Most companies are surprisingly quick to start fixing growth problems.
Pipeline slows, so marketing launches another campaign. Conversion rates fall, so someone proposes a website redesign. Sales cycles get longer, so the team adds another sales enablement tool. Customer acquisition costs rise, so the budget gets shifted to whatever channel currently reports the lowest CAC.
There is a lot of activity.
But there is one question that often gets skipped:
Where exactly are we trying to go?
That question is the starting point for Reframe, the second stage of my Growth Framework.
In the Gauge stage, we diagnosed the current state. We looked at growth goals, performance, customers, markets, technology, team capabilities, data, and the actual market a company could realistically reach and win. Gauge gives leadership something critically important: evidence about what is actually happening rather than assumptions about what might be happening.
But evidence alone does not create strategy.
Before you start fixing what Gauge uncovered, you need to decide what the organization should look like when those problems are solved.
That is the future-back moment.
Watch it here.
Imagine Realizing You Took the Wrong Turn
I think about this when I’m out walking Dusty and Tanner.
Imagine the three of us have been walking for twenty minutes when I suddenly realize we’ve taken the wrong turn.
I could start walking faster. I could shorten both leashes. I could tell Tanner to stop pulling. I could try a different harness on Dusty.
None of those actions solve the important problem.
We’re headed in the wrong direction.
Growth teams make the same mistake all the time. They optimize before they establish direction.
A company can become incredibly efficient at generating the wrong leads, selling the wrong offer, targeting the wrong accounts, investing in the wrong channel, or building capabilities that have very little connection to where the company needs to be two years from now.
Before you optimize the route, decide on the destination.
Reframe Starts With the Future
Years ago, when I wanted a group of teammates to help me solve a difficult business problem, I would tell them:
“Let’s walk the dog.”
Usually, that produced a few puzzled looks.
What I meant was that we were going to make the problem visible.
We would stand in front of a large whiteboard and start with what we already knew. I might sketch the problem, map the people involved, outline the steps in a process, and identify where I thought the opportunity existed.
My thinking was intentionally incomplete.
The point wasn’t to prove that I already had the answer. The point was to make my thinking visible enough that other people could challenge it, add to it, and improve it.
We would walk that problem around the block together until we had something closer to a plan.
Reframe uses the same idea, except there is one important difference.
We don’t begin with today. We begin with the future.
Ask What Winning Actually Looks Like
Start by asking the leadership team a deceptively simple question:
What does winning look like 12 to 24 months from now?
“We want to grow” is not an answer.
Neither is “increase pipeline,” “improve awareness,” “expand internationally,” or “become AI-first.”
Those are directions, not destinations.
A future-back growth discussion needs specificity.
🐕 How much revenue are we trying to create?
🐕 How much should come from new customers versus expansion?
🐕 Which customer segments should drive that growth?
🐕 Which products or solutions should become more important?
🐕 Which markets should we enter, expand, defend, or leave?
🐕 What should pipeline coverage and pipeline velocity look like?
🐕 What should retention and expansion look like?
🐕 How should the sales cycle change?
🐕 What market position do we want customers to associate with us?
Once those questions become concrete, something important happens.
The conversation changes from “What marketing should we do?” to “What must be true for this future to exist?”
That is a much more useful strategy conversation.
Now Walk Backward
Once the destination is clear, start working backward.
Suppose the business wants to increase recurring revenue significantly over the next 18 months by expanding into a particular enterprise segment.
Do not immediately jump to campaigns.
Instead ask what conditions must exist before that revenue can happen.
Maybe six months before the revenue target is achieved, the company needs substantially more qualified pipeline from that segment. Before that happens, the sales team may need stronger account coverage, different executive relationships, better proof points, and a clearer enterprise buying journey. Before that happens, marketing may need a stronger category position, better customer evidence, more precise account intelligence, and different content.
Suddenly the campaign is no longer the strategy.
The campaign is one consequence of the strategy.
The sequence might look like this:
🐕 12 to 24 months: Define the business outcome and what winning looks like.
🐕 6 to 12 months: Identify the capabilities, pipeline, customers, partnerships, and market position required to make that outcome possible.
🐕 This quarter: Determine which major constraints need to move first.
🐕 Right now: Identify the decisions, experiments, investments, and actions that start moving those constraints.
This is essentially walking the dog backward from the dog park to your front door.
You know where you want to end up. Now you can figure out the route.
The Hardest Question Is Usually What to Stop
There is another question I like to introduce during Reframe:
What are we currently doing that does not help us get there?
This is often where the room gets quieter.
Companies accumulate activity.
There are campaigns that have run for years because they have always run. Events that someone loves attending. Technology platforms purchased under a previous strategy. Customer segments the organization continues chasing even though win rates are terrible. Metrics that keep getting reported even though nobody makes a decision from them.
Every one of those activities consumes some combination of money, people, management attention, and organizational energy.
A future-back strategy gives you a way to challenge them.
The question is no longer simply, “Does this program perform?”
The better question becomes:
“Does this help create the future state we’ve agreed we want?”
If it doesn’t, there should be a very good reason it is still consuming resources.
Because strategy isn’t simply deciding what to do.
Strategy is also deciding what you are willing to stop doing.
Gauge Gives You Evidence. Reframe Gives You a Point of View.
This is why I separate Gauge from Reframe in my Growth Framework.
Gauge establishes the baseline.
It helps you understand your performance, your market, your customer, your capabilities, your technology, your data, and your current growth constraints.
But a diagnostic does not automatically tell you where the company should go next.
Reframe takes that evidence and turns it into a point of view about the future.
Maybe Gauge shows that your theoretical TAM is huge but your realistically reachable market is much smaller. Reframe determines which portion of that reachable market deserves disproportionate attention.
Maybe Gauge shows dozens of disconnected campaigns. Reframe establishes which growth outcomes those programs should actually support.
Maybe Gauge uncovers serious gaps between marketing, sales, product, and customer success. Reframe defines what the future customer journey and revenue model need to look like.
Maybe Gauge finds an expensive technology stack with overlapping tools. Reframe identifies which capabilities will actually be required for the future operating model.
The diagnosis matters.
But the destination determines which findings deserve action first.
Before You Launch Another Campaign, Turn the Map Around
There is enormous pressure inside companies to demonstrate action.
Launch something.
Buy something.
Change something.
Optimize something.
Those actions feel productive because they’re visible.
But sometimes the most valuable move leadership can make is to spend a little more time deciding where the organization is actually trying to go.
Before your next growth planning session, try putting these four questions on the whiteboard:
🐕 Where do we want to be 12 to 24 months from now?
🐕 What must be true for that future to exist?
🐕 What has to change this quarter to make those conditions possible?
🐕 What should we stop doing because it doesn’t help us get there?
Then let the team challenge the map.
Add what you missed.
Cross out what no longer makes sense.
Turn assumptions into decisions.
And only then start choosing campaigns, technology, agencies, programs, and investments.
That’s the first dog walk in Reframe.
Gauge told us where Dusty, Tanner, and I were standing.
Now we’ve turned the map around and decided where we’re going.
The next question is just as important:
How do we make sure the whole pack follows the same direction?
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