Early in my career, back when CRM was still a new idea most companies hadn’t adopted, I was chasing an opportunity with Sears. They wanted a system for one of their call centers, and the obvious job in front of me was to work out how many seats I could sell.
I didn’t do that, at least not right away. I spent the discovery time trying to understand how they actually worked: their workflow, their real headaches, what mattered to them strategically. And in those conversations something surfaced that had nothing to do with the number of call center seats. They had an adjacent problem managing their field service calls, and it was costing them.
So we did something that wasn’t on anyone’s price sheet. We brought in a partner software company and started a three-way collaboration to integrate field service into the call center workflow, solving several of their priorities at once. The deal stopped being a call center install and became something far more valuable, to them and to us. The value we created, and the size of the deal, grew by an order of magnitude. Not because we pushed harder on seats, but because we stepped back and asked a different question.
That’s the difference between linear and exponential growth, and in my business, it’s something I think about constantly.
Most growth is linear. You add more of something and you get more out. More hours, more calls, more spend, and the results move up more or less in step. Linear growth is honest work, and it’s nothing to apologize for. Doubling a result this way is a real win, and for a lot of teams it’s exactly the right goal. But it has a ceiling, because it can only scale with more effort, and effort runs out.
Exponential growth is a different animal. It doesn’t come from adding more fuel. It comes from changing something so that the same effort produces far more, and then keeps compounding. With Sears, the compounding didn’t come from selling more of what I’d walked in to sell. It came from seeing a bigger problem than the one on the table.
Here’s the trap. Exponential sounds like the harder ask, so when we’re told to aim higher, we instinctively just do the linear thing with more intensity. We schedule more, we push more, we grind. And we don’t get great results, because working harder at the same approach only gives you more of the same result, never a different kind of result. The two aren’t the same activity at different speeds. They’re different games.
The strange part is that the bigger goal is often the easier path. If I’d set out to grow that deal a little, I’d have polished the quote, sharpened the pitch, chased a few more seats and competed on level ground with everyone else who was chasing that opportunity. Aiming for something much bigger forced me to ask a better question. Not “how do I sell more of this,” but “what would actually have to change to really matter to them?” That question is clarifying. It rules things out, and it points you at the few places where change will compound.
In my experience exponential growth almost never hides in new demand you have to try to conjure up. It sits in the gap between what’s possible and what’s actually happening. The customer who was interested and never converted. The good result that quietly lapses because nothing was built to sustain it. The need sitting right next to the one you were asked about. Those aren’t glamorous frontiers. They’re gaps in what’s already in front of you, and closing them is often where the compounding lives.
There’s one more thing the Sears deal taught me, and it has nothing to do with talent. Linear growth is something you can do alone, because it’s bounded by your own reach. Exponential growth almost always lives in the seams between people. I couldn’t solve the field service problem by myself. It took Sears, a partner company, and us, each holding a piece none of us could finish alone. That’s why coordination, not heroics, is the real engine of a step change. The leverage is in how the pieces fit together, and usually no one person is standing where they can see the whole thing.
None of this is an argument against linear growth. Of course, we have to keep it and constantly work it. It’s a genuine win, and most quarterly wins are the result of it. My point is simpler than that. If what you want is a significant change, stop asking your linear methods to deliver it. Spend less energy pushing harder, and more energy choosing a smarter path. Find the one or two places where a change would compound, get the right people moving on them together, and let the math do what effort alone never can.
