Today, Revenue Growth Management (RGM) departments are at the crossroads of strategy and execution, pivotal in driving meaningful, organization-wide change. By effectively utilizing RGM levers, these teams optimize revenue while ensuring that every department—from sales and marketing to finance and operations—aligns toward shared goals.
RGM is not a one-person job; it’s a cross-functional effort that touches every part of the value chain.
Orkla, a consumer goods company with over 300 local brands spread across 12 portfolio companies, is no stranger to change—and the effectiveness of their RGM department is proof. In our recent webinar with Orkla, hosted by Kaj-Dac Tam, VP NRM Strategy, we explored how RGM leaders can develop change management plans within complex organizational structures.
RGM teams can lead change management initiatives thanks to their cross-functional visibility and ability to influence decision-making. Their expertise in connecting the dots between departments allows them to see the bigger picture, ensuring that every decision is made with a holistic understanding of its impact.
Change management planning provides an opportunity to guide an organization toward long-term growth. However, with the rapid pace of market changes and data proliferation, RGM departments face ongoing challenges, including aligning strategies with the company’s overall goals and translating complex insights into actions.
The three common barriers to change are:
Addressing these barriers to change is essential because it will enable RGM departments to translate them into RGM actions. Here, we dive deeper into how Orkla addressed these barriers when setting up its RGM function across the organization.
One significant barrier to change is uncertainty. People across departments often hear about RGM, but few truly understand what it is and how it should be applied, leading to confusion and resistance to new initiatives. To overcome this, the RGM department must demystify RGM and show how it ties into the company’s overarching strategy.
Relevance is critical in this process. Often, RGM can be seen as an additional task or reporting tool rather than an integral growth driver. Without apparent relevance in the organization, RGM risks losing its impact. Focus on the fundamentals and ensure that strategy, processes, and execution are closely linked to create value across the organization.
2. How is it going to change?
Even when the need for change is clear, the path forward is often less so. RGM teams need to assess the organization’s readiness for change—does it have the right people, processes, and capabilities in place to execute this vision? Change might be inevitable, but it can’t be successfully executed without proper preparation.
3. Why is it going to change?
Finally, the strategic purpose behind RGM-driven changes must be clearly communicated. When the purpose is vague, getting buy-in from the rest of the organization becomes harder. Effective RGM change management ensures that everyone speaks the same language, uses the same analytics, and takes coordinated actions to achieve growth.
Action orientation is crucial to this process, so organizations should focus on the 20% of input that generates 80% of the output. RGM departments can emphasize actionable insights, moving beyond theoretical discussions to real-world applications that improve business outcomes.
“It is easy to get lost in the hundreds of RGM-related analyses, overloaded with information, and stuck in analysis paralysis. It’s easy to get stuck crunching numbers and creating visualizations. But, this is not all action-oriented.” — Kaj-Dac Tam.
To help the organization get the most out of its RGM levers, RGM departments need to understand the challenges each business unit experiences when change occurs.
Every market and business unit is different, and often, a top-down approach to change can cause a lot of resistance. Instead of focusing on changing and aligning the differences, Orkla focused its efforts on the elements that are the same: people, processes, and tools.
Once the common barriers to change are addressed and clarified, RGM departments can leverage these three elements to create synergies that promote efficiency and innovation. This approach accelerates the transition from insights to actionable outcomes, fostering a more cohesive strategy across the organization to scale initiatives globally while remaining agile to local market needs.
Change management plans should focus on cross-department functionality, optimizing processes, or refining tools, depending on the context. However, the greatest impact typically occurs when all these elements are considered collectively.
All markets and business units share one key factor: people. It's essential to have the right people in the RGM department who can empower the organization by asking the right questions.
To remain relevant, RGM departments should ask questions that foster collaboration with various business units, enabling them to develop strategies to help the organization achieve its revenue goals.
Right people, asking actionable questions is the first step towards moving from insights into actions.
To be effective, you need to set up the right processes and have the right tools available.
Individual departments are often involved in different processes and use different tools from one another, often resulting in missed details or double work. The RGM department's role here is to challenge and improve these processes by offering an outside perspective and finding core cross-functional tools that can be scaled and automated.
Orkla defines RGM as a fact-based approach to drive long-term growth through value creation for the organization, its customers, and its consumers—a triple-win approach.
A fact-based approach means making data-driven decisions that replace gut feelings with data analysis while considering human impact. And, at the core of Orkla’s RGM strategy is value creation, which is not just a buzzword but a tangible process centered on four elements:
These key elements guide Orkla’s team—from marketing to category managers—in making informed decisions. These 4 “Ps” ensure that each RGM action impacts penetration, purchase frequency, and basket size, ultimately driving category expansion. This structured approach helps avoid speculation about what is causing changes in the category, providing clarity instead of relying on SKU-level analysis or assumptions about consumer behavior.
Nailing the basics is critical to Orkla’s success, and this method of RGM enables sustainable category growth.
To ensure the basics are covered, Orkla has adapted key RGM analyses that set a solid foundational baseline.
The analyses align different categories and ensure that all business units are focused on the same metrics, fostering unity across the organization.
For Orkla, doing the basics is mandatory but not enough. Orkla wants to accelerate and drive as a category leader, and for that, they are implementing an RGM transformation journey through advanced analytics.
RGM fundamental analysis is usually based on historical data—what has happened and why.
Orkla is also looking forward—using predictions and simulations. For that, Orkla partnered with Buynomics in price simulations to accelerate and capture the capabilities they can not build in-house.
When working with the Buynomics platform, Orkla’s RGM team can scale their efforts, using predictive and prescriptive simulations to model future outcomes and make data-driven decisions.
Orkla is leveraging Buynomics Virtual Shopper AI to gain competitive advantage. The obtained AI-powered insights enable faster, more confident decision-making.
"Knowledge is great, but that’s not what drives the results. We need to act on our knowledge, and AI can accelerate this insight generation at a much faster pace than ever before.” — Kaj-Dac Tam.
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