What’s Customer-Led Growth (CLG) and why should I care?

My partner at A6 Group, Olivier Delerm, just published a great, detailed article about customer-led growth or CLG and I thought it would be interesting to share a summary suitable for all of us in the Support and CS community, complete with practical action items and resources if you want to know more.

What’s CLG?

CLG is a methodology that considers existing customers as the main engine for growth. It’s different from classic models like sales-led growth (where the sales team drives growth) and product-led growth (where the product drives growth through freemium models for instance).

The key concept of CLG is that customers who recognize that they are getting value from using your products will not churn, will expand their usage, and will become advocates for others. This means that we need to organize our entire process and organization around creating and compounding value before, during, and long after the initial sale.

What’s required to implement CLG?

Change the org

Siloed organizations cannot succeed with CLG. Instead, Sales, Product, and CS need to align around a shared mission: listening to customers’ experiences and improving them. So for instance, CS needs to drive value realization and expansion, not just firefight; Product needs to create roadmaps that drive retention, not just react to the loudest customers.

Change your metrics

The executive sponsor who signs the renewal — or doesn’t — thinks about business outcomes: revenue impact, cost reduction, competitive advantage, risk mitigation. They don’t care about features or ease of use (what the users care about) beyond whether the features enable the business outcome. So ideally you want to understand the customer’s business goals and measure your success through theirs.

This doesn’t mean that traditional metrics such as NPS, CSAT, or MTTR are useless: they are very relevant to running your operation, but they are not sufficient to confidently embrace CLG. At a minimum, add more outcome-based metrics such as time-to-first value (how quickly new customers experience a meaningful outcome), feature adoption, retention rates, and expansion rates.

Rethink your QBRs

QBRs need to target the economic buyer (not just the power users) and focus on discussing how your product is helping them meet their objectives (not just upcoming features or adoption metrics). This is going to be a challenge for some CSMs. See below for how AI can help prepare such briefings.

Leverage AI

Customers tell us a lot about what’s important to them through support cases, transcript of calls, community posts, and survey responses. The only way to interpret this massive amount of data is to use AI tools to mine it and identify patterns, something AI tools are very good at. And forget static health scores: dynamic sentiment analysis can run continuously, stratify customers any which way you want, and highlight issues proactively.

If you are more ambitious, AI tools can generate custom executive briefings, pulling from product usage data, outcome metrics, and contract history to produce concise, compelling drafts ready for a CSM to review and perfect.

What can I do today to move towards CLG?

It can take many months to move an organization all the way to CLG nirvana. But you can start with a few easy steps.

Conduct an executive audit with your top 10 accounts. Specifically target the economic buyer, not the power user, and ask them to tell you the value your solution delivers (don’t argue back, just listen). The gap between what they say and what you think you know will enlighten you.
Map the entire customer journey from from initial sale through first value milestone, identifying every handoff, every assumption, and every place where the value narrative degrades. I’ve customer journeys with many organizations and the results are always eye-opening.
Pilot an AI-generated executive briefing tool. Measure how the quality and outcome of the conversation change.

Want to know more?

Olivier proposes a CLG maturity model and many other examples and recommendations in the original post. Check it out or contact me for a custom assessment.

Have you already adopted CLG, even partially? Tell us about your experience in a comment.