.
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Run quarterly business reviews that assess current state, set ambitious but realistic goals, build actionable roadmaps, and define key results that keep everyone aligned.
Analyse monthly performance data across all four growth engines. Identify what is working, what is not, and make tactical adjustments using a structured decision framework.
Mike Michalowicz
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A decision tool for prioritising growth work. Diagnose where to act, then pick a small change that unlocks progress now.
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Unify customer data from every touchpoint to create complete profiles that power personalised experiences across marketing, sales, and product.
Achieve the state where your product solves a genuine, urgent problem for a defined market that's willing to pay and actively pulling your solution in.
Block extended time for cognitively demanding tasks requiring sustained focus, maximising valuable output whilst minimising shallow distractions.
Credit the channel that introduced prospects to your brand to measure awareness efforts and understand which top-of-funnel activities start customer journeys.
Identify the fundamental factors that directly cause business expansion, concentrating resources on activities that generate measurable results.
Measure the month-over-month growth in qualified leads to predict future revenue and catch pipeline problems before they impact revenue three months later.
Track your user journey through Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue to identify which stage constrains growth most.
Send a series of scheduled emails that educate prospects over time to stay top-of-mind without overwhelming them with aggressive sales pitches.
Choose one metric that best predicts long-term success to align your entire team on what matters and avoid conflicting priorities that dilute focus.
Identify what you do better or differently that competitors can't easily copy to defend margins and win customers consistently over time.
Connect tools so data flows automatically between systems to eliminate manual entry, keep records current, and enable sophisticated workflows across platforms.
Calculate how many users you need in experiments to detect meaningful differences and avoid declaring winners prematurely based on insufficient data.
Focus your entire organisation on the single metric that best predicts success at your current growth stage, avoiding distraction and misalignment.
Measure which marketing activities drive desired outcomes to allocate budget toward channels that actually generate revenue instead of vanity metrics.
Group customers by acquisition period to compare behaviour patterns and identify which acquisition channels and time periods produce the best long-term value.
Define events that start automation workflows so the right message reaches people at the right moment based on their actual behaviour not arbitrary timing.
Connect triggers to actions across systems so repetitive tasks happen automatically and teams can focus on work that requires judgement instead of admin.
Store raw data from all business systems in one place to run analyses and build reports that combine information across marketing, sales, and product.
Automate multi-touch email campaigns that adapt based on recipient behaviour to nurture leads consistently without manual follow-up from reps or marketers.
Apply disciplined experimentation across the entire customer lifecycle, optimising every stage through rapid testing and data-driven iteration.