From Mike Haldane, Founder and President
Let's face it, being responsible for a company's growth can be stressful. I've been there countless times in roles like Head of Commercial Operations, VP of Marketing, VP/General Manager, and Business Manager. I've felt the pressure of quarterly expectations and the wear and tear that comes with it.
However, after a career filled with successes, failures, and valuable lessons, I've learned to navigate the chaos and tackle the challenges of revenue growth head-on, with a data-rich, well-planned, practical approach. What does this entail? Well, to start it means avoiding the common pitfalls, such as:
- Assuming that internal teams fully understand the market, macro trends, requirements, personas, messaging that resonates and the competition
- Lacking a strategic plan or having one that is poorly constructed and/or put on the shelf and not looked at for a year once built
- Accepting mediocre execution and/or insufficient accountability, which is usually due to a lack of clear understanding of the strategy
The good news? Many of your competitors are likely facing these same challenges, which presents an opportunity for you to outpace them with the right strategy and great execution. While it requires discipline and a willingness to do things differently, the rewards can be substantial.
- At Provation, we facilitated a growth readiness assessment, created a customer advisory council, put a strategic plan into effect, built a sales operations and marketing team, launched an order sets business (won "Best in Klas" in 2012+), expanded the business in the Middle East, drove and launched Provation Capital®, put a PR program into place and reworked the sales compensation plan. Revenue nearly quadrupled from 2009 to 2014, more than half of which occurred via Provation Capital by 2014.
- At Global Traffic Technologies, we conducted a growth readiness assessment, assembled a customer advisory board, drove the strategic planning process, built and ramped the product management and sales engineering functions, expanded in Europe and the Middle East, created and launched Priority Control as a Service® (won Fortive’s product of the year award in 2019), hired and ramped a marketing team, built a PR program and reworked the sales compensation plan. Revenue doubled between 2016 and 2020; recurring revenue grew from less than 1% of revenue to approximately 10% in that same timeframe.
- At Calsense, we facilitated a growth readiness assessment, built a customer innovation council, introduced a strategic planning process, created and launched Irrigation Management as a Service™ (won “silver” for product of the year in 2022 – Irrigation Association), conceptualized and kicked off Smart Irrigation 2.0™, reworked the channel program, revamped the sales and marketing teams, built financial modeling/pricing tools, wrote (with attorney) the needed contract templates, assembled a product management function, expanded geographically, established a thought leadership campaign and rolled out new sales compensation plans. Calsense is now in the process of executing on its commercial strategy, which is expected to enable 10x growth within the next several years.
This passion for enabling business growth led me to establish MarketWise. Over the past 25+ years, I've honed my skills at both large and small companies, including Maytag, Intel, 3M, Wolters Kluwer, Fortive and others; and I've brought together a network of experts who have done similar things. We're not motivated by prestige, titles, or money. Instead, we love the work and we simply want to share our hard-earned wisdom to help companies thrive.
If you want to grow your organization's revenue, we can help you do that. We'll put you on a well-researched, vetted path to growth and we'll help you set things up so that you stay the course and continue to prosper for years to come.
