That assumption deserves more scrutiny than it usually receives. A business can have capable people in Product, Marketing and Sales, each working hard and delivering against their own objectives, while the system connecting them is not strong enough to support a significantly larger ambition. Under ordinary conditions, experienced individuals can compensate for those weaknesses through relationships, personal judgement and additional effort. Once the growth expectation rises substantially, those informal mechanisms begin to show their limits.
I encountered this very directly when I joined Samsung with a simple brief: double the local B2B business within a year. The objective was clear, but the commercial infrastructure underneath it was still relatively modest. The B2B team effectively consisted of one highly experienced salesperson, while local product and marketing support had considerable room to develop. Doubling the business therefore could not reasonably be treated as a matter of asking Sales to make twice as many calls or Marketing to create twice as much activity.
One of my first conversations with the salesperson was deliberately practical. Rather than arriving with a large programme of my own, I asked what he needed most from Product to make his work easier. His answer was a proper local product catalogue in Dutch and French, which initially sounded almost too basic in relation to the size of the target. Building it together quickly revealed why that apparently small request mattered.
The catalogue forced several things to connect that had previously been more separate. Product knowledge had to be translated into material that Sales could actually use, while customer conversations began flowing back into the way products were explained. I joined customer visits to understand what people were asking, which parts of the offer required more explanation and where our existing material was not helping enough. Marketing could then use real local examples and customer proof rather than creating content at a greater distance from the field.
None of those changes would individually explain why the business eventually doubled. Their importance was that they strengthened the commercial system through which the larger growth ambition had to travel. Once Product, Marketing and Sales were working from a more connected view of the market, it became easier to identify larger opportunities, support customer conversations and broaden the commercial approach beyond the existing category. Hotel TV, tenders and other volume opportunities subsequently became part of the growth story, but they were pursued within a business that was becoming more connected rather than simply more active.
This distinction matters because growth targets are usually allocated through an organisation function by function. Sales receives a revenue number, Marketing receives pipeline or demand objectives, Product receives roadmap priorities, and management expects the combined effort to produce the desired result. What is less frequently examined is whether those functions are making their decisions from the same assumptions about customers, priorities and the route to growth.
When those assumptions differ, additional pressure can amplify the disagreement rather than solve it. Marketing may generate more demand for the segments it considers attractive while Sales concentrates on accounts it believes can close quickly. Product may prioritise capabilities based on a longer-term view of the market while the commercial organisation responds to immediate customer requests. Each decision can make sense within its own function while the combined effect creates more activity, more handoffs and more opportunities for friction.
The situation becomes particularly difficult because increased activity initially looks like progress. Campaign volumes rise, pipeline reviews become more intense, account plans multiply and management sees a visible response to the growth challenge. If the commercial logic underneath those activities has not been aligned, however, the organisation can expend considerably more energy without creating a proportional improvement in results. The growth target has increased the workload without increasing the coherence of the system.
That is one reason ambitious targets can be diagnostically useful. They expose dependencies that were previously manageable. A salesperson who could bridge a positioning gap personally may no longer have time to do so at twice the volume. A marketing team that relied on informal feedback from Sales may find that information arrives too slowly once the funnel becomes larger. A product leader who could resolve conflicting requests individually may discover that the organisation needs clearer criteria for prioritisation.
Those pressures should not automatically be interpreted as evidence that the people involved lack capability. In many cases, the larger ambition has simply revealed that the organisation was relying on individuals to compensate for weaknesses in the way work moved between functions. The people were carrying more of the operating model than management realised.
The same pattern appears during acquisitions, international expansion and changes in business model. A commercial setup that worked well at one level of complexity can become increasingly dependent on informal coordination as the organisation grows. Adding more people or increasing targets without revisiting how decisions, information and ownership move through the system can make those dependencies harder to manage. Growth then begins to create its own drag.
Senior management therefore has to distinguish between two very different questions. The first is whether the organisation has enough capacity to deliver the target, while the second is whether the existing commercial model can convert additional capacity into additional growth. The first question leads naturally towards more resources and more activity, whereas the second forces a discussion about priorities, customer logic, positioning, handoffs and decision rights.
That discussion can be uncomfortable because it moves the growth challenge away from individual departments and into shared management territory. It is relatively straightforward to ask Sales for a stronger pipeline or Marketing for more leads. It is harder to decide which customers deserve disproportionate attention, which propositions should be prioritised, what the organisation will deliberately not pursue, and how Product, Marketing and Sales should resolve competing demands when all of them appear reasonable.
Yet those are often the decisions that make a larger growth ambition credible.
A target of ten percent additional growth may sometimes be absorbed through better execution within the existing system. Doubling a business is a different proposition because the organisation cannot assume that yesterday's operating model will scale automatically to tomorrow's ambition. At some point, leaders have to ask whether the way the business currently creates, communicates and converts value is capable of carrying the result they are asking for.
That is the more useful role of an ambitious growth target. It should do more than increase pressure on the organisation. It should force management to examine whether the commercial system itself is ready for the ambition being placed upon it.
When the answer is no, asking every function to work harder may create impressive levels of activity, but it will not necessarily create the business the target assumes already exists.
