HOW TO ACHIEVE

TRANSFORMATIONAL
GROWTH
Combining Vision, Insight, and Innovation with Cultural
Alignment and Unified, Disciplined Digital Execution

Strategic Brief | October 2019

HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

TABLE OF CONTENTS

3 MAKING GROWTH INTRINSIC TO YOUR CORPORATE DNA

5 THE NEED FOR CROSS-FUNCTIONAL ALIGNMENT

6 CREATING A GROWTH CULTURE

8 SETTING THE GROWTH AGENDA

10 INTERNATIONAL EXPANSION AND GROWTH

12 DELIVERING ON THE PROMISE OF GROWTH

13 ABOUT THE GROWTH GUIDANCE CENTER

14 PARTNERS AND AFFILIATES

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

MAKING GROWTH INTRINSIC

TO YOUR CORPORATE DNA

Growth engineering – the data-driven practice of mapping routes to revenue to achieve persistent
performance – has become a critical imperative in the age of digital transformation, disruptive commerce
expansion, accelerating competitive intensity, and revenue science innovation.

These disruptive factors are having a profound impact on increasing customer value, scaling global operations,
improving product success, and rethinking and adapting business models and go-to-market strategies.

For many companies, growth is the driving force that brings it all together. Yet questions loom: Where do
you find it? How do you inspire it? What hinders it? How do you invest in it? Who within the organization
orchestrates and owns it?

This dynamic environment helps explain the increasing incidence and influence of the chief growth officer
(CGO), as well as chief revenue and commercial officers. Currently, more than 6,000 executives profiled
on LinkedIn have the CGO title, and the number is rapidly increasing. Another 15,000 have the title of
chief revenue officer, while approximately 28,000 executives say they are chief commercial officers.

According to Singular, a marketing intelligence platform company, more than 21 percent of brands with at
least $50 million in annual ad spend now have CGOs. A similar percentage of companies with annual ad
spend of $5 million to $10 million also have CGOs.

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

Major companies in fast-moving consumer goods

If you can’t brands, including Coca-Cola, Kimberley-Clark, and

Mars, Incorporated, have newly minted CGOs while

articulate eliminating the chief marketing officer (CMO) title

—suggesting a fundamental shift in thinking, and,

what you’re potentially, a downgrading of marketing’s stature in

the board room.

doing as a However, the rise of the CGO could be as big an

company on
opportunity for CMOs as it might be a threat. CMOs
need to step up and take on the role and responsibility

one page,
to lead the cross-functional alignment necessary to
truly drive top-line growth—a factor they are often

you’re going
evaluated for, but not fully empowered to influence.

For many marketing leaders, the expectation that growth

to have is their primary mandate already exists as research by the
CMO Council one of every four business leaders surveyed
trouble. believe the CMO is primarily responsible for growth
strategies and revenue generation.

—Mark Simoncelli
Senior Global Growth Acceleration,
Strategy and Value Creation Executive,
Frost & Sullivan
Pressure to deliver top-line performance is mounting, with
nearly 70 percent of marketers saying their companies
expect marketing to be the primary revenue driver and
business growth architect. Yet, marketers also indicate
that they are under-involved in key levers for growth,
such as the development of new products, markets,
customer experiences, and business conversions.

New CGOs, in fact, have often previously held CMO roles. Nonetheless, some major companies are turning
to other executives to take over the reins of growth.

Peter Horst, who has held senior marketing leadership roles in a variety of industries and companies,
including CMO of The Hershey Company and TD Ameritrade and Senior VP of Brand Marketing for
Capital One, believes the CMO is in a strong position to assume the mantle of CGO. However, taking on the
responsibilities of executive growth driver demands a deep understanding of the business and the ability to
influence and manage everything from teams, talent and technologies across a variety of functional areas.

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

THE NEED FOR CROSS-FUNCTIONAL

ALIGNMENT
Regardless of who holds the title, the emerging role of growth leader must have the authority and capacity
to work across and align the key functional areas in an organization that drive growth, including marketing,
sales, product, customer experience, technology, and analytics. It is a role, says Horst, that provides the
CEO and the board with “one throat to choke” when it comes to top-line growth, rather than spreading
that responsibility across multiple functions with no one feeling wholly accountable.

