The UGF is so simple and versatile, it is hard to explain

Digital Transformation is a broad topic and like customer centricity, involves every part of a company. A large client had many patchwork initiatives around “digital”.   We used the UGF as a reference point to assess the current state and to make recommendations on what to improve.

Because of its structure, the UGF provided a customer perspective - starting with the customer and moving backward. Short-term improvements could be immediately made while we identified larger, more strategic topics to be addressed.

The Unified Growth Framework (UGF) is used in innovation projects, including product and business process innovations. It provides a customer-focused perspective, enabling businesses to evaluate both product and business process innovations. A specific client had a problem both separating the business and the product innovations, while understanding when both should be considered together.

The UGF provides a customer focused structure that enables clarity to the client to understand if the customer will buy the innovation, or what needs to change with the innovation to make it attractive to the customer.

The UGF helped a non-digital manufacturer understand the impact of its customers’ digital transformation. It identified key changes, including: 1) Customer expectations, 2) Competitive landscape, and 3) Internal challenges.

The UGF also enabled the company to develop strategies for addressing these challenges, such as: 1) Investing in digital technologies, 2) Developing new digital products and services, 3) Training employees on new technologies and processes.

The IT team initially believed that all products should undergo the same order-to-cash process. However, the UGF (specifically, the 3rd step, “Order,” and the 4th step, “Use”) highlighted the differences in customer requirements across markets.

This insight improved the IT team’s understanding, resulting in better outcomes in subsequent sprints.

A sales organization improved its forecasting accuracy and efficiency by categorizing CRM opportunities into four distinct types (UGF): 1. New customer, 2. Renewal, 3. Enhancement, add-on, and 4. Expansion. This approach recognized that each category had different probabilities and growth impacts, leading to forecasts that better reflected customer activities. Additionally, it was discovered that sales processes varied significantly across these opportunity types.

As a result, forecast accuracy significantly improved, and the time sales management spent on forecasting was reduced.

A client enjoyed a very high level of brand recognition. However, a disproportionate level of the marketing budget was pointed at bringing in new “logos” and not developing existing customers. Social media campaigns were being made to entice a new customer, while ignoring existing ones.

The UGF enabled the marketing team to adapt its approach, which triggered a sales increase with existing customers.

A large, global company experiencing declining website traffic used the Unified Growth Framework (UGF) to identify and reinstate valuable content previously removed for certain customer personas. It was found that the process for capturing new customer data was inefficient and unhelpful to the customer. The UGF facilitated clearer IT / marketing requirements by emphasizing a customer-centric approach.

Through content improvement, deploying a Customer Data Platform, and refining feedback processes, the website became more customer focused and traffic increased, improving cross-department collaboration.

Sales’ lead acceptance of leads generated by marketing was under 10%. The UGF enabled the marketing team to target customers better, while improving how the salesforce qualified and interacted with the leads when received. Both marketing and sales share a common goal of helping the customer start the selection process.

In one year, sales lead acceptance increased to over 75%.