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\n\t\tOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.\t<\/p>\n
When growth slows<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n But they all have the same problem: They start with a solution before you understand the problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n If your company isn\u2019t growing as quickly as you expected, something is preventing potential or existing customers<\/a> from taking the actions you need them to take. The question is: Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n Before deciding which growth tactic to try next, I would start there.<\/p>\n Most companies have enough data to identify where their funnel isn\u2019t performing.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Those numbers tell you something important. They tell you where to look<\/strong>. But they don\u2019t necessarily tell you what to fix.<\/p>\n Imagine that 1,000 people visit your website<\/a> every month, but only 10 request a demo. There are dozens of possible explanations.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n The metric is the same in every scenario: 1% visitor-to-demo conversion. <\/strong>But the appropriate solution is completely different. That is why jumping from a disappointing metric directly to a growth tactic can be so inefficient.<\/p>\n Consider another common SaaS problem: Lots of people start a free trial, but few become paying customers<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Maybe your marketing attracts people who were never likely to buy. Maybe users sign up expecting a capability your product doesn\u2019t have. Maybe they can\u2019t 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\u2019t get their team on board. Maybe they can\u2019t justify the price. Or perhaps they simply aren\u2019t ready to buy yet.<\/p>\n If the problem is usability, improving onboarding<\/a> could work. If the problem is that you\u2019re attracting the wrong people, it probably won\u2019t. If the problem is missing functionality, a better nurture sequence probably won\u2019t solve it either.<\/p>\n This is why I think of growth problems as discovery problems before they become execution problems.<\/p>\n You need to understand the cause before you can confidently choose the treatment.<\/p>\n Instead of beginning with \u201cWhat should we try next?\u201d start by identifying the behavior that isn\u2019t happening.<\/p>\n For example:<\/p>\n These are much more useful starting points because they force you to focus on a specific customer behavior<\/a>. Then ask a simple question: Why aren\u2019t these customers doing what we expected them to do?<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n But analytics can\u2019t always tell you what was happening in someone\u2019s head when they made a decision.<\/p>\n That is where customer interviews<\/a> can help. Suppose you want to understand why trial users aren\u2019t buying. Talk to people who recently completed a trial but didn\u2019t convert.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t ask, \u201cWould you have bought if our onboarding were better?\u201d That introduces your hypothesis into their answer.<\/p>\n Instead, reconstruct what actually happened. The same approach works throughout the funnel.<\/p>\n If target buyers aren\u2019t responding to your marketing, talk to people who resemble the audience you\u2019re trying to reach and understand how they think about the problem you\u2019re solving. If qualified prospects<\/a> aren\u2019t buying, interview lost opportunities and find out how they evaluated the decision.<\/p>\n If customers aren\u2019t expanding, talk to accounts that considered adding users but didn\u2019t. If customers are leaving, talk to people who recently canceled.<\/p>\n You\u2019re looking for the gap between what you expected customers to do and what they actually did. Then you\u2019re trying to understand why that gap exists.<\/p>\n One customer interview shouldn\u2019t determine your growth strategy.<\/p>\n Customers have individual preferences<\/a>, circumstances and opinions. Someone might dislike your pricing model. Another might ask for a particular integration. Someone else might want a completely different feature.<\/p>\n The value comes from patterns. If six of eight lost prospects tell you they couldn\u2019t confidently explain the product\u2019s 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\u2019t know what they were supposed to accomplish first, you may have found an onboarding problem.<\/p>\n If customers who churn<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n They give you evidence about which problem deserves to be solved and strong clues into how to solve it.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n You still have to make a judgment. Customer interviews won\u2019t hand you a perfect growth plan, and qualitative research should usually be considered alongside funnel data, product analytics and other evidence.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n There will always be another growth tactic to try. That\u2019s part of what makes growing a company<\/a> difficult. There are hundreds of things you could be doing at any moment, and many of them sound plausible.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t happening in the first place.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n When growth slows<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n But they all have the same problem: They start with a solution before you understand the problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n If your company isn\u2019t growing as quickly as you expected, something is preventing potential or existing customers<\/a> from taking the actions you need them to take. The question is: Why?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nGrowth metrics tell you what is happening, not necessarily why<\/h2>\n
The same growth problem can have completely different causes<\/h2>\n
Start with the customer behavior you need to change<\/h2>\n
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Ask customers what happened<\/h2>\n
Look for patterns, not individual requests<\/h2>\n
Then choose the tactic<\/h2>\n
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Diagnose before you prescribe<\/h2>\n
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Key Takeaways<\/h2>\n
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