Growth leaders must be strategic and organizational change agents and risk takers who have the capacity
to recognize, through data-driven research and analysis, where the best opportunities for growth lie and
what is required to seize them. They must also possess the skills and determination to drive those changes
across the organization and the company’s broader ecosystem. All of this is impossible without a clear
mandate from the CEO and board.

Growth strategy alignment requires the buy-in of the entire organization, and it begins with a well-articulated
strategy and direction that is understood and embraced by all functional areas of a company. Growth leaders
and experts universally point to the need for a clear and succinct strategy that can be easily explained and
grasped at all levels of the organization.

Mark Simoncelli, Senior Vice President of Americas Consulting at Frost & Sullivan, notes, “You have
to have clarity of purpose and direction. You also need alignment in terms of the strategy and what
it means to implement it. If you can’t articulate what you’re doing as a company on one page, you’re
going to have trouble.”

Clearly articulating a company’s brand purpose and strategy may sound easy, a “no-brainer” for some,
but may not be as easy to achieve, warns Horst. “You need a strategy that is pristine in the sense that
it’s coherent—there are no internal contradictions, there is no wishful thinking, which is something that
can often sneak into strategies.”

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

CREATING A GROWTH CULTURE

One of the chief inhibitors of growth is a dysfunctional corporate culture. Growth leaders and experts
agree that companies too often stifle growth with a non-inclusive, overly hierarchical management structure
that suppresses innovation and ideas from percolating up the organization. As Simoncelli notes, there is a
well-known saying in consulting circles, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Horst concurs, “It helps massively to have an

upbeat, receptive tone in the air,” he says. “When

Innovation is easy.
people are full of dread and fear…that’s just going
to naturally be a drag on any kind of innovative

What’s difficult is
thinking.”

He adds that a company can have rich sources

getting innovation of data and research and advanced tools for
monitoring customer shifts, needs, and pain
through the system. points, “But it’s the culture and mindset of the
people that are taking all that in that really
—Shari Matras, Chief Growth Officer, Jelmar matters. You can have all kinds of information
being piped into an organization, but if you don’t
have an open and porous culture and mindset, it
won’t have the effect on thinking that it should.”

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

Shari Matras, who was recently named chief growth officer

Some of
of Jelmar, a respected mid-sized leader in household and
commercial cleaning products, has been an innovation and
marketing leader at numerous large consumer packaged
goods (CPG) companies. She believes politics, bureaucracy,
and stiff management hierarchies often stand in the way of
the best
innovation and growth within big CPG companies, which are
now struggling with growth. ideas come
“Big CPG knows where the big opportunities are. They
have all the research,” she says, but management ego
from lower...
and hubris often kill innovation. “New people come in and
throw out great ideas and initiatives because it wasn’t their the people
actually in
idea. Senior leadership has to be able to get out of the way
and let the people who have the data and are close to the
consumer get the job done.”

She points to the success of Kind Bar, the all-natural snack touch with
customers
bar, as one of many missed opportunities. “Why didn’t big
CPG come up with an all-natural snack bar? Because it was
too costly! They had the data, but they ignored it to protect
category margins.”
day in and
day out.
“Innovation is easy. Just give consumers the products and
packaging they want,” Matras says. “What’s difficult is
getting innovation through the system.”

Krishna Srinivasan, Global President & Managing Partner at

— Krishna Srinivasan,
Frost & Sullivan, has been analyzing growth markets and Global President & Managing Partner,
opportunities and consulting with leading and emerging Frost & Sullivan
businesses for nearly 30 years. He finds that at far too
many companies, growth is a top-down exercise.

“The board and executive management decide ‘these are

the three opportunities we should go after.’ They take a
vote, and they go forward,” he says. “But they don’t have a
system that captures opportunities from all corners of the
organization. Some of the best ideas bubble up from the
front-line, people most often in touch with customers, day
in and day out. They also don’t have a system to capture
ideas from the external ecosystem, whether its partners

or customers.”

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

SETTING THE GROWTH AGENDA

Establishing a company-wide growth strategy and agenda is job one for growth leaders. Without it,
the CGO lacks the authority, buy-in, and mandate to drive growth and realize change. James Hier, the
chief product and growth officer for media agency, Wavemaker Global, put it this way, “The kernel – the
starting point for growth – is to first identify the growth opportunity. Far too many growth strategies
start with defining an audience, a target. But there may be other forces at play, there may be cultural
trends, or shifts in channel or distribution channels, that can derail actions. Without the growth opportunity
identified first, everything else is irrelevant.”

