Find the friction. Remove the friction.

Ignite customer-led growth.

A human-first operating system for growth, augmented by AI. Three interlocking frameworks and an executive cadence, deployed as a 90-day sprint. Built with the people who know your customer journey best.

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The 7As: The Diagnostic

Seven stages. One customer journey. Every friction point named by the people who live it.

Most growth audits look at symptoms – pipeline metrics, conversion rates, CAC, LTV. The 7As look where the truth actually lives: in the humans and the journey they take together for your customers.

A1 – Audiences / Customers + Insights. Do you know your customers by heart? Not demographics – their problems, motivations, and the moments that matter.

A2 – Awesomeness / Positioning + Product. What is your genuine differentiation? Weak positioning kills pipelines that good products should be winning.

A3 – Amplification / Awareness + Storytelling. Are your stories breaking through? This isn't just about channels and spend. It's about whether your narrative earns attention in a crowded market.

A4 – Acquisition / Leads + Sales. Are your sales-led and product-led motions working together or against each other? This stage exposes friction most companies are too close to see.

A5 – Activation / Onboarding + Engagement. The first 30, 60, 90 days are where retention is won or lost – and where most companies underinvest.

A6 – Adoption / Expansion + Retention. Are you deepening customer relationships or just maintaining them? Revenue growth lives here.

A7 – Advocacy / Virality + Referrals. What turns customers into loyal advocates? Most companies leave this stage almost entirely to chance. The 7As treats it as a system.

The output: a complete 7As scorecard with friction points, OKRs, investment priorities, and clear ownership at every stage. Not a deck. A diagnosis owned by the people who will execute the fix.

SPARC: The Operating Framework

Five questions every executive team should answer clearly. Most can't.

Every company has a strategy. Most can't execute it – not because the strategy is wrong, but because the organization was never purpose-built to deliver it. SPARC is how we build that organization, with the people already inside it. Born at the Stanford Executive Program and pressure-tested across PE-backed unicorns and public companies.

S – Strategy. What are you prioritizing – and what are you explicitly not? The hardest leadership decision isn't choosing what to pursue. It's choosing what to stop.

P – People. Do you have the brightest, rightest, fittest people in each role doing their best work? Where are people operating below their potential because the role isn't defined right?

A – Alignment. Growth breaks down at the handoffs. Between marketing and sales. Sales and customer success. Product and everyone else. Fix the handoffs and the whole machine runs faster.

R – Routines. How do you make faster, data-driven decisions and build accountability into the rhythm of the team? This is where the 360 Brief lives – the standing cadence that keeps marketing legible to the CEO and CFO continuously.

C – Culture. What does high performance look like here – and do your people know it? Culture isn't a values poster. It's what you promote and what you permit.

PST: The Decision Lens

Three words. One shared language. Faster, cleaner decisions.

After a 7As audit and a SPARC roadmap, you have a lot. Data. Insights. Gaps. Opportunities. Then comes the hardest part: deciding what to actually do. PST exists to cut through all of it.

P – Preserve. Keep doing it. This is working. Protect the investment and don't let the noise of transformation crowd it out.

S – Strengthen. Do it better. This has real potential – but it needs optimization, additional resources, or sharper execution. Not everything underperforming needs to be stopped. Some things just need to be fixed.

T – Transform. Do better things. Do new things. This needs significant change – reduced, reimagined, or stopped entirely. The hardest category to populate honestly. PST makes that conversation possible because it's a shared framework, not a verdict handed down.

The prioritization formula: LOI – LOE = ROI. Level of Impact minus Level of Effort equals Return on Investment. High impact, lower effort moves to the top. High impact, high effort gets sequenced carefully. Low impact, high effort gets cut.

5Rs (Impact): Reach. Retention. Revenue. Resources. Returns.

3Vs (Growth Levers): Value. Velocity. Volume.

The 360 Brief: For CMOs and SVPs of Marketing

You can run great marketing and still lose your seat.

The average CMO tenure is under three years. In PE-backed companies, it's often shorter. The CMOs who lose their seats rarely lose them because they ran bad marketing. They lose them because the CEO didn't see the wins. The CFO couldn't connect the spend to the numbers.

Monthly Marketing 360 Brief – One page. CFO-readable. Connects the prior month's activity directly to pipeline coverage, CAC payback, and net revenue retention. Not impressions. Not MQLs.

Standing Attribution Story – Attribution is always contested at budget time, unless you've been telling the story all year. When the CFO questions spend, you've already answered three times.

The Wins Bank – Every quarter, before any budget review, there's a documented record of what you shipped, what it moved, and what you stopped.

