What Drives B2B Organic Growth?

What is B2B organic growth? B2B organic growth is the additional revenue and profitability as driven by new products, as opposed to by M&A when marketing to businesses that sell to other businesses. With that in mind, we began a search to understand the answer to the question, “What drives B2B organic growth?”

Want to drive rapid, profitable, sustainable growth at your company… and focus on what matters most? This original research taps over 10,000 years of combined experience from 540 B2B professionals. You’ll see which of 24 B2B organic growth drivers they deemed the most important, and which they were most eager to improve. Some of these drivers help you understand customer needs, some help you meet those needs, and some do both. Hint: A good strategy is improving how you understand customer needs.

After you check out the 24 growth drivers in this research report, consider benchmarking your company on the same 24 growth drivers… using our free B2B Growth Diagnostic.

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Preview: What Drives B2B Organic Growth

Rapid, profitable, sustainable B2B organic growth is the Holy Grail of business. Achieve this and you gain shareholders’ applause, customers’ respect, and rewarding careers for your employees. But how do you achieve this? This was our key research question.

We surveyed 540 B2B professionals with more than 10,000 years of combined management, marketing, technical and sales experience. This led to new findings on B2B organic growth—some unexpected—which have not been reported elsewhere. Especially encouraging was this: You’ll find in these pages clear and compelling insights to guide your B2B growth journey.

So what could drive rapid, profitable, sustainable B2B organic growth? Our working hypothesis—which this research tested—was this: You must understand and meet customer needs better than others.

We investigated 24 B2B organic growth drivers to see how much they help B2B companies understand and meet customer needs. Drivers such as Market Research and Customer Interviews fell in the “understanding” bucket, while Patent Protection and Portfolio Management were part of “meeting” customer needs. Here are five key findings:

The greatest need for improvement is in understanding—more than meeting—customer needs. Of 24 B2B organic growth drivers, the number one driver to upgrade is Market Insight (such as understanding their jobs-to-be-done).
Companies were more eager to improve B2B organic growth drivers “owned” by the marketing function than technical. Only one driver managed by the technical function appeared in the top 13.
Most B2B companies are quite similar. Factors such as company size, ownership structure, type of product sold, job function have limited impact on B2B organic growth driver competence.
The extent to which a company was already using voice-of-customer methods made a significant difference in how well they performed most of the B2B organic growth drivers.
Companies delivering strong value propositions are better at all 24 B2B organic growth drivers… and especially adept at three: Customer Interviews, Front-End Work, and Market Concentration.

Further, click here to learn the significant differences between B2B and B2C businesses.

For more, see the 2-min video, Know what really drives growth, part of Dan Adams’ series of 50 (free) 2-min videos, B2B Organic Growth.

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