Is Change Management the Missing Link in Your Revenue Growth Strategy?
What’s worse than something not working out? Seeing it turning into failure. (Fact in point :70% of all change initiatives fail). Now when you think about it in RGM’s context where success demands coordinated change across multiple functions, the challenges are even more acute.
Considering the various touchpoints of Revenue Growth Management(RGM), it’s not pricing and sales that has to be optimized. RGM managers must also balance the needs across marketing, supply chain, and other departments while meeting evolving retailer demands. And complexity only amplifies, thanks to volatile market dynamics, including general inflation, dramatic raw material cost fluctuations, and rapidly shifting consumer preferences which only gets ‘better’ with value-seeking “smart shoppers”.
Now this brings us to two important realisations –
1. The highly cross-functional nature of RGM efforts which touches every part of the value chain, 2. Change is the only constant.
Why Change Management is Critical for RGM Teams?
These two realizations create a perfect storm that makes traditional implementation approaches insufficient. Why? Because traditional change management approaches assume an idealistic implementation scenario where they have a clear start and end point, Stable market conditions during implementation, clearly defined stakeholders, sequential rollout plans and our personal favourite One-time training and capability building. But in RGM’s reality: It’s a total 180 degree. Now when you think of it because not only do you have to coordinate changes across multiple functions (already complex), but those changes need to happen in an environment where the target keeps moving.
Hence when we examine why RGM initiatives struggle to deliver their promised value, these two critical failure points emerge:
1. Resistance to change
Unlike isolated departmental changes, RGM transformations directly impact the already established way of working across the entire organization. Sales teams that have historically owned customer relationships now must adapt to data-driven pricing recommendations. Marketing teams might push back against promotion optimization that might limit their creative flexibility. Finance often questions the ROI of new RGM investments. This multi-layered resistance creates organizational antibodies that can quietly derail even the most well-designed RGM strategies.
And if not evident enough RGM’s effectiveness hinges on seamless collaboration across functions. However, when each department operates with different performance metrics, planning cycles, priority frameworks, decision-making processes ; It often leads to implementation deadlock and below par outcomes.
2. RGM Maturity and Resource Gaps
When you think of it, the maturity challenge in RGM is more than just tool adoption and trainings. Why? Because today’s RGM needs rather demands a fundamental shift from retrospective analysis to predictive decision-making. While we see that RGM managers understand its importance, but they are often seen rushing into RGM transformation without properly assessing maturity level or required capabilities.
Now this creates three critical sub gaps:
Data and Analytics Maturity
* Over-reliance on historical data creating a "rearview mirror" perspective
* Limited ability to run multiple hypothesis tests across RGM levers
* Teams struggle to move from "what happened?" to "what will happen?"
Post Your Ad Here
Comments