With the inclusion of ‘growth’ in many new senior leadership role titles and the relatively recent invention of the CRO position, it feels like ambitious organizations are pivoting hard towards strategies and efforts to fuel growth. But there’s an inherent problem to be resolved before this new intention becomes more than a hollow corporate mantra or sentiment to impress investors.
The real challenge is that to genuinely enable and drive growth across your organization, you require levels of collaboration and internal go-to-market clarity well beyond the current status quo. You must enact structural and behavioral change. Most organizations believe that they have their teams, regions and channels aligned, but here’s the reality: in the process of execution, the divide begins and the gap continually widens.
A true orientation to growth requires all the fundamental functions within an organization to ruthlessly follow a single vision, to universally understand and adopt the same strategy. Unfortunately, this rarely happens. Executives share their vision, sales start to implement a commercially focused revenue strategy and marketing works to build a powerful brand. Everyone believes that they are connected, they all attempt to align but, in reality, they’re each acting in isolation. Somewhere in the routine day-to-day translation from strategy to execution, the signal is lost in the race to deliver against their independent goals.
The next generation of (B2B) professional services providers has emerged to address this embedded issue. There is now a world where business consulting and creative agency services are being integrated to ensure that an organization can achieve a unified growth ambition across its entirety, regardless of global footprint, channel complexity or the reality of internal power plays. In this new era, the big-picture corporate vision drives a powerfully aligned go-to-market strategy, which is delivered through an aligned sales model, branding strategy and in-market activation program, all of which are underpinned by a cohesive, integrated data/technology platform.
It sounds so simple, but it takes a new breed of professional services partner to support a business in transitioning from a growth ambition to a growth outcome, in removing the disconnects and the silos, in delivering a single strategy without a moment of signal loss.
Some firms have built their new capabilities by adding creative skills to a business consultancy; others have taken creative agencies and bolted on business consulting skills, but both models are challenged commercially and culturally. The alternative is a new type of professional services partner that is being built from the ground up, part agency and part consultancy but one company– like our firm, Marketbridge – with one connected team, seamlessly reinventing growth globally.
It’s time to start bridging the gap. It’s time to meet Marketbridge.
This article originally appeared in B2B Marketing’s 2025 U.S. B2B Agency Benchmarking Report.
