Are you a B2B company looking to achieve sustainable, predictable, profitable growth (SPPG)?  Referencing The B2B Executive Playbook by Sean Geehan, SPPG is the holy grail of goals for any B2B organization.  Throughout my career, I’ve observed three fundamental elements that will enable the realization of SPPG for B2B organizations:  Market Driven Strategy, Customer Engagement and Internal Alignment.   Here’s an overview of how these elements work in concert. 

In the B2B world – customer engagement is the fundamental leverage point that allows an organization to foster two-way communication.  During the sales process, and subsequent working relationship with customers, there are countless opportunities to engage with decision makers for dialogue - both outbound (ie. awareness and selling) and inbound (voice of the customer, market insight).  With the right environment and process, customer engagement is the cornerstone to gather insight. 

For example – Dell’s Large Enterprise Group leverages multiple initiatives to capture the voice of the customer.  Maureen McCann, Marketing Director for Executive Customer Engagement leverages several programs to capture the voice of the “C” suite to help guide the enterprise strategy.   She comments “the direct dialogue with “C” level executives about their challenges and vision for the future enables us to clearly understand where we need to focus and strengthen our approach”.

This insight, when properly vetted, helps an organize formulate a strategy that directly addresses market needs and direction – a market driven strategy.  The market driven strategy is the “outside-in” approach to guide the allocation of budgets and resources to the programs that will drive market success and market alignment.  With connection to customers gaining continuous market insight, the market driven strategy has an element of flexibility to course correct when necessary. 

Sustainable, predictable, profitable growth is not built with a strategy alone.  The internal teams and resources of the enterprise must be aligned and driving seamless execution.  We call this “Internal Alignment” – where an organization can execute on market driven requirements and strategy – delivering the products, services and solutions to the markets that have the highest potential for growth.

In the future I’ll review these elements individually in more detail.