Your Growth Engine Matters More Than Sales Training: Here’s Why

Delivering on ambitious growth plans is one of the defining challenges for today’s business leaders. Some growth initiatives yield impressive results, while others reveal underlying obstacles. For companies facing the latter, the natural instinct is often to focus on the sales team: investing in training, recruiting new talent, implementing methodologies, or even undergoing wholesale transformation. These are all valid strategies, and each can play an important role in driving business growth. But they’re not the full answer.

At Mohala Growth Partners, we encourage leaders to pause and ask themselves a critical question before pouring resources into sales-focused solutions: Is your business geared for growth? This means examining not just your sales team but the entire growth engine—the alignment between sales, marketing, and product management—and whether it’s positioned to deliver sustainable results in today’s fast-changing market. Often, the root cause of stalled growth lies in overlooked gaps within this engine.

This post explores why your growth engine matters more than sales training and offers a framework for leaders to assess and optimise it.

 

 

The Common Approach: Focusing on Sales First

• When revenue growth slows or needs to accelerate, sales teams are often the first point of scrutiny. Business leaders may:

1. • Invest in Sales Training: Enhance skills like objection handling, consultative selling, or negotiation.

1. • Recruit New Talent: Bring in experienced salespeople to improve pipeline performance.

1. • Adopt New Sales Methodologies: Implement systems like SPIN selling or MEDDIC.

1. • Undergo Transformation Initiatives: Restructure teams or reconfigure sales processes.

These efforts have their place, and they often deliver measurable benefits. However, they assume that sales teams operate in isolation from other key functions. In reality, sales performance is intricately linked to the effectiveness of marketing and product management. Without alignment, even the best sales initiatives can falter.

 

The Overlooked Question: Is Your Business Geared for Growth?

Before committing to sales-focused activities, leaders must step back and ask: How does our business achieve growth? This seemingly simple question often prompts a superficial response, rooted in growth plans already in place. However, real growth requires a deeper understanding of how the three core functions—product management, marketing, and sales—work together.

 

Is Product Management Ready for Today’s Market?

Product management is the starting point of the growth engine, shaping the value proposition that sales and marketing deliver. But markets don’t stand still. To truly support growth, leaders must consider:

• • Customer Expectations: Have customer needs evolved since the product was first developed? Staying current requires regular engagement with customers beyond those who have been with the business for years, as their insights may no longer reflect broader market realities.

• • Competitive Landscape: Are innovative competitors outpacing your product offering? A proposition that was once unique may now face challenges from disruptors who’ve shifted the market’s perception of value.

• • External Market Forces: How are economic, regulatory, or technological changes affecting the market? Product teams must adjust to these external pressures to ensure the business remains competitive.

Without clarity in these areas, product management risks becoming reactive rather than proactive—a major barrier to achieving sustained growth.

 

Is Marketing Aligned with Today’s Buyer?

Marketing bridges the gap between the product and the customer, crafting messages that resonate. But how well does your marketing team understand today’s buyer?

• • Buyer Personas: Are they up to date? A buyer persona developed years ago may no longer reflect current purchasing behaviours or decision-making processes.

• • Relevance and Differentiation: Does your marketing highlight how your product or service solves today’s problems better than the competition? Differentiation is critical, especially in crowded markets.

• • Metrics and Goals: Are marketing efforts aligned with driving revenue growth, or are they focused on vanity metrics like lead volume? High lead counts mean little if those leads aren’t qualified or relevant to sales.

Marketing that fails to adapt to changing buyer expectations risks wasting resources on campaigns that generate activity but not results.

 

Can Sales Effectively Articulate a Differentiated Value Proposition?

Sales teams are often seen as the frontline of growth, but their success depends on alignment with product and marketing. Leaders should evaluate:

• • Clarity on Outcomes: Can salespeople clearly articulate the outcomes your product delivers, tailored to the client’s specific needs? Generic pitches no longer suffice in a competitive market.

• • Confidence in the Proposition: Do they feel equipped with the insights and tools needed to differentiate your offering? Outdated or inconsistent information can erode confidence and effectiveness.

