What if we aimed to sell better by rethinking our growth strategies and how to create value instead of focusing on the prevailing paradigm of extracting value and selling more, more, more in a finite world? This is Sales Trend 4 of the 12 Sales Trends Report for 2023.

Sales growth is usually the top priority for almost every CEO and sales leader going around. The common catch cries of ‘How do we sell more? How do we grow market share? How do we get more customers to buy more? How do we increase margins and shareholder return’? have been ringing out through many boardrooms, C-suites, and sales team meetings on a daily basis for at least the last 50 years.

There is nothing wrong with these questions in principle, however, businesses, governments, and societies are at a major tipping point as they look to grapple with the current state of the world’s economies, the rise in inequality, limits on our finite supplies and worldly resources, and environmental degradation.

There are a lot of questions being asked and deep thinking going on when it comes to rethinking growth, and how we deliver value and create a sustainable world in which to work, live, and flourish.

Questions such as What type of growth are we looking for? What types of markets do we want to be in? Does growth always have to be linear? Does growing bigger always equal better? Do we stay private or should we IPO? Why is GDP the main measure? How do we become the next unicorn?

It’s time we rethink what we mean by value and growth if we want to be around for the long term.

The devastating consequences of exponential growth & value extraction

In March 1972, a book called ‘The Limits of Growth’ was released selling several millions of copies at the time. It was written by a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who spent two years plugging data into a computer-simulated model called World3, to understand the implications of growthism for humanity.

What is Growthism? Growthism says growth must be achieved at all costs; growthism is willing to sacrifice everything for more growth. It’s not just a system or a set of institutions, it’s a mindset; an ideology; a set of cherished beliefs; one that’s hardened into dogma. Growthism contends that growth IS the point. [1]

What these MIT researchers found was this: ”If humans propagate, spread, build, consume, and pollute beyond the limits of our tiny spinning orb, we will have problems.”

Growthism brings us to Milton Friedman, whose focus was on value extraction to maximise profits and shareholder return. Fans of Friedman look to extract value from every source possible -clients, employees, supply chain, resources, communities, and the environment. See Sales Trend 2 – the Moral case for being human-centred for more insights into these issues.

As noted by Herman Daly, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, in his article, Growthism: its ecological, economic and ethical limits[2], 21 March 2019, “The present system of world growthism, in the broadly capitalist mode, is triumphant. But growthism itself has turned out to be a false god because growth in our finite and entropic world now increases ecological and social costs faster than production benefits, making us poorer, not richer (except for the top few percent). Recognition of this reversal is obscured by the fact that our national accounts (GDP) do not subtract the costs of growth, but effectively add them by counting the expenditures incurred to defend ourselves from the un-subtracted costs of growth.”

As stated in the 2 May 2021 Forbes article, Why Business Must Shift From Value Extraction To Value Creation, “The self-interested approach of value-extraction at the expense of the rest of society came under increasingly intense criticism. Even Jack Welch called maximizing shareholder value, ‘the dumbest idea in the world’. The meager financial returns of firms pursuing shareholder value added fuel to the fire.”

This 50+-year obsession with growing bigger, faster, while extracting value at the cost of humans and the planet is killing us, literally. Growthism is not human-centred.

So how much is enough and where to from here?

Umair Haque, Director of Havis Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics for Humans says “Just as positive psychology revolutionized our understanding of mental health by recasting the field as more than just treating mental illness, we need to rethink our economic paradigm. Why? Because business as we know it has reached a state of diminishing returns–though we work harder and harder, we never seem to get anywhere. This has led to a diminishing of the common wealth: wage stagnation, widening economic inequality, the depletion of the natural world, and more. To get out of this trap, we need to rethink the future of human exchange. In short, we need to get out of business and into betterness.”

While these wicked problems can leave us feeling overwhelmed, there are practical remedies, decisions, and actions we can take now to bend the curve towards a better future. Unsurprisingly, these concepts are not new and can be easily adopted if we have the will.

1. Shifting to the Value Creation Path

When it comes to value creation, we can listen to the market and what our clients are telling us.

Creating customer value is not new. The customer value creation paradigm signalled by Peter Drucker in 1954 has very different consequences from that of the value extraction paradigm. Whilst Peter Drucker’s focus was on management, leadership, and the intersection between organisations and society, the cornerstone of his ideas for business was always on the customer.

“An enterprise’s purpose begins on the outside with the customer…” (Drucker 1986)

The purpose the organisation exists is to add value for customers. If there is no value add, then the organisation will cease to exist. Knowing the customer and the two-way value exchange is critical to long term business success.

For many years, Drucker’s dictum was ignored, however, it’s being embraced by more and more businesses around the world as human-centred customer-first thinking spreads across organisations.

Instead of just selling more, more, more, and strip mining the planet of resources, we need to adapt to selling better, listening to our clients’ priorities, and determining what value means to them and how we can deliver that value in a way that is economically, environmentally, and morally sound.

2. Being Businessworthy & B Corps

What if we “Strive not to be the best company in the world, but the best company FOR the world”?

This is the philosophy of B Corps which encourage organisations to use the power of business to solve social and environmental problems. They encourage businesses to be a force for good for everyone and the planet. Becoming a B Corp opens up a new world of different growth opportunities markets, customers, partners and suppliers, and how to add value in a way that doesn’t destroy the planet.

Then there’s the concept of Being Businessworthy developed by the Business for Peace Foundation in Norway.

Being Businessworthy is about recognising that in business we need to get these two curves, the “making money” curve and the “making a difference” curve, to come together. We need to make money while making a positive difference to other people; merging profit with a higher purpose while acting ethically and responsibly.

Both B Corps and Being Businessworthy are human-centred and purpose-led.

While the prevailing business models, in big business at least, are still heavily weighted in the profit maximisation camp, more and more customers are demanding change – they are wanting to engage with, and buy from, human-centred, ethical businesses that take into account the Quadruple Bottom Line – people, purpose, profit, planet.

Selling Better instead of selling more is worthwhile. In fact, Selling Better has been proving to be more profitable than selling more[3].

It’s time we rethink growth and look at the various options available to us, especially those options that deliver better business and societal outcomes for humans, humanity, and the planet.

[1] https://hbr.org/2013/10/this-isnt-capitalism-its-growthism-and-its-bad-for-us

[2] https://www.localfutures.org/growthism-its-ecological-economic-and-ethical-limits/

[3] https://www.barrett.com.au/blogs/2022/7688/case-study/selling-better-in-extreme-conditions-
case-study/

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