The Ultimate Growth Strategy Framework that Achieved 8x Growth

In one of my previous acts, we achieved 8x growth by planning our growth strategy through a unique perspective. In this article, I will be sharing that unique perspective by structuring it into a growth strategy framework.

First, we will go through this comprehensive growth strategy framework. Then, we will see how to apply this framework to a business. Finally, we will understand how we used this powerful framework to achieve 8x growth.

We usually limit our view while planning a growth strategy. Many times we equate growth to one activity or project. However, growth results from multiple activities working in sync consistently for a long period of time. 

Sometimes, we just call our marketing strategy a growth strategy which is not accurate. Growth strategy differs from marketing strategy. Marketing strategy is just one pillar of growth strategy. But, there are other pillars in play as well. 

For everyone to have this expanded view of growth, I have structured all the pillars and designed the MSPD growth strategy framework. Basically, there are 4 key pillars that are a part of the growth framework that needs to work in sync to achieve sustainable growth.

MSPD growth strategy framework and it’s 4 pillars of growth

1 – MARKETING ACTIVITIES

As we discussed, marketing strategy is not similar to growth strategy but is one of the pillars of growth strategy. 

It’s not important that you need to have a solid marketing strategy or you need to do aggressive marketing to drive growth. Marketing is just one of the pillars. You can achieve growth by focusing on other pillars and by just doing basic marketing activities. 

Depending on your product, industry, market scenario, and size of the company you can decide whether marketing is the right pillar to focus on for growth. 

Consider marketing as a key pillar of your growth strategy only if you think it is the best way to achieve your goals.  

Once you are sure marketing is a key pillar in your growth strategy then you can start building your marketing plan. 

Within your marketing plan, you can consider all types of marketing activities. It includes your online marketing as well as offline marketing. All your marketing channels and communications are part of this. It includes SEO, performance marketing, social media, content, email, and more. 

It’s not necessary to activate and implement all types of activities or channels. If you are starting up then limit your channels to 3. Focus on channels that you expect can give you maximum impact. These channels can be found through experimentation and user research. 

If your budget is low then you should focus more on organic strategy and less on paid sources. If you have a good budget then you can activate your performance marketing on various channels like Google, Facebook, and gain quick traction for your product. 

Select the marketing activities and channels that are relevant to your product and users. It’s okay if you are not working on all channels until you are getting results from the few channels you are on. 

2 – SALES STRATEGY

All of us are aware of basic sales setup, i.e. building a sales team, providing them with leads, and having a demo and deck in place to talk and convert customers., however, to hack growth we should take a step ahead and innovate new sales strategies or offerings. 

There could be other similar products in the market, but you can stand out with a unique sales offering and package. Think about what additional items you can offer with your product. 

An email marketing product can give an unlimited contact database option. An online fitness platform can deliver additional hours of nutritional consultation. 

If you are a payment gateway product and you are planning to launch in new cities then you can have a seller first approach, where you onboard a huge number of popular sellers in that location by giving some incentive to sellers and get more payments done through your application. Thus, increasing the visibility. 

Think about how you can innovate and bolster your product offering and build a solid sales strategy. Your sales strategy could be your market differentiator. 

Another factor you can consider to increase sales is to partner or associate with organizations that can become your channel partners. 

It will help you reach out or land a huge number of customers with just one closure. These partners could offer a different product to the same set of users. If you have a social media management product, then you can partner with social media agencies on a commission basis to pitch the product to their clients.

3 – PRODUCT TWEAKS

The third key pillar of growth is the product. And we are not talking about stuff like building products that customers want, need mapping and all. We assume all that is in place within your product management. 

We are talking about product-based growth. But don’t complicate the meanings of product-based growth. How we see this is, how can you optimise your product or add features to a product that increases the revenue from the product or adoption of the product.  

In simple words, all you need is to think about how you can get more people to purchase within your product or how can you increase the average per user usage of the product.

This definition works differently for each industry. Based on the type of your product and your pricing strategy, your product growth tactics will differ. A few key things that are part of product-led growth are Funnel Optimisation, Product Recommendations, Freemium Model, and Easy Onboarding.

For an e-commerce company, growth could be by adding a feature, like personalised product recommendation to increase sales from each consumer. Or it could be optimising the conversion funnel to increase the conversion rate. 

For a SAAS product, it could be to increase the monthly billing of customers by adding a few paid add-ons or limiting a few key features for premium plans. You could also launch the Freemium model to onboard more users and reducing the uncertainty factor.

In the end, you are making tweaks in the product or adding features in the product with a mindset to increase sales from your users or increase revenue from your users. 

4 – CUSTOMER DELIGHT

Another way of hacking growth is by making your current customers get new users to the product. This could be by incentivising them through a good referral program or delivering gobsmacked customer service. 

You cannot completely control your product and be 100% certain that no customers will face any issue with the product or would not need help in using the product. 

Design a solid customer service process, and build a high-quality customer support team. Train your customer service team to treat and respond to each customer pleasantly. They can act as a consultant for the firm. 

