Chief Growth Officer on the rise: 8 things having a CGO does for a growth-focused brand, enterprise, or startup
Do you need to have a Chief Growth Officer to grow? Of course not.
Does it significantly help? Absolutely … although, as with everything else in life and business, your mileage may vary.
Chief Growth Officers are hot right now.
Search LinkedIn, and you’ll see over 900,000 results. Check Google trends, and you’ll see a definite growth trajectory of interest over time.
Recently, Singular surveyed 700 companies on growth roles. 14% of them have Chief Growth Officers, while almost 30% have a VP or SVP of growth and 41% have a growth marketing manager. But what we really learned is how CGOs change the organizations that employ them.
(Get the full report, for free, here. No personal information required.)
What we learned, above all, is that Chief Growth Officers are growth catalysts. And they’re also a forcing function for change.
“CGOs are valuable because they are committed to disrupting the status quo.”
– Vista Equity Partners
The most important thing CGOs do? They break down silos, bring different departments together, and unify activity focused on growth.
“The CGO role is a hybrid role designed to work across departments, with a focus on sales, marketing, and product,” says Matt Fitzgerald, CGO of the Buchanan Group, and Home Tester Club, which democratizes product reviews.
Other Chief Growth Officers agree:
“Traditional functional silos can slow a company down while they gather consensus amongst respective leads,” says Chris Renton, CGO of SnapPay. “For companies that are growing extremely fast, the CGO focuses on short, medium and long term strategic initiatives, partnerships, products, marketing, and sales to drive growth.”
That’s not just wishful thinking or idle chatter. What we saw in the data is a significant difference between companies that are led by CGOs and those that are not.
At CGO-led companies, we found that:
- Apps are much more critical
- Marketing teams are much larger
- Marketing budgets are also larger
- Marketers are significantly more fraud-aware
- Granular data is a much bigger focus
- AI and automation are high on the priority list
- New skills training is much more likely to be prioritized
- Marketing technology is also a higher-priority investment
(For all the details and stats, see the full report. Again, it’s free, and you won’t have to surrender your personal information.)
The most critical piece?
CGO-led organizations are focused on achieving analytics mastery. That’s something that, once achieved, comes with a 3X performance improvement in speed, ROI, efficiency, and customer insights, according to Gartner.
Access the full report to find out:
- Where CGOs are growing
- What CGOs are achieving
- How CGOs are optimizing growth
- What CGOs are changing
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