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.
Meet Random Rick, Specialist Steve, and Solid Sarah. See why only one approach compounds. Understand how small improvements across 12 metrics multiply into significant results.
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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.
Uncover specific pain points, validate assumptions, and reveal what actually drives buying decisions. Run research that produces actionable insights, not just interesting quotes.
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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Small improvements across 12 metrics multiply into exponential growth. Learn how engines connect, why improvements compound, and where leverage lives.
Calculate your true growth trajectory by measuring the rate at which your business grows when gains build on previous gains over multiple periods.
Measure the month-over-month growth in qualified leads to predict future revenue and catch pipeline problems before they impact revenue three months later.
Estimate the maximum revenue opportunity if you captured 100% market share to size your opportunity and prioritise which markets to enter first.
Send a series of scheduled emails that educate prospects over time to stay top-of-mind without overwhelming them with aggressive sales pitches.
Focus effort on the 20% of activities that drive 80% of results, systematically eliminating low-yield work to maximise output per hour invested.
Organise the tools that capture leads, nurture prospects, and measure performance to automate repetitive work and connect customer data across systems.
Track predictable yearly revenue from subscriptions to measure business scale and growth trajectory in B2B SaaS and recurring revenue models.
Calculate how many users you need in experiments to detect meaningful differences and avoid declaring winners prematurely based on insufficient data.
Capture specific user actions in your product or website to understand behaviour patterns and measure whether changes improve outcomes or create friction.
Track revenue growth from existing customers through expansion and contraction to prove your product delivers increasing value over time.
Drive acquisition and expansion through product experience where users discover value before sales conversations and upgrade based on usage.
Identify the fundamental factors that directly cause business expansion, concentrating resources on activities that generate measurable results.
Store information in browsers to track user behaviour across visits and enable personalised experiences without requiring login for every interaction.
Apply disciplined experimentation across the entire customer lifecycle, optimising every stage through rapid testing and data-driven iteration.
Enable tools to exchange data programmatically so you can build custom integrations and automate processes that vendor-built integrations don't support.
Focus your entire organisation on the single metric that best predicts success at your current growth stage, avoiding distraction and misalignment.
Select metrics that reveal whether you're achieving strategic goals to track progress and identify problems before they become expensive to fix.
Focus resources on high-impact business mechanisms where small improvements generate disproportionate results across the entire customer journey.
Interpret experiment results to understand the probability that observed differences occurred by chance rather than because your changes actually work.
Diagnose and break through stagnation by identifying which business mechanisms have reached capacity and require new approaches.