Last week I sat down with Jason Wolf, President at Full Story and former Global CRO who scaled SAP Ariba from sub-$200M to $1.7B over 16 years. We tackled a question that's top of mind for every revenue leader: how do you systematically identify and evaluate new growth vectors for your business?
We started at 30,000 feet, mapping the broad categories of growth opportunities, then drilled down into the tactical frameworks Jason uses to make specific investment decisions. From international expansion timing to product roadmap prioritization, we covered the decision-making process that separates successful growth initiatives from expensive distractions.
What emerged was a clear mental model for CROs navigating growth decisions, built from Jason's experience expanding across multiple products, geographies, and market segments. The core insight: most companies struggle with growth not because they lack options, but because they lack a systematic way to evaluate which options their customers are actually pulling them toward.
But here's where it gets interesting. At Ariba, they didn't choose between expanding to new markets or building new capabilities. They followed what Jason calls the "trajectory principle" - looking upstream and downstream of the core business process they enabled.
They started with electronic purchase orders and invoices. Instead of trying to sell the same thing to different people, they asked: what happens before a purchase order? Strategic sourcing. What happens after? Payments and treasury management. This led them from serving procurement teams to owning the entire CFO office ecosystem.
"We let the business process and our customer feedback lead us as much as our worry about our competitors," Jason explained. "You really need to have a formal strategy around how you're going to address the market better and why someone uses your product will get more value than somewhere else."
The reason this works comes down to how customers actually experience your solution. When we artificially constrain our thinking to discrete choices, we miss the natural business process flows that customers live in every day.
"When it comes to building solutions or growing teams, growing markets, I think really getting an assessment of is this organic and driven from my customers? Are they taking me there? Or was this really a hunch that someone had that we're following?"
This hits on something I see constantly - companies pursuing growth vectors because they sound strategic rather than because customers are pulling them there. A customer asking for a specific feature doesn't necessarily validate a new market. It might just be noise.
The framework that emerges: Before pursuing any growth vector, pressure-test whether you're being pulled by genuine customer demand or pushed by internal optimism. This maps to what researchers call confirmation bias, but the practical application is what matters.
Say: Articulate the capability clearly
Show: Demonstrate it in controlled environments
Prove: Generate verifiable customer results
At Full Story, Jason deploys specialist solution engineers exclusively on new capabilities. "I have them in the field 50% of the time. They are taking what the product team is trying to put out there and they are battle testing the living crap out of it." This take a tremendous amount of risk out of big product launches.
The genius here is that by requiring customers to co-create proof points rather than passively receive demos, you're creating genuine buy-in. When customers help build the validation case, they own the outcome. It's what psychologists call the endowment effect, but the business impact is what counts.
These specialists aren't just showing features; they're developing deep expertise through repeated application in real customer environments. It's deliberate practice applied to enterprise sales.
"I used to say to my teams, the glory is in the deal, but the gold is in the pipeline," Jason told me. "I think that's shifted. It's not what you can sell, but can you renew it?"
This isn't just customer success platitudes. Jason operationalizes this through what he calls "clear solution based on clear value organized around a clear plan."
Most sales teams nail the first two. The third one - clear plan - is where deals die. "A clear plan is not a Gantt chart," Jason emphasized. "A clear plan is a name from the customer organization that owns a particular lane. It is a set of time that's pre-agreed to that you will have that name and that person to work on this."
The psychology here is loss aversion - customers aren't just buying your solution, they're buying reduced risk. But the tactical application is what separates good revenue leaders from great ones: named owners, pre-agreed time commitments, and customer-specific implementation plans that fit their actual organizational structure.
"What I've found that's kind of counterintuitive is once you have the team established, the growth vector is often based on the newer things that you do, and it's often not from the home base."
Why? Regional teams often become your most aggressive early adopters because they want to prove themselves. They "treat the customers in more holistic way. And they like to be first. They like to be known as the first to achieve something."
Jason's rule of thumb: Start considering international expansion around $40-50M ARR, but only with multiple solutions, not just one. The key is starting simple with strong local partners rather than trying to replicate your entire go-to-market motion.
When I asked about research versus just throwing a rep out there, Jason was clear: "Start simple. Don't start alone. Start with a partner. Choose a specific area, usually by industry, and choose a specific use case that you think is going to deliver more value than what they have today."
Throughout our conversation, Jason returned to the power of specialization over generalization. At Full Story, they've created solution engineering specialists who each "name an enemy" - identifying specific competitors they're designed to replace.
"If you're going to have a focus, look in the world that we're in, people are consolidating. So if we're going to have a focus area, let's not only have a new capability we're trying to roll out or a new product we're trying to roll out, let's understand what that means at the technology landscape of a customer and who we could potentially replace."
Each specialist owns mobile, data, new products, or integrations. The competitive advantage isn't just deeper knowledge - it's the ability to have definitive points of view about technology landscapes and replacement opportunities.
"CIOs, CFOs are wanting less tech. You better know what you can serve and then what you can replace."
This connects to research on expert performance - rather than creating generalist solution engineers who know a little about everything, they're building focused expertise that becomes genuinely hard to replicate.
Especially in the AI-age where you can build and ship product at accelerated speeds, the companies that will win in the next decade won't be the ones with the most growth options; they'll be the ones with the clearest understanding of which options their customers are actually pulling them toward.
Further Reading:
"Lead and Disrupt" by Charles O'Reilly and Michael Tushman
"Thinking in Bets" by Annie Duke
"Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" by Anders Ericsson
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