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Mike Moorman, principal at ZS, kicked off HSMAI’s 2022 Curate Executive Insights Forum with a session focused on achieving commercial excellence leveraging his expertise across industries. His goal when working with organizations is to evolve their commercial functions to become increasingly impactful in their markets.
Why commercial excellence?
Mike explained that B2B commercial effectiveness has its roots in sales force effectiveness. Sales Strategy, Sales Force Design, Customer Engagement Process, People and Skills, and Motivation are all key drivers – these leading practices are priorities for success on commercial journey.
An organization can’t reach the pinnacle in all the drivers, but the idea is to drive growth and business outcomes in the areas that are most important to you. You must ask, what combination of drivers can you focus on to achieve your objectives?
Investments in commercial effectiveness can have significant ROI– if you improve the optimization commercial functions, you can increase organic growth +5% in revenue.
Ideas on organizational implementation
Traditionally there is a paradigm of a department doing its part and then handing off to the next department – like a baton transfer. It is one of the sources of the biggest rifts – especially between marketing and sales departments. The better sport to have in mind is three-legged race – in marketing and sales there is more of a joint ownership mentality, collaborative, input, partnering. Ask yourself, which you are – a baton transfer or three-legged race?
Organizations are all over the map in structure and there are many paths to commercial excellence. Trends include:
- Naming a Chief Commercial Officer or Chief Revenue Officer
- Opening commercial centers of excellence
- Changing culture, processes, & shared metrics
What is forcing organizations to work better together across functions?
- Omni channels and orchestration
- Closed loop leads management
- Digitized sales forces
- Solutions and/or value-based selling
- Strategic account management
- B2B to C information about our customer’s customers
Mike shared that there are two ways to get to commercial excellence – evolution or revolution. Evolution is incremental, a year over year continuous improvement plan. Transformational is a larger scale strategy and/or capabilities change.
Current effectiveness is just one consideration when determining priorities, roadmap, and business case. Other factors include expected impact and investment and difficulty plus interdependency.
Mike had one final piece of advice for embarking on the commercial effectiveness journey, “Be careful not to try to boil the ocean.”
Take a look at his slides for more.