Growth is not a number to target. It is an equation to improve.
Marketing plans for 15% because it asks for better execution. Ask instead what it would take to double each of four levers, reach, attention, action and value, and the answers change. This essay is about that shift: from 15% moves to 10X moves, who should be paid for making them, and how to prove they work.
1
The 15% Trap
It is October, and somewhere a leadership team is building next year’s marketing plan. The spreadsheet opens with last year’s actuals. The CRM team expects the database to grow by 12%. The email team promises a two-point lift in click rates. The engagement team has a new journey that should improve conversion by a tenth. Retention commits to trimming churn. Finance adds it all up, tests it against the budget, and the plan lands where plans usually land: 15 to 20% growth, funded by more campaigns, more automation and a larger technology budget.
Nothing in that plan is wrong. Every number is defensible, and every team has done its homework. Yet the plan is built to produce a small answer. The plan is small because the question is small. Ask a team for 15% and it will find 15%, by doing what it already does a little better.
The first problem is the starting point. Budgets begin with last year, so teams are asked how much better their part of the machine can get, not whether the machine is the right shape. Email optimises sends and clicks. Engagement optimises journeys and conversions. Acquisition optimises cost per customer and return on ad spend. Each improvement is real, and each is measured on its own dashboard. None is asked how it combines with the others.
That leads to the second problem: fragmentation. Reach belongs to one team, engagement to another, conversion to a third, retention to a fourth. They report to different leaders and are rewarded against different goals. Nobody owns the multiplication. Worse, a local win can damage the whole. A promotional calendar that sends harder lifts this quarter’s conversions and quietly erodes the attention next quarter depends on. A discount that lifts transactions thins the margin each transaction earns. Every team hits its number, and the business gets less than the sum.
The third problem is the database illusion. Brands count registered users, subscribers and customer records as assets. Many of them are no longer reachable in any useful sense: emails go unread, app users have not opened the app in months, customers have quietly moved on. As I argued in From Messages to Media, a database is not an audience. The number that matters is Real Reach: the people who have engaged with the brand in the last ninety days, set against the size of the list. For most brands the gap is large. The cost of that gap arrives later, in the paid-media budget, when the brand buys back customers it once had and pays a second time for a relationship it let lapse. I measure that as REACQ%: the share of customers bought through paid media who were already the brand’s customers.
The fourth problem sits underneath the other three. The technology and services marketing buys are paid in ways that reinforce the trap. Email platforms charge per message. Engagement platforms charge per contact or per active user. Agencies charge for activity. Ad platforms charge for paid reach. Each model rewards improvement inside its own category. None is rewarded for changing the economics of the customer relationship as a whole. I will come back to this, because I run one of these companies, and our pricing is part of the problem.
So change the question. Instead of asking how to grow 15% next year, ask how much of the value your existing customers could create you are realising today. Count every visitor who browsed and was never identified, every subscriber whose attention faded, every cart left behind, every form left unfinished, and every purchase made at a discount it did not need. In most businesses, that unrealised value is not a rounding error. It can be several times what the business earns from its customers now, and most of it needs no new acquisition spend at all.
This essay is about one shift: from a 15% mindset to a 10X mindset. Not 10X as a forecast, but 10X as the question that forces different moves.
Marketing has been planning with addition. It should be planning with multiplication.
2
Think in Doublings
Two times two times two times two is sixteen. Four doublings make 16X. Fall short on every one of them, and the product still lands somewhere near 10X.
The arithmetic is the least interesting part of that sentence. Whether a team finds 70%, 80% or 100% in any one place matters far less than what the target does to the team. A 15% target asks for better execution. A doubling asks for a different idea.
Ask an email team for 15% more revenue and it will refine what it already does: sharper subject lines, better send times, one more promotion in the calendar. Ask it to double how often customers give the brand their attention, and none of those moves gets close. The team has to ask a different question: why would anyone come back between purchases? That question leads somewhere new. The same is true of every lever in the business. A doubling cannot be reached by tuning, so it forces the search for a new move.
I should be clear that doubling anything in a mature business is hard. This essay does not argue that 10X is easy. It argues that most plans never look for it, because they are not organised around the levers that multiply.
