Growth drivers

Without named drivers, budget, hiring and attention spread evenly across everything, and nothing gets enough to work. A short list gives you something to protect and fund, and a reason to say no to ideas that touch none of the drivers.

It also changes how you read a bad month. If one driver stalls, you know which number to look at, instead of searching across twenty activities.

And it protects the business. A company that has never named its drivers may cut the one that works because it looks like any other expense. A founder can cancel a partner programme to save budget and only find out three months later that it brought in half the new customers.

Naming drivers does not mean everything else stops. It means everything else is judged against whether it helps a driver.

A growth driver is a specific cause of growth that you can point to in your own numbers. Most businesses do dozens of things: publish posts, attend events, send newsletters, run ads, answer inbound questions. Usually two or three of them account for most of the new revenue. Those are the drivers. The rest is activity.

Drivers tend to be one of three kinds. A channel: most new customers arrive through partner referrals. A behaviour: customers who connect a second tool in their first week stay far longer. A segment: companies with ten to fifty staff buy faster and renew more often.

A driver is what already produces growth. A growth lever is the thing you choose to pull to get more of it.

Mistaking correlation for cause. Keen customers may connect a second tool because they were always going to stay. Check by nudging one group towards the behaviour and comparing it with a group left alone, as in an A/B test.

• Look at where growth came from in your own data: which customers stay longest, spend most, and where they first heard of you.
• Talk to the people closest to those customers, such as sales, support and account managers, to learn why, not only what happened.
• Write each pattern as a hypothesis and test it before treating it as a rule.
• Point budget, hiring and roadmap at the confirmed drivers, and treat everything else as optional.
• Revisit the list every quarter, because drivers shift as the market changes.