Do you have a growth plan for 2022?

Hit hard by COVID, manufacturers had to deal with shutdowns, exceptional supply chain disruptions, and crippling inflation. Many CEOs went into survival mode, focusing on cost reduction and limited new market expansion, and often leaving vacant jobs unfilled.

But 2022 is already promising a new sense of optimism for our sector, marked by renewed customer demand, added infrastructure spending, and continued digitalization of marketing. Manufacturing companies are looking for growth, and they recognize that they’ll need a new strategy if they hope to capture new audiences – and keep the ones they already have.

Industrial CMOs will need to think beyond macro growth goals and get serious about creating a growth roadmap that answers, “Where will growth come from?” Let’s take a look at what it takes to build a quantifiable growth plan.

Your overall growth goal is at the center. That’s the number your CEO is set on achieving. And it’s your job to analyze what percentage growth of the total goal will come from each quadrant. Each quadrant will require its own sales and marketing strategies, so you’ll be developing four marketing strategies and four sales strategies in one growth plan.

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Lower left quadrant: Penetration
This quadrant is concerned with selling more of your product or service to more customers in your current market. Say you want to get 3% of your 12% growth goal from your current customer type, without adding new products or services. What are your strategies and tactics? You’ll want to ask yourself key questions like:

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• “Are our customers aware of our full array of products and services?” If not, “Do we need to develop a customer campaign to address lack of awareness?”
• “Are there pricing incentives we should consider?”
• “Should we bundle our offerings?”

Upper left quadrant: New market expansion
This quadrant is concerned with selling your current product or service to new types of customers. You’ll want to address these key questions:

• “How do we identify and prioritize new target markets?”
• “Which markets will value our core competencies and what are their barriers to entry?”
• “Which ones offer the most near-term growth potential — and what about longer term?”
• “What do we need to adjust in our sales and marketing messaging to attract these targets?"

Lower right quadrant: New product, same pool
This quadrant is concerned with developing new products that will add value for your current customer types. You’ll want to address these key questions:

• “Do we have new products or services in the pipeline? What does our timing look like to go from concept to production?”
• “How will we launch a new product or service awareness campaign?”

Upper right quadrant: New product, new pool
This quadrant is concerned with developing a new product or service to sell to an entirely new type of customer. While it’s not likely that this quadrant is a 12-month growth contributor for most manufacturers, you certainly shouldn’t avoid this area altogether. Creating a new product is a lengthy process (product development, legal processes, testing, etc.), and attracting new customer types also requires user and market research, and a significant advertising budget. But when your sector is shouting for a new product that could fill a gap in the market, this quadrant could end up contributing the majority of growth in a future year’s goal if given adequate lead time.

Bottom-line
While organizing your growth plan this way takes considerable work and research, think of the benefits: This approach will enable you to more closely align sales and marketing activities to specific audiences, messages, and growth targets. And it will keep performance and results more accountable to specific goals and KPIs. Just remember to keep these things in mind when developing your roadmap:

• Your macro growth goal is only the starting point; the real work is in analyzing how much each component can reasonably contribute back to the larger goal.
• Each quadrant will require its own sales and marketing strategies.
• Developing a new product to sell to new customers is likely a multi-year effort, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore this lever altogether.

Dennis Bailen and Bob Sherlock are partners and CMOs with Chief Outsiders, the nation’s largest and fastest growing firm offering fractional chief marketing officer services with Fortune 500 experience.