For this episode of “What’s Your Edge?” I’m thrilled to welcome Heather Valentine to the conversation. Heather is a seasoned growth executive with over 25 years of experience leading high-performing teams in the SaaS-based healthcare and life sciences technology sectors. Her career spans the entire innovation lifecycle, making her a perfect fit for our Barriers to Revenue Growth discussion today and strategies to overcome these. I’ve had the privilege of working with Heather over the years and know she will be sharing some valuable customer-centric insights with us. Heather, welcome to “What’s Your Edge?”

3 Barriers to Growth that Transcend Across All Organizations

At VisionEdge Marketing, we emphasize the importance of identifying growth barriers as early as possible. Heather, to kick things off, what do you think are the 3-5 biggest barriers to growth for most organizations?

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• Of course, the answers to this question can be highly dependent upon whether you are talking about a start-up or a large global established company.  However, there are some universal areas/categories that I believe transcend across all types of organizations trying to grow:
  
• The second is then give the team the right tools. And with this category, I mean the right value statements, value use cases, and value examples of how your company can bring real, documentable value to your customers.
  
• The third is somewhat related to category #2 above but it is so critical it deserves to be separated out and that is: “Put the customer and the center of your business”. This is what I call “Customer Experience Excellence” and is always a growth category in every growth formula that I put together for any of the organizations that I have led over the years.
  

Can you share a specific example from your career where you encountered one or more of these barriers? How did you and your team address them?

Because I attempted to choose some universal growth challenges, I have dealt with all three.  That said, I think the second category is worth digging into in more detail (even though I am passionate about getting all three right on a continuous basis). I usually call this category “Value Engagement” which really is about Value Identification, Value Realization, and Value Execution (documentation so you can replicate it for the next customer).

At VisionEdge Marketing, we believe that the better an organization can align itself around business strategies to create customer value, the better.  We have a number of Proven Business Frameworks to help organizations designed just for this purpose. But identifying the barriers is just step one. To truly drive growth, operational excellence is critical.

At VisionEdge Marketing, we define Operational Excellence as executing business strategy more consistently and reliably than the competition—with lower operational risk, reduced costs, and increased revenue.

Heather, in your experience, what operational changes have been the most impactful for accelerating revenue growth?

Truly measuring what is working and what is not working and being a metrics-driven culture.  I am not talking about micromanaging at all, but rather measuring what activities are producing the right results and how an organization can double down on what is working and reduce time spent on what is not working.

What are your thoughts on how organizations can balance efficiency with the need for innovation to maintain a competitive edge?

This is such a large topic in and of itself, and I think it is truly one of the most difficult areas that stifle company growth. In a nutshell (so to speak), many companies think they are measuring the right growth metrics when they are not. I will give you an example: relying on a Net Promoter Score and thinking that if you have a good score, all is well. Not so.

One thing we advocate at VisionEdge Marketing is to implement a continuous improvement culture, where teams are encouraged to innovate and optimize workflows regularly.  As part of this culture shift, we use a term, Advantageous Excellence, which focuses on strategic innovation and differentiation, to enable our customers to develop unique capabilities that will set them apart. The benefits of Operational Excellence include improved efficiency and cost savings, while Advantageous Excellence drives innovation and competitive differentiation.

Operational changes are crucial, but they must be aligned with a customer-centric approach to truly drive growth. And that takes us to one of my favorite topics: customer-centricity.

We believe that customer-centricity is the foundation for creating stellar customer experiences. While customer-centricity is a term we hear a lot about these days, it’s much more than a buzzword. At VisionEdge Marketing, we define it as putting the customer at the heart of every decision and action. It ensures that every interaction adds value and meets customer expectations, leading to satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.

Take Me to Advisory Services

Heather, what does customer-centricity mean to you, and how does it relate to Customer Experience Excellence?

To me, it means truly understanding the industry, market, and the specific needs that your customers have.  This seems like a generalization, but I do not mean it that way. Rather, you can become an “industry expert” but also apply that expertise to the specific customer issues you are trying to solve.

A customer-centric approach is only as effective as the data that informs it. Let’s discuss the types of data that are most valuable for making informed, customer-centric decisions.

Heather, what types of data have you found most valuable in making customer-centric decisions?

The answer here circles back to some of my previous points in that an important growth driver (actual customer centricity itself) is truly understanding their issues and needs and how to help them reduce “lags” in their own growth trajectory. Creating customer-centric “replication stories” (use cases) and building up many of these to use in future customer engagements really helps the team be super “customer-centric.” This is what I meant previously about giving your teams the right “tools.”

Data-driven decision-making is critical for aligning customer needs with business strategies. At VisionEdge Marketing, we recommend using both qualitative and quantitative data—like customer feedback, purchase history, and engagement metrics—to guide these decisions.

So, my last question for you is, what data have you found most helpful in making customer-centric decisions?

To build upon what I have already mentioned, I find that to ensure that you are documenting value effectively, interviewing your customer base is critical and I find too many companies do not do this, or rely on really “thin” surveys only.

As you know from working together, we are passionate about selecting measures, metrics and key performance indicators that align with strategic initiatives with business results. Measures such as customer engagement, customer effort, and customer lifetime value can provide a clear picture of how effective customer-centric initiatives are.

How do you think organizations can better leverage advanced analytics to uncover hidden opportunities?

As we wrap up, do you have any last thoughts you’d like to share with our community?

Heather, thank you for such an insightful conversation. Listeners, take a moment to think about your organization. What’s one barrier to revenue growth you could overcome by focusing on operational excellence, customer-centricity, and data-driven decision-making? Start there.

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