In this second post of our series of Growth Strategy in the Digital Age, we delve into what characteristics define holistic growth strategies and what factors should be the key considerations when building and executing the strategy.
If you would like to refresh on the first post in the series, it can be found here: Defining Growth Strategy in the Digital Age
Why is it important to consider growth strategy holistically?
While it might be tempting to pursue growth through aggressive marketing, direct sales campaigns, and new product launches, a holistic approach that considers and encompasses how growth will impact all aspects of the business delivers significantly better and more sustainable results. Here are some explanations of why thinking holistically when defining your growth strategy is essential:
A narrow focus on sales and marketing might deliver impressive short-term revenue spikes, but without parallel development of operational capabilities, product quality, and customer experience, these gains often prove temporary and drive churn rather than sustainable customer relationships. Bain's ‘Profit from the Core Model’, sums this up very well by explaining that truly sustainable growth requires "strengthening the core business" alongside expansion efforts.
A holistic strategy ensures that growth is built on solid foundations, with reinforcing elements that create ongoing momentum rather than isolated bursts of activity that quickly fade.
When growth efforts concentrate exclusively on customer acquisition or revenue metrics, resources can be misallocated, creating imbalances that undermine overall performance. A comprehensive approach ensures appropriate investment across all business functions, from product development to operations to customer service.
This balanced allocation prevents scenarios where sales and marketing effectiveness overwhelms operational capacity, leading to disappointed customers and damaged reputation: what is often called the ‘churn and burn’ cycle.
A holistic growth strategy helps to underpin collaboration and cohesive working across the organisation. When all teams understand how their efforts contribute to a common goal, coordination improves dramatically.
This alignment also prevents the all-too-common situation where sales make promises that product cannot meet, or where marketing creates expectations that customer delivery can't fulfil. When the organisation is aligned to a common goal and action plan, each function operates with a clear understanding of how it supports and depends on others.
Narrow growth strategies are relatively easy for competitors to replicate. If your growth relies solely on marketing tactics or pricing strategies, rivals can quickly duplicate, adapt and respond with similar approaches.
In contrast, growth strategies built on the combination of multiple factors - interconnected capabilities, superior products, efficient operations, exceptional customer experience, and innovative go-to-market strategies - create a competitive advantage that's much harder to copy. Multidimensional strategy, delivery, and operation provides protection from competitive responses.
Creating a growth strategy that considers your business needs holistically will enable more effective risk mitigation by distributing risk across multiple functions and avoiding risk concentration in specific areas. For example, if your growth strategic is subject to external change - regulatory updates in a target market or technological shifts impacting a product line - other aspects of the strategy can be adapted to compensate.
This diversification principle applies not just to what you sell and where you sell it, but also to how you manage the impact of growth across the whole business.
As used in the above example, companies with comprehensive growth strategies develop capabilities across multiple dimensions, making them more adaptable to changing market conditions. When rules change, customer preferences shift or new opportunities emerge, businesses that are well prepared can reconfigure their capabilities rather than hitting a wall and needed to start again from scratch.
Organisations that consider growth through a lens of developing the entire business, can make more structured and balanced investment decisions. The quality of these decisions, and the ability to cope with changing dynamics, often reduces the overall investment and delivers greater return on investment and shareholder value than a series of disconnected activities by different business functions. This dramatic performance difference can be directly linked to the advantages of a holistic and synergetic approach.
Key considerations when defining a comprehensive growth strategy
So, now we understand that developing an effective growth strategy requires careful consideration of all the factors that will influence its success, let’s examine the essential considerations that should inform your approach:
A common failure is starting growth initiatives without properly layout out your goals or how you will measure results. Vague aspirations like "grow the business" provide insufficient direction and are not measurable. Instead, effective growth objectives should be well documented and use established frameworks such as Objectives & Key Results or OKRs.
Examples of well-defined OKRs might include "capture 20 customers from competitor XYZ increasing market share by 15% within 12 months" or "increase customer base through a targeted user-acquisition campaign doubling monthly active users within 18 months".
Before committing to any growth direction, comprehensive research and comparative analysis is essential. This must include looking into expansion options, for example, horizontal expansion into new markets versus vertical expansion by introducing new products to existing markets and customers, and the dynamics and impact of each of the options under consideration. The research should include:
By grounding your strategy in robust research and data-driven decision making rather than assumptions or gut feel, you will significantly increase your ability to effectively plan and cope with change and ultimately improve overall chances of success.
Growth consumes resources. Whether you immediately realise it or not, any initiative that you start will impact financial, human, technical and operational resources. A realistic assessment of these resources is crucial:
Simply put, you must ensure that you have a clear understanding of the resources needed to execute the growth initiative and cope with the impact across business functions. If you do not have those resources before you start, you must include the actions that you will take to add the necessary resource as deliverables with associated timelines as a part of your execution plan.
Every growth strategy involves risk. Organisations give themselves a greater chance of success by identifying, quantifying, and planning how to mitigate these risks wherever possible:
Standardised risk assessment and treatment frameworks should be used to identify and quantify risk, and mitigation and contingency plans should be developed to outline how you'll respond if things don't go as planned.
Growth often requires significant change. Outperform often stress upon the hidden impact of change initiatives, growth-related or not, to human resources and organisational culture. An organisation's readiness to cope with change is often a major determining factor in success. It's important to keep human resources and cultural impact top of mind. Consider:
The timing of your growth strategy can significantly impact its success regardless of how well it is planned or executed:
Growth that can't be sustained often leads to painful contractions and a ‘churn and burn’ scenario. Following the guidelines in this post and building a holistic growth strategy will help you to ensure that end-to-end plans are in place and all functions of the business can scale together:
Earlier in this section we described the importance of laying the foundations of your growth strategy with well-structured OKRs. However, this is only half of the story if you do not ensure that appropriate techniques and frameworks are in place to measure the impact and performance using meaningful metrics. When designing performance measurement tools consider:
Echoing the earlier point of organisational and cultural change, growth initiatives that introduce new products or services or open-up new markets must be effectively integrated with your core business and existing control and governance frameworks:
By methodically addressing these key considerations, you can develop a growth strategy that's not just ambitious but also realistic, resilient, and aligned with your organisation's broader goals and capabilities.
Conclusion
In summary, defining a truly comprehensive growth strategy requires a holistic perspective, balancing ambition with operational capability, robust resource planning, and risk management. By linking objectives to clear results, conducting thorough market research, ensuring organisational alignment, and effectively measuring performance, businesses can avoid the trap of short-termism and build sustainable and adaptable growth.
Ultimately, integrating new initiatives with core operations and maintaining a focus on culture and scalability ensures that growth is both resilient and long-lasting, positioning organisations to succeed even in changing market conditions and competitive landscapes.
What's Next?
The next article in this series on Growth Strategy will dive into the details of market positioning and entry planning. We will be covering how to identify and segment growth markets, competitive analysis and positioning, brand strategy, and go-to-market planning.
In the meantime, if you would like to understand more on how Outperform can help you to execute successful growth initiatives please contact us.