Randy Brown, Chief Marketing Officer at Chief Outsiders and Founder and CEO of Live-Stream Interchange, knows a lot about driving organic business growth through marketing. He shared his excitement and passion for marketing with Tim Maitland.

“The focus for so long has been on the discretionary spend component of marketing, which is the marketing budget and all of the stuff we see every day, especially the traditional advertising and PR and tradeshows and events and things like that,” Brown said. “But when you actually look at the total upstream through downstream activities that add value in the business and drive value creation, there are a lot of extremely important processes in there that are not necessarily consuming discretionary marketing spend.”

Brown and his two businesses help companies realize the value in those processes, so they make the most of their marketing opportunities without sacrificing budget. One formula Brown believes in is growth gears, which he calls the three Gs.

“That first gear is insights,” Brown said.

This linear process begins with a company understanding its markets, customers, and its competition. Once the company knows what space to operate in, the formulation of the best strategy can commence.

“We then move to the second gear, which is strategy development,” Brown said. “This is developing the strategy based on those strategic hypotheses that you developed in the insights gear. The deliverable in this gear is to identify the top three to five growth levers that the whole organization will rally around and driving the market around a three-year strategic plan.”

The final gear is execution. And this last step is focused on the organization aligning, funding and resourcing all the marketing activities to drive sales effectiveness.