Professional Documents
Culture Documents
TRANSFORMATIONAL
GROWTH
Combining Vision, Insight, and Innovation with Cultural
Alignment and Unified, Disciplined Digital Execution
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Growth engineering – the data-driven practice of mapping routes to revenue to achieve persistent
performance – has become a critical imperative in the age of digital transformation, disruptive commerce
expansion, accelerating competitive intensity, and revenue science innovation.
These disruptive factors are having a profound impact on increasing customer value, scaling global operations,
improving product success, and rethinking and adapting business models and go-to-market strategies.
For many companies, growth is the driving force that brings it all together. Yet questions loom: Where do
you find it? How do you inspire it? What hinders it? How do you invest in it? Who within the organization
orchestrates and owns it?
This dynamic environment helps explain the increasing incidence and influence of the chief growth officer
(CGO), as well as chief revenue and commercial officers. Currently, more than 6,000 executives profiled
on LinkedIn have the CGO title, and the number is rapidly increasing. Another 15,000 have the title of
chief revenue officer, while approximately 28,000 executives say they are chief commercial officers.
According to Singular, a marketing intelligence platform company, more than 21 percent of brands with at
least $50 million in annual ad spend now have CGOs. A similar percentage of companies with annual ad
spend of $5 million to $10 million also have CGOs.
company on
opportunity for CMOs as it might be a threat. CMOs
need to step up and take on the role and responsibility
one page,
to lead the cross-functional alignment necessary to
truly drive top-line growth—a factor they are often
you’re going
evaluated for, but not fully empowered to influence.
—Mark Simoncelli
Senior Global Growth Acceleration, Pressure to deliver top-line performance is mounting, with
Strategy and Value Creation Executive, nearly 70 percent of marketers saying their companies
Frost & Sullivan
expect marketing to be the primary revenue driver and
business growth architect. Yet, marketers also indicate
that they are under-involved in key levers for growth,
such as the development of new products, markets,
customer experiences, and business conversions.
New CGOs, in fact, have often previously held CMO roles. Nonetheless, some major companies are turning
to other executives to take over the reins of growth.
Peter Horst, who has held senior marketing leadership roles in a variety of industries and companies,
including CMO of The Hershey Company and TD Ameritrade and Senior VP of Brand Marketing for
Capital One, believes the CMO is in a strong position to assume the mantle of CGO. However, taking on the
responsibilities of executive growth driver demands a deep understanding of the business and the ability to
influence and manage everything from teams, talent and technologies across a variety of functional areas.
Growth leaders must be strategic and organizational change agents and risk takers who have the capacity
to recognize, through data-driven research and analysis, where the best opportunities for growth lie and
what is required to seize them. They must also possess the skills and determination to drive those changes
across the organization and the company’s broader ecosystem. All of this is impossible without a clear
mandate from the CEO and board.
Growth strategy alignment requires the buy-in of the entire organization, and it begins with a well-articulated
strategy and direction that is understood and embraced by all functional areas of a company. Growth leaders
and experts universally point to the need for a clear and succinct strategy that can be easily explained and
grasped at all levels of the organization.
Mark Simoncelli, Senior Vice President of Americas Consulting at Frost & Sullivan, notes, “You have
to have clarity of purpose and direction. You also need alignment in terms of the strategy and what
it means to implement it. If you can’t articulate what you’re doing as a company on one page, you’re
going to have trouble.”
Clearly articulating a company’s brand purpose and strategy may sound easy, a “no-brainer” for some,
but may not be as easy to achieve, warns Horst. “You need a strategy that is pristine in the sense that
it’s coherent—there are no internal contradictions, there is no wishful thinking, which is something that
can often sneak into strategies.”
Innovation is easy.
people are full of dread and fear…that’s just going
to naturally be a drag on any kind of innovative
What’s difficult is
thinking.”
Some of
of Jelmar, a respected mid-sized leader in household and
commercial cleaning products, has been an innovation and
marketing leader at numerous large consumer packaged
goods (CPG) companies. She believes politics, bureaucracy,
and stiff management hierarchies often stand in the way of
the best
innovation and growth within big CPG companies, which are
now struggling with growth. ideas come
“Big CPG knows where the big opportunities are. They
have all the research,” she says, but management ego
from lower...
and hubris often kill innovation. “New people come in and
throw out great ideas and initiatives because it wasn’t their the people
actually in
idea. Senior leadership has to be able to get out of the way
and let the people who have the data and are close to the
consumer get the job done.”
She points to the success of Kind Bar, the all-natural snack touch with
customers
bar, as one of many missed opportunities. “Why didn’t big
CPG come up with an all-natural snack bar? Because it was
too costly! They had the data, but they ignored it to protect
category margins.”
day in and
day out.
