The First 90 Days as a New Head of Growth

A new Head of Growth inherits a business that is already moving. Campaigns are running, prospects need responses, customers expect delivery and leadership wants progress. The first quarter needs to improve that business while developing a more reliable understanding of how it grows.

Treat the first 90 days as a period of diagnosis, controlled improvement and shared execution. The balance depends on the company's stage, sales cycle, urgency and available evidence. A broken enquiry form can be fixed immediately. Replacing the CRM or changing the company's positioning requires a stronger case.

By the end of the quarter, the team should understand its most important growth constraints, have clear ownership of the work and be learning from improvements already under way. A presentation alone is an incomplete outcome.

1. Start with the commercial mandate

Clarify what the company needs growth to achieve and why it hired this role now. Is the priority new revenue, a more reliable pipeline, better retention, entry into a market or stronger economics from existing demand? Agree the commercial objective, time horizon, budget and capacity with leadership.

Establish what you can decide and which decisions require other leaders. Understand existing commitments before changing priorities. The mandate should cover the dependencies that influence growth, including Sales, Product, Customer Success and Delivery, even when those teams report elsewhere.

Separate the company's existing targets from your confidence in the route to achieving them. Keep reporting against commitments while checking their assumptions. If the baseline or plan is unreliable, surface that early with evidence and agree how it will be reviewed.

2. Understand customers, offerings and the full funnel together

Customer conversations and performance data answer different parts of the same question. Interviews help explain what buyers need, expect and value. Funnel and revenue records show which behaviours and outcomes are actually occurring. Use each to challenge the other.

Review the company-wide funnel, then examine meaningful offering and persona combinations. Connect each combination to its acquisition messages, landing pages, conversion actions, qualification, sales progression and customer outcomes. Add channel or market detail where the volume supports useful comparisons.

For example, a technical product may attract technical evaluators while the business buyer needs a different commercial argument. Low sales conversion could reflect that mismatch, weak follow-up or a genuine product-fit problem. The aggregate conversion rate cannot identify the cause by itself.

Read the ads, landing pages, nurture messages and sales material a prospect encounters. Listen to sales calls and speak with relevant customers and lost prospects where access permits. Check whether the promise made at acquisition survives qualification, sales and delivery.

Use a full-funnel audit to organise the investigation across Reach / Attract, Engage / Convert, Nurture / Close and Retain / Grow. Treat inherited explanations as hypotheses to test, including your own assumptions from previous roles.

3. Establish a baseline you can trust

Agree what counts as a lead, a qualified lead, an opportunity and a customer. Check how those definitions appear in actual records. A dashboard can look consistent while teams apply different entry conditions or leave key fields incomplete.

Build a proportionate baseline around revenue, stage conversion, progression time and customer outcomes. Examine source and segment differences without drawing conclusions from tiny samples. Distinguish recent leads that have not had time to convert from comparable cohorts whose sales cycle has elapsed.

Record important data limitations alongside the numbers. Missing source information or inconsistent opportunity stages should reduce confidence in a conclusion. Repair the measurement that matters for the next decision before commissioning a complete reporting rebuild.

4. Improve verified problems while diagnosis continues

There is no general reason to wait until day 31 or day 61 to make a useful change. Match the evidence required to the decision's potential impact, cost and reversibility. Continue work that is performing while investigating the constraints.

Fix clear operational failures early: a form that fails, an enquiry routed to nobody, an agreed follow-up that never happens or an incorrect product claim on a page. Confirm the failure, assign an owner, make the correction and check the result.

Where the cause is uncertain, run a limited test. Specify the observation, the proposed explanation, the change and the evidence that would support continuing or revising it. Keep the scope small enough to interpret what happened.

Consider an illustrative business with relevant inbound enquiries that stall after the first call. Marketing and Sales might jointly test follow-up material addressing a recurring buyer objection. Measure subsequent progression and inspect conversations. Avoid claiming the material caused higher revenue simply because a few deals later closed.

Major budget shifts, a new positioning direction, a platform migration or substantial team changes need broader evidence and stakeholder agreement. Urgent circumstances may justify faster decisions; document the assumptions and review points rather than pretending uncertainty has disappeared.

5. Use the 30/60/90 structure as checkpoints

Days 1–30: clarify the mandate, understand customer and offering differences, inspect the funnel and validate the most important data. Share an initial baseline, open questions and early fixes. Start aligning the teams around the commercial problem.

Days 31–60: deepen the strongest constraint hypotheses, compare evidence across functions and run focused improvements. Explain what has become more certain, what remains unresolved and where the investigation changes the next decision.

Days 61–90: consolidate learning, agree the next quarter's priorities and establish ownership, resources and review dates. Continue promising work, revise weak assumptions and stop activity that cannot justify the attention it consumes.

These checkpoints can overlap. A long enterprise buying cycle may require more time to assess closed revenue. An early-stage company with little historical data may need more direct customer evidence and small tests. Adapt the sequence to the business rather than requiring every team to complete the same interview count or launch on the same day.

McKinsey's guidance on leadership transitions similarly recommends adapting action to the situation and judging progress by impact rather than a fixed calendar.

6. Make growth a shared operating responsibility

The Head of Growth should help Marketing and Sales work towards shared commercial outcomes. Sales needs to understand the messages that generated an enquiry. Marketing should continue supporting relevant prospects through nurturing and sales enablement. Both teams should review qualification and progression together.

Apply full-funnel management through clear action owners, shared definitions and a review rhythm suited to the business. Bring Customer Success and Delivery into discussions when customer outcomes challenge the acquisition promise or expose a recurring fit problem.

Each review should resolve a decision, an action or an evidence gap. Share developing findings with leadership throughout the quarter so the day-90 discussion builds on earlier conversations. Ownership is stronger when the people expected to execute have helped interpret the evidence and shape the response.

7. Deliver a diagnosis, a working rhythm and a committed plan

By day 90, leadership and the team should be able to answer five practical questions.

What is the baseline? Provide agreed funnel definitions, relevant commercial measures and the data limitations that affect interpretation.

Where is growth constrained? Name the priority problems, show the supporting evidence and distinguish confirmed failures from explanations still being tested.

What has changed? Summarise completed repairs and tests, the observed results and what remains too early to judge. Make clear which work should continue, change or stop.

How will the team operate? Confirm decision rights, action owners, cross-functional handoffs and the review process. Identify capability or resource gaps that block the plan.

What happens next? Agree a small set of initiatives with expected commercial effects, owners, resources, measures and decision dates. State what will be paused or stopped to create capacity.

Assess commercial impact on a timeline that reflects the business. If revenue cannot yet be observed, use relevant leading evidence such as qualified opportunity progression or customer activation, while continuing to track whether it translates into revenue and retained value. More activity alone does not establish success.

8. Connect the first quarter to an ongoing growth system

The NBT Growth Model provides a useful structure for continuing this work. Growth Marketing Checkup identifies constraints and evidence gaps. Growth Route Formulation turns the diagnosis into priorities. Growth Navigation connects those priorities to execution. OKR-Driven Optimisation reviews outcomes and updates the approach.

The first 90 days should begin that cycle. The Head of Growth's contribution is a clearer commercial direction, an organisation better able to act together and an evidence-based way to decide what to improve next.