Customer-Led Growth (CLG) is a strategic approach that leverages customer insights to qualify and quantify customer value, then operationalize and optimize the end-to-end customer experience.

‍Customer-led growth does not presume what marketing, sales, or product experience your business should offer. Rather, it begins with creating organization-wide understanding around what experience is most appropriate for the company's best customers. Value to customers is then delivered — whenever, wherever, and however they need it — throughout their relationship with the company.

In a customer-led organization, both customer-facing and technical teams rely on KPIs representative of value to customers (rather than business metrics), above all else, to build acquisition, engagement, retention, and expansion strategies. Companies who unambiguously and rigorously qualify and quantify the value created for customers across the organization will thrive.

Deeply understanding your best-fit customer influences whether you implement strategies that are product-led (like Slack, Ahrefs), sales-led (like Salesforce, Marketo), engineering-led (like Facebook, Stripe) or marketing-led (like Buffer, Drift).