“Innovation is easy. Just give consumers the products and
packaging they want,” Matras says. “What’s difficult is
getting innovation through the system.”
or customers.”
Matras has dug deeply into available research and conducted a custom segmentation study to better
understand Jelmar’s consumers. With those insights in hand, she and her colleagues developed hundreds
of ideas for new products and approaches to the market. Eventually, this list was culled down to the best
ideas that were validated through customer feedback from “shop-along’s” and focus groups.
Matras describes the process as building an “innovation pipeline.” It represented a mind shift for the
company toward thinking about the business as a “platform,” rather than individual products.
Srinivasan believes too few companies take a structured, analytical approach to discovering and validating
where growth opportunities exist, particularly regarding transformational growth.
across growth
companies don’t have a very structured approach to
analyzing and executing against growth opportunities.”
comes with markets at Kraft Foods, calls the process of looking at the big
opportunities ahead, “mining for gold.” The CGO needs to look
patience and beyond quarterly results and take a longer view in thinking
about customer segments, geos, and new experiences.
the intestinal Says Srinivasan, “All of the work we do revolves around growth
fortitude to do and what we call the growth pipeline, which starts with the
opportunity universe, whereby we work with clients to identify
what it takes. the entire universe of opportunities they could pursue, and
then subsequently winnow them down to the top three or four,
which becomes what we call their growth zone.”
—Peter Horst, Author, Growth Leader.
“You need the right balance across growth horizons. In all likelihood, the bulk of growth will come from the
appropriate exploitation and nurturing of existing assets. Looking at how to grow them. Looking at how
to extend those capabilities and equities into new categories and adjacencies. And even in that, there’s a
balance between short-term hits versus slightly bigger ones. But, there also needs to be sufficient focus on
the longer term bets. And that needs to come with patience and the intestinal fortitude to do what it takes.”
Maggie Xiao is the vice president on regional growth initiatives in China for Medtronic, the world’s largest
manufacturer and developer of medical devices and a global leader in services and solutions for the health
care industry. To develop and execute growth strategies for the China health care market, she works closely
with the region’s strategy team, led by the company’s regional president, and other partners from Medtronic’s
four business groups in China, as well as working to align local innovation and growth initiatives with corporate
management.
While Medtronic has been in the China market for 30 years, the market is changing rapidly as China seeks
to dramatically transform and improve its health care system. It is essential that Medtronic understand
and adapt to these changes, competitive developments, and local market needs. The company has a
rigorous and continuous strategy planning process, fed by insight developed by internal teams and outside
consultants.
Major Chinese growth initiatives include building business teams, products, and services to address the
needs of emerging and lower level sub-regions in China, as well as its fast-emerging private health care
system, which China is encouraging to take pressure off the public system that provides care for the vast
majority (90 percent) of the population.
For example, Medtronic is developing value added services to help the private sector development and
manage newly created hospitals. It also develops and adapts its products and technologies for the local
market, setup local R&D capabilities for overall China product strategy.
Additionally, it pays close attention to emerging companies and disruptive competitors, investing in many
of them and sometimes making acquisitions to support its ability to address emerging trends and needs.
Licensing agreements and technology transfer is also a significant part of the company’s China growth
strategy.
Xiao believes that many companies struggle to understand and keep pace with regional markets, especially
fast-emerging markets such as China. These companies are challenged to develop the robust processes
needed to keep pace with local market changes and forecast where the market is heading. Many also
struggle to get the necessary commitment and alignment from corporate management.
“You need to be able to continuously track and understand how these changes will affect the competitive
landscape and customer needs. You need to build a strategy to continually lead the market. You need the
right local talent and capabilities to address change,” Xiao says.
DELIVERING ON THE
PROMISE OF GROWTH
The Global Guidance Center, a global resource for heads of growth, revenue, and commercial operations,
provides a list of four essential considerations when looking to identify, map, execute, measure, and sustain
growth momentum and business lift:
1. Effective use of on-demand knowledge, predictive analytics, customer insights, and market
intelligence is essential to growth strategy mapping and continuous innovation, transformation,
and calibration across the enterprise.
2. Revenue growth and competitive sustainability is contingent on timely, reliable, and projectable
research and real-time monitoring of global markets, product categories, enabling technology,
customer behavior, and global economic and regulatory changes.
3. Auditing, assessing, valuing, and realizing growth opportunities requires new disciplines,
modeling capability, data-driven decision making, digital proficiencies, receptive and adaptive
organizational cultures, as well as critical internal stakeholder and partner alignment.
4. Tracking, measuring, and evaluating the value, relevance, and effectiveness of research and
product development spend relative to return on investment, revenue contributions, and
business performance improvements is a strategic imperative across all lines of business.