4 alternatives to marketing led growth

Let’s imagine that there are 5 ways to grow a business. PLG – Product-led growth MLG – Marketing-led growth SLG – Sales-led growth CSLG – Customer-success led growth ELG – Engineering-led growth Which is best? I’ll cut right to the punchline: instead of picking one, you probably want a blend. The wealthy of Silicon Valley love PLG and ELG. It lets access to capital, access to amazing product talent, a love of product metrics, and patience. You focus on nothing but building an amazing product, iterate on it not for months but for years, patiently waiting for teams and individuals to adopt it organically, because they love the product – bottom-up marketing. I like it too – I appreciate the concept of focusing on making the product amazing. PLG and ELG are the approaches to product growth that will be most enhanced by generative AI, which allow for much more rapid product improvement. But the two approaches above are expensive and not realistic for most B2B solutions providers. Those kinds of businesses traditionally relied on SLG, which relies on skillful, intelligent, and socially brave people to sell, one-on-one, day after day. This is the most underappreciated of the three approaches. Like the similarly personality-powered CSLG, which focuses on extreme customer happiness after the sale, this focuses on one-to-one human relationships. Thus both will be slightly less transformed by generative AI than the other approaches. SLG is the most derided- maybe that because people are secretly too scared to sell. So they default to the go-to: marketing-led growth. Social media, content marketing, digital advertising, SEO. This is the one that will be most disrupted by generative AI, especially SEO. Anyway – why the rundown? What’s my point? Most people need to escape the mental trap of assuming that marketing-led growth is the only path forward. There are lots of options!