Join a group of Software as a Service (SaaS) executives around the proverbial water cooler (or, more likely, a Zoom call) and you might hear talk of unicorns and magic numbers, expansion metrics, or churn rates. Whether it sounds like fantasy or finance, they’re all talking about the same thing. Growth.

You don’t need to be a tech titan to know that constant growth is the linchpin by which SaaS businesses operate, but not all growth looks the same. And despite what some overzealous pundits want you to believe, not all growth is “good” growth.

I’ve been focused on business growth my entire career, leading both marketing and sales teams in SaaS, data storage, and other industries. The sales and marketing departments I oversee at Celigo have achieved significant growth since my start here in the summer of 2023. I couldn’t be prouder of my teams because that’s the type of sustainable trajectory more SaaS businesses should aim for.

Sustainable growth is more incremental, but it’s also less likely to fizzle out fast. It looks forward instead of just at the current quarter or fiscal year. And while it takes many forms, it’s a lens businesses can use to determine their hiring needs, sales projections, and new market development requirements—helping you understand the levers you can pull to continue to excel. All while still doing right by your current customers and preventing your employees from burning out. 

It’s the model we use here at Celigo, where we follow a three-step approach to sustainable growth.

Step 1: Establish a growth agenda

Many SaaS growth plans leave a lot to be desired—resembling a “choose your own adventure” game, rather than a strategic approach. It sounds crazy, but in my experience many teams don’t document their plans well and this leads to lack of alignment and constantly revisiting “decisions” that were made. So how do you fix that? By writing out a growth agenda, which formally answers questions like:

• What do we want the company to look like in 24 to 36 months?
• What are our biggest priorities to establish that growth?
• What do we need to do now to achieve it?

Take Celigo, for example. We’re an established mid-stage, privately held company with a significant customer base. Our priorities are to continue to grow predictably by entering new markets, diversifying the business, and introducing new products that service our existing customers. To make that happen, we’re actively hiring and resourcing the company to meet those goals, and looking for ways to add new efficiencies to our go-to-market processes. 

Voila. We have a growth agenda in progress. The next step is to establish a formal roadmap based on those goals and the growth characteristics you expect to see, outlining the specific quarter-by-quarter revenue goals you need to achieve to meet those objectives. With those revenue targets in place, you can begin to execute strategies and tactics to accomplish them and align your objectives and key results (OKRs), management incentives, and company-wide goals accordingly. 

But writing out a growth agenda is just the start.

Step 2: Align your organization 

The next step is to align your entire organization around your growth agenda. Because sustainable growth is only achievable when all your teams are driving in the same direction. 

To achieve this, I’ve found that leaders must constantly communicate—even over-communicate—the agenda. You’ll know you’re on the right track when you find your own voice becoming a bit repetitive. Attention spans are short and there are competing priorities, so don’t be afraid to hammer your point home.

Everybody across the organization should have a clear, undisputed view of what you’re hoping to achieve, how, and when. They should understand the metrics through which you view growth and their role in meeting them. 

To communicate our growth agenda at Celigo, we take a multi-pronged approach, getting buy-in by prioritizing the teams, leaders, or stakeholders with the biggest stakes or loudest voices first. It might take time to get everyone on board—we all know agreement isn’t a given in most businesses—but the only way we can align everyone on a common goal is by opening the door to these conversations in the first place. 

Then we align on departmental roles and responsibilities so that each team knows its unique objectives. This is where a lot of organizations go wrong. Not only do they start out with a poorly defined view of where growth is going to come from, but they’re unable to communicate their expectations to the rest of the business. Growth may be the goal, but if it’s just a vague expectation, nobody will know what they’re meant to do, and nobody will be aligned on the same objectives. You’re doomed for failure from the start.

And if success is your objective (and it usually is), why wouldn’t you do everything you can to enable it? Which brings me to my next point.

Step 3: Set your business up for success

Don’t leave roadblocks in the way of growth. Rather, remove friction and add efficiencies to your processes and workflows to set your teams up for success from the start. 

Think about how you engage with potential customers, convert them to leads and opportunities and manage them through the buying process. This involves many touchpoints and systems. If any of those are disjointed, a prospect will encounter friction and may choose to step away, moving on to a competitor instead. And the repercussions of that are more personal than simply a lost sale. A dedicated salesperson who put in the effort to secure the deal is missing out on the success, potentially hindering your team’s ability to achieve growth targets.

When data is siloed, you’re also doing your teams a disservice—tasking them with reentering data across tech solutions. That can lead to inaccuracies, inefficiencies, and failed collaboration—but from a ground-level perspective, it’s also counterintuitive to your overall goals, and simply a time suck for your employees. Team members are engaged in tedious manual tasks instead of focusing on higher-value activities that contribute to the organization’s overarching goals. These inefficiencies make meeting growth objectives—and maximizing profitability—more difficult for your business as a whole.

At Celigo, we’re operating in a competitive SaaS space, so we know maintaining sustainable growth requires every advantage we can get. Which is why we’ve unified our sales, marketing, and customer success processes—treating them as different stops in one singular journey. We also “drink our own Kool-Aid,” establishing strong integrations between solutions using Celigo’s own iPaaS  (Integration Platform as a Service) technology. All to ensure the customer experience is friction-free, data isn’t siloed, and technology works together. Then we automate wherever we can, freeing up our teams for even more high-value work. 

That helps our teams work together effectively as an organization and reduces friction along our customer journey—making sustainable growth easier for everyone to achieve.

Building growth that lasts

If leaders are only focused on growth now, at all costs, any shiny, happy successes you achieve early on can distract you from the big picture. You get focused on the next win, not whether those successes are possible to recreate or maintain in the long run. By focusing on sustainable growth, though—and facilitating it through a well-communicated growth agenda—you can start to see that growth take off, a slow and steady rise with an always visible horizon. 

And a unified tech stack can add efficiencies to that growth model, making it easier for organizations to better serve their customers and mitigate employee burnout. It can also help you stay on top of new markets and segments and remain agile to industry change—recognizing possible challenges early.

For growing SaaS businesses, that’s the kind of growth worth talking about.

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Want to learn more? Connect with James on LinkedIn and follow Celigo for more insights from our executive team.

James Whitemore is the Chief Growth Officer at Celigo. He has over 25 years of experience leading sales and marketing teams in the SaaS, cloud, networking, and data storage industries, and has a history of driving profitable revenue growth. James has worked for both start-up and big-tech companies, giving him a unique perspective on how sales and marketing teams can work together to form a predictable and scalable revenue engine.