The Reason Your Growth Tactics Probably Aren’t Working

When growth slows, there is no shortage of advice about what to do next. Post more on LinkedIn. Invest in SEO. Run paid ads. Rewrite your homepage. Improve onboarding. Change your pricing. Launch a referral program. Hire a salesperson.

But they all have the same problem: They start with a solution before you understand the problem. 

If your company isn’t growing as quickly as you expected, something is preventing potential or existing customers from taking the actions you need them to take. The question is: Why?

Before deciding which growth tactic to try next, I would start there.

Growth metrics tell you what is happening, not necessarily why

Most companies have enough data to identify where their funnel isn’t performing.

You might know that only 2% of website visitors start a trial. You might know that 80% of those trials never become paying customers. Maybe your sales team loses half of its qualified opportunities. Or perhaps customers sign up but never adopt enough of the product to stick around.

Those numbers tell you something important. They tell you where to look. But they don’t necessarily tell you what to fix.

Imagine that 1,000 people visit your website every month, but only 10 request a demo. There are dozens of possible explanations. 

You might be attracting the wrong visitors. Your ideal customers might not immediately recognize that the product is for them. You might be describing a problem they don’t consider important. They might understand the value but not believe your claims. They might think the product is too expensive. They might not want a demo. Or they might simply have unanswered questions preventing them from taking the next step.

The metric is the same in every scenario: 1% visitor-to-demo conversion. But the appropriate solution is completely different. That is why jumping from a disappointing metric directly to a growth tactic can be so inefficient.

The same growth problem can have completely different causes

Consider another common SaaS problem: Lots of people start a free trial, but few become paying customers.

What should you do? A common recommendation might be to improve onboarding. That sounds reasonable. But first, consider some of the reasons people might not be converting.

Maybe your marketing attracts people who were never likely to buy. Maybe users sign up expecting a capability your product doesn’t have. Maybe they can’t figure out how to use the product. Maybe they understand how to use it but never experience enough value during the trial. Maybe they love the product but can’t get their team on board. Maybe they can’t justify the price. Or perhaps they simply aren’t ready to buy yet.

If the problem is usability, improving onboarding could work. If the problem is that you’re attracting the wrong people, it probably won’t. If the problem is missing functionality, a better nurture sequence probably won’t solve it either.

This is why I think of growth problems as discovery problems before they become execution problems.

You need to understand the cause before you can confidently choose the treatment.

Start with the customer behavior you need to change

Instead of beginning with “What should we try next?” start by identifying the behavior that isn’t happening.

For example:

• Your target buyers see your ads but don’t click.
• Website visitors don’t start trials.
• Website visitors don’t book demos.
• Trial users don’t become paying customers.
• Demos don’t convert to qualified opportunities.
• Qualified opportunities don’t close.
• New customers don’t adopt important features.
• Existing accounts don’t add more users.
• Customers cancel.

These are much more useful starting points because they force you to focus on a specific customer behavior. Then ask a simple question: Why aren’t these customers doing what we expected them to do?

That changes the growth conversation. Instead of brainstorming tactics, you start by investigating causes. And one of the most useful ways to investigate those causes is to talk to the people who actually made the decisions.

Ask customers what happened

Analytics are incredibly useful for understanding behavior. They can show you where people drop off, which features they use, how often they return, which campaigns produce signups and how different customer segments behave.

But analytics can’t always tell you what was happening in someone’s head when they made a decision.

That is where customer interviews can help. Suppose you want to understand why trial users aren’t buying. Talk to people who recently completed a trial but didn’t convert.

Ask what originally caused them to look for a solution. Ask what they hoped your product would help them accomplish. Ask what they expected when they signed up. Walk through what happened during their trial. Find out what they liked, what confused them, what disappointed them and what ultimately prevented them from purchasing.

Don’t ask, “Would you have bought if our onboarding were better?” That introduces your hypothesis into their answer.

Instead, reconstruct what actually happened. The same approach works throughout the funnel.

If target buyers aren’t responding to your marketing, talk to people who resemble the audience you’re trying to reach and understand how they think about the problem you’re solving. If qualified prospects aren’t buying, interview lost opportunities and find out how they evaluated the decision.

If customers aren’t expanding, talk to accounts that considered adding users but didn’t. If customers are leaving, talk to people who recently canceled.

You’re looking for the gap between what you expected customers to do and what they actually did. Then you’re trying to understand why that gap exists.

Look for patterns, not individual requests

One customer interview shouldn’t determine your growth strategy.

Customers have individual preferences, circumstances and opinions. Someone might dislike your pricing model. Another might ask for a particular integration. Someone else might want a completely different feature.

The value comes from patterns. If six of eight lost prospects tell you they couldn’t confidently explain the product’s value to the person approving the purchase, you may have discovered a champion enablement problem. If trial users repeatedly tell you they signed up but didn’t know what they were supposed to accomplish first, you may have found an onboarding problem.

If customers who churn consistently tell you they stopped using the product months before canceling, you may have discovered an adoption problem that begins much earlier in the lifecycle. Those findings give you something much more useful than a list of growth ideas.

They give you evidence about which problem deserves to be solved and strong clues into how to solve it.

Then choose the tactic

This is where tactics become valuable. Once you have evidence about what is preventing customers from moving forward, you can decide what intervention is most likely to change their behavior.

• Maybe the answer really is a new onboarding flow.
• Maybe it’s different positioning.
• Maybe you need stronger customer proof.
• Maybe you need to change who you’re targeting.
• Maybe sales needs better tools for helping a champion build internal consensus.
• Maybe customers need more support during their first 30 days.
• Maybe the product is missing something important.

You still have to make a judgment. Customer interviews won’t hand you a perfect growth plan, and qualitative research should usually be considered alongside funnel data, product analytics and other evidence.

But now your growth ideas are responding to something you have observed rather than something you have assumed. That is a very different way to make growth decisions.

Diagnose before you prescribe

There will always be another growth tactic to try. That’s part of what makes growing a company difficult. There are hundreds of things you could be doing at any moment, and many of them sound plausible.

The challenge is figuring out which problem is actually preventing growth and which action is most likely to address it. So the next time a funnel metric disappoints you, resist the temptation to immediately ask what tactic you should try.

1. Start with the behavior.
2. Identify the people who aren’t doing what you expected.
3. Talk to them.
4. Understand what happened.
5. Look for patterns.

Then decide what to change. Because the fastest route to growth may not be trying more things. It may be understanding why the things you need customers to do aren’t happening in the first place.

When growth slows, there is no shortage of advice about what to do next. Post more on LinkedIn. Invest in SEO. Run paid ads. Rewrite your homepage. Improve onboarding. Change your pricing. Launch a referral program. Hire a salesperson.

But they all have the same problem: They start with a solution before you understand the problem. 

If your company isn’t growing as quickly as you expected, something is preventing potential or existing customers from taking the actions you need them to take. The question is: Why?