Our managing partner, Teresa Allan, and SBR Consulting‘s Alan Morton recently joined the brilliant host Dave Stevens on The Business Marketing Club podcast to discuss the report How to deliver “Deep Growth” in a disruptive market. Give it a listen now to hear them discuss

→ The concept of the Growth Function
→ The benefits of unifying your sales, marketing and customer success teams
→ How alignment = customer centricity & the power of being customer-centric
→ How to nail your growth strategy & identify where you are on the journey to Deep Growth
→ How to define growth and measure its success

How to nail your growth strategy: is it time to rethink sales, marketing and customer success?

Better alignment fosters better performance, higher retention and win rates through a unified growth strategy. 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.

The problem with the existing model of sales, marketing and customer success working as separate functions is that they often have different KPIs and objectives which hinders the alignment of efforts towards a common goal. This leads to a lack of closed feedback loops preventing valuable insights from being shared across teams, leading to missed opportunities and no lessons learnt. Additionally, the absence of collaboration and sometimes even unhealthy competition between teams can hamper overall business growth.

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

The Power Of The Growth Function: Being Truly Customer-Centric

Your growth strategy should focus on unifying your sales, marketing and customer success teams to create a growth function with synchronised KPIs and aligned objectives – this allows your business to be truly customer centric.

Customer-centricity allows for a seamless customer journey where every touchpoint is optimised for maximum impact – you understand their needs from unaware to advocacy, you know when and how best to show up and the right type of interaction to utilise.

By building deeper relationships with existing customers, you can manage and withstand external pressures better such as price fluctuations and new entrants to the market; and you can achieve higher customer retention rates, increased sales win rates, and larger average deal sizes.

Pull On The Skillsets You Already Have Internally, Focus On Nurturing Your Existing Customer Relationships And Increasing Satisfaction, And 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.

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.

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 your growth 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 deep growth strategy, check out our Accelerator Workshop.

But How Do You Define Growth? And How Do You Measure Its Success?

Defining what growth looks like is not straightforward. Is it more customers? More profit? A bigger global footprint? A deeper client base? Whilst all of those are important, it’s crucial to recognise that having more customers year on year is not only an unrealistic target, but an obsession that leads you away from your core purpose and identity. The ultimate measurement of success that encourages deep, lasting and synthesised relationships with existing customers, is customer lifetime value (CLV).

The Ultimate Measure Of Success: Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

At its heart, Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) means your customers stay with you longer. The simplest way to achieve that: make them happy with the relationship through a unified customer experience. Reward loyalty. Drive customer satisfaction.

It challenges the concept of always needing more customers and instead focuses on DEEPER growth of your relationship with them. The sort of relationships that drive recurring and increasing revenue as a foundational goal, and bring in new business more cheaply, through customer advocacy and referrals. According to Ron Sela, gaining a new customer costs around five times as much as keeping an existing one, and there is a 60-70% chance of selling to an existing customer, versus 5-20% of selling to a new prospect.

Roots And Shoots: A Single Team Driving Deep Growth

If customers are happy, they will put down roots, they will increase their spend through ‘Deep Growth’, and they will advocate, driving new opportunities, or green shoots.

Roots and shoots means long-term sustainable growth and profitability, instead of short-term sales targets. And it means creating a self-sustaining regenerative cycle of customer satisfaction and new referrals.

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.