Do you know the best way to drive your company's growth? If not, then according to author and customer growth evangelist, Tiffani Bova, it’s time to boost your Growth IQ.
Trying to find the one right move that will improve your business's performance can feel overwhelming. But, as you'll discover in Growth IQ, there are just ten simple--but easily misunderstood--paths to growth, and every successful growth strategy can be boiled down to picking the right combination and sequence of these paths for your current context. Tiffani Bova travels around the world helping companies solve their most vexing problem: how to keep growing in the face of stiff competition and a fast-changing business environment. Whether she's presenting to a Fortune 500 board of directors or brainstorming over coffee with a startup founder, Bova cuts through the clutter and confusion that surround growth.
Now, she draws on her decades of experience and more than thirty fascinating, in-depth business stories to demonstrate the opportunities--and pitfalls--of each of the ten growth paths, how they work together, and how they apply to business today. You'll see how, for instance:
* Red Bull broke Coca-Cola and PepsiCo's stranglehold on the soft drink market by taking the Customer Base Penetration path to establish a foothold with adventure sports junkies and expand into the mainstream.
* Marvel transformed itself from a struggling comic book publisher into a global entertainment behemoth by using a Customer and Product Diversification strategy and shifting their focus from comic books to comic book characters in movies.
* Starbucks suffered a brand crisis when they overwhelmed their customers with a Product Expansion strategy, and brought back CEO Howard Schultz to course-correct by returning to the Customer Experience path.
Through Bova's insightful analyses of these and many other case studies, you'll see why it can be a mistake to imitate strategies that worked for your competitors, or rely on strategies that worked for you in the past. To grow your company with confidence, you first need to grow your Growth IQ.
Author quotes
After years of watching companies make the same mistakes over and over again, or miss opportunities to accelerate growth, I realized that too many companies seek the one right move - which by the way rarely exists - i order to improve or sustain their performance. The reality is, when it comes to growth, the one thing is, it’s never just one thing.
The fact is, 87 percent of all companies go through a growth stall at some point, and only a small percentage of them ever recover.
Growth is far less complicated than most people make it out to be. You might be surprised to learn that you can categorize most growth efforts taken by a business into one of ten growth paths. Deciding which pathhs are liable to have the greatest positive consequences will, and in fact should, change over time. No growth path should be written in stone.
About the author
Tiffani Bova is the global customer growth and innovation evangelist at Salesforce. Over the past two decades, she has led large revenue-producing divisions at businesses ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 500. She spent ten years at Gartner, the world's leading IT research and advisory firm as a distinguished analyst and research fellow. Her cutting-edge insights have helped Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, SAP, AT&T, Dell, Amazon-AWS, and other prominent companies expand their market share and grow their revenues. This is her first book.
Why LoA loves it….
Every company experiences challenges with growth at one time or another, but for entrepreneurs building their startup businesses, it can be a major challenge that holds them back. In her new book, Growth IQ, Tiffani Bova shares invaluable insights from her work helping some of the biggest companies in the world to navigate their own growth trajectory, and entrepreneurs can learn from her experience and take-outs. This is a book that can really make a difference to women entrepreneurs who want to take their business growth aspirations to the next level. --- Melanie Hawken, founder and ceo of Lionesses of Africa