Self-reflect for a moment: Are you overlooking opportunities to grow or failing to grasp the full potential of growth opportunities you do pursue? Or perhaps there’s a market segment you’re missing or a natural product extension that’s in line with current trends.
Optimizing organic growth—using a company’s own resources to increase revenue—generates value and sends a powerful message to investors and talent about organizational health, ability to innovate and performance potential.
Yet companies often have blind spots and biases about where to look for growth opportunities and how to select the best ones. They face challenges moving resources at the scale and speed needed to support such opportunities, and weaknesses in developing and executing strategies to seize them. They may also not be fully ready to grow inhibiting them from achieving their full organic growth potential.
So, how can top management diagnose if and where they have blind spots? How can they optimize growth readiness? And most of all, what steps can they take to enable greater organic growth? To answer those questions and more, Deloitte recently surveyed more than 1,200 executives to test a growth readiness framework across 10 activity and capability areas.
The results uncovered 10 key insights into how those activities and capabilities drive organic growth, and identified the best practices that set organic growth overperformers apart from the pack:
Correct for blind spots
Every company has potential biases and blind spots in where it looks for growth. Growth overperformers do a better job of correcting for those, between the core and new businesses, across time horizons, and across types of growth opportunities.
Grow from the core
While every company looks for growth in adjacent and new businesses, overperformers also look deeper into the core business for growth opportunities. For example, they grow revenue by increasing customer retention and loyalty.
Make clear and granular choices
Growth overperformers understand their customers and the stages of their journeys and specific behaviors. This deep knowledge underpins their segmentation and targeting choices.
Create a winning value proposition
They excel at designing customer experiences, brand positioning and pricing and they consistently offer a unique value to their customers.
Execute with discipline
Overperformers deliver the customer experience, pricing and other strategy elements through strong execution and alignment between marketing and sales.
Adapt in real-time
They put systems in place to monitor execution elements such as sales or campaign results and adjust or adapt simultaneously.
Find new revenue streams from data
Growth overperformers look to make use of data to drive new revenue streams.
Align leadership
Leadership forums help ensure alignment around a growth agenda, and the team shares goals and accountability. They commit to maintaining communications across functions.
Attract talent
A strong cycle of growth and talent attraction shapes a culture of innovation. Overperformers recognize the importance of diversity, inclusion and social responsibility platforms to help attract and retain top talent.
Use enabling technology to support business growth
Digital technology fuels growth drivers, such as targeting and personalization and easy access to customer information. Predictive analytics allows real-time adaptation of strategic activities.
Effectively driving organic growth requires businesses to look beyond just their growth financial targets and already-identified growth opportunities to consider their capacity or readiness to grow.
Management teams who are ready to make organic growth a priority need to come together on a shared view of the steps required to achieve growth readiness. That involves alignment across teams, functions and levels, and demands listening to leaders from across the organization. It takes cross-team and cross-functional deliberation and collaboration. Think of achieving organic growth as a team sport.
A structured process helps the team to diagnose its strengths and weakness, compare its strengths to those of growth overperformers and set priorities to optimize their efforts. Once armed with a shared understanding of the company’s growth readiness and a growth readiness optimization plan, the team can build an agenda for organic growth.
Our research suggests an agenda that combines how much to grow, where to grow and how to improve capacity to grow will help create a robust platform for organic growth success.
