How should marketers change their
thinking around organic growth in
the new landscape?
Organic growth has always been a do
or die for every company. Due to the
current landscape, most businesses
are reassessing their growth strategies.
Profitable and sustainable growth is
only achieved when a company fully
understands its existing and prospective
markets and customers so well that
they can deliver something of value to
them—better and more quickly than
their competition. This requires
being even better at upstream
marketing.
Upstream marketing, as
defined by Dr. Ram Charan,
is “the strategic process
of identifying and fulfilling
customer needs.” And we
would add, quantifying existing
and prospective customers
in a market, or the number
of existing customers using a
particular solution. To achieve
this, the marketing organization and
every function across the company
needs to be even more customercentric—
focused on problems that
need solving or opportunities that need
addressing—as well as market-centric.
Can you speak to the power of a
metrics-driven marketing practice
and why it matters so much in the
current landscape?
Every function within an organization
needs to care about performance
management. Performance
management is about accountability and
alignment, and requires being grounded
in measurement and process, which in
turn enables improvement. Marketing
organizations measure many things.
12 milkshake
PRESIDENT, VISIONEDGE MARKETING
LAURA PATTERSON
BEST-SELLING AUTHOR ON ACCELERATING
YOUR GROWTH STRATEGY
Laura Patterson is a growth strategy
consultant to business leaders.
Obsessed with helping companies
take a customer-centric approach
to growth and to making business
decisions with more confidence, Patterson
is a trusted advisor with global customers
within the technology, financial services, life
sciences, and manufacturing industries. She cofounded
VisionEdge Marketing in 1999, serving
customers like Cisco, Elsevier, Howden, Kennametal, Tektronix, Southwest
Airlines Cargo, and over 200 more worldwide. Her latest book, “Fast-Track
Your Business: A Customer-Centric Approach to Accelerate Market Growth”
shares how to develop profitable growth strategies for customers. We sat
with her to find out her thoughts on growth in the current environment.
The proven Circle of Traction includes
11 upstream growth components which
together, provide a holistic approach to
improving customer-centricity:
❱ Internally, across all functions, strategies
for expanding within existing, and into
new markets, planning, processes,
operational excellence, people and skills,
technology, data and analytics, and
culture and leadership style.
❱ Externally, the right and consistent
messaging, and at the right time across
all channels, the customer journey and
overall experience, touchpoints and
processes, including those of partners
within the ecosystem. The sum of the
customer experience.
Can you Identify some of the
changes that stand out since you
wrote the book? And can you talk
a bit about what changes might be
sustainable over time?
While “Fast-Track Your Business:
A Customer-Centric Approach to
Accelerate Market Growth” is a new
book, for 20+ years, we’ve been
developing profitable growth strategies
for our customers, based on the
Whether that’s activity, such
as number of events held,
or output, such as open
rate and response rates,
or better measures tied
to business results or
outcomes. The key is to
measure what matters
to the business. That
requires the marketing
team to have business acumen,
to know the business results they
are expected to impact, and how
their contribution beyond ROI will be
measured. For example, the number
of conversations with qualified new
prospects created for the sales team and
the rate of adoption of a newly launched
product by existing customers. If, as a
marketing organization, you want to be
relevant, credible, and influential, then
the right measures and timely reporting
of these matters.
Can you share with us how the
“Circle of Traction” helps drive
organic growth?
More and more, companies are
competing on customer experience,
versus solely on products and services.
February 2022