3. For the Cathedral Builders: have a vision now of how growth works in the New Normal.
For those ambitious to reach the C-suite in their careers—who know they (and their customers) have "Patrick Mahomes potential"—develop a vision of how growth is changing.
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of growth now: bought growth and earned growth.
Bought growth is employee-led through traditional silos like marketing, sales and support—each “owning” their piece of the customer journey. The top priority of bought growth is achieving business objectives. Customers have increasingly rejected that ever since they went digital two decades ago, and the 2022 Downturn has created urgency for a change.
Earned growth is customer led, executed by agile, cross-functional teams often outside of silos, and based on connecting customers with each other and prospects, through natural advocacy, referrals, peer communities and co-created products. The top priority of earned growth is customer needs and objectives, followed by business impact.
Christina Kosmowski, the former head of customer success and marketing in her ascent to CEO, is implementing powerful earned growth at LogicMonitor.
For example, Christina and her board have six company objectives this year. They use a variation of V2MOM with a twist: "We DON’T have a single owner for any of them. Which confused people at first!"
"The objectives are about helping customers as they go through their journey. That touches everything: sales, marketing, customer success…so ALL of them are the owner."
Christina then said, with great emphasis.
- "I'll just say one other thing. A customer story/PR piece is just as important to us as getting our revenue from this. And that is also a weird thing to say <laugh>, because everyone is used to measuring things around the revenue of the initiative. And I said, I don't actually care up front [during strategic planning] about the revenue. I care about the customer feedback loops, and I care about the referenceability–the true stories of customers being these showcase accounts for us."
And we'd suggest you make that your top priority too, in the companies you decide to work for, and the companies you wind up leading.