success factors of marketing-driven expansion, Part 2.

This is part two of a series of three parts on growth success. You can find Part 1 here.

Marketing is not the only factor driving growth in an organization, but it has a greater impact than ever before. Its role encompasses the entire customer journey. Marketing is unique in comparison to sales, product and customer success.

In my almost thirty years of experience, I’ve found that many marketing organizations struggle to measure and drive growth. There are too many reasons to list them all. Most companies want to grow, but they are unable to do so because they lack a growth framework.

A framework is a tool that helps your organization plan and manage growth. The framework should be able to adapt to the unique needs of your organization.

Marketers need to know:

• How to grow your business?
• Focus on the areas that will drive growth.
• The maturity of an organization in relation to each element of success for growth.

The Growth Maturity Index ^(TM) details the attributes that make up organizational maturity.

This article will discuss the first three success factors required for sustainable growth.

• Positioning, messaging, and content.
• Engagement of the buyer and customer
• Processes for marketing, sales and customer service.

Success element 1: Positioning and messaging

When I speak with executives, the refrain “We need more material” is often repeated. Many organizations have bought into the same notion.

You most likely don’t need any more content. You need content that is customer-centric and relevant to their journey and stage.

You must first define your brand positioning and messaging before you can create this type of content. These are the foundations for any content strategy. You will need less content to develop once you have defined your brand and market positioning.

The majority of organizations with which I interact are at the stage of Aware and Enabled. However, it is when you get to hyper-personalization and multiple content streams by audience or solution that you will reach the highest stage of maturity. When your message resonates with every customer stakeholder, at each stage of the journey, you have reached maturity.

Success element 2: Customer and buyer engagement

In the early days of my career, I worked as a member of a marketing department at a large software company. My division had a revenue of about $50 million and approximately 5,000 clients. We did very little marketing and customer success outreach.

He wanted to change this because he knew the importance of engaging with customers at each stage of their journey. He implemented several changes to marketing and sales. We generated an additional $12 million revenue in that year from our existing customers. This is a pretty remarkable shift!

To optimize growth, organizations must improve their engagement strategies. is not enough to generate demand for new customers. It is essential that they have full lifecycle customer engagement, which means personalized messages.

It all starts with the way your current and potential customers interact with your brand. You want them to become your advocates. This approach will help accelerate organizational growth by improving maturity.

Success element 3: Marketing, sales and service processes

Marketers often say that the sales department owns the relationship with customers. Sales owns part of the relationship with customers, but any company that believes they own the entire relationship will struggle to grow sustainably.

Marketing, sales, and customer service/success all play different roles in this relationship. To get the most out of that relationship, it is important to have defined processes between all the different roles.

I get it. It can be tedious and time-consuming to define processes, workflows, and service levels. To achieve account-based implementation and the highest growth maturity level, these processes must be defined and continuously optimized. It is without it that experience will be difficult to obtain, ultimately leading to decreased customer lifetime values (CLV) and customer attrition.

The key elements to achieving sustainable growth

A high level of maturity is required to create a sustainable growth machine. Marketing, sales and customer service must work together and continuously optimize to move from value creation into value expansion. This framework will help you to achieve the necessary alignment, and benchmark your organization’s maturity.

I’ll be back next month to discuss the remaining three success factors and how marketing plays a role in them.

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