The four pillars of growth acceleration

Conversion ➽‘Be like Amazon: Even a lemonade stand can do it’ is the new book by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, the godfathers of conversion optimization. About Amazon's successes and how others can grow just as fast.

Customer Centricity

From the beginning, Amazon has been a company that helps customers make purchasing decisions. In the beginning, they wrote the reviews mostly themselves, but with honesty. A product that wasn't good got a bad review. Pure customer centricity means that you are not there to dazzle people, entice them to buy a product that they regret afterwards. The intent is to help customers choose. As a lemonade stand, you want to have small sample cups and show how many times which product has been sold in the last few hours.

Continuous Optimization

Continuous improvement is a byproduct of loving your customers, your employees, your suppliers and your investors. If you truly care about these people, you will never stop making what you do even better. At Amazon, only one in 10 experiments has a successful business case, and only rarely is it a home-run. Therefore, you only achieve those if you keep puzzling continuously to figure out how to improve. Revenue growth there is directly related to the number of experiments it conducts per year.

Culture of Innovation

When you double your number of experiments, you also double your inventiveness. The more often you fail, the more you learn and the better your next adjustments will be. The power here is to think of each business choice as something you can also undo. Changes will be made that are not easily reversed, but avoid discussing from uncertainty and risk aversion every decision, which is perfectly undoable, as if it were irreversible. This completely kills speed and therefore inventiveness.

Corporate Agility

In our modern society, it is not the big fish that eat the small fish or vice versa. The fast fish eat the slow fish. Even in a large organization, you want to stay fast. Small teams, never larger than they need more than two pizzas as a meal, are allowed to make their own decisions. However, they must be able to back them up with reliable data that unlocks the real mission and vision for customers. This prevents recrimination when success fails to materialize. After all, with recrimination comes fear, and fear takes away freedom and slows your growth.

Ton Wesseling fills in the recurring conversion column each month on behalf of Online Dialogue Emerce magazine: the magazine about “the next step in E-business.” This month he writes about: The four pillars of growth acceleration.

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