• • Collaboration with Other Teams: Are sales, marketing, and product management working together regularly to refine strategies, or are they operating in silos?

The inability to articulate a compelling, differentiated value proposition is a common cause of missed opportunities—and it often stems from misalignment within the growth engine.

 

Assessing Alignment in Your Growth Engine

Alignment is essential, yet many businesses operate with disconnected teams. This misalignment can lead to:

• • Fragmented Objectives: Marketing prioritises lead generation, product focuses on feature development, and sales targets conversions—but none are working towards shared growth goals.

• • Stale Market Understanding: Teams rely on outdated data or long-term client feedback, missing the broader market shifts that competitors are capitalising on.

• • Ineffective Collaboration: Cross-departmental meetings occur, but they’re often tactical rather than strategic, addressing immediate issues rather than aligning on long-term growth plans.

Ask some simple questions::

1. • Conduct Cross-Functional Reviews: Understand how each team views the market and their role within the growth engine.

1. • Evaluate Data Sharing: Are insights from marketing informing sales strategies? Is product development aligned with real-time customer feedback?

1. • Examine Collaborative Practices: Are teams strategising regularly and with purpose, or are meetings driven by siloed agendas? Leaders within these departmental functions can also be highly adept at leveraging company politics to mask agendas or redirect focus away from themselves. For example, sales teams may blame marketing for poor-quality leads, while marketing might claim that sales fails to follow up effectively. This finger-pointing often results in ineffective collaboration and perpetuates silos.

But the more important question is: Are these departments solely focused on growth? Or are marketing efforts driven by departmental KPIs like lead volume, and sales by short-term targets such as hitting this year’s revenue numbers—to the exclusion of the company’s longer-term growth plans? Departmental leaders can be highly effective at creating the appearance that company growth is their primary focus. However, if their bonuses and performance metrics are tied to individual departmental outcomes, the reality is often different.

This misalignment underscores the need for clear, shared objectives across departments. Without a unified growth strategy, departmental goals will remain siloed, and the organisation’s overall growth potential will be compromised.

 

The Case for Growth Alignment Diagnostics

A structured growth alignment diagnostic provides an impartial, comprehensive and critically impartial, evaluation of your business’s growth engine. This process identifies:

• • Business and Department Level Diagnostic: Where your product, marketing, and sales teams sit on a spectrum from disconnected to fully integrated.

• • Correlation Analysis: Review multiple data sources to correlate how aligned the organisation is to the overarching business strategy and its growth plans.

• • Key Gaps: Specific areas where misalignment is hindering performance.

• • Actionable Recommendations: Targeted strategies to improve alignment and drive sustainable growth.

The LinkedIn Statistic: A Wake-Up Call

In a 2024 LinkedIn survey of 2,000 companies, only 35% of senior leaders believed their growth engine was effectively aligned. This alarming statistic highlights the widespread nature of this issue and underscores the need for businesses to prioritise alignment before investing in siloed initiatives.

 

Quick Informal Test before Spending on Sales Initiatives:

Consider these steps:

1. • Ask the Right Questions: Challenge assumptions by engaging teams in discussions about market conditions, buyer expectations, and competitive positioning.

1. • Understand the Depth of Silo Thinking: discuss shared growth objectives and how your teams will think about them and what that means to them achieving the results – look out for departmental focus!

1. • Invest in a Diagnostic: Work with growth consulting experts, such as Mohala Growth Partners, to conduct a comprehensive alignment assessment.

1. • Foster a Culture of Collaboration: Regularly convene sales, marketing, and product teams to strategise and share insights.

When revenue growth needs to go through a step-change or improvement, focusing solely on sales training, hiring, or methodologies can provide short-term improvements but often misses the bigger picture. Sustainable growth requires a fully aligned growth engine where product management, marketing, and sales work seamlessly together.

As the LinkedIn statistic (and many industry and academic studies) shows, most companies fall short in this area. By prioritising growth alignment diagnostics and addressing how your business achieves growth, you can unlock greater potential and ensure that every investment contributes to meaningful results.

Your growth engine matters more than sales training—invest in it wisely.