“We first look at at the data”
“We first look at at the data of the companies… three, five years back worth of data.”
Real alignment starts with facts. You need to go to the numbers before you go to org charts.
A simple, strong approach looks like this:
- Pull three to five years of customer data.
- Check who buys what, how often, and with what margin.
- List who stopped buying and how that hurt profit.
- Rank products and clients by real contribution, not by volume.
From there, you run an 80/20 or Pareto analysis. You split customers and products into four groups by value. The hard truth is that up to a quarter of your base will end up costing you money. They take time and block capacity, but still demand low prices.
That insight gives you clear options. You can raise prices, change terms, or let some accounts go. You can then move those freed hours and slots to your best clients and to look-alike prospects.
This step also sharpens your ideal customer profile and buyer personas. It tells marketing who to attract and tells sales who to stop chasing.
“We aligned our KPIs, our compensation plans, our dashboards”
“We aligned our KPIs, our compensation plans, our dashboards.”
Once you know who you want to serve, you need shared rules of the game. You can’t ask teams to act as one if you still pay them as rivals.
A strong growth engine uses one set of goals across brand, demand, sales, and service. For example, you can:
- Tie part of everyone’s bonus to revenue and margin, not just volume.
- Add shared KPIs like retention, referral volume, or profit per account.
- Use one dashboard that both sales and marketing review together.
You also train people to see their impact on others. Service learns how their speed and tone affect new deals. Sales learns how overpromising hurts capacity and brand trust. Marketing learns that lead quality matters more than form fills. Your teams will stop working in silos and start asking how else they can help.
“We train them to upsell” and “You had to have 4 or 5 referrals”
“We train them to upsell.”
“You had to have 4 or 5 referrals.”
Customer service sits at the point where promises meet reality. That makes it a key growth lever, not just a cost center.
You can treat service as a growth role in three ways:
- Train reps to spot upsell and cross sell signals.
- Arm them with simple questions about new projects or plants.
- Give them a clear handoff path to sales when they see a fit.
At the same time, you can build a referral habit across the whole front line. Not just in sales. You set a clear target, like four or five referrals per person each year. You show people when and how to ask. You also support them with short, clear referral emails or landing pages.
This turns great service into warm leads. It also deepens trust, because customers finally feel seen. And it lowers acquisition cost, because many new deals will start from those happy clients.
“You have to build a strong foundation for your revenue generation”
“You have to build a strong foundation for your revenue generation.”
The right move also depends on your size and stage. The core ideas stay the same, but the path changes a bit.
For a startup:
- Define your ideal customer early and test it fast.
- Build a simple growth engine from day one, even if one person wears several hats.
- Use fractional leaders if you can’t afford full time senior roles.
For a small or mid size firm:
- Take a hard look at your return on every revenue dollar.
- Bring in an external view to assess your growth engine as a whole.
- Be honest about what you do well and what you should outsource.
For a large enterprise:
- Check if your current leaders still match your next growth stage.
- Look for silent resignation and complacency in key roles.
- Run regular reviews of your engine so culture and structure don’t drift.
In every case, you treat marketing, sales, and service as one system. You fuel it with logic. Once that engine’s running, watch it grow.
