What’s Really Getting in the Way of Growth?

When a business wants to grow faster, marketing is an obvious place to look. There aren’t enough leads coming in, the website isn’t generating interest, campaigns aren’t delivering, sales needs better materials or the company simply isn’t well known in the market it wants to reach. Improving any of those things could help.

But before deciding what marketing needs to do differently, it is worth answering a more fundamental question: what is actually preventing this business from hitting its growth plan? Marketing can generate interest, create opportunities, help a business become known for the right things and give sales a stronger proposition to take to market, but there are limits to how much of a growth problem it can resolve on its own.

Start with where the growth is supposed to come from

A growth target gives the business a number to aim for, but the business still needs to decide where that growth will come from.

For one company, growth means winning larger contracts from the same type of customer it already serves well. For another, it means entering a new sector, expanding into a new geographic market, increasing revenue from existing accounts, launching a service the business has never sold before or shifting the mix of work toward more profitable opportunities. Each of those requires a different response, and several of them depend on factors other than the volume of leads being generated.

Knowing where the growth is expected to come from gives sales and marketing something specific to work toward, while helping the wider business decide where to invest.

Are you pursuing the right customers?

Once the business has decided where the growth is expected to come from, the next question is whether it is focused on the customers most likely to deliver it. This gets complicated as companies grow, because the customers that built the business are not always the customers that will take it through the next stage.

A company may want to move upstream, enter a more valuable market or become less dependent on a single sector. That doesn’t mean walking away from the accounts that got it here, but it does mean being deliberate about where new business development effort goes. When leadership, sales and marketing have different views about which customers matter most, effort gets spread across different priorities.

The result may not become obvious immediately, but it can eventually leave the business with a pipeline weighted toward opportunities it did not particularly want to pursue.

Does the offer work for the customers you want?

A business can have a strong reputation, a proven offer and a loyal customer base, and still find that none of it travels easily into the next market it wants to pursue.

Selling into a larger organization usually means selling to a different buyer, and that buyer tends to have different expectations. A technical or operational contact may be persuaded by product knowledge, responsiveness and an established working relationship, whereas a procurement function or a more senior commercial buyer will generally want evidence such as references from organizations of comparable size, compliance documentation, defined service levels and a commercial case that can be understood without the technical detail. A business can be entirely capable of meeting those expectations and still have nothing prepared that demonstrates it.

This is where growth strategy and proposition become the same conversation. There needs to be a convincing reason for the customer you want next to choose the business you have today. Where that reason is difficult to articulate, putting the offer in front of a larger number of people is unlikely to change the conversion rate.

Does the way you present the business match where it is going?

Businesses evolve faster than the way they describe themselves. A company can double in size, add three capabilities and win work it wouldn’t have been shortlisted for five years ago, while its website, sales materials and messaging still describe the business it was at the start of that run.

That gap becomes expensive as soon as the company starts pursuing larger or different opportunities. Prospective customers can only judge what they can see. They don’t know about the expertise that never made it onto the website, the major project nobody turned into a case study or the senior capability that isn’t reflected anywhere in the proposition. If the business intends to compete differently, how it presents itself has to support that ambition rather than quietly contradict it.

Are sales and marketing working toward the same commercial priorities?

Sales and marketing can each be performing well and still pull in slightly different directions. Marketing generates interest from one audience while sales concentrates on another. Sales responds to the opportunities in front of it this quarter while marketing builds position in a market that will take eighteen months to develop.

Both approaches may make sense, but they need to support the same growth plan. Once that direction is shared, it becomes easier to decide where marketing investment goes, what sales needs to support its conversations and which opportunities deserve the most attention.

Can the business deliver the growth it is pursuing?

There is also a practical question that can get overlooked when the focus is on generating demand: what happens when the growth arrives?

Winning larger clients, entering new markets or simply taking on more work creates requirements elsewhere in the business. Larger customers frequently expect a standard of service that smaller ones never asked for, including formal reporting, integration with their own systems, named account management and defined routes for escalation.

Processes that worked well at one scale come under strain at another, and customer experience suffers when delivery capacity has not kept pace with what sales has committed to.

That doesn’t mean every capability has to be in place before the business starts selling. It does mean the growth plan should account for what will need to change as new opportunities convert, and marketing shouldn’t be asked to accelerate demand the business isn’t yet in a position to serve.

Are the priorities understood across the leadership team?

Most businesses have more opportunities than they have time, people or budget to pursue, which makes prioritization the real constraint.

When one member of the leadership team wants to enter a new market, another is focused on growing existing accounts and a third wants immediate lead generation, those competing priorities affect decisions across the business. Marketing investment, hiring, operational capacity and leadership attention all follow from the choices a business makes about growth.

A defined set of priorities gives the wider organization a stronger basis for making those decisions.

What does this mean for marketing?

Once the wider picture has been examined, assessing what marketing needs to do becomes considerably more straightforward. The answer might be a new website, a campaign, stronger sales materials, a revised proposition, better case studies or a more focused content strategy.

There may well be real problems with the existing marketing that need fixing. The difference is that those decisions are now being made in the context of what the business is trying to achieve, rather than in response to a disappointing set of numbers on a dashboard.

Marketing has an important role in growth, but it is one part of a system. Customers, proposition, positioning, sales, operations, leadership priorities and decision-making all determine whether a business reaches the next stage of its plan. When growth isn’t happening at the expected rate, looking across those areas often reveals a very different problem from the one marketing was asked to fix, and once a business understands what is actually getting in the way, it can direct its time and investment toward the things most likely to change the outcome.

If your business has ambitious growth plans but isn’t getting the results it expected, Crown Rock can help identify what is getting in the way and where to focus next. Get in touch.

www.crownrockcomms.com contact@crownrockcomms.com