Growth has many dimensions to be evaluated. A Growth Strategy should address the different categories. Already in the 1960th McCarthy the 4Ps were mainstream thinking: Product, Price, Place, Promotion which evolved to the 7Ps: people, process, physical evidence. The Ansoff Matrix is another approach to define the growth strategy which focus on the bigger picture such as Market Penetration, Market Development, Product Development and Diversification.

The Growth Strategy can address organic or inorganic growth through mergers and acquisitions, it can cover strategic items such as a new innovative product or entering new markets or channels. 

You can distinguish your growth strategy in short and long term activities, short term may be closer to a growth plan rather than a strategy. Strategies are long term plans but dependent on your industry you have areas which take significantly longer - up to years such as product innovations. 

The main questions you need to address first, excluding the strategic fields such as M&A and Internationlization are the following: What product do we sell to which customers at what price through which channels and what is the goal we want to achieve.

The growth target (goal) should be related to your market size and market growth. If your overall offering is competitive, your growth expectation should at least be market growth. If your market share is not dominant or even low, your chance to outgrow the market is higher, hence your ambition can be set higher. If you have a very unique product which can be seen as a game changer your ambition should target high as well. It becomes harder to beat market if you have a dominant market share and a state of the art product to sell.

It is mandatory that you understand a couple of things around your product and potential customers. First of all what problem does your product solve for your customers and what are your Unique Selling Points (USPs). If your product does not have significant USPs and it is rather a MeToo product or commodity, your main differentiators may be brand or price. In any case you need to understand the value creation for your customer and who are the buying personas at a prospect that you can address exactly these personas with your value proposition at your target customers even if it is only price. 

The better you analyze your target customers, buying personas, value creation, the more effective you can place your message and create business. On the opposite the less you understand your target group and USPs, the more money you waste on trying to sell your product to the wrong prospects or personas.

On the longer term you can succeed if you develop a product to gain a competitive advantage by creating more value and unique selling points for your customer than your competition. But it is important that you educate your sales channels, prospects and customers to articulate and understand your value add to position your advantage.

Marketing communication, lead generation, sales methodology and execution need to go hand in hand to create growth out of your value creation at customer.

Pricing strategies are a topic on its own. The price of your product should reflect the value you create at your customer but mostly the price is highly influenced by competition or sales teams that ask for a price advantage over competition. Cost in many cases is a key influencer to pricing, which should not be the case if you create huge value for your customer. But in tight markets your production cost will become important to be able to react to market pricing, hence striving for cost excellence should be part of your DNA in these market conditions.

Equally important is a long term sustainable business model, ideally with recurring revenues. If you are able to land and expand at a customer by having a first product placed at one department or use case and with the great experience you upsell from there that gives you continuous growth within an existing customer base. 

You can always create low price entry offers for new customers or even freemium offers if you have a strategy set, expectations positioned at customer and your sales team that the entry price is not the long term price level.

Depending on your industry, your product, your ability to invest in scaling up a sales team across regions, you may consider a direct sales or an indirect sales approach, mostly a hybrid model. There are a couple of things that you need to address going indirect:

• An indirect channel needs a sustainable margin for your business partner and yourself.
• An indirect channel should reduce your investment in sales while scaling faster through existing customer relationships of your channel partners but for the price of a lower margin.
• Your product and organization must be channel ready, that means you need documentation, sales collateral, sales & service trainings for partners and a product which can be handled by your partner without your help if trainings are completed.
• You need a channel sales team to acquire new channel partner and manage the relationship.
• Avoid major channel conflicts if you implement a hybrid sales model that you do not compete too much with your channel partners.
• Finally you need to think about the value proposition to your partner, why should they partner up with you and open up their customer base to sell your product. The partner takes an investment in training, dedicated resources etc.. What does he get in return? Typically, you get a cool product which creates value at customer, has good USPs, adds to your existing portfolio, delivers a good margin and the producer of the product may generate leads for the partner.

Upselling a customer requires a well educated sales team to have great customer insights and building an account plan on how to address the increase in share of wallet. A good sales team can take the first product placement to a reference case and market it further to other departments or use cases.

Creating growth by new customers is a totally different approach. Either you need to find the relevant prospects in your market if the number of potential customers is not so huge that you can't do it effectively, you better find a way that your prospects find you if they have a need for your product.

Target customer selling is addressing a predefined list of customers where your teams think that there is a need for your product. That can be done by cold calling or getting a sales person on board with good relationships to these prospects or by target account marketing in targeting the buying personas of certain companies through social media messaging.

If your addressable market is huge and it is not easy to spot who has a need for your product you need to choose a different approach. You need to create contacts and nuture leads to be handed over to a sales team if prospects desires to buy a product is qualified. Cold Calling into a market where you don't know the demand nor the relevant customers is most inefficient way of spending your sales & marketing budget.

Contacts and Leads can be created in many ways. In some industries and for some products fairs and events are working well, advertising has been reduced in B2B markets as the behavior of decision makers have changed and the internet is the most relevant information gathering platform today, that is why most businesses today use digital content marketing to create leads or a combination. Fairs, events, advertising have a relatively high cost per lead because your spending is high and e.g. the conversation rates from contact to lead in advertising are low. Digital content marketing has a 40% lower cost per lead but requires great valuable content, such as blogs, videos, reference stories, webinars to be pushed through social channels to your target group.

Creating contacts and leads require a highly trained marketing and sales team to run the right campaigns to your relevant personas and a fully automated tool set that a contact is nurtured through to a lead, qualified by a telesales team and than handed over as warm sales lead to your sales team for immediate follow up.

Even if we only touched the relevant components of a growth strategy / plan, you can see that it requires highly skilled people and a good plan how and where to invest to make your growth happen.

• Understand your market, market growth and your growth ambition
• Decide on the more long term activities such as product development and M&A
• Understand your product, value generation at customer and the USPs
• Understand your market, buying personas and value proposition by persona
• Choose your channel strategy to address the market
• Have a sustainable pricing strategy to generate long term healthy business
• Decide on your split between upselling the existing customer base and new prospects
• Educate your marketing and sales team, partners to get your value add across
• Execute and automate to get efficient on your go to market approach to have best in class KPIs and SG&A costs.