Growth barriers

Find barriers that are in the way of business growth and turn them into actions.

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What are growth barriers?

Businesses face growth barriers on every step of the customer journey. To think negatively, about why customers are not completing the funnel, your mindset is shifted and put in a customer-centric thinking model. This exercise will help you find barriers and turn them into solutions.

What you’ll need:

A Pen & Post-its
1 printed Growth Barriers Canvas.
Use the canvas preferably in a group.

Thinking of growth barriers

The Growth Barriers exercise is divided into 4 phases of your customer funnel. Why are prospects not acting the way you expect? Challenge assumptions of your team about growth problems and possible solutions and come up with non-obvious ideas.

Growth Barriers is more than just an ideation tool, it’s a mindset that you should try to apply throughout your company’s growth process.

Step-by-step guide

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The Rules
Take 10 minutes per phase, maximum. Urgency drives creativity. Everyone is free to write down all their ideas. Grab your post-its to write down ideas individually! After 10 minutes, we go through the written ideas and put them in the phase’s column.

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The Awareness Phase
Why are users not finding you? Take 10 minutes to write down ideas individually, then place them in the most left column.

Focus on the idea and remove double ideas. An example idea could be: we are not ranked high enough in Google.

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The Activation Phase
What can go wrong when comparing your offer and that of a competitor?

In the second round, users are comparing your product to others, and will not choose your product. Why would they do that? For example: we do not offer a trial period.

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The Conversion Phase
What can go wrong in the onboarding process or closing a deal? Write down why customers would drop out of this phase.

For example: a cart was abandoned because there is too much distraction on the check out page.

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The Retention Phase
What can go wrong while using your product or would make a customer stop using it?

For example: there is no loyalty program.

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Wrapping Up
Every participant has max. 3 votes, to choose the most important points of improvement of all phases.

These are the fundamental change factors to focus on new tactics.

Review all barriers and turn them into solutions. To think of solutions, the Growth Canvas might help. Or add a solution of a barrier to your marketing plan. For example, if your problem is a low conversion on a certain landing page, think about solutions that might solve this. A solution could be improving UX of your landing page and A/B test it.