Growth Strategy Advisor | Lawrence & Co. | B2B Growth Strategy, GTM Design, Value Creation
Everyone wants to grow. Sustaining it takes discipline and relentless focus on the fundamentals. Christina Bottis has spent more than two decades building that discipline. Today, she helps CEOs and leaders build it too.
In four C-suite roles, Christina has worked across the commercial organization rather than from a single functional seat. Her experience spans product marketing, demand generation, revenue operations, customer experience, solution implementation, digital transformation and commercial leadership, giving her an unusually broad view of how growth is actually built inside a business. She has worked across startups, mid-market companies and global enterprises, in industries ranging from SaaS and logistics to manufacturing, staffing and HR technology.
That breadth eventually changed the question she asks.
When growth slows, companies often respond with more activity. More campaigns. More salespeople. More channels. More technology. Christina has spent enough time inside those decisions to know that activity is not the same thing as progress.
Her work today is built around finding the problem underneath the visible symptom, then helping leadership teams scale the commercial strategy, alignment and capabilities required to address it.
The Experience That Changed the Question
Christina’s perspective did not come from studying growth from a distance. It was built by operating inside the functions responsible for creating it.
Early in her career, she moved through product, implementation, marketing and sales roles before eventually taking on C-suite responsibility. That progression gave her a view of the customer and the business from multiple points rather than through the lens of marketing alone.
Over time, that became central to how she understood go-to-market.
A company can have talented marketers and still struggle to convert. It can have a seasoned sales organization and still be missing quota. It can have strong products and still fail to communicate their value clearly enough to the people making the buying decision.
For Christina, the common thread is alignment around the customer.
When she enters a business experiencing growth constraints, one of the first things she looks for is whether leadership is treating a core go-to-market problem as though it belongs to a single tactic or channel. An even bigger warning sign appears when she asks leaders to define their ideal customer and the problem they solve, only to receive several different answers.
That fragmentation matters because growth is not owned by one department. It is the result of multiple teams and touchpoints working toward the same customer, the same problem and the same commercial objective.
Her advisory work is a natural extension of that operating experience. Today, she advises B2B and PE-backed companies on growth strategy, go-to-market design and value creation, helping leadership teams diagnose barriers to growth, build the commercial function needed to address them and develop the leaders responsible for delivering the strategy.
When More Is Not the Answer
One of Christina’s strongest convictions is also one of the easiest for organizations to overlook: constrained growth is rarely solved simply by adding more resources to the existing plan.
She has seen organizations treat growth as a tactical problem, one they believe they can hire or buy their way out of. But if the strategy itself is misaligned, additional resources can simply make the wrong strategy more expensive.
Her alternative starts with a more fundamental question: Is the company solving a clear customer problem in a differentiated way, and is everyone in the organization aligned around how it solves that problem better than anyone else?
That question becomes especially important when the market changes faster than the internal playbook.
Christina recalls one large B2B organization where demand began declining after its product strategy evolved. Familiar tactics that had previously produced growth were no longer delivering, and the natural response was to consider adding more salespeople and saturating the market.
The deeper problem was somewhere else.
The company’s core ideal customer profile had changed. The organization was no longer reaching the right decision-maker, and it had lost touch with that person’s pain points and goals. The resulting shift was not simply a marketing adjustment. The value proposition, campaign messaging and sales strategy all had to change to meet the customer where they actually were.
What Christina remembers most is how the answer was found.
It began with simple conversations with customers and prospects.
“The insight was waiting for us; we just had to have the awareness to look for it and not fall prey to the status quo.”
That experience continues to shape the way she advises leaders. Before diagnosing a commercial problem through dashboards, funnels or forecasts, she wants to know when the teams, from leadership to individual contributors, last spoke with a customer in real life.
For Christina, there is no more valuable strategic input.
Customer Obsession Is a Commercial Discipline
Customer obsession can sound like familiar business language until Christina explains what she means by it.
For her, it is not about putting the customer into a presentation or adding another layer to a marketing strategy. It is a discipline of understanding how value is actually created for the people a business serves and aligning the strategy and the organization around that understanding.
She defines it simply as “relentless curiosity and empathy for the people we serve.” The word people is deliberate. Customers are human, and their decisions are influenced by far more than a rational assessment of a product or solution.
