Operating model · Phase 02
Every account has one binding constraint.
Weeks 4 to 12. Creative volume, landing throughput, sales capacity or margin — we isolate the constraint actually limiting growth and put the whole budget behind relieving it, rather than spreading effort evenly across everything.
Why one constraint, not five priorities
Effort spread evenly moves nothing
A growth plan with five equal priorities is usually a growth plan that has not identified which of the five is actually binding.
With reconciled data from the instrumentation phase in hand, we test each plausible constraint in sequence rather than guessing: is the account creative-starved, meaning good audiences exist but run out of fresh variants before they saturate? Is it throughput-starved, meaning traffic is available but the landing experience cannot convert it fast enough? Is it capacity-starved, meaning marketing is generating more qualified pipeline than sales can work? Or is it margin-starved, meaning every lever available simply costs more than the resulting customer is worth?
Only one of these is usually true at a time, and it is rarely the one a client assumed going in — most engagements start with a request to fix a symptom (a rising cost per lead, a falling conversion rate) that turns out to be downstream of a different, unaddressed constraint entirely. We spend the first two to three weeks of this phase testing that hypothesis specifically, then commit the remaining budget in the phase to relieving whichever constraint the test confirms.
The four constraints
What we test for, in order
Test one
Creative volume
Do good audiences exist that run out of fresh creative before they saturate?
Test two
Landing throughput
Is traffic available but the conversion path too slow or unclear to capture it?
Test three
Sales capacity and margin
Is pipeline outpacing sales, or does every lever cost more than the resulting customer is worth?
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