Matras has dug deeply into available research and conducted a custom segmentation study to better
understand Jelmar’s consumers. With those insights in hand, she and her colleagues developed hundreds
of ideas for new products and approaches to the market. Eventually, this list was culled down to the best
ideas that were validated through customer feedback from “shop-along’s” and focus groups.

Matras describes the process as building an “innovation pipeline.” It represented a mind shift for the
company toward thinking about the business as a “platform,” rather than individual products.

Srinivasan believes too few companies take a structured, analytical approach to discovering and validating
where growth opportunities exist, particularly regarding transformational growth.

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

“I think a lot of companies can analyze and implement

You need the strategies once they’ve determined what the strategy is.
But even before you get to that point, you have to ask
right balance whether you’re pursuing the right opportunities. Most

across growth
companies don’t have a very structured approach to
analyzing and executing against growth opportunities.”

horizons... Frost & Sullivan’s research team includes nearly 1,000

balancing analysts globally who continuously monitor and explore a

wide range of market forces, customer trends, technology

short-term hits developments, business model shifts, geographic forces,

and other factors shaping business opportunities.
with slightly Leveraging that intelligence to identify opportunities is key
to Frost& Sullivan’s work.
bigger ones.
That balance
Sanjay Khosla, senior fellow in the Kellogg Markets and
Customers Initiative and former president of developing

comes with markets at Kraft Foods, calls the process of looking at the big
opportunities ahead, “mining for gold.” The CGO needs to look

patience and beyond quarterly results and take a longer view in thinking
about customer segments, geos, and new experiences.

the intestinal Says Srinivasan, “All of the work we do revolves around growth

fortitude to do and what we call the growth pipeline, which starts with the
opportunity universe, whereby we work with clients to identify
what it takes. the entire universe of opportunities they could pursue, and
then subsequently winnow them down to the top three or four,
which becomes what we call their growth zone.”
—Peter Horst, Author, Growth Leader.

Horst states that a company’s growth agenda needs to be

balanced across short-term incremental improvements,
longer-term changes to existing products and markets,
and big transformational bets.

“You need the right balance across growth horizons. In all likelihood, the bulk of growth will come from the
appropriate exploitation and nurturing of existing assets. Looking at how to grow them. Looking at how
to extend those capabilities and equities into new categories and adjacencies. And even in that, there’s a
balance between short-term hits versus slightly bigger ones. But, there also needs to be sufficient focus on
the longer term bets. And that needs to come with patience and the intestinal fortitude to do what it takes.”

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

INTERNATIONAL EXPANSION AND

GROWTH
New and emerging geographic markets represent a huge opportunity for growth. However, companies
need to be sure they understand these markets and how their organizational capabilities, products, and
resources fit with local needs, forces, and factors. Rigid centralized management can be a major impediment
to realizing growth opportunities in new markets. Companies need a robust process for understanding and
responding to local market trends and changes, and the capability and commitment to adapt to local
customer, regulatory, and product needs.

Maggie Xiao is the vice president on regional growth initiatives in China for Medtronic, the world’s largest
manufacturer and developer of medical devices and a global leader in services and solutions for the health
care industry. To develop and execute growth strategies for the China health care market, she works closely
with the region’s strategy team, led by the company’s regional president, and other partners from Medtronic’s
four business groups in China, as well as working to align local innovation and growth initiatives with corporate
management.

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

While Medtronic has been in the China market for 30 years, the market is changing rapidly as China seeks
to dramatically transform and improve its health care system. It is essential that Medtronic understand
and adapt to these changes, competitive developments, and local market needs. The company has a
rigorous and continuous strategy planning process, fed by insight developed by internal teams and outside
consultants.

Major Chinese growth initiatives include building business teams, products, and services to address the
needs of emerging and lower level sub-regions in China, as well as its fast-emerging private health care
system, which China is encouraging to take pressure off the public system that provides care for the vast
majority (90 percent) of the population.

You need the right local talent and capabilities

to address change.
—Maggie Xiao, VP, Regional Growth Initiatives, Medtronic

For example, Medtronic is developing value added services to help the private sector development and
manage newly created hospitals. It also develops and adapts its products and technologies for the local
market, setup local R&D capabilities for overall China product strategy.

