How a business understands its role in the market also shapes which growth opportunities it is able to see.
When I took over the leadership of a Country Leadership Team, the market had been declining for several years. Our market share remained stable, so revenue declined with the market. Within the team, the fall in revenue was largely understood as a consequence of the market environment.
We therefore started by asking who we wanted to be as a team.
Until then, success essentially meant:
“We maintain our market share in a difficult environment.”
The new identity went further:
“We can do more than our competitors and actively shape the market in our favour.”
That changed how we looked at the business. Which customers would shape the market in future? Which of them had received too little attention from us? Which needs were still underserved? And which of our own assumptions about customers and partnerships were getting in the way?
It became clear that some customers with particularly high potential had barely been a focus. Some had even received deliberately limited attention because their way of doing business differed from our own.
The team began to understand those customers’ business models better and to build a new basis for collaboration. This led to new partnerships, a different key-account structure and a different allocation of resources.
Within the following two years, the business turned around. In each of the next three years, it achieved double-digit growth.