In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, there’s a pressing need to eliminate siloes and foster collaboration within businesses, especially ones experiencing fast growth.

By combining the sales, marketing and customer success teams into one single team – the growth function – unified along strategic objectives, with synchronised KPIs and one goal: to be truly customer centric; businesses can drive Deep Growth.

“Deep Growth” is a decisive organisational change that can help businesses navigate turbulent waters and drive strong, sustainable, and valuable growth. It’s deep rooted, not transitory and is about having strong relationships with your customers built on trust. If you can achieve Deep Growth you can focus on reducing churn, increasing advocacy and increasing referrals.

B2B tech businesses can withstand the pressures causing plateauing growth by creating a growth function and driving Deep Growth, but where to start?

The Deep Growth Maturity Model highlights the four stages of Deep Growth. It starts with the three functions of sales, marketing and customer success siloed and moves to a completely unified, growth function approach in stage 4. As the teams work better together, performance increases and risks from market volatility declines.

1. Siloed: Difficult to predict future performance. A top line strategy exists, but there’s no clear plan on how to execute this across the teams. Sales, marketing and customer success work in siloes, there is limited communication, fragmented leadership and no clear view of the ICP. Relevant insights are scarce and disconnected, and tools are limited.

2. Connected: External factors have a significant impact on growth rate potentially causing it to stagnate. Each team has a plan, but they are not connected – they have different goals and KPIs. Leaders talk but teams are still isolated creating a ‘them and us’ culture. Data exists but it’s difficult to extract and use effectively; and tech stacks are underutilised.

3. Aligned: Performance is predictable and steady. Teams are aligned possibly with a shared leader (Chief Growth Officer), have synchronised KPIs and work together with roles and responsibilities clearly defined and understood across the customer journey. Messaging is consistent, data informs the strategy and tech is fully aligned and utilised.

4: Unified: Deep Growth. Single team, fully integrated around customer segments with insight-first objectives and a clearly defined strategy on how to deliver value across the business. Real-time data and tech and tools fully adopted.

You need to start with an assessment of where you are in order to identify and prioritise initiatives and work streams that help you move towards becoming a fully unified growth function. The following key areas will give you a good starting point to explore whether your business has what it needs and is culturally ready to grow sustainably.

Where are you on the Deep Growth journey? Six Steps to a Deep Growth Strategy

1. Priorities: look at the current status of growth in the business, from goals to market maturity. What are the external risks to your current performance? How well defined are your sales goals, how are you tracking to achieve them and how widely understood are they across the business? 

2. Plan: are your KPIs and objectives customer-centric and working towards both short and long-term success? Are you able to adjust your targets to look at the long term?Do you have leadership’s backing to make necessary changes? Do marketing, sales and customer success have the data they need and combined strategies, goals and KPIs?

3. Positioning: is your positioning strong, true to your business goals and purpose and most importantly, customer-centric? Do you have a really strong red thread or value prop that runs through the entire customer journey and keeps the organisation aligned? Does your positioning resonate with core audiences, have you tested it, does it create space between you and the competition, is it future proof?

4. People: what skills do you have within your current team that can work in the new structure? What’s the appetite and culture for change? Is there a culture of collaboration? Will leadership champion these changes? How easy will it be to change roles; how will it affect pay and individual goals?

5. Process: clearly defined easy-to-activate processes, supported by tech, frameworks and approvals, should unlock creativity and innovation. How much do your current teams follow a process, are they supported with the right frameworks and KPIs to succeed? Can you clearly process-map the new team from end to end around the full customer journey?

6. Tech and Tools: great tech systems, connected and used effectively, will supercharge this strategy. Do you have the tools that’ll allow the team to connect customer insights back to the top of the sales funnel in real time? Is there anyone in the team with responsibility for analysing the data and feeding back to the teams so they can optimise in real time?  

If you want some help kick starting your journey to Deep Growth, check out our Accelerator Workshop.

The Growth Function: A single, unified team driving Deep Growth

Placing customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty at the heart of your sales and marketing strategy can bring resilience and growth to your business at a time when external risk factors have rarely felt more volatile, especially in the rapidly transforming tech world.

By aligning your teams with strong goals and real-time customer insights, with clarity on roles and KPIs, you will set them up for success in their roles and motivation in their work. And only by getting leadership on board with this approach will you take another step towards the big wins it can bring you.

By unifying your sales, marketing and customer success teams you can
➡️ generate 32% higher revenue
➡️ retain 36% more customers
➡️ achieve 38% higher win rates
➡️ drive greater average deal sizes

Continue reading 👉 Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Defining Growth Through The Ultimate Measure Of Success

Download the full report now 👉 Download Roots and Shoots: how to deliver Deep Growth written in partnership with SBR Consulting

Accelerator Workshop: Kick-start your journey to Deep Growth 👉 contact us now
What is it? A 90-minute workshop + 30-minute discussion to assess the robustness of your current growth strategy and ability to shift to a ‘Deep Growth’ strategy.

Who is it for? Fast growth scale-up businesses who are experiencing revenue volatility or looking to build a foundation to accelerate growth opportunities.

The Value? The ability to drive strong, sustainable and valuable growth by unifying your organisation, eliminate siloes and becoming truly customer centric.