The deck says new demand. The numbers, more often, say rearranged demand.
The categories
There is, in the demand picture of any firm, a small set of buyers who would have bought from the firm regardless of the motion the firm is currently running. There is a larger set who would have bought from a competitor. And there is a third set — usually smaller than the firm thinks — that the motion has, in fact, conjured into existence.
What the firm is paying for
The firm pays the same per-customer-acquired cost across all three categories. The economics of the motion, however, look very different depending on which category the customer fell into.
The discipline
The discipline is to know, with some precision, which category the firm’s growth is coming from. Most firms do not. The ones that do tend to make different bets about how to spend the next quarter’s commercial budget — bets that compound, over a few years, into a different firm.
Practice · Marketing