The importance of commercial excellence for your organization

Commercial excellence is essential for all corporate functions:

Business owner or CEO

Most business owners or CEOs put their weight into the scales when landing large deals or strengthening C-level relationships with their most important customers. But how well do they deep dive into commercial excellence to discover the capabilities of their Organization, the Sales Organization on addressing the challenges of the industry they operate in, and guaranteeing planned customer success levels while keeping customer acquisition on point?

Did you, as CEO, know that 81% of Sales & Marketing teams don't frequently audit their own sales & marketing processes?

"Failure to analyze what is and isn't working opens you up to outdated and defunct sales collateral floating around, and your strategy will also be built upon old or incorrect insight."

How can you then reach your revenue targets most efficiently? That effort doesn't end with a business or target plan at the beginning of the year (or the year-end before), no matter how well executed and detailed in excel that plan might be. It is a continuous effort of zooming in on different levels (capabilities, skills, mindset across buyer journeys), translating the correct strategic assumptions into your levels, and plotting the right path forward in a dynamic scenario, an offense-defense playbook. "What if this, what if that…?"

CFO or Finance

The CFO office is a strong partner of sales excellence. Safeguarding margins, controlling the cost of sales, and data-driven input from sales to finance are essential for a healthy organization to make intelligent fact-based decisions on forecasting budgets, drilling down into line item impacts on revenue and cost.

Allianz Trade : "The CFO needs to widen the cash flow management culture from the finance department to other areas to encourage the company's growth without undermining stability. The CFO and the credit manager are key in customer risk management, helping to put effective procedures in place involving all the company's relevant resources."

Commercial excellence is finance's ally to ensure financial goals are met without losing the flexibility a sales organization craves.

HR or People Management

Sales Excellence impacts HR as well. As a CHRO or L&D manager in your Organization, your goal is to improve (sales) employee performance. But how can you be sure to enable the right program which fits your Organization's exact needs, is not too tactical, and responds to both the needs of your Organization, both on the transactional sales employee level as well as the strategic, more business level? A commercial excellence analysis provides the right insights to position the proper learning & development at the right level and intensity.

Commercial excellence helps HR enable sales to develop the best team instead of only focusing on hiring new, 'better' talent. Typical outcomes of commercial excellence analysis are insights into roles and competence matrices.

Why is a commercial excellence analysis necessary?

Commercial excellence enables you and your team to consistently exceed your target and achieve strategic improvements in your sales process. As a result of increased sales excellence, you and your team will see increased deal values (up 10%-20%) with decreased sales cycle times.

However, spending time to self-detect is impossible - mainly due to your need to fully coach your team and your daily operations. (That is mainly why 81% of sales & marketing professionals don't audit their processes.)

"As many as 65% of sales professionals feel that a deficit of time and appropriate resources are their biggest challenge. However, all sales and marketing departments will feel time poor if the systems they labour under are inefficient or poorly constructed."

Self-diagnose and self-treatment are not the answer.

Some sales leaders shy away from bringing sales excellence consultancy into their Organization. Strangely enough, they don't see the apparent partnership in having outside advice strengthening their views or detecting flaws constructed because of too many in-house, inbred strategies that have not been held?to comparison with industry practices.?

Stop self-diagnosing "Dr. Google style." You won't get the same level of certitude as visiting your doctor, who will perform a scan, do blood analysis, and take an X-Ray or lab tests to understand what's happening. It only makes sense to apply the right treatment or medicine to the right pain areas afterward. And, same as with your health, having the right follow-up and aftercare treatment creates an even bigger impact on improvement.

"Drilling from execution to operations to find efficiencies does require an outside-inward view, to enable a safe,objective discussion about strategic choices such as segmentation but as well policies or tech tooling."

Yesware : "Much of sales (commercial) excellence is created by specific strategy and execution. Sales teams need to have targeted, high-reaching initiatives and goals that are supported by tools, training/coaching, and culture to achieve excellence." As depicted in the image above, execution is just a small part of the iceberg. You need to drill down into all areas that impact sales execution.

What areas does a sales excellence analysis cover?

Fanatic focus on customer

Best-in-class organizations have a fully dedicated focus on their customer. Customer centricity is translated into the overall interaction scope with every department across all channels. They make the greatest effort to customize their interactions in the most impactful way across the buyers' journey and the buyers' lifecycle.

Strategic focus on sales as a customer touchpoint

Champion organizations leverage the full strategic value of sales. They make sure that corporate strategies include explicit sales elements. These companies enable a cross-functional approach between sales and all other teams to address customer requirements holistically.

Data-driven

While most companies collect important amounts of data, the importance is mostly more in volume versus impact. The smartest organizations use data to drive decisions and ensure these metrics and data are used to scale or direct resources correctly. "Sales is not an art but science flavored with art."

Data makes us as well leave our gut feeling behind and look at facts, discover trends, and seek consensus on decisions - and strategies. Data is the basis for processes that enable people to act smartly and deliver the highest impact in their role.

Process mapping and execution

Best-performing companies have processes identified and executed but measured and created in such a way that they evolve, e.g., account engagement plans in place for each customer, per segment in detail as sensible. These companies have flawless execution. Processes are documented and supported by training, checklists, and instruments.

The Outcome: A Strong sales culture with the right mindset.

Belonging to a performance-driven sales organization installs pride and is an underestimated driver of retention of your sales team. Commercial excellence brings your Organization to "Extreme Ownership": the highest level of performance & trust. Jocko Willink describes such an organization with values such as: "You need to take extreme ownership. Take ownership of your mission. Take ownership of your job. Take ownership of your team. Take ownership of your clients. Take ownership of your future. Take ownership of your life."

In high-performance, high-trust (Navy Seals), there are outcomes to draw in parallel. Think of:

1. Move And Cover

The principle of move and cover is simple and effective, but it requires working as a team. You need every team member working together to "move and cover" to improve your services and your business.

2. Keep Things Simple

Because if the team (your Organization) doesn't understand how you communicate that plan to them, then there's no possible way that they can execute it. When you keep things simple, you can ensure that everybody on your team understands the mission.

3. Prioritize And Execute

Identify the problem that needs to get solved and get it fixed now. And keep going. Prioritize. Execute. Repeat. You can't allow yourself or your team to get fixated on a single target. You need to make sure you understand your priorities, then assign responsibilities to handle everything that needs to get done. But it can't all fall upon your shoulders alone. And that brings us to the importance of …

4. Decentralized Command

This just means everybody is a leader. And the way you lead with a decentralized command is by making sure that everybody on the team understands: the mission, the goal, the end state they're trying to achieve, the parameters they're trying to work within, the perimeters they're allowed to maneuver in, and finally and most important: why they're doing what they're doing.

If they know why they're doing what they're doing, they can go out into the field, make decisions, and they all can lead.