Growth Pulse

# Growth Pulse

One page that answers whether the growth engine is working, and what to do about it this week.

Owners describe pulling numbers from three dashboards and trying to find the story themselves. The story is the deliverable here — not the dashboards.

## Step 1 — Pull everything in parallel

Dispatch all connector calls in a single batch. See `reference/data_sources.md` for the metric-to-tool mapping. Serial pulls turn this into a wait nobody sits through twice.

- **HubSpot** — deals by stage, new contacts, lead source, win rate, cycle time, stalled deals - **PayPal, Stripe, Square** — revenue trend, transaction counts, refunds - **Shopify** — orders, SKU-level revenue, repeat purchase rate - **QuickBooks** — realized revenue, the number the books agree with - **TikTok Ads** — last week's spend, impressions, clicks, results, and cost per result per campaign, from the native connector (`report_integrated_get`, last 7 days against the prior 7), so paid spend sits beside the sales it claims to drive - **Mailchimp** — campaign, e-commerce, and audience-growth analytics, with revenue attribution on campaigns - **Gmail or Microsoft 365** — inbound inquiry volume and response times - **Public reviews** — recent ratings and review text, via web research

If a source errors or is missing, record it and move on. This skill is designed to say something useful on one connector and something excellent on six.

**Zero connectors is a supported path.** Ask for exports — a CRM deal export, a sales report, an ads performance CSV — and build the same pulse from files. Say it plainly rather than stalling.

## Step 2 — Compute the five views

Read `reference/thresholds.md` for the cutoffs. Compute each view and assign it a status.

1. **Channel trend** — revenue by channel this period versus last, and versus the same period last year where available 2. **Funnel conversion** — leads in, qualified, opportunities, won; the conversion rate between each step and where the biggest drop-off sits 3. **Campaign return** — spend versus attributed revenue per campaign, and cost per lead 4. **Product performance** — top three and bottom three by revenue and by growth rate 5. **Customer sentiment** — recent review scores, review themes, disputes, churn signals

A view with no data gets marked "n/a" and named in the appendix. It does not silently vanish.

## Step 3 — Find the actual story

This is where the skill earns its keep. Five views on their own are still a dashboard. The job is to connect them.

The connections that matter most:

- **Spend rising while cost per lead rises** means the channel is saturating, not scaling - **Strong lead volume with falling win rate** points at lead quality or response speed, not at marketing - **One product carrying the whole trend** means the growth is more fragile than the total suggests - **Sentiment dropping while revenue holds** is the early warning that shows up in revenue two months later - **A stage where the funnel drops off sharply** is usually worth more than any new campaign

Look for the single sentence that explains the period. Lead with it.

## Step 4 — Write the three actions

Every pulse ends with exactly three actions. Not five, not a list of everything noticed.

Each action needs three things or it isn't an action:

- **What to do** — specific enough to start today - **Why** — the number from this pulse that justifies it - **What it's worth** — the rough size of the opportunity or the risk

Rank them by size of impact, not by ease. Owners can decide what's easy; only this pulse can tell them what's big.

If the honest answer is that nothing needs to change, say that. A pulse that manufactures three actions every week trains the owner to ignore them.

## Step 5 — Compose

Use the exact structure in `reference/output_template.md`. Include only sections with real data.

Writing rules:

- Numbers lead, words follow. Not "paid social performed well" — "paid social drove 41 leads at USD 18 each, down from USD 31 last month." - Every number carries its comparison. A figure with no baseline is a missed insight. - Name the specific campaign, product, channel, or customer. "Some campaigns underperformed" is unusable. - No marketing vocabulary the owner doesn't use. Not "top of funnel velocity" — "how many new leads came in and how fast." - If a section has nothing worth saying, write "No material change" and move on.

## Step 6 — Deliver the pulse page

Alongside the chat pulse — additive, never a replacement — deliver the full pulse per the owner's stored output preference — never default to a markdown file. Check the `## Business context` block's `Output preference` (shared style guide rule, `../../shared/artifact-style.md`):

- **Visual artifact (the default):** render the pulse as an HTML page in the house style. Each of the five views gets a panel; revenue trend, cost per lead, and win rate are stat tiles with their comparison as the context line; campaign return and product