The Challenge — Topline Revenue Growth
Topline revenue growth remains one of the most visible indicators of organizational health. Yet sustaining profitable growth over time is far harder than most leaders expect. McKinsey research shows that only one in eight companies achieved annual growth rates above 10 percent in the decade leading up to COVID — a sobering reminder of how elusive consistent growth really is.
Today, sales rep assessment data highlights that the challenge is even steeper. Sales leaders are navigating intensified competition, persistent inflationary pressure, and ongoing economic uncertainty, all while employee and customer expectations are being fundamentally reshaped. In this environment, growth requires sharper strategic focus, greater discipline, and a more adaptive go-to-market model.
6 Keys to Successful Growth from Growth Leaders
Despite ongoing market volatility, some organizations continue to deliver strong, sustainable growth. In our work with these growth leaders, we see six consistent topline revenue practices that separate them from the rest. These are not generic best practices — they come from sales leadership simulation assessment benchmarks and are the deliberate choices that shape how leaders prioritize, align, and execute for growth.
Which of these sales growth strategies are most relevant to your current reality — and where might you need to rethink your approach to stay ahead of the pack?
- Create Alignment for High Growth
Sustained growth rarely comes from strategy alone. Our organizational alignment research shows that companies that deliberately align strategy, culture, and talent grow revenue 58% faster and deliver 72% higher profitability than their misaligned peers. That advantage is not accidental — it is engineered. High-growth organizations get alignment right in three critical areas:
-
- Sales Strategy: Their path to growth is clear, credible, and actionable — understood and embraced by the stakeholders responsible for executing it, not just documented in a plan.
- Sales Culture: How work gets done consistently reinforces the behaviors required for topline revenue growth, creating a healthy, high-performing environment across the enterprise.
- Sales Talent: Company-wide talent management practices are designed to attract, develop, engage, reward, and retain high performers who directly contribute to revenue growth, rather than merely sustain the status quo.
One recent client illustrates the point. Their growth strategy was sound, but day-to-day behaviors — how people thought, collaborated, and made decisions — directly undermined their growth ambitions. Only after redesigning how work was executed and rewarded by marketing, finance, product development, legal, and procurement did sales growth begin to accelerate.
The question is straightforward: Are you truly aligned for growth — or just hoping strategy will carry the load?
- Prioritize Your Competitive Advantage for High Growth
One of the most powerful — and most overlooked — drivers of sustained revenue growth is ruthless clarity around competitive advantage. High-growth companies are crystal clear about how they win in the marketplace in ways that are genuinely valued by customers and difficult for competitors to replicate or replace.
Rather than chasing breadth, these organizations define a sharply focused ideal target client and a differentiated value proposition that clearly sets them apart. They resist the temptation to be everything to everyone. Just as important, growth leaders understand that how they sell — the experience, discipline, and approach — is often as differentiating as what they sell.
For growth leaders, the mandate is straightforward but demanding: identify what you do meaningfully better than competitors, align your go-to-market approach around that strength, and double down. This focus becomes the winning sales formula for profitable growth.
Consider a recent client whose new-business win rate tripled once they stopped pursuing every opportunity and concentrated on prospects that matched their true sweet spot.
The real question is this: Is your competitive advantage unmistakably clear to your target clients — or only to your internal team?
- Embrace a Sales Driven Culture for High Growth
High-growth companies treat selling as a shared responsibility, not a departmental function. They are unified by a deep commitment to helping customers succeed — from marketing and new business development to customer service, operations, and even legal. In these organizations, a customer-centric mindset shapes how work gets done, decisions are made, and trade-offs are evaluated.
Putting the customer first is more than a slogan. It is the foundation of a company-wide growth mindset that fuels trust, strengthens relationships, and creates sustained demand with the right clients. When everyone understands how their role contributes to winning and keeping customers, growth accelerates.
One client learned this the hard way. After seventeen consecutive quarters of flat performance, they made a deliberate shift from a product-centric culture — dominated by engineering priorities — to a sales-driven culture centered on understanding clients, delivering differentiated value, and applying discipline to their new business development process. The result: 15% revenue growth in a single year.
The question to ask is simple but revealing: Do you truly have the sales-driven culture required for high growth — or does selling still live in a silo?
- Focus on Your Core Business While Being Opportunistic in Adjacencies for High Growth
Topline revenue growth leaders understand a simple truth: sustainable growth starts with a strong core. They are explicit about which parts of the business deliver the highest performance and future potential, and they back those segments with a deliberate, disproportionate share of leadership attention, investment, and operational support.
This focus is not narrow — it is disciplined. Research consistently shows that roughly 80% of growth comes from the core business, while the remaining 20% is generated through adjacent opportunities such as new offerings, industries, or geographies. High-growth companies sequence these moves carefully. They do not chase adjacencies to compensate for a weak core; they expand outward only after the core is positioned to keep winning.
Consider two recent examples. One client accelerated growth within existing accounts by packaging services by industry vertical rather than selling disconnected, one-off solutions. Another, after proving its advantage in a local market, expanded internationally once it was clear that its differentiation translated across borders.
The underlying question is a strategic one: Are you systematically rationalizing your business to fuel growth — or reacting opportunistically without a clear growth logic?
- Choose M&A and “Lift Out” Opportunities Wisely
Sustaining organic revenue growth over time is difficult. Few strategic moves can alter a company’s growth trajectory and enterprise value as quickly as a well-executed acquisition. High-growth organizations often generate more than a quarter of their revenue growth from a disciplined portfolio of mergers, acquisitions, and strategic lift-outs — the targeted hiring of intact, high-performing teams.
The key word is disciplined. Growth-oriented M&A is not about scale for its own sake. When executed with clear intent, acquisitions can accelerate growth by adding differentiated product lines, expanding capacity, opening access to high-growth markets, neutralizing competitive threats, and injecting critical expertise, intellectual property, or credibility where it matters most.
Disney provides a classic example. The acquisitions of Pixar, Marvel, and 20th Century Fox were not opportunistic bets. Each deal brought distinct strategic assets — advanced animation capabilities, proven franchise engines, and expansive content rights — that strengthened Disney’s growth platform and compounded long-term value.
For growth leaders, the challenge is how selectively and thoughtfully M&A is deployed. The question to ask is straightforward: Where could the right combination of businesses grow faster together than they ever could apart?
- Understand that Less Can Be More for High Growth
High performing cultures apply the same performance discipline to their business portfolio that they expect from their people. Topline revenue growth leaders routinely assess which products, services, customers, and operating models truly earn the right to exist. They make deliberate choices to simplify — pruning slow-growing, margin-draining, or overly complex businesses in order to double down on areas with the greatest growth potential and lowest friction to serve.
This focus is not about cost cutting for its own sake. It is about reallocating attention, capital, and leadership energy toward the opportunities that can scale faster and more profitably. By saying no more often, growth leaders create the capacity to say yes to the initiatives that actually move the revenue needle.
The discipline of subtraction is often what enables breakout growth.
The real question is this: Do you have a rigorous, repeatable process to continuously rebalance your portfolio — or does complexity quietly dilute your growth agenda?
The Bottom Line
Is your business truly set up for high growth — or simply hoping market conditions improve? Sustainable revenue growth comes from making deliberate choices: where to focus, what to stop doing, and how to align strategy, culture, and talent around what actually drives results. The growth leaders stand out not because they do more, but
To learn more about how to create topline growth, download How to Optimize Your Sales Force in the Face of Increased Performance Pressure
Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.
0
