Accelerating Growth, Part I: The Five Most Common Growth Drivers for CEOs

When solving for growth, the area that most business owners and leaders usually tackle first is sales and marketing. This makes sense because these functions are most closely tied to generating revenue. In my experience as a business leader and a growth advisor, the five specific elements that most CEOs focus on are:

1. Sales Team – How good are our sales reps? Do we have enough of them? Are the territories fair? How would you grade your sales leader?( if less than a 9 on a 10 point scale, attention is needed).  Are the leaders effectively managing, incentivizing, and coaching the sales team?

2. Sales Pipeline – Do we have sufficient active deal volume to meet our sales targets? Are deals moving through fast enough? Can your sales team talk fluently about the number, type and quality of each tier of their pipeline?

3. Lead Quality – Are we getting the right kind of leads? On target, right size, actively in buying mode, etc.

4. Marketing Mix – What kind of marketing are we doing and through which channels? Are our marketing efforts sufficiently priming the pump for sales? When was the last time you performed a “zero based budget” for Marketing?

5. CRM – Do we have a good CRM in place that allows us to track sales performance? Is our sales team actively updating sales activity and results into the CRM? The selection of your CRM system and how it is used has become a “top 3” accelerator(or detractor) from sustained growth

If there are deficiencies in any of these areas, it certainly makes sense to get to work on fixing those. To achieve consistent, healthy, and sustainable growth, you need to have the fundamentals solidly in place and working well.

However, growth is not just a matter of sales and marketing. When you look deeper at how growth in any company is generated and sustained, you’ll find there are many more factors in play, any of which could impede growth. Therefore, while you’re working on ensuring that sales and marketing are performing optimally, you also need to discern if you have a bottleneck somewhere else.

In our next article we will take you through another 7-8 areas that often are important contributors to growth. A couple of the items on the list coming up may surprise you!