5 Ways for CEOs and CTOs to Approach Growth System Design

Growth system design utilises systems thinking to create highly effective go-to-market (GTM) strategies, optimising complex sales, marketing, and revenue operations. However, in the midst of tangled business operations and disconnected processes, leaders may struggle to know where to begin. 

This is where adopting key approaches to growth system design comes in, initiating an organisation's journey towards a cohesive ecosystem that powers sales and marketing strategy and revenue growth.

1. Create a Systems Thinking Mindset

Today’s business landscape is far more complex than ever before. Building a strategy for growth is no longer as simple as identifying a niche, building a product, and tasking a sales team. Successful businesses often serve multiple sectors with numerous services and have a raft of digital and physical sales channels to navigate. Products and markets are influenced by supply chains, talent shortages, regulations, digitalisation, and, of course, competitors and customers. 

So, being able to accurately envision your market and position your product accordingly, with the flexibility to accommodate change quickly, requires an incredibly holistic approach. That approach is systems thinking, a way of strategic thinking that encompasses all internal and external variables and accounts for existing and required operational processes. 

As a leader in your organisation, you are likely to be a strategic thinker. Creating a systems thinking mindset is taking this further and seeing the interconnected relationships in every part of your operation and markets. 

Systems thinking is about removing disconnection and leveraging interconnectedness and displacing siloes, and adopting synthesis. 

2. Strategise Growth System Design

Once you open your mind to systems thinking and begin to see your business and its environment in this way, it’s time to use this new view to analyse and optimise processes for growth and create effective GTM strategies. Systems thinking is a powerful marketing and revenue operations tool that can increase market reach, deliver sales, and drive revenue.

Here are some examples of how strategising growth systems design can begin:

• Understand your market through research, gathering insights, and analysing customers
• Map fully your marketing process and customer journey
• Align content creation, lead nurturing, and outbound marketing with corporate goals
• Measure success with KPIs for every outcome, starting with brand awareness, lead generation, and sales
• Constantly collect new data, analyse and react with feedback loops
• Be prepared to iterate approach or product based on a continually moving market
• Embrace systems thinking, strategising, and optimisation as continuous processes

3. Leverage Data for Competitive Advantage

Any strategy must be data-driven, and data must now be treated as a vital business asset. It’s not enough for leaders to understand their market in their heads or on paper. Deep, tangible insights taken from multiple data points are required to go to market and convert customers. 

Customer data reveals wants, needs, and behaviours; continuously garnered competitor data reveals market positioning. To survive and thrive in today’s complex landscape, organisations must be able to collect, store, and analyse insights in almost real-time to react proficiently to market changes and retain competitive advantage.

4. Integrate RevOps Functionality

A RevOps approach can see sales, marketing, and service departments, or any departments that directly impact customers or revenue generation, either combined or, at the very least, deeply connected. RevOps is a strategy to bring together customer experience, remove silos and measure the impact of processes and ROI. This interconnected approach puts RevOps at the heart of modern systems thinking and growth system design. 

RevOps can combine customer data and interfaces from multiple departments for a 360-view and customer-centric approach. Customers in a digital world expect a company to recognise who they are instantly and connect any previous experiences. The benefits of RevOps include greater alignment of sales and revenue-generating goals across an organisation, customer focus, and simplifying processes and data generated for more effective outcomes.

5. Adopt a Robust Tech-Stack

We’ve discussed systems thinking, growth systems design, data-driven insights, and RevOps. By the very nature of these tools, they are interconnected and can be combined for accelerated business growth - by design. Our last tactic to approach growth system design can bind these methodologies together: technology. 

Systems thinking enables leaders to streamline processes and effectively identify suitable marketing, customer relationship management (CRM) systems and automation tools. These tools, including AI, can be leveraged to bring every process or data point under one roof and connect every employee and customer into an interconnected ecosystem for efficiency and market advantage. A robust tech stack, one that works for your organisation today and tomorrow, is a tech stack that’s carefully chosen and optimised for your processes and aligned with your business goals. 

Purchasing enterprise-grade CRM technology is a significant investment of capital and commitment. The right or wrong tech stack can make or break a business. But how to choose the right RevOps machine or CRM? 

• Understand business processes through systems thinking and growth system design practices
• Recognise how processes align with goals to determine the desired purpose of your tech stack or CRM
• Identify if a CRM empowers RevOps, analytics, collaboration, operations, or sales
• Assess budget, scalability, ease of use, and customisation options

Lastly, take time to decide and consult stakeholder teams internally. Your new mindset may have already empowered greater communication and collaboration between your internal teams; leverage this to find the digital tools required for growth. 

Existing businesses that have evolved to today’s new business environment or, equally, startups facing the challenge of breaking into highly competitive new markets can find growth system design overwhelming.  If that’s the case, outside assistance from a growth, systems, or RevOps expert may be a necessary step forward.