Commercial Excellence Simplified – Part 2

In the previous post (Commercial Excellence simplified), I took your attention to the foundation of commercial excellence, selectivity.

Of course, in today’s complex business environment, “selectivity” requires a detailed breakdown. The four commercial excellence pillars are strategy, Performance, Operations, and Technology. (SPOT)

Strategy is basically about defining the commercial end game as well as the commercial journey starting point. Between those two points, we find the market coverage (geographies and segments),  go-to-market approach, product mix, and pricing. Defining those elements requires a clear understanding of the “why?”. This understanding will take us to “what” and “how”—where we will discuss the strategy. 

Once the strategy is built, then we define our performance measurement criteria. Market expansion, new market penetration, channel diversification, profitability, growth, etc. It naturally includes a people development plan and the compensation plan linked to those criteria.

Operations is the translation of the strategy into the daily practice of the salespeople. It includes defining the roles and responsibilities, risk review, compliance, cross-functional roles, operating rhythm, offering, and entire process from lead to payment.

Finally we need to use the technology to run all the above mentioned points in the most effective way. It can be some simple tools such as “Grammarly” to avoid spelling mistakes or state of the art tools like CPQ and CRM software. There are also online collaboration and remote working tools that integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning. The critical point about technology is to put humans at its center. Technology is a great lever of commercial excellence when we build it around the interests of our stakeholders.  

To sum up, all SPOT points apply to a ten-person small business as well as a large corporation with ten thousand employees. And as you can see it is no rocket science. It just requires will and courage to ask honest questions about the abovementioned points.