How to create a growth team that does more with less

You’ve got the people. You’ve got the processes and platforms. Where’s the growth? 

Businesses have the right people in place to generate growth. So say 100% of C-suite professionals, and 78% of marketing leaders.  

Over 85% of all respondents to the same survey – as published in the Bluprintx Enterprise Growth Report – believe that they have the organizational structure and processes in place to enable effective growth. But there’s still something missing.  

Having the right resources isn’t the endgame. Without connecting the dots across people, workflows, technology and data, it’s impossible to activate that potential. Let’s talk about linking it all up, leveraging AI for productivity gains and empowering a growth team that’s ready to act… 

Reduce siloes and improve collaboration 

Communication is a prerequisite to connecting the dots. Everyone knows that sales and marketing alignment is a common barrier to growth. Isn’t it time to start doing something about it?  Without mutual understanding and knowledge sharing across teams, you’ll never be in an optimal position to create streamlined workflows and utilize technology cross-functionally.  

AI can support your efforts in this arena – often without requiring new subscriptions or commitments. Common business platforms like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Asana are all beginning to incorporate AI to benefit communication and collaboration. From thread summaries and AI-enhanced search in Slack to OpenAI-powered ‘intelligent recap’ for your Microsoft Teams meetings, AI is stepping in to level up human cooperation. 

This is true internally, but also from a customer-facing perspective. Siloes between teams will impact customer journeys. Ensure that teams are aligned and processes are designed to serve the customer at every stage of their lifecycle, with smooth handovers and transfer of relevant data and insights. Examine where AI can help you to manage large-scale data, and manage all your customer data across the organization without putting a greater workload on your team. 

Allocate your resources effectively 

Analyze and improve resource allocation to accelerate delivery while guarding against burnout. Ensuring that tasks and projects are given to team members with the right skills and appropriate capacity reduces the risk of unplanned delays.  

With headcounts frozen – just 4% of business leaders prioritized staff retention and team growth – but businesses still targeting growth, this is a route to doing more with less. Matching tasks to skills helps your internal resource to operate at maximum productivity while minimizing risk of burnout. 

Artificial intelligence can help you to conduct workforce optimization. When integrated into your work management AI-enhanced systems can analyze workloads, outputs and performance to identify skills gaps or highlight areas of strain – enabling you to take a more responsive and flexible approach to resourcing. 

Implementing automation that drives greater efficiency and reduces human error represents another opportunity. Everywhere that routine tasks can be automated puts time back in marketing diaries and eases capacity constraints while improving team alignment. 

From a leadership perspective, adopting an integrated work management tool makes it easier to visualize capacity through a top-down view with scope to drill down into individual projects. Time is a resource that can – and must – be budgeted with as much care as financials.    

Accelerate decision-making and strategic execution 

Marketing leaders are confident in the capacity of their team to deliver growth. But is that faith reflected in the autonomy and agency to make decisions? 

Marketing moves quickly, and opportunities come and go. Put the frameworks in place to support decision-making – including 360-degree customer views, data and trends via business intelligence platforms – then empower your team to make real-time decisions.  

And it’s not all about your team making decisions. Predictive sales and marketing solutions can carry the load of personalized marketing by preparing and delivering content, based on customer behavior and historic data. This provides a hands-off route to accelerating decision making and improving customer engagement, all targeted towards boosting revenue. 

At the same time, mitigate risk with robust approval processes. Build structures that ensure when content hits the market, or strategies fall into place, they’re delivered with absolute confidence and consistency. Empower your people, celebrate successes, stride confidently towards growth.

Realizing growth potential with the resources available is a core theme of the Enterprise Growth Report, our flagship research paper which also highlights specific AI productivity opportunities.