Chapter 5

The Four Drivers of Business Success

In the previous chapter, we focused on the impact of word of mouth as a driver of your business success and the best way to measure it, WoMI. I briefly mentioned a list of three other major drivers of financial success with customers, making a total list of four:

  1. Customer retention, keeping your current customers.
  2. Customer upsell, selling more to your existing customers.
  3. Marketing-driven customer acquisition, acquiring new customers via various marketing and advertising efforts.
  4. Word-of-mouth-driven customer acquisition, acquiring new customers who are brought to your organization by the recommendations of others.

In today's ultracompetitive business environment, what I've called Accelerated Darwinism, only the strong survive, and success and failure can happen at an alarming rate. You need to excel at a minimum of one of these drivers to have a chance at survival. If you are great at three or four of these drivers, you have a chance to do great things and be an industry leader. As companies mature, often their strengths shift among these revenue and growth drivers.

Google built its businesses at the beginning by using word of mouth to acquire new customers and did a great job in retaining their current customers (or users). Both of these growth attributes were driven by providing a great customer experience. As its market share growth has slowed, Google is using upsell to continue its growth trajectory. While you could argue that ...

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