That perspective has remained consistent across the industries and business models she has worked within.
The tactics change. The technology changes. The buying process changes. AI is changing what teams can execute and how quickly they can execute it. But the fundamentals remain: know who you are trying to serve, understand the problem they need solved, understand where they are, and build a commercial system around meeting that need.
Real customers do not experience a business through departmental handoffs. Their experience is continuous, human and often nonlinear. For a company to differentiate effectively, the entire go-to-market organization has to remain aligned to that reality rather than optimizing isolated stages of a funnel.
That is also why Christina identifies market intelligence and revenue operations as two of the commercial capabilities that have become particularly important to growth in recent years. One keeps the organization close to the market; the other helps turn that understanding into an operating system the business can measure and improve.
What Leaders Have to Unlearn
Christina’s career has also taught her that some of the most persistent barriers to growth come from assumptions that once worked.
The danger is not having a playbook. The danger is continuing to use it after the conditions that made it successful have changed.
Her own experience has required that kind of unlearning repeatedly, across multiple waves of transformation. The foundational questions of growth remain remarkably durable, but the way organizations answer them continues to evolve. AI and technology have opened new possibilities for execution, while customers have become increasingly difficult to reduce to a predictable sequence of funnel stages.
That creates a different responsibility for today’s commercial leaders.
They cannot simply preserve what worked last year and add new tools around it. They have to continually test whether the assumptions underneath their strategy still hold.
This is where Christina’s operating background becomes particularly relevant. She has not spent her career inside one narrow version of the growth function. She has built and transformed teams across the commercial stack, across different business models and different stages of company growth.
The result is a perspective that treats growth not as a collection of campaigns, but as an operating system. The distinction is important. A framework can create discipline. It should not replace judgment.
Advising Through an Operator’s Lens
Christina’s move into advisory work is an evolution of the operator’s experience that came before it. After more than twenty years leading growth from inside organizations, she now works directly with CEOs and leadership teams on sustainable growth, strategic planning, business scaling and leadership development. The shift gives her a different vantage point.
As an operator, she was accountable for making the strategy work. As an advisor, she can step back far enough to see the patterns that repeat across companies: growth teams working without shared definitions, leaders investing in tactics before establishing strategic clarity, organizations relying on historical assumptions, and businesses losing proximity to the customer as they scale.
Her credibility in this work is rooted in having lived those decisions herself.
She has led teams, built commercial functions, managed complex go-to-market organizations and worked through the moments when an established growth engine stopped behaving as expected. She has also experienced the personal significance of being recognized at the C-suite level. Christina has twice been named a Crain’s Chicago Business Notable Executive in Marketing, with the first recognition coming during her first C-level role. She describes that recognition as a reflection of the team and work behind it, while the second recognition reinforced that she and her team had built the discipline to sustain excellence.
Today, that same discipline informs how she works with leaders.
She is not approaching a CEO’s growth problem with a predetermined answer. She is trying to determine what is actually happening before deciding what should happen next.
The Question Before the Strategy
There is one question Christina would ask every CEO before offering advice:
“What customer problem are you trying to solve and how do you solve it better than anyone else?”
Her reasoning is straightforward. If the organization cannot answer that question clearly, there is little value in moving immediately to campaigns, channels, hiring plans or technology investments.
The answer has to be more than a positioning statement. Leadership needs conviction that the problem is real, important and urgent enough for customers to act on. From there, demand, investment and growth have somewhere meaningful to begin.
That is ultimately what connects Christina’s two decades as an operator with the work she does now as an advisor.
She spent years building the machinery of growth. Now she spends her time asking whether the machinery is driving the right outcome.
For leaders accustomed to responding to stalled growth with more activity, that can be an uncomfortable question. It can also be the most useful one.
Because sometimes the next stage of growth does not begin with doing more.
It begins with disciplined focus.
Christina Bottis is a Growth Strategy Advisor with Lawrence & Co. and runs an independent go-to-market advisory practice based in Chicago, Illinois. She works with high-growth B2B and PE-backed mid-market companies to diagnose growth barriers, build aligned go-to-market strategies and develop the commercial leadership required for sustainable growth. To connect with Christina or learn more about her work, visit christinabottis.com.
