How CEOS Should Think About Growth

There are only a handful of things you can do to grow faster. The trick is going all-in on just one.

Knowing What Matters And Getting It Right

CEOs juggle a lot of jobs. That’s one of the reasons the pay is so good. But with so many roles to play and fires to put out, it can be easy to lose sight of the one responsibility that matters more than any other.

Dave Kellogg put it best in his article, “The CEO Job Description In Revisionist Form.” He argues that the most effective chief executives know they really get paid to do one job:

“The CEO’s job is to get what matters right.”

It sounds almost too simple when you put it like that. But if you read Dave’s article, you’ll understand the intention and power behind those words. Paraphrasing Dave, the CEO’s real job is to decide—to clearly identify what’s most important, make it the central focus for their team, and lead the charge to get it done.

Too many CEOs (especially those struggling to break out of slower-than-desired growth situations) miss this point. Paralyzed by sluggish performance and tempted by the prospect of a transformational turnaround, they hesitate to take a stand. They don’t clearly declare what’s holding their company back from growing faster. And as a result, their teams fall into an exhausting cycle of trying to fix everything at once- a “just try harder” doom loop that temporarily quickens the cycle times on their team, but fails to actually move the needle when it comes to increasing revenue.

The real trick to avoiding this trap is to simplify what it takes to grow faster. It’s the CEO’s job to name the growth levers at their disposal, diagnose which lever needs the most work, name it as their singular area of focus, and then direct a disproportionate amount of their energy there.

But knowing where to focus? That isn’t easy. Neither is taking a stance. Many CEOs are unclear about (a) how to diagnose which growth lever is their true bottleneck, (b) how to select their best first move to improve things, and (c) what to measure to stay honest about their progress.

So, to help cut through the noise, I’m sharing the growth levers framework I use with my portfolio companies. If you’re like many of my CEOs, this framework won’t exactly blow your mind. This stuff is, I’m told, pretty basic. But, as many of my CEOs have also told me, seeing the options all laid out in a simple menu of performance improvement options can help crystallize your thinking and build conviction on where your business needs the most help.

And it’s that conviction - the stance-taking fuel that powers all successful turnarounds - that we’re trying to create here. It’s that conviction that separates the great CEOs from the others who get stuck trying to improve everything all at once.

Lever 1: Create More Opportunities

How To Know If This Is Your Problem

If you’re consistently starting each quarter with sub-sufficient pipeline coverage, or if your YOY opportunity creation is flat-to-down while budgeting for growth, then pipeline creation is almost certainly your #1 issue. You can’t close what you can’t create, and the lifeblood of any growing business is a predictable flow of qualified opportunities. If your pipeline is weak, you can stop here. You need to fix this first.

Your Best First Move

In my world of B2B software, pipeline creation starts with building a better list. You need to not only define your market, but also find a way to convert more of those who might buy someday into those who are thinking seriously about buying soon. A better list won’t solve all your problems, but it’ll make everything that goes into running a proper sales play (messaging, enablement, training, tracking, and adjustment) a lot easier. Without a clear, printable list of who you’re trying to sell to, you don’t know who you’re aiming at - which almost guarantees that you’ll miss.

But if you know which accounts you have the best shot with, and hit them enough times with relevant, thoughtful outreach, I can almost guarantee you’ll start building more pipeline. Plus, with a solid target account list, you’ll quickly see if you’re actually covering your market or just admiring it from afar. After they really dig into the data, many companies struggling to build pipeline realize quickly that their newly defined target accounts have barely heard from them. Fix that, and good stuff happens. Fixing it starts with building a list, and then marshaling your team to lay out a plan of attack for how you’re going to turn those target accounts into people that know you, trust you, and tell you when they’re ready to buy.

Your Key Metric

You’re trying to create more pipeline, right? Well, start tracking your weekly pipeline creation versus a target, with a twelve-week moving average to smooth out some of the noise. This will tell you if you’re actually creating enough pipeline to feed the beast or just spinning your wheels. Plus, it will force you to have a weekly conversation about what you can do next to keep scaring up pipeline. The template I use with my companies is in our sales metrics playbook - free download here.

