Sales-led growth

Win customers through direct sales conversations where reps guide prospects from discovery to close with personalised solutions and relationship building.

Sales-led growth

Sales-led growth

definition

Introduction

Why it matters

How to apply it

Keep learning

Growth orchestration

The cockpit that sits above your four growth engines. Individual teams can excel at their own metrics, but without orchestration they're musicians playing different songs. This is where everything comes together and where improvements in one engine amplify gains in another.

Explore playbooks

Growth team tools

Growth team tools

The wrong tools create friction. The right ones multiply your output without adding complexity. These are the tools I recommend for growth teams that move fast.

Compound growth

Compound growth

Small improvements multiply. A 10% gain across twelve metrics doesn't add up to 120% - it compounds to 3x growth. This is the mathematical engine behind systematic growth.

Growth strategy

Growth strategy

Four decisions that shape everything else. When growth feels harder than it should, the problem is usually here. Get these right and execution becomes much easier.

Growth rhythms

Growth rhythms

Without rhythm, effort becomes scattered and progress invisible. A consistent operating cadence keeps your team aligned and your growth system continuously improving.

Related books

Startup growth engines

Sean Ellis

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Rating

Startup growth engines

A tour of growth case studies. Identify engines, spot patterns and design experiments that fit your context.

Related chapters

No items found.

Wiki

Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

Track revenue growth from existing customers through expansion and contraction to prove your product delivers increasing value over time.

Product-led growth

Drive acquisition and expansion through product experience where users discover value before sales conversations and upgrade based on usage.

Minimum viable test

Design experiments that answer specific questions with minimum time and resources to maximise learning velocity without over-investing in unproven ideas.

Email sequence

Automate multi-touch email campaigns that adapt based on recipient behaviour to nurture leads consistently without manual follow-up from reps or marketers.

Pirate metrics

Track your user journey through Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue to identify which stage constrains growth most.

Go-to-market strategy

Plan how you'll reach customers and generate revenue by choosing channels, pricing, and sales models that match your product and market reality.

OMTM (One Metric That Matters)

Focus your entire organisation on the single metric that best predicts success at your current growth stage, avoiding distraction and misalignment.

Pipeline coverage

Calculate how much pipeline you need relative to quota to ensure you generate enough opportunities to hit revenue targets despite normal conversion rates.

Sales-led growth

Win customers through direct sales conversations where reps guide prospects from discovery to close with personalised solutions and relationship building.

Deep Work

Block extended time for cognitively demanding tasks requiring sustained focus, maximising valuable output whilst minimising shallow distractions.

Contact management

Organise customer and prospect information to track relationships, communication history, and next steps without losing context or duplicating effort.

A/B testing

Compare two versions of a page, email, or feature to determine which performs better using statistical methods that isolate the impact of specific changes.

Inbound Marketing

Attract prospects through valuable content that solves real problems, building trust and generating qualified leads who approach you.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Calculate the total cost of winning a new customer to evaluate marketing efficiency and ensure sustainable unit economics across all channels.

UTMs

Track campaign performance precisely by appending parameters to URLs that identify traffic sources, mediums, and campaigns in your analytics.

Product-market fit

Achieve the state where your product solves a genuine, urgent problem for a defined market that's willing to pay and actively pulling your solution in.

Trigger

Define events that start automation workflows so the right message reaches people at the right moment based on their actual behaviour not arbitrary timing.

Founder-led growth

Build distribution through your personal brand and network where your expertise and story attract customers who trust you before your company.

Value proposition

Articulate the specific outcome customers get from your solution to communicate why they should choose you over doing nothing or using alternatives.

Sample size

Calculate how many users you need in experiments to detect meaningful differences and avoid declaring winners prematurely based on insufficient data.