What actually makes growth create more growth?
This spring, I wrote a series about the Commercial Engine.
The starting point was quite simple:
Customers have changed the way they buy. So we need to change the way we create growth.
Not Marketing on its own.
Not Sales on its own.
Not Product on its own.
Not Customer Success on its own.
But as one commercial engine, working around the same customer journey and the same commercial goals.
In the last post, I tried to make that quite practical: shared customer data, one customer journey and common metrics.
I also suggested small cross-functional Revenue Pods, with people from Marketing, Sales, Product and Customer Success working towards the same outcome.
I’ve kept thinking about that since.
What actually makes growth create more growth?
A strong brand makes Sales’ job easier.
What Sales learns from customers can help Product make better decisions.
A better product creates more value for customers.
Customers who get real value stay longer, buy more and recommend us.
And that makes it easier to win the next customer.
None of this is particularly revolutionary. We know these things are connected.
But I’m not sure we always run our companies as if they are.
Because when it works, growth isn’t really a sequence of separate activities. It’s a system where one part makes the next part stronger.
The next cycle starts from a stronger position than the one before.
That, to me, is where growth starts to create more growth.
But do we actually organise for that?
We still tend to organise Marketing, Sales, Product and Customer Success as separate functions.
And there are good reasons for that.
We need specialist competence, leadership and people to learn from. And someone still needs to worry about the marketing budget. 🙂
I’m not suggesting we get rid of functions.
But if growth is actually created between them, should more of the work happen there too?
Take acquiring new customers. Is that a Marketing problem? A Sales problem? A Product problem?
Probably none of them on their own.
The same goes for growing existing customers, entering a new market, launching a new product or improving retention.
They are business problems. And solving them usually requires people from several parts of the company.
So perhaps we should spend less time asking:
“What should Marketing do?”
“What should Sales do?”
“What should Product do?”
And start more often with:
“What problem are we trying to solve and who do we need around the table to solve it?”
And then there’s AI
AI adds another dimension to all of this.
As AI can do more and customers can find out and do more on their own, where do people make the biggest difference?
Where does human judgement matter? Relationships? Deep customer understanding?
And does AI make it even more important to organise people around problems rather than activities?
I’m not sure where that takes us yet. But it’s something I want to think more about.
So where does that leave the Commercial Engine?
I still believe in the basic idea I wrote about this spring.
Marketing, Sales, Product and Customer Success need to work around the same customer journey and the same commercial goals.
But I think I stopped one step too early.
Getting the functions to work better together is important.
The question I’m interested in now is what happens when we start looking at growth itself as the system and organise, lead and measure accordingly.
That’s what I want to explore in this series.
I don’t have a new model with four boxes and a clever acronym. I do definitely don’t have all the answers.
But I do have a few hypotheses.
And I’ll start with this one:
If growth is cross-functional, why do we still organise the work around functions?
That’s next.
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