A growth strategy navigates and articulates multiple dimensions like market development, diversification, market penetration and product development, aiming for profitable growth. This allows companies to increase flexibility, decrease dependency and risk, push innovation, develop ecosystems, and focus on long-term shared value. A company should shift from a sales to a growth strategy by changing its mindset, strengthening bonds between teams, and increasing cooperation under a single strategy that evaluates opportunities across multiple dimensions. The Ansoff Matrix can help identify and prioritize developing new products or opening new markets to suit a company's growth needs across dimensions.

1. Why does your organization need to shift from
sales to a growth strategy?
One dimension Multiple dimensions
A sales strategy is related to navigate over one dimension (time and income), while a growth strategy
is related to navigate and articulate multiple dimensions (market development, diversification,
market penetration and product development) aiming for profitable growth.
time
income
income
Market development
Diversification
Marketpenetration
Productdevelopm
ent
Top 7 reasons why your company should shift from a sales strategy to a growth strategy:
1. Change your mindset to be a pioneer, not a follower
2. Increase flexibility, decrease dependency and risk
3. Push innovation and try new things with high return
4. Develop an ecosystem, not just customers
5. Focus on long term shared value
6. Strong and intelligent bond between sales, product and marketing teams
7. Increase company’s interoperability and cooperation under one strategy
Market
Development
The Ansoff Growth Matrix
Diversification
Product Development
Market
Penetration
Products or Services
Markets
New
New
Existing
Existing
The concept
Nowadays, organizations are called to transform to be ecosystems. This means multiple interactions with insiders
and outsiders, continues flow of information with multiple stakeholders, heavy data analytics capabilities, and APIs
all over.
Therefore, every company’s team should be treated likewise. Particularly, the sales or growth team should begin to
change its mindset from one dimension to multiple dimensions and take the lead. This is what I call to shift from a
sales strategy to a growth strategy.
Living in one dimension is limited, poor in scope, has low flexibility, high dependency and risks. If you are looking
for profitable and real growth a multiple dimension approach could be the answer.
Although I am proposing that the sales team should lead the growth strategy, this is a multi-interdisciplinary
approach that must count with C-level support and strong integration with the marketing, innovation, supply chain,
and customer success team.
Think, plan, and execute in multiple dimensions, means to have a plan that evaluate, measure and merge the
following concepts: market development, diversification, market penetration, and product development. Also,
being in multiple dimensions requires to have an open mind for horizontal and vertical integrations.
How to navigate this approach? The tool that I am proposing is the Ansoff matrix developed by H. Igor Ansoff and
published in HBR in 1957. This tool could help to identify and prioritize to develop new products or open-up to new
markets and combined them to suit every company's growth needs in multiple dimensions.
Remember that today's competitive advantage is no longer tomorrow 's competitive advantage.
Written, compiled and designed by Felipe Afanador Cortés felipe.afanador@alumni.esade.edu October 2019
The tool
Example: Apple
One dimension
Multiple dimensions
Apple PCs
New MacBook Pro, iPad pro, iPhone 11, iWatch
iPhone6,7,8,10
AppleM
usicandAppleTvplatform
Beats products, Shazam, Siri
Income
Income
Diversification
Market development
Productdevelopm
ent
Marketpenetration