Q&A with Laura McDonald

Laura Macdonald is Chief Growth Officer for Hotwire Global, leading the organization’s global business development, marketing and innovation teams, as well as consulting with top global technology clients. Laura has a degree in Linguistics and Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.

What is the remit and role of the chief revenue/growth officer in your organization?

At Hotwire, my remit covers business development and sales, marketing and reputation, and product and innovation. It’s a pretty broad role, but ultimately it comes down to helping Hotwire and ROI∙DNA elevate their reputation, build and maintain the right relationships with marketing and comms leaders at top technology companies, and deliver on our own revenue goals for continued growth.

What are the essential requirements for growth strategy mapping, continuous innovation, digital transformation and performance calibration across the enterprise?

Asking questions! While people have always worked in sales, marketing and innovation, growth roles that bring all of these together as one is relatively new. Asking questions, and then using data and informed expertise (like client interviews, talking to peers, industry reports like from McKinsey) to put together potential solutions, and continue to learn from what’s working and iterate the next is essential.

What data-driven insights and intelligence are essential to identifying growth areas and formulating sustainable growth strategies?

We call this triangulating truths at Hotwire, and it’s something that we do for clients as well as ourselves. This means getting insights into our target audience and customers and what they’re looking for, understanding our direct competition and “frenemies” and what is working or not for them, as well as understanding the broader landscape and what those macro trends are in the market. Putting these insights together allows us to identify the white space for growth.

What systems or processes do you have to anticipate, understand and react to new contenders, market disruption, geo-political, economic and technological change?

We use a number of different tools, some proprietary and some third-party to pull in insights and anticipate upcoming trends. We use that plus conversations with current and potential customers plus peers to understand what’s happening, and allow us to identify the whitespace and where best to react. Change is constant, so for us it’s important to keep true to our core values and evaluate everything against that, not just react to a volatile environment.

Which functional leaders and teams need to align and combine to execute growth plans and deliverables?

All functional leaders and teams play a role in growth. If we don’t have the right client services or delivery in place, then we won’t have happy client who want to invest more with us to get even better results. If we don’t have the right people and culture initiatives then we won’t have strong team retention and growth and that impacts our ability to service clients and new business opportunities. Ultimately I believe that growth is a team sport, and everyone must play their role to be successful at executing our growth plans and deliverables.

How does your performance compare to competitors in your category space?

Certainly from conversations with similar sized peers to us, we seem to have a more dedicated, data-driven approach that allows us to plan ahead more effectively and invest in the right places.

What external and internal forces are most impacting your company’s ability to grow?

External is definitely the market forces and the confidence among tech brands and our marketing and comms clients to continue to invest. Internally it’s about capacity, and how much our team can invest into sharing new thinking and approaches, and not just on delivering what’s being asked of them today.

Where is your company currently focusing resources and marketing spend to counter these forces and generate incremental growth?

We’re focusing resources and marketing efforts not just on capturing attention with net-new clients, but also on educating existing clients on what we can offer. This takes the burden off our account teams who can focus on superior delivery, and allows us to meet our clients where they are, when they are most interested.