4 Ways CEOs Can Start Making a Big Impact on Growth Today

Most CEOs believe that their influence on growth is mostly limited to hiring great marketing and sales leaders and giving them aggressive goals to hit. While this is important, CEOs at the fastest growing companies also take an active role in the process of driving growth. Below are four ways CEOs can start making a big impact on growth today.

1. Champion a North Star Metric A North Star Metric tracks the expansion of value delivered across your customer base. An effective North Star Metric aligns the full team around delivering more value to more customers. As more value is delivered, more customers are retained, which is essential for driving sustainable growth. Facebook is one of the pioneers of this concept. Growth team leaders at Facebook credit Mark Zuckerburg with pushing a North Star Metric of Daily Active Users as the most important driver of long-term growth in the business.
2. Focus Resources on Highest Leverage Opportunities Don’t double the marketing budget if you have activation or retention issues. Take the time to understand what is preventing growth and allocate sufficient resources to fixing the issues. For example, in the early days at LogMeIn our CEO, Mike Simon, recognized that customer acquisition efforts were being hampered by a poor onboarding experience. Over 90% of new registered accounts never actually used the product. This significantly decreased my marketing team’s allowable acquisition cost for a new registered user. Mike refocused the product team on customer onboarding and was able to improve the customer activation rate by more than 1000% in just a few months. After these improvements we were able to quickly scale profitable marketing spend from $10K/month to over $1M/month, unleashing hockey stick growth. Today LogMeIn is valued at over $5 billion.
3. Monitor the Inputs that Lead to Growth Don’t wait for growth targets to be missed. The leading indicator for new sources of growth are ideas that actually get tested. If your team isn’t doing much testing, it is unlikely you’ll hit aggressive growth targets. Especially since testing is also required to improve conversion efficiency from existing sources of growth. On my team at GrowthHackers, we had an aggressive target around developing agency partners. When I noticed the person leading the charge for this objectives was not running tests around it or even generating ideas, I was able to ask him what was going on. He explained that the initial signal we had seen with early partners was a false signal and he no longer believed this was a good place for us to be focusing our efforts. After reviewing the data, I agreed and put him on a higher impact part of the business. If I hadn’t been monitoring his inputs on this goal, we likely would have lost some important agility in refocusing his efforts. 
4. Break Down Barriers to Cross Functional Testing The fastest growing companies test across all stages of the customer journey. This journey often traverses marketing, product, support and engineering departments. Cross functional testing always requires CEO support. Not everyone will be thrilled about allocating product development resources to testing. However at Dropbox I found the engineering team quickly became believers in testing when they saw the impact on our growth. Getting them to this point required Drew Houston’s help pushing through those first few tests. The testing culture we established when the company was less than 10 employees has helped propel Dropbox growth to the fastest SaaS business to ever reach the $1B revenue run rate.     

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CEOs who focus on these four areas can make a huge impact on their company’s long-term growth. Share this post with your CEO so they can become a partner in driving growth at your business. 

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