Industry: B2B SaaS, Agencies, Enterprise Growth
Use Case: Growth System Optimization | CAC Reduction
Client: Scaling Companies (Aggregate Insight)
By Checkgrow: AI | Sales | Agentic Systems for Growth
Table of Contents
Introducing the most common growth mistakes
Unstructured Knowledge (Your Company’s Brain is a Mess)
No Clear, Actionable Values (Your Values are Just Wall Art)
SOPs That Don’t Scale (Your Processes are Built for Yesterday’s Team)
Outdated Automation (Your Automation is Collecting Dust)
Ineffective Tracking (You’re Tracking Vanity Metrics)
Lack of Synchronisation (Your Teams are Running Their Own Race)
Unclear Product Benefits (You’re Selling Features, Not Solutions)
Unqualified Leads (Your Funnel is Full of Bad Fits)
High CPA (Your Acquisition Cost is a Symptom, Not the Disease)
Closing Thoughts
Introduction
Everyone is chasing growth. In the boardroom, they talk about scale. Investors want it fast. Teams pull long hours, trying to hit those big goals.
And yet, growth stalls. It’s rarely because people aren’t working hard enough. It’s because small, hidden mistakes are quietly draining momentum from the system. They’re like a slow leak in a tire, you don’t notice it at first, but eventually, you’re going nowhere.
At a recent Checkgrow talk, we broke down the nine most common growth mistakes we see again and again. None of them are dramatic, overnight failures. They’re subtle habits that build up over time and ultimately define a company’s performance.
Let’s walk through them as the real-world roadblocks we help scaling companies remove every day.
Unstructured Knowledge (Your Company’s Brain is a Mess)
Information is the fuel for speed. But in most companies, that fuel is spilled everywhere. It’s buried in a thousand Slack threads, locked in old email chains, or worse, living only in one person’s head. When that person goes on vacation or leaves, their knowledge walks out the door with them.
The Real Cost: Simple decisions take days. The same mistakes get repeated every quarter. A new hire spends their first month just trying to figure out “how we do things here” instead of actually doing them.
How to Fix It: Create a “single source of truth.” This doesn’t have to be a massive, complex project.
Actionable Tip: Start small. Pick one critical process this week, like how to qualify a new lead or how to report a bug, and document it in a shared place like Notion, Confluence, or even a well-organised Google Doc. Use tools like Loom to record quick video walkthroughs. When everyone knows where to find the answers, the entire company gets faster.
No Clear, Actionable Values (Your Values are Just Wall Art)
Values aren’t sweet sounding words for the careers page. They are the simple rules that guide your team’s decisions when the playbook runs out.
Without them, teams work against each other. The sales team values speed, so they promise a custom feature to close a big deal. The engineering team values stability, so they have to say no. That internal conflict just cost you a deal and created friction.
The Real Cost: The company can’t move as one. You’re a collection of talented people rowing in different directions.
How to Fix It: Define 3-5 core values and translate them into expected behaviours.
Actionable Tip: For each value, ask: “What does this look like in action?” For a value like “Customer Obsession,” the behaviour might be “Every team member speaks to at least one customer every month.” Your values are real only when they help an employee make a tough choice without needing a manager’s approval.
SOPs That Don’t Scale (Your Processes are Built for Yesterday’s Team)
Many companies write Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for the team they have today, not the one they want in two years. A checklist that worked for a 5-person startup will grind a 50-person company to a halt.
The Real Cost: As you grow, small inconsistencies multiply. The customer experience becomes a lottery, sometimes great, sometimes terrible. This inconsistency kills trust and costs you renewals.
How to Fix It: Build flexible frameworks, not rigid rules.
Actionable Tip: Instead of a word-for-word sales script, create an SOP with a framework: key discovery questions to ask, mandatory benefits to mention, and the goal of the call. This ensures quality while leaving room for human judgment. Focus on the why and the what, but allow flexibility in the how.
Outdated Automation (Your Automation is Collecting Dust )
Automation should be a super-enhancer. But too often, it’s an anchor. We see systems built years ago that are now completely out of sync with how the business actually runs. That old Zapier flow meant to assign new leads? It broke three months ago, and now hot leads are sitting in a digital black hole.
The Real Cost: Instead of saving time, old automation creates manual workarounds, wastes hours, and lets opportunities slip through the cracks.
How to Fix It: Treat your automation like a garden, it needs regular tending.
Actionable Tip: Schedule a quarterly “Automation Audit.” The owner of each key workflow (e.g., lead nurturing, customer onboarding) must review it, test it, and confirm it’s still doing what it’s supposed to do.
Ineffective Tracking (You’re Tracking Vanity Metrics)
You can’t fix what you don’t measure. But measuring the wrong things is even worse, it makes you feel productive while you’re actually failing. Many dashboards are filled with “vanity metrics”: clicks, impressions, social media followers. They look impressive, but they don’t connect to what really matters: revenue, retention, and profit.
The Real Cost: You make bad decisions based on misleading data. You pour money into marketing channels that feel busy but don’t deliver actual customers.
How to Fix It: Connect every metric to a business outcome.
Actionable Tip: For every number on your dashboard, ask the question: “Does this metric help me make a decision about budget, strategy, or people?” If the answer is no, ditch it. Track ‘demo requests from qualified companies’ instead of ‘website visitors.’ Track ‘customer lifetime value’ (LTV) instead of ‘number of sign-ups.’
Lack of Synchronisation (Your Teams are Running Their Own Race)
Growth is a relay race, not a collection of individual sprints. Marketing, Sales, Product, and Customer Success need to pass the baton seamlessly. But often, they don’t even seem to be in the same stadium. Marketing generates leads without knowing if Sales can handle them. Product builds features without input from the support team that hears customer complaints all day.
The Real Cost: Momentum is lost at every handoff. It feels like you’re working twice as hard for half the results.
How to Fix It: Create shared goals and shared data, not more meetings.
Actionable Tip: Build a shared dashboard. Let Marketing see how many of their leads turned into actual sales. Let Sales see which marketing campaigns are bringing in the best-fit customers. When everyone is looking at the same scoreboard, they start playing like a team.
Unclear Product Benefits (You’re Selling Features, Not Solutions)
Your product can be brilliant, but if you can’t explain its value in one simple sentence, it’s invisible. Too many sales pitches are a confusing list of features, specs, and technical jargon. When a potential customer can’t easily understand the benefit, they can’t buy.
The Real Cost: Your sales cycle drags on forever, and you lose deals to competitors who are simply better at telling their story.
How to Fix It: Use the “So What?” test.
Actionable Tip: State a feature of your product, then ask, “So what?” Keep asking until you arrive at a clear, tangible human benefit.
- “Our platform has AI-powered analytics.” -> So what?
- “It automatically finds trends in your data.” -> So what?
- “So you save 10 hours a week on reporting.” -> So what?
- “So your team can focus on growth, not spreadsheets.” That’s the benefit.
Unqualified Leads (Your Funnel is Full of Bad Fits)
A sales funnel is all about fit. Flooding your pipeline with unqualified leads is one of the most expensive mistakes you can make. Your sales team wastes its most valuable resource (time) chasing people who were never going to buy.
The Real Cost: Your customer acquisition cost skyrockets, your sales team’s morale plummets, and you get a reputation for being spammy.
How to Fix It: Be a bouncer, not a greeter. Qualify leads aggressively at the top of the funnel.
Actionable Tip: Use disqualifying questions on your sign-up forms (e.g., “What is your company size?”). Implement lead scoring to prioritise leads who visit the pricing page or watch a demo video. It’s better to have 10 great leads than 100 mediocre ones.
High CPA (Your Acquisition Cost is a Symptom, Not the Disease)
A rising Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is rarely a marketing problem. It’s a business problem, the final, painful symptom of all the other mistakes combined. When your teams are misaligned (#6), your benefits are unclear (#7), and your salespeople are chasing bad leads (#8), of course it’s expensive to win a new customer.
The Real Cost: You’re not just overpaying on ad spend. You’re paying the salaries of people working inefficiently, losing deals, and taking longer to grow.
How to Fix It: Stop trying to find cheaper clicks. Fix the system.
Actionable Tip: Look at your CPA as a health score for your entire growth engine. When you fix the underlying issues, organise your knowledge, clarify your values, and align your teams, your acquisition costs will naturally come down.
Closing Thoughts
Growth doesn’t stall because of one big catastrophe. It erodes from a thousand tiny cuts, the small, repeated mistakes that create friction in your system.
The good news is that every single one of these are fixable, and it doesn’t need more hustle, only better systems.
At Checkgrow, we build these systems for our clients, agentic growth engines that remove all the friction and align teams, so growth stops being a struggle and starts to flow with ease.
Curious which of these nine gaps is holding your team back the most?
Let’s find out together on a call!
