Business Growth Strategies For CEOs: Top CMOs On Marketing Strategy Implementations

Sales Velocity Model: A Tool for Growth Engine Mechanics

Wed, May 14, 2025 | Posted by Vince Margiotta

Most companies deploy a sales “force”. Too often, their combined efforts are not meeting company growth expectations. Most CEOs would like a better growth engine, a larger sales pipeline, and more sales, but they struggle with exactly how to help their sales teams. Busy CEOs combined with people and process related complexities of Sales, often results in companies not being clear on the root cause of their growth engine problems.

Read More

How Healthy Business Management Processes Sustain Business Growth

Tue, May 15, 2018 — In our first blog of the series, we defined the difference between a growth plan and a growth engine. In that discussion, we defined a growth plan as a singular event that identify future revenue and profit streams and identify capabilities, assets, and competencies the business needs to build to take advantage of future growth opportunities. As we define it however, a growth engine is not an event or a document or a plan, a growth engine is a system of integrated and replicable growth focused processes that support and enable sustained growth performance over a number of years. That blog included a brief questionnaire that helped you assess your company's ability to put a growth engine in place.

The Role of Processes in Digital Growth for Small- and Mid-Sized Businesses (SMBs)

Mon, May 14, 2018 — This is the second in a series of articles on helping executives in small- and mid-sized businesses utilize digital technologies effectively to assist in accelerating revenues and profits. The previous article included an introduction to four major ways digital technologies can help your business, described a spectrum of technologies and a possible implementation roadmap, and associated digital proficiency with enhanced business performance. It also included a 10-question survey to help you set an internal benchmark for your digital programs. In this article, I’ll provide practical guidance on where to start a journey for those businesses with a minimal digital growth path today.

How Your Executive Team Can Sustain Your Business Growth through Best Practices

Tue, May 1, 2018 — If you don’t believe that consistent, profitable business growth is a need of virtually every small- and mid-sized business, and especially for yours, you probably won’t get value from this article. The real challenges aren’t understanding the value of growth to your business--they are about determining where your best growth opportunities are, prioritizing across multiple potential growth opportunities, integrating both shorter- and longer-term growth opportunities into your management processes, and organizing for success and building an ability to tap into new revenue streams consistently and over multiple years.

How Does a Fractional Multi-CMO Approach Accelerate Business Growth?

Wed, Apr 25, 2018 — Think about the last time you recruited for a key marketing position. The candidates you interviewed were impressive and experienced, but the perfect hire would have required you to take one applicant’s extensive industry background and combine it with the digital savvy and laser-focused strategic mindset of another. While we all strive to identify the ideal expert, securing the perfect combination of knowledge, personality, and skills seems about as likely as capturing a griffin or chimera.

The Digital Growth Imperative for Small- and Mid-Sized Businesses (SMBs)

Thu, Apr 19, 2018 — There are many ways to think about growth, and many models to help stimulate your thinking. One of the more traditional, best known, and still effective models, is this one:

An Equitable View: Four Questions to Ask in Gauging Your Company’s Market Potential

Tue, Apr 17, 2018 — Private Equity investors, as a rule, have a propensity for looking before they leap. Known for their discipline and attention to detail, PE investors rarely reach for a dime without conducting a fair amount of due diligence. Most potential PE investment activity has within its foundation a document known as the investment thesis – essentially, the private investors’ “white paper,” outlining in detail how value will be created and a return made on the investment within the target exit timing. Often the primary drivers of this thesis are restructuring costs – fixed overhead, asset deployment and operating expense. Another driver relates to the sales force – in particular, whether an addition of headcount or selling tools would drive more sales, and increase effectiveness.

The New "Growth Kid" on the Block: Introducing Horizon (Zero)

Wed, Apr 11, 2018 — Since the introduction of Horizon Growth planning in the late 1990’s, businesses which have successfully understood and adopted this multi-year approach to generation of new revenue and profit streams have realized the benefits of forward planning. Horizon Growth planning was introduced in 1999 in a book titled The Alchemy of Growth: Practical Insights for Building the Enduring Enterprise by several McKinsey associates (Baghai, Coley, White). If you want to read a Cliff Notes version of Horizon Growth planning from the author, you can read excerpts here.

How CEOs can Leverage Multiple Best Practices: Integrating Horizon Growth Planning with EOS/Traction

Fri, Mar 16, 2018 — What happens when you combine two best practices? Do you get best practices on steroids? Are two best practices always better than one? Is there a chance that they conflict with each other? Can they be used in a complementary manner to accelerate your business’ growth and performance?

Supercharging Your SWOT, Step One: Consolidating Your SWOT

Wed, Jan 10, 2018 — Conducting your SWOT analysis was fun, wasn’t it? It allowed you to take a break from working in your business, and allowed you to work on your business — a valuable step back during which you were able to take a breather from the day-to-day grind, and view the big picture of your business with clarity. No matter how long your SWOT process lasted, undoubtedly, once you got rolling, the information flowed — resulting in a growing cavalcade of lists that characterized your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

< Previous Page Next Page >

Growth Insights for CEOs