“Commercial Strategy is on-going decision making on how to best realise identified revenue opportunities, not a 3 year planning exercise”

Mikkel Bach-Anders, Partner Kvadrant

mba@kvadrant.dk

+4540411331

The environment in which your commercial organization operates is changing. Customer demands, technologies, and service models are rapidly developing, setting new standards and creating opportunities. As a consequence, companies need to revisit their commercial strategy with high frequency and answer questions like:

• Which markets do we focus on?
• Which customers do we focus on?
• What do we offer for these customers?
• How do we win those customers most profitably?
• How do we grow and retain our customers most effectively?

Commercial strategy development is the process and discipline of answering those questions and translating them into a coherent set of actions for operations and development.

What we do

A commercial strategy is a design of a coordinated set of actions across sales & marketing to take advantage of key opportunities for value creation.

Research & analysis: Help companies understand the market, industry, company situation, and dynamics that share strategic decision making

Strategy development: Help companies understand the most critical opportunities and challenges to address, define their guiding commercial strategy policy and build the transformation roadmap.

Implementation support: Support implementation by aligning Sales & marketing organizations around common goals and coordinated actions to unlock growth and efficiencies

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How we work

Strategy development with Kvadrant Consulting typically follows a 5 step process, where we are involved in all or selected parts of the process, depending on the specific situation and client needs.

Although the initial creation of a clear and coherent strategy report is a linear process with the commercial leadership team, subsequent strategizing happens in an iterative process as new knowledge is added and old assumptions are challenged.

1. Understand the context & challenge: Meeting with CEO/CRO/CCO to understand the company, context, and what challenges the commercial strategy needs to solve

2. Research & preparation for commercial executive strategy workshop: Gather data from internal and external sources to prepare for initial decision-making and strategy design by the executive team

3. Executive workshop to prototype strategy: 2-day work session with sales & marketing leadership to align on commercial opportunities and challenges to focus resources towards, key issues to solve, prototyping of strategy to win, and definition of next steps

4. Test, revise & cascade: Qualify critical assumptions underlying the strategy designed with additional research and work with sales & marketing management to cascade commercial strategy into sales & marketing development and operations

5. Create the strategic narrative & governance model: Write a strategic narrative with key insights, conclusions, decisions, and actions from the strategy process and implement the strategy governance model

While the outcome of the strategy process is a tangible document describing which opportunities and associated challenges sales and marketing leaders will focus operational & development resources towards, why and how it will be done, this is just the starting point towards greater value creation from better use of commercial resources and closer collaboration between sales & marketing.

It is the foundation for guiding operations and subsequent transformation initiatives but not the end destination

Case in point

A European leader in commercial technology for the pharmaceutical industry experienced declining growth rates and declining prices due to growing pressure from the competition and commoditization in their traditional core product.

The CEO needed to identify the strategy to counter these developments and move the company onto a new sustainable growth trajectory — the rest of the executives aligned around these decisions.

Over 3 months, the company partnered with Kvadrant Consulting to kickstart this process and crafted a joint strategy for the company with associated functional strategies to support their new winning ambition.