COMMERCIAL
EXCELLENCE
Across industries, businesses with superior commercial capabilities consistently deliver:
Revenue growth ~1.9% higher than peers
Margin growth ~4.7% higher than peers in the same sector (McKinsey & Co. and Bain & Co.)
Competition is accelerating. Customers are increasingly sophisticated in their approach to procurement. Your top and bottom line growth has stagnated.
Some or all of these may be recognisable to you. If it does, what can you do?
To counteract these pressures, many organisations focus on building and embedding best in class sales, marketing and commercial capabilities and talent. To do this, you will need to design, develop and implement a commercial excellence program.
It’s easy and tempting to try and do everything at once when setting out to transform your sales and marketing capabilities. Whilst there is no recipe book for commercial excellence programs, we’ve been involved in many sales transformation programs and have found that there are five keys to real, ongoing success:
1. Find out what best practice looks like
Often, we don’t know what we don’t know. We have found best practice visits to other companies including those in adjacent or different industries will help you gain a perspective of what is and is not possible, expose you to new ways of thinking and to ultimately help you define your own program priorities.
2. Get your leadership team involved
Your leadership team is important in setting targets, modelling behavioural changes and maintaining the momentum of your program. To demonstrate their commitment to change we have found that it’s best practice to have your leadership team highly engaged in the change process which sends the clear message that change is occurring and should be embraced.
3. Set and track targets
Some of the most common questions you will be asked is how do we know it’s working and what’s the real benefit? It’s therefore really important to establish a baseline before you commence your journey. Tracking your progress will help you understand and articulate the benefits, what you have achieved and where you are in relation to any targets that you have set.
4. Build capabilities
It’s important to invest in your sales team’s capabilities. This not only addresses the ‘what’s in it for me?’ question that we all have when undergoing a change process but it will help your sales and marketing teams develop new commercial capabilities that are needed in the increasingly complex world of B2B sales.
5. Embedding the program
Embedding commercial changes is often easier said than done. To ensure that your commercial teams adopt (and continue to adopt) new ways of working you may want to consider conducting regular customer account reviews, refresh existing content and capabilities, add new and interesting content, establish reward mechanisms and where needed, develop new talent.