Great customer service will lead to customer delight thus generating loyalty among your users and eventually building a segment of product advocates. These product advocates will talk about your product within their network. Get that word-of-mouth going. Zappos is a great example of having amazing customer service and driving growth. 

According to Nielsen, 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family over any other type of advertising.

Another hack is by designing highly rewarding referral programs. There are so many successful companies that achieved growth with referral programs. Uber, Airbnb, Doordash, and all other similar companies have a referral program in place. Referral programs can also be your high performing growth hack. 

How to Apply MSPD Growth Strategy Framework

First of all, a very important note, it’s not necessary to use all 4 pillars in your growth strategy. 

Depending on your type of business and the size of the company, you can decide how many pillars will work for you and which will be those pillars. You can support your key growth pillars by implementing basic activities on other growth pillars. 

The very first step to define a growth strategy is deciding which pillars you need to focus on. 

The biggest growth strategy decision you will take is deciding which pillars will play a part in your growth strategy. 

Here are a few samples of the MSPD growth strategy framework for different sizes of organizations. Also, the following strategy is from a generic view. You can tweak the strategy based on your business. The following will give you direction tr approach.

MSPD Growth Strategy Framework for Early Stage Startup

If you are an early-stage startup, we recommend that you have one driving growth pillar and just a few basic tactics for other growth pillars. 

Mostly, for an early-stage startup, the product is a driving force where you get users through your network, evaluate the core value of your product, and drive engagement within the product.

If you are entering a mature industry then you can decide on marketing as the driving force.

For early-stage companies, sales and customer service pillars add up later once the minimum traction is achieved.  

MSPD Growth Strategy Framework for Growth Stage Startup

If your company is in a growth stage i.e. evolved over product-market fit then you may assign 2 or more pillars as your key growth pillars. 

Depending on the resources you have and the industry you are in, you can select among the following MSPD strategy framework. 

Option 1 – Full-on Growth 

Activate sales and marketing together in addition to product tweaks to increase engagement of users on the platform. 

This strategy makes sense if you are in a competitive landscape and you want to capture the market before other competitors. 

Option 2 – Sales Driven Growth

In this, your growth strategy will be sales driven, where you build a sales team and design a sales strategy to get new customers. In addition, you will be working on your product to increase product adoption and engagement. 

Option 3 – Marketing Driven Growth 

In a marketing-driven growth strategy, you will go all-out with your marketing activities i.e. experimenting and activating multiple marketing channels. Like the sales-driven strategy, you will also be working on your product to increase product adoption and engagement. 

MSPD Growth Strategy Framework for Mature Stage Startup 

Once you have crossed the growth stage and are in a mature stage then it is about giving priority to all four pillars of the growth marketing framework. You have to be running all your growth pillars aggressively. It looks similar to the original framework.

Note: We will be discussing the MSPD growth strategy framework in detail for different industries in the following articles. Follow us on Linkedin for updates.

How we achieved 8x growth for an e-commerce platform

The platform was an e-commerce marketplace for endurance sports events like running events, marathons, and more. We migrated the product into a new platform and we wanted to initiate the business or growth engine for it. 

The business model was dual-sided i.e. we had a buyer side and seller side. Our key use case or functionality was to manage online registration for these events. 

We had a two-pillar growth strategy, as we were into a mature market we needed to be aggressive. Our 2 key growth pillars were sales and product. In addition, we had few initiatives running for marketing and customer service to support the growth from sales and product. 

Pillar 1 – Sales Strategy

Our objective for sales strategy was to get more events listed on the platform i.e. onboard more sellers. As we got more events listed on the platform the business model was such that organically we got more users and sales. 

Following were a few initiatives we kicked off, 

• Differentiating from our competitor by innovating our sales offering – We added new deliverables in our product plan. We positioned ourselves as an event consultant rather than just a registration partner. This helped us differentiate from our competitors. We pitched a complete package for event organizers i.e. registration + marketing for the events.
• Special first-time offer for new organizers – For every organizer on listing their first event with us we guaranteed them free digital ads worth an x amount on our social channels. This helped us onboard more organizers. 
• Incentive for sellers to get more sales on our platforms – An organizer can list an event on our platform and also on a competitor’s platform simultaneously. We came up with an incentive plan for getting them more registrations on our platform. If registration for an event crosses a number x then we reduce our commission on it thus generating more profit for the organizers. 

Pillar 2 – Product Tweaks 

Our objective was to increase sales from visiting users and to increase organic traffic. 

Following are a few initiatives, 

• Growth experiment to increase conversion rate – We experimented our consumer journey to increase our conversion rate. We reduced our conversion process from 6 steps to 4 steps. Thus increasing our conversion rate by 300%. 
• Automated page creation for Google search engine – In our market, organic searches are location based like ‘marathons in mumbai’. We added a script that automated the process of creating the landing page for cities based on user search and indexing for search engines. This helped us rank for multiple city search keywords. Thus, increasing our organic traffic. 

In addition to this, we did regular marketing activities like posting on social media, campaigns, and email marketing. We also had basic customer support in place. 

With all these, within 6 months we achieved an 8x increase in total quarterly sales/registration on our platform. 

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