Lever 2: Convert More Opportunities to Customers

How To Know If This Is Your Problem

So, you've got enough opportunities in the pipeline—great. But if your win rate on truly qualified opportunities is below ~30%, or if you’re frequently missing late-quarter booking targets despite seemingly strong pipeline coverage late into the quarter, it's time to dig into how you can “just win more.” Other signs this is where you should focus? Unreliable forecasting and a general feeling of paranoia that your pipeline isn’t as solid or believable as it should be. If any of these sound familiar, or if you’re uncovering evidence of a combination of these issues, it’s likely that pipeline conversion, not creation, is your real issue.

Your Best First Move

Start by listening to a handful of sales calls. What you’re looking for are cringeworthy moments: Examples of poor sales execution that definitely don’t reflect the way you want your company showing up in front of customers. You know what good messaging sounds like, the impact a well-run demo can have, and how you want your team asking and answering questions. So trust your instincts as you listen: if something feels off, it probably is. As SaaStr CEO Jason Lemkin once said, "Listen to some sales calls. What you hear will shock you." Look for signs of confusion, weak objection handling, or muddled messaging. These missteps are also important signals. They’re the areas where your team needs more training, clearer guidance, or stronger reinforcement. The bad news is, these problems are definitely holding you back from winning more deals. The good news? They’re fixable - with a little training and lot of reinforcement.

Next, dig in on pipeline reviews. Start by building a pipeline heatmap for yourself, conditionally formatted so that all the "old, stale, and sloppy" opportunities light up in bright red. Include key fields like age, stage duration, push count, next steps, and last activity date to get a full picture of which deals are being actively worked and which are just cluttering the pipeline. This will help you identify deals that may need to be disqualified or moved out, allowing your team to focus on opportunities with a real chance of closing.

But don’t just review this heatmap in private. Pick your spots and bring your heatmap to pipeline review meetings with your sales team. Use it to guide discussions and challenge the team on why certain deals are stuck or keep getting pushed. This exercise isn’t just about knowing which deals are in play; it’s about understanding the quality of the pipeline and ensuring your team is focused on the right pipe management fundamentals. Combining what you learn from the sales calls with insights from the pipeline review can give you a comprehensive picture of where your team needs more training, reinforcement, and support. (It’s also a sneaky-good off-cycle performance review for your sales leader. Based on what you learn, it’s worth asking yourself: Do you still think you have the right GTM leader for what needs to be done?)

Your Key Metric

Snapshot your pipeline early in the quarter—around week 3 or 4—to give the team time to clean up their beginning-of-quarter opportunities. Then, compare this snapshot to the pipeline at the end of the quarter. Track your overall conversion rate, but also pay attention to how long it takes for the pipeline to start showing meaningful progression. This will tell you if the team is effectively moving deals through the pipeline or if things are stalling out.

For even more insight, break down these metrics by sales rep. Analyzing pipeline creation and conversion rates by rep will help you see who’s consistently turning opportunities into wins and who might need more support. The data will quickly highlight your top performers—the ones you want to use as examples for the rest of the team. This approach helps you spot patterns, understand where the bottlenecks are, and refine your coaching and training to improve overall conversion rates.

Lever 3: Reduce Churn of Current Customers

How To Know If This Is Your Problem

Is your bucket too leaky? You’ve got a retention problem if your renewal rates are consistently falling below what you've budgeted or if you’re frequently blindsided by non-renewals from customers you assumed were happy and likely to renew. Other warning signs include declining NPS or CSAT scores, indicating dissatisfaction or a deteriorating product experience. If you conduct a usage audit, look for patterns like a drop in logins or reduced engagement with key features—these can be early signals that customers aren’t getting value from your product or that your implementation process needs work. Pay particular attention to customers signed within the last 1-2 years. These newer customers provide a core sample of how well you’re setting expectations during sales and delivering value through onboarding and early adoption - and they’re a more honest sample of the customers you’ve added with your more recent, likely-less-founder-involved sales, marketing, and customer-success processes.

