Lather. Rinse. Repeat. There’s a reason that some things – like the number of tires on a car -- or in this example, how we use shampoo – remain decidedly the same. The old axiom that tells us not to fix what “ain’t broke” has served humankind well for generations.
For successful businesses, it has been hard to argue with the status quo. For those fortunate to celebrate multiple years of exponential growth while deploying tried-and-true business strategies, it makes sense to keep doing what’s working.
For many businesses, however, a funny thing happened on the way to Easy Street. Today, more than ever, growth is not coming as easy for those who have employed the shampoo approach to marketing. Competitive pressures in today’s consumer landscape have applied more PSI than ever to the bottom line. You may have found that as the steam has run out of your growth engine, and, though your revenues may be growing, your margins and market share just aren’t growing at the same pace -- or shrinking. As you look around at the competition, though, it seems that they are effortlessly deploying capital while you’re just trying to figure out how to reverse the slide.
You find yourself looking for an answer. Are we talking to the right people? Are we buying enough and the right prospect lists? Can we hire more salespeople? Getting to that next tier of growth requires the next layer of strategy. It requires a marketing function that will be an integral part of that transformational growth. Unfortunately, a little more than a third of companies feel like they’ve got the right strategies in place to master such a marketing transformation.
To catch up, it’s essential for business leaders to understand that real transformation is not only defined by organic company growth, but how well said growth is able to outpace that of the competition. This means you can no longer simply ride the demand curve – you have to fundamentally shift it.
By positioning your marketing efforts to be a paradigm-shifter rather than a bystander in the demand curve game, you’ll be able to reap new opportunities, new buyers and new markets. If you can truly unlock the (Big-M) Marketing function, it can become the growth and transformation engine for achieving your goals and busting you through your revenue plateaus at top speed.
The five forthcoming blogs in this series will help you to start to consider how to develop that sound foundation for a more modern transformational Marketing (Big-M) function. It moves you beyond just better lead gen, better collateral and a better website. It sets the stage for unlocking your potential growth. Each blog will help you to understand how to create a safe framework for what you, as chief executive, must understand and implement to develop a modern marketing function. By discovering what’s holding your company back, internally, from the kind of healthy growth you use to experience, by mastering the “dos” and “don’ts” of transforming your marketing function, and by learning how to mobilize your marketing team for growth, you’ll streamline your growth strategy – shifting your demand curve to enjoy riding a different demand curve than your competition.