As commercial leaders, we often find ourselves bogged down in the weeds of operations, with difficulty to look beyond the next reporting call, management meeting or ongoing technology implementation.
The Revenue Engine must run and deliver on its targets.
There is little room to look at the bigger picture, to ask and find answers to where the commercial organization might be heading and what it might look like in a not so distant future.
This is perhaps especially true in the current situation where many sales and marketing leaders are still looking for a new way of operating in a world with less face-to-face meetings, but more digital & virtual customer engagement.
While running the engine to achieve immediate goals and developing to fix immediate challenges are important, the commercial leader holds the responsibility for balancing the need for success in both the short and long term.
3 strategic challenges & opportunities for commercial leaders to address
1. Bridging the sales & marketing gap:
As B2B buyers go digital, the need for collaboration between sellers & marketeers grows (25-30% higher 3-year revenue & profitability growth in B2B companies with tightly aligned sales & marketing)
2. Continuously Innovating on the buying experience:
Complex B2B purchases are getting more difficult (more people involved, more information to interpret…) while B2B buyers increasingly demand simplicity in simple transactions. To win, companies must continuously deliver not just great products, but great buying experiences
3. Rethink how we organize our selves and work together:
The commercial organization has looked more or less the same since it´s invention and while the command and control paradigm has served us well, turning to a less bureaucratic way of working is needed and will take out cost and could prove to serve as a true competitive advantage.
As food for thought for your next commercial leadership meeting, and also the focus of our next Commercial Leadership Lounge (sign-up), here are Kvadrant’s three Moonshots for Commercial Leadership
3 moonshots for commercial leadership
1. The commercial organization as team of Cross-disciplinary Teams:
What would happen if we dismantled the traditional functional silos of sales & marketing and replaced it with cross-disciplinary teams of sellers and marketeers, each team with distinct commercial objectives and areas of responsibility?
2. The commercial organization as an Innovation Powerhouse:
What would happen if we focused less on “getting to minimum standards” and more on systematizing continuous innovation of the buying process and buying experience?
3. The commercial organization as a front-runner in Humanization:
What would happen if we, as commercial leaders, took responsibility for initiating the de-bureaucratization of the organisation and created a sales and marketing function, more aligned with how we actually work in 2020?
Once you have found your feet after a well-earned summer vacation, we hope you will have time to consider the above and find time to join our next Commercial Leadership Lounge on August 20th.
Best regards,
Thomas Børve, Mikkel Bach-Andersen & Martin Mariussen,
Kvadrant Consulting