Figure 1. Four doublings make 16X; even falling short on each lands near 10X. A 15% plan lands at 1.15X.
So what are the levers? For any business that lives on its relationships with customers, I would write the equation like this:
Customer value = Reach × Attention × Action × Value
Measure all four for the same customers over the same period, with value counted as contribution rather than revenue. Each lever asks one question and exposes one leak.
Reach asks how many people we can meaningfully serve. Not records in a database, but known, permissioned people the brand can reach: Real Reach, not list size. The leak is anonymous visitors who are never identified, app users with no contact route, customers with incomplete details, and former customers whose relationship has gone quiet.
Attention asks how often those people give us their attention: reading, browsing, responding, returning, voluntarily. A tracked open is weak evidence, because many opens are now registered by machines rather than people. The leak is attention that decays between purchases because the brand speaks only when it wants to sell.
Action asks how often attention becomes action: completed purchases, applications, bookings and sign-ups. The leak is abandoned carts, unfinished forms, failed searches and journeys with one step too many.
Value asks what each action is worth in contribution, after discounts, costs and returns. The leak is transactions bought with discounts they did not need, thin baskets and missed cross-sells.
In plain words: more people, more often, doing more, worth more.
Figure 2. One equation, four levers, a leak at each. Email earns attention and acts in the inbox; engagement converts across site and app.
The equation is easy to misuse, so one discipline belongs right next to it. The four levers multiply on paper; the moves that pull them do not act independently. Bring dormant customers back into reach and attention per person may fall, because the people you add are less engaged than the people you had. Pay people merely to open and you get more opens from less interested people, which is why rewards should follow completed actions rather than taps. Lift conversion with discounts and value per action shrinks. A good plan pulls each lever in a way that does not push another one back.
Headroom also differs. A neglected programme may have large gaps in three levers; a well-run one may have a gap in only one. The point of thinking in doublings is not to assume every lever can double. It is to ask the doubling question of every lever, and see which ones have an answer.
Asking is the easy part. The harder part is knowing what the 10X moves look like.
3
From 15% Moves to 10X Moves
Every lever can be pulled in two ways. There is the 15% move, which does what the team already does a little better. And there is the 10X move, which changes what the team does. Most marketing plans are made almost entirely of 15% moves.
The previous essay, 10+1 Email Innovations: Pipe to Product, Messages to Money, set out the innovations that turn a single email from a delivery into an action, scored in five stages per thousand emails delivered. This essay steps back from the email to the customer. The innovations are the same; here they appear as moves on four levers, and the score is the whole relationship rather than one send.
Figure 3. Same four levers, different moves. The 15% move refines existing work; the 10X move changes it.
Two engines make the 10X moves: email and customer engagement. They are sold as different categories of software, bought by different teams and reported in different meetings. The customer does not see categories. She sees one brand, reaching her in her inbox, on its website and in its app. The two engines are better understood as two instruments acting on the same four levers.
On Reach, the 15% move is to buy more traffic or add another sign-up pop-up. The 10X move is to identify who is already there. Engagement can recognise far more of the visitors and app users who arrive than most brands bother to. Email can capture contact details from transactions and service interactions, and reawaken quiet relationships before the brand pays to acquire new ones. The test is whether Real Reach rises and REACQ% falls.
On Attention, the 15% move is sharper subject lines and better send times. The 10X move is to give people a reason to return between purchases: a recurring Digest with something useful to read, a small poll or quiz, collectable NeoCards that reward the next open. As I argued in The Next Open, every email has two jobs, and the second is to make the next one more likely to be opened. This is where email leads, because the inbox is where attention can be earned every day.
On Action, the 15% move is to test another button or send another reminder. The 10X move is to put the action inside the message, so the customer can say Yes, Pay or Tell without leaving the inbox. That was the central claim of the 10+1 essay: email no longer only earns attention; it increasingly completes the action. On the site and in the app, engagement carries the rest, with agentic decisioning choosing the next best step for each person. Agents should be judged by the outcomes they create, not by the number of campaigns they generate.
