Please note: this feature is in Preview at the moment, which means we're still making a few tweaks here and there to make it even better. It also means that while all customers can benefit from the Growth Engine right now, when it's out of Preview it may be restricted to certain subscriptions. It's also only available to customers that are on a Standard Customer Success Plan.
📖 Glossary
This glossary will help you understand the terminology in this guide and other related guides.
A simple blueprint for growing B2B product sales
More customers + higher customer lifetime value = sales growth
An extended version of the Growth Formula
Represented as a Funnel-Flywheel
Comprised of the 7 growth strategies for B2B sales growth
The seven elements of the Growth Model
Attract, Sell, Close, Onboard, Order Value, Order Frequency, Retention
Growth Metrics
The TTM statistics for your business' performance
A business intelligence dashboard in the CRM
Features charts and analysis on your growth performance
Growth Benchmarks (coming soon!)
How your performance compares to businesses
Compares your business to those of similar size, industry etc.
Set of articles, help documentation & education for improving your performance
Complete with actionable advice on which CRM features to use
💻 Join our Growth Engine launch webinar on Wednesday 17th July (13:30 BST) to learn what it is, how it works, and why it's important to your business!
How does it work?
The Growth Engine is here to help you succeed with the Growth Formula - attracting more customers and maximising customer lifetime value (CLTV) is key to a profitable, growing business...so the Growth Engine has been designed to help you measure and improve outcomes in these key areas.
To achieve that, your sales growth is further analysed via the seven key growth strategies found in the Growth Playbook. Maximising all seven elements across the funnel and the flywheel leads to repeatable, reliable, and predictable growth.
The Growth Engine analyses your CRM and ERP data, turning it into digestible charts that illustrate your progress in each of these seven growth strategies. By seeing clear upward, flat, or downward trends you can quickly pinpoint which areas need the most focus and improvement.
Armed with this analysis, you can then use the Growth Playbook and the related guides in our Growth Engine Hub to find the CRM features, and various sales & marketing best practices recommended for improving your sales growth.
What do the charts mean?
Depending on how much data you have, you will be able to switch between Monthly data (which is easily understood and recognisable) or TTM (Trailing Twelve Months).
💡 Use your mouse to hover over and highlight "Per TTM Period" - this explains that TTM (trailing 12 months) represents your performance for the past 12 consecutive months. Learn more about TTM and time series data here.
Total Revenue per TTM Period
Understand if your revenue is growing (upward trend) using the Total Revenue per TTM Period tile.
An upward trendline is the result of two things; acquiring more customers and increasing the customer lifetime value.
Customer Acquisition per TTM Period
Accelerating the growth of your customer acquisition is key. If you have a flat customer acquisition, you'll be acquiring more customers, but ultimately that will plateau. You always need to be accelerating your growth of new customers, otherwise customer churn will simply catches up with your customer acquisition.
Customer Lifetime Value per TTM Period
Attract, Sell & Close
Customer acquisition is then broken into Attract, Sell and Close - the first three stages of the funnel.
Attract growth strategy emphasises laser-focused marketing, refining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to attract relevant enquiries, and scaling up to create a robust funnel of high-quality leads.
Implementing the Sell growth strategy involves mapping your sales process and ensuring team consistency. This aids in defining best practices and enables iterative improvement by reviewing wins and losses.
Assuming you attract suitable enquiries in sufficient volume, there are proven methods to enhance Close rates, such as sharing Sales team successes and streamlining the ordering process for customers.
Onboard, Order Value, Order Frequency & Retention
Customer lifetime value (CLTV) is broken down into Onboard, Order Value, Order Frequency, Retention.
Research indicates that on average, customers don't become a “settled, regular & relational customer” until they've placed a minimum of 4 orders. Optimising the Onboard growth strategy can help you create more repeat ordering customers.
If your Order Value is headed in the wrong direction (downward trend), or not growing as fast as you'd like, then you'll want to prioritise improving this metric to impact your overall sales growth.
With the right analysis, customer ordering patterns, including Order Frequency, become predictable. Prompting customers at the right time avoids delays or forgotten orders, boosting sales revenue and fostering customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Increasing customer Retention by just 5% can increase profits by an incredible 25-95%. So, fixing that leaky bucket is a top priority, regardless of the effectiveness of attracting new customers.
Benchmarking
The Growth Engine not only tells you how you're doing in each metric against your own historic performance (i.e. is this metric going up or down over time), but how you perform against other similar businesses. This is presented through benchmarks for upper and lower quartile of data from other businesses of similar size and similar industry.
Missing Data in your Growth Engine?
There are a few possible reasons why you're not seeing data in parts of your Growth Engine:
CRM not integrated - An integrated Inventory Management/Accounting/ERP system is required. Without this, you won't see any data in your Growth Engine.
No "Attract" data - This is likely because you've not logged enough Enquiries yet. The Growth Engine requires 10 or more Enquiries to start showing data in your Attract charts.
No "Onboard" data - Not enough customers have placed their 4th order yet - you need at least 10 customers to have placed four or more orders for this chart to populate.
No "Customer Acquisition" or "Onboard" data - You need at least 10 customers for the data to start populating in these graphs.
No "Sell" or "Close" data - If you've logged fewer than 5 Opportunities in the last 24 months, you won't see any data against these Growth Strategies.
CRM used infrequently - If you're not using the CRM enough, there might not be enough data to calculate average order value (AOV), average order frequency (AOF) and retention data.