Wouldn’t it be great if business growth was really like those picturesque charts in business stock images of happy suited people celebrating a fat green line going straight up to the right? Those charts have little to do with the reality of actual business growth—which likely looks more like a line following a drunk squirrel searching for last season’s nuts. Yeah, you’re getting the visual now.
You may have even felt like our friend the drunk squirrel, chasing after nuts, running from one place or priority to another, trying to manage the business and grow it at the same time.
That’s an exhausting way to try to grow and do it profitably. It’s one of the biggest hurdles business owners face when scaling their business - driving consistent, sustainable growth. The kind of growth that is more than just a blip on the radar—consistent, measurable, scalable business growth.
The problem is that achieving business growth can feel like a costly experiment where you’re chasing solutions, team members, tech stack, or sales and marketing tactics, hoping one of those tactics produces results and brings in more revenue.
You deserve more than squirrelly trial and error to grow your business. You deserve a defined growth strategy that fortifies your business, delights your customers, and supports your team’s success.
Growth-Driven Design (GDD) is a popular framework for user-optimized web design—but it’s not limited to web design or development. The principles of GDD provide a strategic framework to revolutionize business growth strategies in two key ways:
Why is the fast food chain Chick Fil A so revered? Besides their tasty food, most everyone agrees that Chick Fil A delivers the best customer experience. And why is their customer service so great? They create purposeful and deliberate customer moments but they also design purposeful and deliberate employee experiences.
Time and time again, we’ve seen that the success of a business’s customer-facing initiatives depends on the quality of their internal employee experience. User Experience (UX) and Employee Experience (eUX) are two intertwined strands that support your business growth, so when businesses neglect one strand, the other strand can falter or snap. Growth Driven Design provides a framework to support both UX and eUX so that your business flourishes.
Departing from traditional, time-consuming design methods, GDD operates on the premise of continuous improvement and agile adaptation. It prioritizes iterative developments based on real-time user data, which means businesses can swiftly deploy and refine their products, processes, systems, channels, training, and experiences.
This approach not only ensures optimal user experiences but also aligns offerings with evolving market demands. The ultimate value of GDD is that it empowers companies to remain agile, responsive, and competitive in the fast-paced business landscape of today, while fostering sustained growth through a proactive and customer-centric strategy.
One of the key ways GDD supports employees is by helping teams tailor tools and resources to their needs. In the same way GDD uses real user data to improve the customer experience, business leaders can use employee data to create a work environment that removes friction and boosts employee success.
Using data and employee feedback, GDD can help leaders build more efficient workflows through data-driven improvements to internal platforms. Employee feedback is specifically elicited and thus, employees feel valued, which fosters engagement and input on processes and creates a dynamic and supportive work environment that promotes innovation and continuous growth.
To delight your customers and support your employees, the first step is to align your objectives and initiatives. This is just the starting point—the launchpad for making iterative improvements based on real user data—so don’t get caught up in analysis paralysis. Use your best judgment based on your existing data, and build your strategy.
As you implement your launchpad strategy, set up systems that help you gather insights into your customers and employees. Team Sauce uses the power of ClickUp project management software and we’re superfans of our customer insights platform, HubSpot. Leveraging data is a cornerstone of GDD's success, and through meticulous analysis of user behavior and engagement, you can gain valuable insights into what drives customer interactions or employee efficiency.
When you have these systems set up, you can continue making iterative improvements to your business strategy. This data-driven approach helps you pinpoint pain points and areas of improvement for both customers and employees.
GDD is inherently agile, which means your marketing and sales strategies are even more effective. By constantly refining your digital assets and making agile adjustments to your marketing efforts, GDD helps you generate more leads and increase conversion rates.
Using GDD in tandem with a CRM platform like HubSpot turns your website into an effective sales enablement tool. You can build a system that scales to provide valuable content and personalized experiences, nurturing leads and driving them through the sales funnel more effectively.
With GDD, your business operations become more efficient thanks to data-driven continuous improvements. This approach streamlines processes, optimizes resource allocation, and enhances collaboration so that your business adapts to market changes swiftly. The user-centric focus tailors operational procedures to employee needs, ultimately making operations more efficient and effective.
GDD enhances your business’s customer service by driving a delightful user experience. Your data-backed improvements ensure your customers receive exactly what they’re looking for and equips your team with opportunities for bespoke service. GDD's iterative nature ensures ongoing feedback incorporation, which reduces friction, enhances loyalty, and keeps customer service aligned with evolving needs. And when you’re using a tool like Hubspot to provide smart service touchpoints to both employees and customers, you can automate repetitive tasks while keeping them personalized and creating cohesive experiences.
Implementing a Growth Driven Design framework for your business growth doesn't happen overnight. It takes careful planning and won’t succeed without an infrastructure of systems and processes to gather and interpret data. At Team Sauce, we call these Systems That Scale that create Moments That Matter.
This probably sounds better than running in circles, chasing nuts and hoping for growth - but yes, it is overwhelming too. But we have good news: you aren’t on your own to develop these systems and processes! Team Sauce is here to help you implement a successful GDD strategy that drives sustainable growth and fortifies your revenue stream. Contact us to talk with one of our Certified Growth Guides about Growth Driven Design (and leave the nuts to the squirrels)!