On Value, the 15% move is to deepen the discount or push another promotion. The 10X move is to protect contribution: sell at full price where the customer did not need an incentive, recommend with margin in mind, and build better baskets. For publishers, much of Value comes from advertisers and sponsors rather than purchases. The equation in How Publishers Can 10X Their Revenue, subscribers × newsletters per reader × engagement × yield, is the same four levers in a publisher’s terms.
Email earns attention and increasingly completes the action. Engagement converts it across site and app.
Consider how this can work for one customer. Ishita has not visited a fashion brand’s site in three months. She has not complained or unsubscribed; she has simply drifted, the way most customers do long before any report calls them dormant. That drift is the subject of Before the Slide. On Sunday, she receives the brand’s weekly Digest: a short, useful read with a two-question poll at the end. She answers it. Her answer tells the brand something it did not know: she has moved to a colder city.
Her next visit, from a Digest link, opens on outerwear for her new city rather than the summer range she browsed months ago. She adds a coat to her cart, is called away, and leaves. The next morning, an email lets her complete the purchase inside the message, at full price. She is back, and in this telling no advertisement had to buy her back. Whether that holds across thousands of customers like Ishita is exactly what a holdout group is for.
Each step pulled a different lever. The Digest restored Attention. The poll refreshed what the brand knew about her. The recommendation lifted Action. The full-price purchase protected Value. And because she stayed, she remains within Reach.
This is why the two engines belong in one plan. Coordinated, the levers reinforce each other across channels. Email attention feeds engagement sessions, and what engagement learns sharpens the next email. Uncoordinated, the same two engines duplicate messages, tire customers and contradict each other’s offers. A brand that runs them as separate programmes gets the second outcome by default.
Two clarifications keep the model clean. Retention is not a fifth lever. A retained customer stays within Reach and keeps returning, which shows up as Attention and Action; counting retention separately would count the same gain twice. Likewise, Digests, agents and recovery programmes are not levers. They are the moves that pull them.
If these engines can create this much value, a question follows. Why are the companies that sell them still paid for the inputs?
4
Who Gets Paid for Which Lever
Most marketing technology is paid for activity: per message, per contact, per active user, per licence. These models built large, durable businesses. They also set a ceiling, on the vendor and on the brand. A partner paid per send is paid on volume, not on the equation. It gains when the list grows or the brand sends more. It has no stake in Attention, Action or Value.
It is worse than indifference. Call it the attention paradox. When attention improves, a brand needs fewer reactivation campaigns, fewer reminders and fewer win-back sequences. Under per-send pricing, the vendor is paid less for doing better. It should surprise no one that vendors on that model rarely push hard on attention.
A vendor’s business can be described in four revenue streams that mirror the brand’s four levers:
Vendor revenue = Volume + Attention + Actions + Outcomes
The names are deliberate. Each stream is priced at a different depth of the customer’s equation, and so each gives the vendor a reason to care about a different amount of the customer’s growth.
Figure 4. The capture ladder. The deeper a partner is paid, the more of the customer’s equation it has a reason to improve.
A partner paid on volume cares about Reach and little else. A partner paid per verified attention event cares whether customers keep coming back. A partner paid per completed action also cares whether that attention turns into purchases, bookings and applications. A partner paid a share of verified gain cares about all four, including whether each action makes money.
The further down the equation a partner is paid, the more of your growth it cares about.
Outcome pricing needs structure, or it becomes an argument. In The Alpha Playbook I described it in three parts. Beta is the contribution the brand would have earned anyway, agreed before the work begins. Alpha is the verified contribution above it. Carry is the partner’s negotiated share of Alpha. Price then follows value rather than volume, the shift I described in Paid to Send. Paid to Keep.
There is a trap to avoid here. A brand that creates 10X more value does not owe its partners 10X more money. The partner has to prove its contribution against what would have happened without it. It should take a minority share. And it must never charge twice for one outcome: a recovered customer may generate a send, an active user and a completed action, each a fair charge, but the brand’s gain from that customer is counted once.
Two facts make outcome pricing workable. First, the money does not come from the martech budget. No CMO will pay ten times a software invoice out of a fixed technology line. Outcome fees are paid from profit that would not otherwise exist, and for publishers, attention can be funded partly by advertisers. The budget ceiling that caps the martech industry does not apply to a share of new profit. Second, the brand keeps most of the gain. If a partner takes a fifth of the Alpha, the brand keeps four-fifths of money it was not making before.