Additionally, it pays close attention to emerging companies and disruptive competitors, investing in many
of them and sometimes making acquisitions to support its ability to address emerging trends and needs.
Licensing agreements and technology transfer is also a significant part of the company’s China growth
strategy.

Xiao believes that many companies struggle to understand and keep pace with regional markets, especially
fast-emerging markets such as China. These companies are challenged to develop the robust processes
needed to keep pace with local market changes and forecast where the market is heading. Many also
struggle to get the necessary commitment and alignment from corporate management.

“You need to be able to continuously track and understand how these changes will affect the competitive
landscape and customer needs. You need to build a strategy to continually lead the market. You need the
right local talent and capabilities to address change,” Xiao says.

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

DELIVERING ON THE
PROMISE OF GROWTH

The Global Guidance Center, a global resource for heads of growth, revenue, and commercial operations,
provides a list of four essential considerations when looking to identify, map, execute, measure, and sustain
growth momentum and business lift:

1. Effective use of on-demand knowledge, predictive analytics, customer insights, and market
intelligence is essential to growth strategy mapping and continuous innovation, transformation,
and calibration across the enterprise.

2. Revenue growth and competitive sustainability is contingent on timely, reliable, and projectable
research and real-time monitoring of global markets, product categories, enabling technology,
customer behavior, and global economic and regulatory changes.

3. Auditing, assessing, valuing, and realizing growth opportunities requires new disciplines,
modeling capability, data-driven decision making, digital proficiencies, receptive and adaptive
organizational cultures, as well as critical internal stakeholder and partner alignment.

4. Tracking, measuring, and evaluating the value, relevance, and effectiveness of research and
product development spend relative to return on investment, revenue contributions, and
business performance improvements is a strategic imperative across all lines of business.

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

ABOUT THE GROWTH GUIDANCE

CENTER
Visionary growth engineering starts here. The Growth Guidance Center is a new knowledge transfer
initiative by the CMO Council and Business Performance Innovation Network designed to help senior
executives explore and deploy best practices in growth engineering. In partnership with Frost & Sullivan and
other sponsors, we are building out this microsite and conducting new research to understand and explain
what accelerates, disrupts, inhibits, and sustains growth in today’s global enterprises.

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

PARTNERS & AFFILIATES

ABOUT THE CMO COUNCIL

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought
leadership and personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing leaders and brand
decision-makers across a wide-range of global industries. The CMO Council’s 15,000+ members control
more than $500 billion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures and run complex, distributed
marketing and sales operations worldwide. In total, the CMO Council and its strategic interest communities
include over 65,000 global marketing and sales executives in over 110 countries covering multiple industries,
segments and markets. Regional chapters and advisory boards are active in the Americas, Europe, Asia
Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The Council’s strategic interest groups include the Customer Experience
Board, Digital Marketing Performance Center, Brand Inspiration Center, Marketing Supply Chain Institute,
GeoBranding Center, and the Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE). To learn
more, visit www.cmocouncil.com.

ABOUT FROST AND SULLIVAN

For over five decades, Frost & Sullivan has become world-renowned for its role in helping investors,
corporate leaders and governments navigate economic changes and identify disruptive technologies,
Mega Trends, new business models and companies to action, resulting in a continuous flow of growth
opportunities to drive future success.

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HOW TO ACHIEVE TRANSFORMATIONAL GROWTH STRATEGIC BRIEF

ABOUT BPI NETWORK

The Business Performance Innovation (BPI) Network is a peer-driven thought leadership and
professional networking organization reaching some 50,000 heads IT transformation, change
management, business re-engineering, process improvement, and strategic planning. It is
dedicated to advancing the emerging roles of the Chief Innovation Officer and Innovation
Strategist within today’s enterprise. The BPI Network brings together global executives who
are champions of change within their organizations through ongoing research, authoritative
content and peer-to-peer conversations. These functional area heads (operations, IT, finance,
procurement, sales, marketing, product development, etc.) and line-of-business leaders
are advocates for Innovation as a fundamental discipline and function within 21st Century
organizations. They seek to demonstrate where and how new inventive solutions and approaches
can advance business value, gratify customers, ensure sustainability and create competitive
advantage for companies worldwide. For more information, visit www.bpinetwork.org.

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