The Seven Principles of An Organic Growth Program

Driving organic growth in an organization is not as simple as implementing a strategy or rolling out a new framework. It is a complex multi-component program that usually takes many years to implement. While framework and tools are essential ingredients, the success of the program is rooted in managing the culture change in the organization and creating hunger within the organization for a new, customer-centric approach.

In a decade of designing and implementing organic growth strategies and programs at global organizations like GE, Microsoft, P&G, Kimberly-Clark, IBM and others we have learned these seven principles for success. While some of them are more important than others, given the nature of the organization and its culture, we have found that usually all of these apply in designing and implementing an organic growth program.

1. Tie into Corporate Performance Goals
   • The program will have the highest impact when it has a tight linkage to the priorities, goals and strategies developed for the organization.
   • Action: Develop Business Goals for your demand generation initiative and have them communicated to every relevant person by the CEO/CMO.

    

2. Ensure customer-centricity from the top
   • It is not just what senior management says, but what they actually do that signals their intent. As an example - P&L leaders can exhort the virtues of customer-centricity all they want, but it is only when they actually start interacting with customers themselves and start to use that input in decision making that the organization realizes how serious they really are.
   • Action: Identify the iconic behaviors for senior management that will signal customer-centricity the most to your organization and monitor and communicate the same.

    

3. Make a change in the power center
   • Most organizations have a center of gravity that significantly influences the culture and determines the strategic priorities. In some organizations it is product development, in others it is financial management and in others it is operations. Often, however, this driver of initial success makes the organization inward focused and an obstacle to sustained growth.
   • Action: Identify the power center of your organization and determine how that can be influenced by customer-centric “outside-in” thinking.

    

4. Pick your battles
   • There are multiple disciplines and skills within marketing and no organization can hope to be world-class in all of them overnight. One of the reasons why many marketing transformation efforts fail despite the best of intentions is because they try to tackle too much at the same time.
   • Action: To prioritize your efforts, conduct assessment and benchmarking to identify the areas that are both critical and broken.

    

5. Be impatient for results and patient for organizational behavior change
   • The classic approach to any organizational transformation is to conduct an as-is assessment, develop a to-be vision, determine the gaps, design organizational capabilities (processes, training, applications and other tools) to fill in the gaps and push the capability into the organization. This usually requires substantial investments up-front and a long time before any impact is felt in the organization and its business results. This approach is disruptive and a change management challenge. It requires tremendous organizational resilience and resolve and is overall fraught with risk.
   • Action: Create the pull for customer-centric approach and tools by focusing initially on proving a success model rather than process development, training or any other classic capability-building efforts.

    

6. Modify rewards and incentives
   • People do what they get rewarded for. Changing monetary and non-monetary rewards and incentives is one of the biggest signals that the organization is serious about the program and demands a behavior change.
   • Action: Involve an HR representative in the core team and ensure that a review of rewards and incentives is made an integral part of the program.

    

7. Leverage key people
   • Successful marketing excellence programs usually require a mix of internal experience and organizational understanding and fresh “game-changing” external perspectives. The external influencers are required as catalysts to help the organization break its insular mode and approach things in a new way. The combination with experienced organizational managers ensures that in the drive for customer-centricity and marketing excellence, the organization leverages rather than damages the core capabilities and culture that have made it successful thus far.
   • Action: Identify how best to bring external perspective into the core team and create a combination of internal experience and external perspectives to create a balanced program.