Your Best First Move

First, if you don’t already have one, you need to establish some kind of customer health score. This score should ideally combine factors like product usage, support ticket frequency, feedback trends, and account age to give you a holistic view of customer satisfaction and engagement. But if all that seems too daunting, or you just need a quick way to address the issue, just ask your team to update their best guess at customer health - red, yellow, or green. Your customer success team knows whether your customers are happy - and if they don’t, that’s an auto-red that’s worth looking into. Retention gets fixed one customer at a time - and without a simple scorecard, it’s basically impossible to start the triage work this requires.

Next, turn your attention to your onboarding process. Are your customers are getting the most out of your highest-value features from day one? Identify the key touchpoints in your onboarding journey—like initial training sessions, first-month check-ins, and early usage milestones. Make sure these are optimized to set customers up for success, and build in early education to the onboarding process. In one of my portfolio companies, we held a workshop to categorize our most important “early win” core features we wanted users to engage with - the ones that we knew would drive retention, but which tended to go unused in accounts that churned. Then we wrote a 5-touch onboarding email sequence with short demos of each feature, including where to find it in the product and where to go for help. It doesn’t matter how you do it. The key is creating an insurance policy that ensures your customers actually use the parts of your product that offer the most value.

Finally, rethink your approach to renewals. If you’re in “I hope they renew” mode and reaching out a month before a renewal date, you’re already too late. Start focusing on renewals 3-6 months in advance. This isn’t just about checking in; it’s about understanding the customer’s evolving needs and reinforcing the value you provide. Establish a consistent cadence for renewal check-ins—what should happen at 6 months out? At 3 months? At 1 month? Use these intervals to solidify your relationship, address any pain points, and make renewal a non-event rather than a last-minute scramble. And identify a spot for a go/no-go sentiment check. Simply asking customers “Are you planning to renew?” in your NPS survey can be the difference between saving an account and being surprised come renewal time.

Key Metric to Track

Start tracking a "Monthly Available to Renew vs. Renewal Rate." Begin by looking at the customers set to renew each month (the "Available to Renew" cohort) and compare this against how many actually renew on time, renew late/push, downgrade, or cancel outright. If your batting average of renewed vs. available-to-renewed cohorts, dig deeper—are certain customer segments underperforming? Are there commonalities among the customers not renewing (e.g., low engagement, “failure to launch” usage issues, or high numbers of support tickets)? Also, consider tracking this by sales rep or customer success manager. If you see a rep or manager with consistently high renewal rates, study their playbook. What are they doing differently? Use these insights to refine your approach across the team and boost overall retention.

Whole-Ass One Thing

What’s the hardest part of all this? It’s not diagnosing your problem or even executing on the fix. It’s committing to one lever.

If you’re like most CEOs, choosing just one lever and going all-in feels, I don’t know, a little risky. It feels like you’re leaving money on the table. Like you aren’t doing enough. Like you’re only fixing one thing when you could be fixing several. Here’s the thing: That nagging feeling actually a good sign. It’s a surefire signal that you’re about to whole-ass one thing instead of half-assing two (or three).

When that resistance shows up, don’t shy away from it. Use it. Let it remind you of the stakes and the need to focus. Let it push you into throwing all your weight behind what matters most.

Great CEOs don’t dabble. They don’t hedge. They make a clear bet on the single thing that will truly move the needle for their company, then align everything else around it.

Remember: Growth isn’t about being busy. It’s about being bold. It’s about making a call, getting everyone on board, and refusing to let distractions dilute your efforts. So diagnose what’s going on. Pick your lever - just one. Commit to it, own it, and drive it.

Growth is hard. But you can keep things simple.

And keeping it simple - while you get what matters right - is your most important job as CEO.