Introducing Excelling Growth

Dec 17, 2022

As soon as I launched this newsletter I began fielding questions from my contacts such as:

“What is Excelling Growth? Is it a newsletter? Or a company?”

The answer is neither and both. I launched a growth focused agency, to help companies implement growth strategies and techniques so they can achieve remarkable outcomes.

“What is Growth Strategy? I am not familiar with this practice?”

A growth strategy is a plan or action taken by a company to increase its market share, revenue, or profits. There are various ways to implement growth strategy and many approaches, ranging from traditional sales led growth (SLG) to more modern product led growth (PLG). When done right, the growth strategy is implemented by a cross-functional growth team. Growth teams often have a mix of marketing, product, sales and data experts who work together to identify opportunities for growth and develop and implement strategies to achieve it.

Growth teams may be responsible for a variety of activities, such as:

Identifying target markets and customer segments to focus on
Developing and testing hypotheses about what will drive growth
Analyzing data to understand customer behavior and identify trends and patterns
Developing and executing growth campaigns and initiatives
Collaborating with other teams (e.g., product, engineering, sales) to ensure that growth efforts are aligned with the company's overall goals and objectives

A good visualization of how growth is architected within a company is the following:

Growth teams are often focused on rapid experimentation and iteration, using data and analytics to inform their decisions and continually optimize their efforts to drive growth. The ultimate goal of a growth team is to identify and capitalize on opportunities for growth and help the company achieve its long-term business goals.

“What will you be writing about?”

This newsletter is where I will share my observations on how early stage and larger scale companies are tackling the challenge of growing their top line, improving customer acquisition costs, increasing retention and upsell while optimizing monetization. I will share examples by marrying over two decades of experience in the B2B enterprise software market with the latest research and work done by best in class growth companies. Some of the content will be curation of recommended work published by others, most of it will be my own analysis with real world examples. So please subscribe and share with your like minded contacts.

“We are not a Product Led Growth (PLG) company, will this be relevant for us?”

What I find fascinating about modern growth strategy is how applicable it can be for traditional sales led companies. It is possible to start with growth techniques that augment a sales led motion and gradually transform the business to become a best in class growth company. Helping companies climb the growth maturity model is where Excelling Growth delivers value.

“What type of services do you offer?”

Growth is such a large domain and it is constantly evolving. I find myself helping companies who are new to growth to architect their strategy, spread growth oriented goals across product/marketing/sales/partners/customer success, identify the first set of growth techniques and flywheels and build a practical growth roadmap. Some projects are longer term, allowing me to advise along the journey and in some cases the company is looking to kickstart a new growth engine and is looking for guidance which is usually delivered in the form of workshops, such as: