• Table of Contents

  • How to Spot the Hidden Growth Levers in Any Company
  • Why Most Companies Miss Their Growth Levers
  • The Growth Lever Framework: 3 Lenses to Find What Others Miss
  • 1. The Friction Lens: Where Are You Making It Hard to Win?
  • 2. The Underutilization Lens: What Assets Are You Ignoring?
  • 3. The Misalignment Lens: Where Is Strategy Out of Sync with Execution?
  • Case Study: The SaaS Company That Found $10M in a Forgotten Feature
  • Truth Bomb
  • How to Build a Culture That Finds Growth Levers on Repeat
  • Conclusion: Your Next Growth Move Isn’t More—It’s Smarter

How to Spot the Hidden Growth Levers in Any Company

Most companies are sitting on a goldmine of untapped growth potential—and they don’t even know it. Why? Because they’re too busy chasing shiny objects, copying competitors, or drowning in dashboards that measure everything except what actually matters. The truth is, real growth doesn’t come from the obvious. It comes from the overlooked. The under-leveraged. The hidden levers buried beneath layers of “best practices” and bloated org charts. In this article, we’ll show you how to spot those hidden growth levers, challenge conventional thinking, and unlock strategic moves that your competitors won’t see coming. If you’re a CMO, founder, or growth exec tired of playing checkers in a chess game, this one’s for you.

Why Most Companies Miss Their Growth Levers

Let’s start with a hard truth: most companies are structured to maintain the status quo, not to find new growth. They optimize for predictability, not potential. And that’s exactly why they miss the hidden growth levers sitting right under their noses.

• Data Overload: Teams are drowning in metrics but starving for insight. Just because you can measure it doesn’t mean it matters.
• Copycat Strategy: “Let’s do what they’re doing” is not a strategy. It’s a shortcut to mediocrity.
• Functional Silos: When marketing, product, and sales don’t talk, growth levers get lost in translation.

Spotting hidden growth levers requires a different lens—one that sees beyond the obvious and asks better questions.

The Growth Lever Framework: 3 Lenses to Find What Others Miss

Here’s a simple but powerful framework to uncover hidden growth levers in any company. Use these three lenses to interrogate your business model, customer journey, and internal operations.

1. The Friction Lens: Where Are You Making It Hard to Win?

Friction is the silent killer of growth. It hides in your onboarding flows, your pricing pages, your sales handoffs. Find it. Kill it. Profit.

• Audit your customer journey for drop-off points. Where are people ghosting you?
• Look at internal workflows. Are your teams spending more time aligning than executing?
• Ask your customers: “What almost made you not buy from us?”

2. The Underutilization Lens: What Assets Are You Ignoring?

Every company has underutilized assets—audiences, content, partnerships, even internal talent. These are your hidden growth levers waiting to be pulled.

• Do you have a customer list you’re not actively engaging?
• Is your content library collecting digital dust instead of driving demand?
• Are there internal experts who could become external evangelists?

3. The Misalignment Lens: Where Is Strategy Out of Sync with Execution?

Strategy without execution is hallucination. But execution without alignment? That’s just chaos in a suit.

• Are your marketing campaigns aligned with your sales team’s priorities?
• Is your product roadmap informed by actual customer behavior—or just internal politics?
• Are your KPIs driving the right behaviors, or just activity for activity’s sake?

Case Study: The SaaS Company That Found $10M in a Forgotten Feature

A mid-stage SaaS company was struggling to hit its revenue targets. They had a solid product, decent traffic, and a competent team. But growth had plateaued. After applying the Growth Lever Framework, they discovered something wild: a feature that was barely mentioned in their marketing was driving 40% of their highest-value customer renewals.

They repositioned the product around that feature, built a campaign to highlight it, and trained sales to lead with it. Result? A $10M ARR boost in 12 months. That’s the power of spotting a hidden growth lever.

Truth Bomb

The biggest growth lever in your company is probably the one you’ve been ignoring the longest.

How to Build a Culture That Finds Growth Levers on Repeat

Spotting hidden growth levers isn’t a one-time exercise—it’s a mindset. A culture. A way of operating that rewards curiosity, cross-functional thinking, and ruthless prioritization.

• Make “What are we missing?” a standing agenda item in leadership meetings.
• Reward teams for surfacing overlooked opportunities—not just hitting KPIs.
• Break down silos. Growth levers often live at the intersection of departments.

And most importantly, stop worshipping at the altar of “what’s always worked.” That’s how you end up optimized for irrelevance.

Conclusion: Your Next Growth Move Isn’t More—It’s Smarter

Growth isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing what matters. And what matters is often hiding in plain sight. The companies that win aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest campaigns. They’re the ones who know where to look—and have the guts to act on what they find.

So here’s your challenge: This week, pick one of the three lenses—Friction, Underutilization, or Misalignment—and run a 30-minute audit with your team. You’ll be shocked at what you uncover. And if you’re not? You’re not looking hard enough.

Because in the end, growth isn’t a mystery. It’s a matter of perspective.

Mark Gabrielli
Founder, MarkCMO
[email protected]
www.linkedin.com/in/marklgabrielli</