Sponsor Cadence – A standing 1:1 with the CEO and CFO. Not to report. To stay connected to their evolving priorities. This is a sales motion applied internally. Most CMOs don't run it. The ones who do rarely get surprised by a budget cut.

The 90-Day Sprint: How the Frameworks Run Together

Three phases. Seven frameworks applied. One team that builds it together and owns it completely.

Days 1–30: Diagnose. Run the full 7As audit across the customer journey by going deep with the people inside the organization who know where the friction lives. AI accelerates synthesis. Your people provide the signal. Deliverable: a complete 7As scorecard.

Days 31–60: Design. With the audit complete, build the SPARC roadmap and PST investment matrix. Every finding gets a verdict: Preserve, Strengthen, or Transform. Every SPARC gap gets an owner. Deliverable: SPARC roadmap, PST matrix, draft OKRs.

Days 61–90: Deliver. OKRs finalized and aligned across functions. Owners confirmed. The first sprint planned. The routines that will hold the team accountable are in place. The 360 Brief cadence formally launches. Deliverable: a fully activated growth engine.

90+ Standing Operating Cadence: Monthly CEO and CFO one-page Marketing 360 Brief. Quarterly ELT/Board attribution story and OKR progress narrative. Quarterly MLT offsite Now/Next/New portfolio review. Weekly VP + AI and Ops lead human/agent pairing review.

Augmented Intelligence: AI Can't People. Only People Can.

Companies spent $252 billion on AI last year. 74% have yet to show tangible value. Only 15% of employees say their company has communicated a clear AI strategy. That's not a technology problem. It's a human problem.

At CLG Partners, we don't talk about artificial intelligence. We talk about Augmented Intelligence – AI that elevates human creativity, communication, collaboration, productivity, and profitability. A multiplier of the people at the center of your growth strategy, not a replacement for human judgment.

The Human/Agentic Continuum: Now / Next / New

NOW – Work done by people. AI responds to prompts without memory or context. Brainstorming, pressure-testing, second opinions.

NEXT – Human-led with agents in the loop. AI gives better input because you've loaded it with deep context – brand voice, data, competitive landscape. Humans review and approve at specific gates.

NEW – Agent-led with human supervision. AI runs end-to-end on a schedule – the work happens whether anyone's watching or not. A human sets the goals, reviews the output, and redirects as needed.

Every tactic in every A has a current placement and a target placement. The CLG Method sprint decides where each one moves – and holds the line on what stays human on purpose.

Method questions.

The 7As are the seven stages of the customer journey used in the CLG Method diagnostic: A1 Audiences/Customers + Insights. A2 Awesomeness/Positioning + Product. A3 Amplification/Awareness + Storytelling. A4 Acquisition/Leads + Sales. A5 Activation/Onboarding + Engagement. A6 Adoption/Expansion + Retention. A7 Advocacy/Virality + Referrals. Each stage produces OKRs, investment priorities, and clear ownership.
SPARC stands for Strategy, People, Alignment, Routines, Culture. It’s the operating framework that turns the 7As insights into a functioning growth engine. Strategy is built first through the 7As. Then People, Alignment, Routines, and Culture are designed to deliver it.
PST stands for Preserve, Strengthen, Transform. It’s a three-word decision lens for prioritizing investments. Preserve means keep doing it – it’s working. Strengthen means do it better – optimize, fix, increase investment. Transform means do better things – reimagine, reduce, or stop. It pairs with LOI − LOE = ROI to sequence decisions by return.
Ninety days is long enough to go deep with the people inside the organization and short enough to force honest prioritization. The sprint breaks into three 30-day phases. By day 90, the organization has a 7As scorecard, a SPARC roadmap, a PST investment matrix, aligned OKRs, and an installed 360 Brief cadence.
Each of the 7As has one signature Metric that Matters (MtM) – the number that tells you whether you’re winning at that stage or just busy. A1: ICP Signal Match Rate. A2: Time-to-Value Perception. A3: Engaged Attention Rate. A4: Pipeline Velocity Efficiency. A5: Time-to-First-Value. A6: Net Revenue Retention. A7: Customer-Led Growth Rate. Each metric pairs with a Core Friction Signal that predicts where growth is leaking before customers feel it.
No. Augmented Intelligence is integrated throughout the CLG Method regardless of where your organization is on its AI journey. Part of what the 7As audit surfaces is where AI can accelerate your growth engine and where it can’t. The human side comes first. AI multiplies what’s already there.
The 360 Brief is built into every CLG Method engagement – whether we’re running the sprint for a CEO or PE partner, or advising a sitting CMO. For CMOs specifically, the 360 Brief is the protection layer that makes the rest of the work legible to the people who decide whether you stay.

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