Quadshift's B2B Growth Grid: a shortcut to prioritizing your growth efforts

There are many (too many) marketing initiatives you could undertake as a bootstrapped B2B SaaS company. However, with limited time and resources, prioritization becomes crucial.

Quadshift’s B2B Growth Grid can be a great starting point. It gives you the most likely place to begin to invest your money, and more importantly, where to channel your energy, attention, and time. One note: AI has lowered the cost of both paths. Personalized outbound no longer needs a big team, and a high-converting website no longer needs a developer or an agency. The framework still holds because it is about where your buyers are, not how much effort each path takes; just expect to execute either one with far less time and money than it used to require.

🎣 Go Fishing: Large Markets, Low Revenue per Customer

Given the abundance of small fish in the river, waiting by the riverside with your fishing rod (or a large net, if you have one) and reeling in as many fish as you can is likely the best place to start.

Initially, your primary focus should be on optimizing your website for search engines and AI-powered discovery (Google and AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity) to ensure that customers can find you. Then, building a strategy centered on visibility with your target audience can yield long-term benefits. Direct outreach can still be effective, but if your customers are small enough and your market large enough, direct outreach becomes a secondary priority. Each customer is not significant, so you need to manage the cost of acquiring each customer.

Priorities:

1. Website, search, and AI discovery

2. Customer Data/Direct Marketing and Outbound

🏹 Go Hunting: Smaller Markets, High Revenue per Customer

On the other end of the spectrum, you encounter a smaller addressable market but with a higher revenue per customer. The number of fish in this river is fewer, but they are larger, making the fishing approach less efficient and too passive. In this scenario, hunting makes sense: find contact details of your target audience and reach out directly. Since revenue per customer is higher, the additional investment of direct outreach, qualifying leads, and performing demos can still result in positive ROI. Having a website remains important, but ranking first and having high-converting webpages will not be as impactful, initially. That said, a solid site is now cheap enough to build that there is little reason to skip it.

Get in front of your relatively small number of potential customers, make them aware of your existence, and keep your brand top of mind for those who aren’t buying right now.

Priorities:

1. Customer Data/Direct Marketing and Outbound

2. Website, search, and AI discovery

🎣 and/or 🏹: Large Market, High Revenue per Customer

Aren’t you lucky?

Depending on your strengths, your primary focus could be on your website and search visibility, your outbound efforts, or both if you have the resources. A more nuanced evaluation of where the lowest-hanging fruit lies may be needed, but all things being equal, this is a good problem to have.

🤷 Small Market, Low Revenue per Customer

These markets are challenging, but they do exist and require resourcefulness. Since it’s easier for a founder to find contact details, send emails, and make phone calls (and AI now does most of that finding and drafting for you), I would lean towards the direct hunting approach over the inbound fishing one, and be cautious to not over-invest your time in the smallest customers.

Now that you know where to focus your efforts, you can learn more about a time-tested outbound process, AI-enabled outbound automation, or kick-starting your inbound lead gen journey.