It's a marathon, not a sprint – Five B2B marketing rules for sustainable business growth

The pressure for rapid growth is immense in today's business landscape. Companies are often pushed to focus on short-term tactics and quick wins, chasing metrics that look good on a quarterly report but fail to build a foundation for the future. This relentless pursuit of speed can lead to burnout, wasted resources, and a brand that never truly connects with its audience.

The conventional wisdom about growth is flawed. True, long-term success isn’t about sprinting; it’s about building a resilient organization with a deliberate, foundational, and phased approach.

Here are five powerful, and sometimes counter-intuitive, take-aways for building a brand and business that lasts.

1. Sustainable growth is less about Product and Price and more about People and Planet

Many of us learned about the classic "4Ps of Marketing" – Product, Price, Promotion, and Place – a foundational framework for marketing strategy developed by Philip Kotler that has dominated business school curricula for decades.

This has served as our inspiration for the ”4 Ps of Sustainable Growth”: People, Performance, Planet, and Profit – an adapted framework that allows us to broaden the scope to the whole business, not just marketing (watch the video with senior consultants Mimmis Cleeren and Pernilla Brouzell as they discuss the topic).

The 4 Ps of Sustainable Growth: People, Performance, Planet, and Profit.

This adapted model reframes the core drivers of a successful business:

• People: This starts internally with your company culture and values. A strong brand is built from the inside out, where corporate values and brand values are one and the same.

• Performance: This covers not just what you deliver to the market, but how you act and co-create value with your customers, making true customer-centricity a core operational principle.

• Planet: This represents sustainability in its broadest sense, going beyond just environmentalism to encompass the long-term viability and responsibility of your business practices.

• Profit: This is not the starting point, but the natural result of getting the other three Ps right. When you build a strong culture, deliver excellent performance, and operate responsibly, profit follows.

This shift is impactful because it moves growth from a purely transactional activity to a holistic, values-driven mission. It’s about creating profound, lasting value, not just short-term revenue.

2. To scale faster, you must first go slower: The "Crawl, Walk, Run" model

The desire to scale quickly is understandable, but attempting to run before you can walk is a recipe for failure. The "Crawl, Walk, Run" scale-up model represents the three essential stages of a company's maturity, ensuring you build a solid foundation before hitting the accelerator.

The three stages of a scale-up maturity - Crawl, Walk, Run. Source: SUNMICO AB.

Each stage has a distinct focus:

• Crawl: This is the foundational stage. The focus is on creating the conditions for awareness. This means defining the marketing strategy, identifying company values and desired behaviors, developing a clear value proposition, and putting essential assets in place like a visual identity, core marketing materials, internal processes, and a functional website.
  

• Walk: This stage is about execution and learning. With a foundation in place, you can start driving traffic, running targeted campaigns, and measuring results. The primary goals are to build Visibility, Awareness and Adoption, while critically understanding and refining the marketing and sales funnel and creating a CRM strategy.
  

• Run: This is the scaling and optimization stage. Now, you can increase market exposure with bigger budgets and new channels, implement advanced marketing automation, and nurture existing customers. The goals become more sophisticated: increasing Share of Voice, improving Market Perception, and maximizing customer lifetime value.

The core lesson is profoundly counter-intuitive: rushing to the "Run" stage without mastering the "Crawl" and "Walk" phases inevitably leads to inefficiency.

It's simply not sustainable to try to run before you can walk – you will waste a lot of time and resources trying to do things your company is not yet ready for.

3. Your brand isn't a logo; it's your culture made public

Marketing and brand-building cannot be done in a silo. A brand is not just a clever logo or a snappy tagline; it is the public expression of your internal culture and values. For a brand to be truly effective, what you say externally must align perfectly with who you are internally.

This authenticity is the basis of trust. When your corporate values are the same as your brand values, customers experience a consistent and genuine organization. This means that "what you see is what you actually get."

This alignment must be evident in everything from leadership styles and product development to the way you create documentation. A disjointed experience, where external marketing messages don't match internal realities, erodes trust and destroys long-term value. Successful brand-building involves everyone in the company acting in accordance with its core values.

4. Don't cut your engine in a downturn – trim it

A common reaction to economic uncertainty is to slash the marketing budget. It's often seen as an easy cost to cut. However, this is a strategic error. Marketing should not be viewed as a cost to be saved, but as an investment in future growth.

Tough economic times are not a signal to stop marketing, but an opportunity to be smarter about it. Successful companies use downturns to their advantage. They take the time to revisit their messaging, refine their strategy, and develop valuable content. This proactive approach ensures that when the economy recovers, they are positioned to accelerate, not left trying to regain lost momentum and mindshare.

This mindset transforms a recession from a threat into a strategic opportunity to capture market share while competitors retreat.

5. The most important growth question isn't "What's next?" – it's "What do we stop?"

As a company grows, its marketing and communication strategies must evolve. Activities that were critical in the "Crawl" stage may become irrelevant or inefficient in the "Run" stage. Yet, organizations often accumulate tactics without ever pruning what no longer serves them.

To combat this, it’s essential to regularly challenge the status quo with the simple but powerful "Stop, Continue, Start" framework:

• Stop: What activities are no longer contributing effectively to business objectives? Cutting these frees up resources for more impactful initiatives.

• Continue: What is working well? These are the activities that should be reinforced, improved, or done more frequently.

• Start: What new activities are needed to support the company’s next stage of growth and evolving market position?

Asking "What should we stop doing?" is the most crucial question because it is an act of strategic liberation. It frees up locked-up capital – whether time, budget, or focus – and redeploys it towards innovation and the activities that will define the next stage of growth.

Conclusion

Sustainable growth is not a sprint for short-term wins; it's the result of an integrated strategic process. This process is built on an authentic brand rooted in your People and culture. It progresses through deliberate Crawl, Walk, Run stages, avoiding the temptation to scale prematurely. During downturns, it means investing in your growth engine while others retreat. And guiding it all is the discipline to constantly ask what to stop, which provides the fuel and focus needed to advance from one stage to the next. By treating these principles as an interconnected framework, you can build a business that not only grows but endures.

Looking at your own organization, what is one thing you should stop doing to better prepare for the growth journey ahead?

#B2Bmarketing #marketingstrategy #SustainableGrowth