The Compass: Navigating the Enterprise
Value Chain Selling: Strategic Growth
So far in this series on the strategic elements of Value Chain Selling, we’ve gone into detail on how Efficiency helps you do things right, Effectiveness ensures you’re doing the right things, and Risk Mitigation safeguards the business. Now, let’s move up the value chain into one of the most exciting sales strategies: Strategic Growth.
Strategic Growth isn’t just about doing more of the same year over year increases. It’s about new initiatives that drive significant, material & transformative change. While the previous Value Chain strategies solve immediate problems, Strategic Growth taps into long-term and strategic business objectives.
Strategic Growth is planned growth. It’s about helping your buyer achieve specific goals that have been set by their leadership. There can be several types of growth objectives. Some examples are:
· Grow revenues by 50% next year
· Increase EBITDA by 10%
· Enter a new markets
· Launch new products
These aren’t just aspirations – this kind of growth is backed by real focus, energy, and budget. The goals are documented and there is a defined and managed plan in place on how to achieve it. This presents a major opportunity for the Seller.
Strategic Growth is Powerful. Here’s why it should be part of your sales strategy:
C-Level Engagement: Growth initiatives are what senior executives care about most. Their bonuses, and sometimes their jobs, depend on achieving these targets. When you position your offering as a solution that helps them meet their growth objectives, you capture the attention of the C-suite. You’re no longer talking about incremental improvements—you’re helping drive the company’s future.
Budget Priority: Projects tied to Strategic Growth come with serious financial backing. Companies prioritize and allocate budgets for growth initiatives. When you can show that your solution supports these growth plans, it becomes a high-priority investment rather than an expense that can be delayed or cut.
Find the Funds: As companies focus on hitting their growth targets, new funds often become available to support those efforts. Your offering may not have been budgeted but the Buyer will find the funds to make it happen. By positioning your solution as an enabler of growth, you access resources that might not have been available for efficiency or risk-related initiatives.
Expanding the Deal Size: With Strategic Growth, you’re no longer just selling a product for today’s needs. You’re selling a solution that helps drive future growth. This opens the door to larger, multi-year deals because your solution is part of a broader, longer-term roadmap.
How Strategic Growth Outflanks the Competition.
Most salespeople stay stuck fighting over Efficiency, highlighting faster speeds and cheaper costs. But here’s the key: while you should always position the Efficiency of your offering, Strategic Growth is where you outmaneuver the competition.
Let your competitors remain fixated in feature-function battles while you elevate the conversation to a higher level. You’re not just solving today’s operational problems—you’re helping the company achieve its long-term, game-changing goals. And that’s a conversation your competitors aren’t even part of. Now, this takes some courage. You are going to have to go around some people to move up into the Buyer’s organization. Many salespeople are afraid to make that move. But there are numerous ways to do that without offending the Buyer.
A Real-World Example
One of my clients was a restaurant management software company with a suite of products that managed a restaurant’s ‘back of the house’ operations. They had a prospect that was a regional restaurant chain that was actively evaluating inventory management solutions. As part of the discovery process, we were able to uncover that there was also a plan in place to grow into a national restaurant chain. While part of the sales team remained engaged in the technical evaluation of the inventory solution, other team members bridged to senior executives to learn more about their growth plans. We invested the time to prepare a business case that showed how the entire product suite was critical to the Buyer achieving their growth objective. By positioning ourselves as a partner in their growth strategy, we won a multi-year deal that far exceeded their initial scope, with a much faster sales cycle than expected. And the competition engaged in the inventory management evaluation? Their project just disappeared as it was rolled into our larger deal.
How to Execute a Strategic Growth Strategy.
To incorporate a Strategic Growth strategy into your sales approach, you need to shift from tactical problem-solving to strategic discovery. Here’s how:
Do the Hard Work: It’s your job to find out if Strategic Growth initiatives exist. This means digging deep during your discovery process and asking the right questions. If there’s a new growth goal on the horizon, you need to uncover it.
Align with Their Vision: Once you’ve discovered their strategic growth plans, position your offering as an essential driver of that growth. Show how your solution enables them to achieve those objectives more efficiently, effectively and with reduced risk. But, most importantly, how your offering gives them the ability to scale.
Engage at the Executive Level: Strategic Growth decisions happen at the top. Make sure you’re engaging with the executives who have the power to make these decisions quickly.
Think Long-Term, Act Fast: While Strategic Growth initiatives lead to larger deals, they also tend to move quickly. Make sure you’re ready to respond to the urgency, but also position yourself as a long-term growth partner who’s committed to helping them achieve their broader goals.
What’s exciting about focusing on Strategic Growth is that you’re positioning your offering to support this growth journey. You’re showing how your solution helps them achieve their biggest, most ambitious goals—and in doing so, you tap into the substantial funds available for growth initiatives.
Call to Action
Ready to elevate your conversations and start positioning yourself as a driver of Strategic Growth for your clients? Contact us today to learn how the Compass can help you deliver value that goes beyond operational efficiency and positions you as a partner in driving growth.
Navigation: In the next Compass newsletter, we will continue to move up the Value Chain and cover the Customer Experience (CX) value strategy. This is a challenging strategy to execute. It takes hard work and requires a high level of sales strategy mastery. However, this is where the very large and strategic deals take place. We’ll show you how to execute this next week.
This was written while listening to In a Time Lapse by Ludovico Einaudi.
Artwork by Elwood Howell.