Making Marketing More Commercial: Part 4: Selling the dream. (Getting everyone on board).

This is part 3 of a 4 part series: Making Marketing more Commercial. To read the other parts

Part 1: Why be commercial?

Part 2: B2C and B2B aren’t opposites.

Part 3: Framing a strong commercial narrative. (Choosing the right metrics)

Once you have created a version of your revenue tree that you are happy with you need to socialise it across your executive or key stakeholder groups to get their buy in and ensure that they share your understanding of how this all works. Getting agreement and buy-in is a critical step in building your commercial profile and ensuring that you have a solid set of terms to fall back on.

Approaching this socialisation in the right way is critically important so there is some prep involved. You need to prepare two one-pagers. The aim to review these one pagers in 1:1 meetings with each of your key stakeholders. Your goal is that coming out of those meetings is to ensure that:

• Your stakeholder gets a brief but thorough overview of how you see the business and how you see the challenges from a marketing perspective.
• Your stakeholder has a real and valuable opportunity to ask questions, and raise objections to the model.
• You leave the session with genuine agreement as to what you need to do to get the model to a point where it can be agreed upon and become a functional tool to diagnose, build strategy, and track performance.
• You get clear and useful feedback about what challenges you may face selling your approach in to other key stakeholders in future sessions.

The content of the one-pagers is as follows:

Diagnostic Overview:

• Full Revenue Tree.
• Current metrics for the revenue tree trended over time.
• Diagnosis - what are the key strategic things that the Revenue Tree analysis has shown?

Strategic Overview:

• What are your key projects for the period?
• How do they align with your diagnosis and your revenue tree?
• What commercial impact do you expect to see when they are completed? How does this align to broader commercial goals?
• How much do these key projects cost (time and money)?

Socialising your one-pagers

When organising your roadshow consider the sequence of the sessions. Very often you will have some stakeholders who are easy to work with, smart, and collaborative, and others who are difficult or political in some way. I would suggest to sequence your sessions starting with the easiest and most collaborative people and work your way towards the more difficult stakeholders. Keep in mind that for some people it may be useful to already have the buy-in of someone who is higher-status than them politically.

Moving from strategic plan to operational

When you have socialised your revenue tree and associated metrics, it’s time to start making sure all that effort gets embedded in your day-to-day. Build a dashboard with all you metrics on it. Send your key stakeholders a monthly results email with your performance documented against those metrics and the current progress against your agreed strategic projects.

This was part 3 of a 4 part series: Making Marketing more Commercial. To read the other parts

Part 1: Why be commercial?

Part 2: B2C and B2B aren’t opposites.

Part 3: Framing a strong commercial narrative. (Choosing the right metrics)