Roots and shoots: How to deliver deep growth

Is it time to rethink sales and marketing?

As marketing and sales effectiveness consultancies, working with some of the most progressive and fast paced b2b brands globally, Magnus Consulting and SBR Consulting have come together to share the common mistakes and challenges facing tech businesses and introduce a new way of building stability in a highly disruptive market. Deep growth focuses on building roots with existing customers to withstand price fluctuations and new entrants and pushes us all to question whether the current structure of marketing, sales and customer success as different functions is an outdated concept.

Executive summary

History tells us that however strong a business proposition, however impressive the leadership and however solid the investment and financial backing, unexpected change – whether in markets, politics, technological innovation or societal attitudes – will eventually push every organisation into turbulent waters.

This paper sets out how one decisive organisational change can help you not only navigate those waters but also use them to drive growth that is strong, sustainable and valuable.

By pursuing Deep Growth, businesses can mitigate the external factors that cause market downturns, instead making structural changes that unify organisational goals, eliminating siloes.
When external factors change the market, many organisations respond by hanging direction, setting new KPIs and seeking broader reach, but this can leave organisations even less focused.
The tech at our fingertips should allow us to be truly customer-centric from end to end, optimising and customising across the full customer journey.
If we wrapped the three ingredients of marketing, sales and customer success into a
single growth function based around different customer groups, we would create a team of greater combined strength and purpose.
A unified team, combining the functions of sales and marketing to synchronise KPIs allows a business to be truly customer-centric.
Organisations need to be ready to change – to have a genuine growth mindset, not just good intentions.

A new growth paradigm

This is not a paper about boom and bust, about accelerating in good times and surviving the downturns. It’s not about seizing the moment, weathering the storm or beating the odds.

It’s about a better kind of business growth. One that is not only resilient but will thrive in any financial climate. And it’s about the change you need to make to your business – structural and cultural – to keep your growth sustainable whatever challenges the future throws your way. Indeed, the changes that are often made to mitigate tough market conditions should really be the norm in good times too.

It’s about consolidating and harnessing all your organisational strengths, from your people and processes to the real-time end-to-end data you collect, and getting them to work as one powerful, single-minded unit that puts the customer unequivocally at the heart of every business objective.

“If you could get all the people in an organisation rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time”

Patrick Lencioni The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable

What’s holding back growth in your business?

Whether your industry or company is in an expansion phase or is being held
back by the challenges of the market, most businesses will eventually encounter
obstacles that lead to plateauing growth. These patterns are most visible in
technology businesses, given the dynamism and pace of industry change, but
the same factors will be evident across almost all businesses.

These challenges can be divided into external pressures – those that are either
beyond the control of the business or are a natural, inherent part of market
development – and internal obstacles caused by structural and cultural issues
within the business. While the former can be tackled as they arise, the latter are
effectively unforced errors, usually the result of entrenched practices, beliefs
and ways of working.

We argue that by facing the internal challenges head on – by employing a more progressive, unified, long-term and self-sustaining approach to growth – the external problems become far easier to manage and may even melt away completely.

Let’s explore those external issues first, before we take a look at how internal initiatives can transform our responses to them.

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