Growth is not broken. Your system is.
Most SaaS teams don’t have a growth problem.
They have a system problem.
They ship content, run campaigns, buy tools, try AI, yet growth still feels inconsistent. Not because people are lazy or unfocused, but because the system they are operating in is unclear.
Activity is high.
Effort is real.
Results are unpredictable.
That is rarely a motivation issue.
It is a structural one.
A growth system exists to answer one question:
Where is revenue leaking right now?
Activity is not progress
Why doing more stops working past early traction
You often hear that sales and marketing are numbers games. There is some truth in that. But when those numbers are not clearly connected to your north star metric, which should ultimately be revenue, you can end up doing a lot without moving the business forward.
More impressions.
More leads.
More calls.
Still no meaningful impact on revenue.
At that point, activity becomes noise.
How noise enters the system
As targets increase, impressions, leads, demos, calls, work piles up quickly.
Teams get busy. Context disappears. When sales are not coming in, it becomes hard to see where the real problem is. Everything looks active, but nothing is clearly broken.
That is how noise enters the system.
Once noise dominates, even simple questions become hard to answer:
- Where does demand actually come from?
- Which leads are worth pursuing?
- What should we stop doing?
Why founders keep revisiting the same decisions
When the system is noisy, decisions become reactive.
Without clarity on the real bottleneck, decisions are made on gut feeling. A few months later, the same problems appear again, just in a different form.
New campaign.
New tool.
New idea.
Same outcome.
This is usually not because the decisions were bad. It is because the system never made it clear what actually mattered.
What I mean by a growth system
If your setup cannot tell you where revenue is leaking, you do not really have a system. You have activity.
A good growth system is grounded in strategy.
It starts with a clearly defined ICP, and not as a one-off exercise. The ICP is continuously monitored and adjusted based on selected metrics and real feedback.
Once you know who you are building for, demand creation becomes clearer:
- Which channels actually reach your ICP?
- Where do they look for information?
- What problems are they actively trying to solve?
Good demand creation also builds your brand over time.
Bad demand creation slowly damages it.
Demand creation is not about volume.
It is about relevance and consistency over time.
When demand starts coming in, the next layer matters just as much.
You need clear qualification criteria. Clear conversion paths. Clear triggers for when a lead is handed to sales, and when it should not be.
In a healthy system, this is not left to interpretation.
Transparency is the third pillar.
Your CRM should be able to follow the lead journey from the first measurable interaction. At the same time, you need to accept that not everything is trackable.
That is why good systems do not rely on analytics alone. They include simple routines like customer interviews or asking “where did you hear about us?” to fill the gaps analytics cannot.
Especially early on, I do not believe in fancy attribution models. Clear lifecycle stages, meaningful rates, and common sense take you far.
Revenue or MRR is the north star.
Everything else exists to explain why it is going up or down.
A simple way to think about a growth system:
- Demand creation: content, search, discovery
- Qualification and conversion: inbound, sales handoff
- Visibility: CRM, lifecycle, metrics
- Decision loops: what actually informs priorities
No frameworks. No buzzwords.
Where systems usually break
ICP drift
Ambitious goals create pressure.
Under that pressure, teams start chasing anyone who shows even slight interest and is willing to pay something. Slowly, the ICP drifts.
Marketing drifts.
Sales drifts.
Product drifts.
Limited resources get spread across too many directions. Eventually the system breaks because there is no longer a clear customer at the center.
Content without focus
Creating a lot of content without a clear strategy can look like progress.
Traffic goes up. Impressions increase. Sometimes even conversions.
But if that content is not tightly aligned with your ICP and commercial intent, you mostly generate noise. More work. More leads to process. Very little revenue.
The system looks busy. It is not effective.
A CRM that reports activity, not truth
If your CRM tells you how many emails were sent, how many calls were made, or how many demos were booked, but cannot tell you how much qualified pipeline those activities created, it is reporting activity, not truth.
Everything can look like it is moving in the right direction until you realize deals are not closing. By the time that becomes obvious, fixing the system is much harder.
Automation that creates noise
Automation starts with good intentions.
Then new ideas appear. Integrations pile up. Documentation lags behind. Soon, no one fully understands how the system works.
Legacy automations accumulate. Fixing one thing breaks another. Confusion grows.
Automation should reduce cognitive load.
If it increases it, the system is already breaking.
Metrics that do not drive decisions
When decisions are made without metrics, gut feeling takes over.
This is often justified by saying there is not enough data. In reality, even with small volumes, there is usually enough signal to test assumptions.
If a decision cannot be connected to a metric that helps confirm or reject it, that decision is probably too vague.
Why tools do not fix this
Tools amplify structure.
AI does not create clarity. It removes friction.
If clarity is missing, AI just helps you get lost faster.
Speed matters, especially for early-stage and growth companies. But speed without direction does not help. It only takes you faster in the wrong direction.
What actually helps
Fewer decisions, made better
Focus on what matters most.
Early on, many details are irrelevant because you cannot validate their impact yet. Clarity beats precision.
Clear ownership
Every part of the growth system needs a clear owner.
Without ownership, direction fragments. Too many people steer at once. I have seen this break otherwise strong teams many times.
Designed structure before execution
When structure is clear, execution becomes faster and safer.
You do not just move quickly. You know you are not accelerating toward a wall.
Someone who sees the whole system
Growth rarely breaks in one place.
Having someone who can connect growth, GTM, and operations helps ensure the system moves forward as a whole, not as disconnected parts.
If growth feels busy but unclear, the next step is rarely another initiative.
It is stepping back and redesigning the system.
If parts of this felt uncomfortably familiar, you are not alone.
This is the kind of work I do with founders in ongoing advisory engagements.