The 6 levers of commercial excellence

Based upon years of experience and dozens of case studies performed by Perpetos Consulting, there are 6 elements that make the difference in boosting the commercial excellence of a company.

Of course one could say, easy to come up with… however it’s a huge challenge to master them and embed them in your company culture and operating model.

1/ Commercial Performance culture

Creating a culture of continuous improvement where everybody is stimulated to test out new ideas and to implement best practices is not something you build in one day.

Only by consistency in your internal communication about your strategy and vision, your commercial building blocks, organizational structure, team & one-to-one meetings, yearly assessments etc and making sure that in every one of these elements you highlight the desire of continuous improvement, you can create that culture.

Repetition and echoing will make it stick but first it needs to be always on.

2/ Sales & marketing collaboration

What is key is having both departments focusing on the exact same thing, having them speak the same language and have them share objectives. The difference is that marketing is more often working on the top of the funnel (TOFU) where sales takes care of the bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

Ideally marketing is able to make “Cold Calling” unnecessary and provide marketing qualitative inbound & outbound leads. Marketing on the other hand needs continuous feedback on what content to create and how the different marketing channels are performing.

This requires marketing having to deliver Performance marketing which is often out of their comfort zone. Very often Marketeers prefer to focus on the Bottom of Funnel content (BOFU), they have no targets and there is no structured communication with sales. Resulting in teams that work next to each other rather than sitting in the same boat. Recognizing this?

To put them all in the same boat and make them peddle in the same direction, structured communication, clear and simple demand generation processes and using the same tools and data, will make the difference.

3/ Demand Generation

Having a balanced focus on generating new clients, increasing share of wallet and decreasing churn is like balancing on a tightrope.

How do you make sure your new clients that came via the front door, are not slipping out via the back door without you being aware of that?

It’s all about having the right people with the right skills focus on their own priorities and the management being able to measure evolution on the right metrics.

Therefor it’s always better to split hunting and farming responsibilities (as they also require completely different skills) and account, key-account management and customer success (as they often require different activities). This depends of course on the size of your company.

4/ Sales Enablement

How do you enable your team in obtaining their commercial goals. It’s done by providing continuous learning & coaching of their skillset. By supporting them with the right sales & marketing technology, tools and conversational content.

Guidelines of tools and a sales toolkit should steer them for 70 % in what to do, when & how to do it. Their own experience & sales instinct should only make them fill in the remaining 30 % in order to get the job done.

Your sales pitch and storytelling should not be a freestyle dance session. In fact, it should not be open for interpretation at all and if it’s solid and supported by the right materials, your sales team will not want to tell something else. Practice makes perfect. So, make sure you test, learn and iterate before marketing delivers the final version of the sales presentation.

5/ Sales Performance Management

It starts with well understanding what your sales team can influence and manage for the full 100 % (being only their individual activities) and how this impacts your Sales Performance and final Commercial Results.

Very often salespeople are steered on the first level, which is impossible as they cannot control this. In return, people should be managed on how their activities impact their Sales performance. Let’s go more in detail on what these 3 levelled building blocks* can cover:

Level 1: Commercial Results:

Revenue Growth – Profit – Market share – Customer Satisfaction

Level 2: Sales Performance Metrics:

- Market Coverage: ensuring the sales effort and focus is on the desired customers

- Sales Capability: ensuring effective usage of sales skills & tools

- Customer Focus: ensuring growth & client retention

- Product & Value Focus: ensuring the right products are sold at the right margins

Level 3: Sales Activity Metrics:

- Sales Territory: Resource allocation to the right type of customers/prospects

- Customer Interactions: Interacting with clients and/or prospects

- Opportunity Management: Managing individual opportunities & win strategies

- Pipeline Management: Building & Maintaining a balanced pipeline

- Sales Enablement: Improving the sales team’s ability to execute

In an ideal world you translate your Sales Strategy into tangible building blocks that you can report on in order to:

- Demonstrate how sales activities (customer interactions, quotes, deal follow-up,…) consistently will influence the sales team’s performance on their sales objectives.

- Validate sales objectives that you prioritized in order to establish the desired business outcome.

- Show how the sales team and the individual seller evolve on these parameters.

- Indicate where in the sales process further improvement & focus is needed.

6/ A compelling go-to-market messaging based upon a solid content strategy

Know your customer and map their touchpoints with your business and align your messaging. Is your content strategy organized around moving your prospects throughout their buyer journey and does it influence their buyer readiness?

Does sales know when the prospects are nurtured enough but not too much so they are still able to influence the buying criteria based upon your own value proposition.

Do your clients get regular confirmation on why they should stay with you as a provider?

I bet you that in 50 % of the B2B companies that exist longer than 5 years and have more than 20 employees, not even 50 % of all the above is at a descent level. Do you want to know why? I know, because I’ve been there. You’re managing from too up close. Let me know if can help you in taking some distance.

Interested in learning more about increasing your sales productivity: Selling versus Buying. I invite you the check out this interesting webinar from Perpetos Consulting.

*Inspired by Cracking the Sales management Code, by Neil Rackham