Customer-Led Strategy Growth
Where should our next phase of growth come from?
Customer-led growth strategy answers where your next phase of growth should come from by asking the people who will have to pay for it: your customers. Rather than modelling growth from assumptions made inside the business, MindMarket goes and finds out which of your existing customers have room to buy more, which people who do not buy from you today could be won and why they have held back, and which of your growth options your market will reward. What you get is a ranked direction, with your customers' own words as the evidence behind it.
THE SITUATION
Is this your situation?
- You have three or four credible growth options on the table, and everyone in the room has a favourite, but nobody has a sound way of choosing between them.
- Your last growth push worked beautifully in one market and fell flat in another, and a year later nobody can explain the difference.
- Your board wants a number, and the number rests on assumptions about customers that nobody has ever tested with a real one.
HOW WE WORK
How does MindMarket approach growth?
- We work out which growth you mean. "Where should we grow?" is not a question a customer can answer, so we turn it into ones they can: what would make you buy more from us, what stopped you buying at all, and what would you have to give up to choose us over what you use today. Getting this right takes a working session with your team, and it is where most of the value of the project is decided.
- We talk to the people who would have to fund it. We speak to your current customers, the customers you have lost, and the people who chose a competitor instead, in their own markets and in their own language, with researchers who live there. Each of those groups holds a different piece of the answer, and only the three together tell you where growth is available.
- We rank your options, and we are honest about the ones we set aside. We put your growth options against what we heard and rank them, with the trade-offs stated plainly and the business case attached to each. For the options we do not recommend, we tell you what would need to happen for them to turn out to be the better choice, so you can keep watching for it.
THE DELIVERABLE
What do you get?
- A ranked set of growth options, with the reasoning behind the ranking written out so your leadership team can follow it and challenge it.
- For each option, the specific customer behaviour it depends on, and a clear view of whether the evidence supports it or not.
- A short narrative you can take straight into a board meeting, written in the language of your business rather than the language of research.
- All of it as a Decision Case: one short written recommendation on the decision above, with the evidence under each claim, in a form your board can act on.
METHODS
Which research methods do you use for growth?
Most growth decisions are answered with in-depth interviews, ethnographic research and focus groups. We choose the method for the decision, never the other way round, and we will tell you which one we recommend and why before you commit to anything.
QUESTIONS
Strategy questions, answered straight
How do you research where growth should come from?
We find growth by asking three groups the same question: your current customers, the people who nearly bought and did not, and the customers of the options you are weighing. Current customers tell us how much more they would buy and what would trigger it; the near-misses tell us why they held back; the third group tells us whether a new market or segment is winnable. Each group is interviewed in depth, in its own language, and the three answers together show where growth is available and at what cost.
How long does a growth study take?
A growth decision usually runs as a Deep Listen programme, eight to twelve weeks from the framing session to the decision workshop, because it covers several groups and often several markets. When the decision has already narrowed to one option and one market, First Listen answers it in two to three weeks. The number of markets and how hard the near-miss customers are to find are what stretch the timeline.
How is this different from a growth study?
A growth study tells you what customers said and leaves you to decide what it means. This tells you which option to choose and why, with the trade-offs of the ones we set aside. The fieldwork is of exactly the same quality; what changes is that the work ends in a recommendation rather than in a set of findings.
We already have a growth plan. Can you test it?
Yes, and it is often the most sensible place to start. We identify the assumptions your plan depends on, then go and check the two or three that would hurt most if they turned out to be wrong.
What does customer-led growth research cost?
Growth work is priced like any MindMarket study: per market, with the ranges open on our pricing page, and the strategy part quoted after the framing conversation. Most growth decisions start as a Deep Listen programme; a single-option check runs as First Listen. Your itemised quote arrives within 48 hours of the brief.
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