Its not just another buzzword. Customer-Led Growth is when you conceive of, design, and execute programs that mobilize your customers to drive the strategic growth initiatives that have been set by your C-Level executives. For a primer, read The Customer-Led Growth Manifesto.

You bring your key leaders from marketing, sales, and customer success into the workshop. These should be the people who set your go-to-market strategy and are accountable for its results. We roll up our sleeves and gather input from these stakeholders to fill out the Customer-Led Growth Canvas, by doing these things:

1. List out your top C-Level strategic growth initiatives and priorities for the next 6-12 months and the executive(s) charged with driving each initiative.
2. Surface the biggest challenges and opportunities your company faces in pursuing each initiative. These can be market perceptions, objections, questions, fears, doubts , competitive pressures; and can be untapped opportunities.
3. For each challenge or opportunity, come up with ways you can mobilize customers to crush the challenge or seize the opportunity. What types of customers? If you could wave a magic wand, what would you want these customers to do or say?
4. Start to define the customer program. How and when will you engage these customers in a program? How will you measure customer influence on revenue?
5. Prioritize your list, and now you have a roadmap for the top ways we can mobilize customers to drive Customer-Led Growth.

Each stakeholder should come into the meeting knowing the top strategic growth initiatives they are working on, and come with a list of the biggest challenges and obstacles that get in the way of pursuing them.

Examples of strategic growth initiatives:

• Penetrate a new market segment or increase market share in a segment
• Educate buyers about our new, disruptive approach for solving their problem
• Migrate customers from a legacy product to our new SaaS platform
• Expand our footprint within large enterprise accounts

Examples of challenges and obstacles:

• We face tough competition from vendors who have been selling into that segment longer than us
• We’re known for being a point solution provider, not for providing an enterprise suite
• Our customers are content with the legacy product and view it as too disruptive to make a change
• We have an easy time landing a new account, but to expand we struggle crossing functional boundaries

After completing this workshop, you will have:

• Inspiration and buy-in for embracing Customer-Led Growth, which takes a more strategic, surgical approach than the “Random Acts of Customer Proof” that most companies practice today.
• Alignment among your key stakeholders on which opportunities for mobilizing customers will have the greatest impact.
• A Customer-Led Growth Canvas completed for your highest priority go-to-market initiatives.
• A business case you can use to get buy-in from your senior executives, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success peers to support a more strategic program.
• Greater confidence to drive change by having proven strategies and programs that have helped other companies pursue similar growth initiatives.
• A conviction that you’ll never want create those old-fashioned case studies, testimonial videos, and reference programs ever again.

If you need help formulating a Customer-Led Growth strategy before buying software, we will do this workshop for your company for a small fee. This is for you if:

• You know you can get more value from your customer programs but don’t know where to start.
• You want to make sure you are mobilizing customers to drive your most important strategic growth initiatives.
• Your traditional Marketing and Sales tactics have become less effective.
• You need to get your peers bought in to this new approach.