The costs are real, and vendors should state them. Outcome revenue is lumpier than subscription revenue. Media revenue is shared and earns thinner margins. Attention products need real demand from brands and advertisers, not assumed demand. Above all, vendors have to become different businesses: running programmes, measuring incrementality and waiting to be paid until the result is proven. Relabelling old features does not count.
The 10X mindset applies to the vendor too. The 15% move for a martech company is to sell a bit more volume to each customer each year. The 10X move is to be paid for helping the customer pull all four levers.
For the brand, this becomes one question to put to every partner: what are you paid on, and which of my levers does that make you care about?
Aligned incentives make the promise plausible. They do not make it true.
5
The 10X Test
A doubling mindset is not a forecast. What turns it into an operating model is a discipline in four parts: an audit, a short list of moves, experiments that prove them, and a clear statement of what would show the idea to be wrong.
It begins with an audit. The brand and its partner look at all four levers in the brand’s own data, not industry benchmarks. How far is Real Reach below the size of the list? How many of the customers bought through paid media were already customers? Where does attention fade? Where do actions fail? Where does value leak away in discounts and returns? The answers differ from brand to brand. One has a Reach problem: most of its traffic is never identified. Another has an Action problem: interest is high and checkout loses it. A third converts well but at thin margins. The aim is not to double every lever. It is to find the levers where a 10X move exists.
Figure 5. Illustrative headroom assumptions. Uneven across levers, roughly 6X before interactions and testing.
In the illustration in Figure 5, the assumptions imply something like 6X, not 10X, and that is before the levers’ effects on one another are tested. That is a perfectly good answer. A brand that finds even a few-fold opportunity in its existing customers has a very different plan from one that started at last year plus 15%.
Next comes the short list. Pick the two moves with the most headroom and the strongest evidence, and test them over a quarter. Before anything starts, agree the baseline, the eligible customers and a holdout group that keeps receiving today’s experience. A recurring Digest might be tested for its effect on attention and on the purchases that follow. A next-best-action engine might be tested against the brand’s existing journeys. A recovery programme might be tested against both doing nothing and buying the same customers back through paid media.
Then the standard of proof. A message that arrived before a purchase did not necessarily cause it. A customer who returned after an email might have returned anyway. Gains have to be measured against what would have happened without the move, which is what the holdout is for. They also have to be measured in contribution, not gross revenue. Doubling transactions through incentives can look like growth while destroying value.
Finally, the essay owes its readers the conditions under which it is wrong. The four-doublings strategy fails if, across many brands, audits find 10X moves in fewer than two levers. It fails if gains in one lever are routinely cancelled by losses in another: attention falling as reach expands, or conversion rising only as margins fall. And it fails if partners cannot create enough verified gain to justify outcome fees. Any of those findings would not make ambition wrong. It would mean the big opportunity sits in one or two levers rather than four, and the plan should be built around those.
If those conditions do not hold, planning changes. It starts with the four levers instead of the budget. The team asks the doubling question of each lever, lists the 10X moves, ranks them by evidence and funds the ones with the best expected contribution. Marketing becomes organised around the economics of customer relationships rather than around campaigns, channels and tools. Its partners change role too: from delivering activity and reporting engagement to finding opportunities, running the moves and sharing in the gains they can prove.
Return to that planning meeting, a year from now. The spreadsheet opens differently. Instead of last year plus 15%, it opens with four questions. What would it take to double the customers we can reach? To double how often they give us their attention? To double how often that attention becomes action? To double what each action is worth?
The answers will not always add up to 10X. But they will show where growth is hiding, and they will produce moves that a 15% plan would never have considered.
Ten times growth is not a forecast. It is a different way to ask the question. The old plan began with a budget, divided it among channels and hoped the improvements would add up. The new plan begins with customer economics, asks the doubling question of each lever and tests how far the answers compound. For brands, the prize is more value from relationships already earned. For the companies that serve them, it is the chance to be paid for helping create it.
Growth is not a number to target. It is an equation to improve.
