Commercial Excellence

Outperform your peers with commercial excellence

Commercial excellence is about optimizing each aspect of the sales process, so that it is geared to deliver your value proposition to your clients seamlessly, with minimal friction. In other words, commercial excellence is as much about thinking from the client’s perspective, as it is about thinking from your employees’ perspective.

While selling great products will set you ahead of your competitors, it will only do so much – that’s when commercial excellence comes into play.

get started

“The key is when a customer walks away, thinking, ‘Wow, I love doing business with them, and I want to tell others about the experience.'”

Shep Hyken

Keynote speaker and CX expert

Commercial excellence basics

Delivering commercial excellence to your clients starts with the ability to understand your customers’ needs and aligning your internal processes to fulfilling those needs with maximal efficiency.

Alexandra van der Stap workshop drawing on board

A three-step plan to achieving commercial excellence

In industries where businesses compete on pricing or customer experience, commercial excellence is a key element in achieving better margins and driving growth. This is the case with businesses limited by production constraints (consider energy, chemicals, or manufacturing, or retail industries) as well as with ones that aren’t (SaaS platforms, for example).

According to a comparative survey by McKinsey, better commercial capabilities help businesses achieve 4.7 points better margins and 1.9 points higher earnings.

1. Understand industry-leading practices

For organizations running on enterprise systems such as SAP and Salesforce, standardization can help them achieve a baseline level of competitiveness that is comparable to that of top performers. In addition, it helps them leverage best practices that are specific to their area of operations, across all organizational processes. This process also helps them uncover those processes that differentiate them from the leaders, while optimizing costs and achieving time-based efficiencies.

2. Measure outputs of commercial capabilities

A key step in achieving commercial excellence is knowing the upsides and pitfalls of your commercial capabilities. This entails measuring the resultant of your efforts across all fronts. For example, at what point of the customer journey are customers dropping off? Which channel partner is driving the highest sales? Are your marketing efforts attracting enough new customers? What is the reason behind high customer churn? Analytics tools and data-driven processes can help you answer these questions.

3. Invest, transform, or rationalize

Once you understand the output of your commercial capabilities, it is easier to spot what works, or to fix what doesn’t. For instance, if two of your six channel partners are driving most of your sales, it might be time to reconsider your channel strategy. Or, if a channel partner management system is consistently keeping your customers waiting for a discount, you might need to invest in better digital capabilities. Similarly, your ecommerce interface might call for a makeover.

At Nextrday, we have helped our clients execute the right decisions in the process of driving commercial excellence for them.

Build Your Strategy with Your Teams.

Engage your coworkers and create your vision and strategy with your team. You will not only end up with a better strategic plan, but it will help with the adoption and execution of your strategy as well.

And you might have more fun along the way!

Strategy Creation
Workshop

strategy creation workshop small

read more

Vision & Mission
Workshop

Strategy mission vision workshop small

read more

Achieve commercial excellence

Commercial excellence is the ability to understand your customers’ needs and align your internal processes to fulfill those needs with maximal efficiency. In a time when great CX is the baseline for surviving in markets, commercial excellence calls for empathy, precision, and capabilities to seamlessly interact with your clients.

Here are a few questions that you should ask yourself to achieve commercial excellence:

  • How are my commercial capabilities performing from my customer’s perspective?
  • How can I better empower my channel partners to deliver the best experience to my customers?
  • Are my sales teams getting high quality leads? How is lead quality measured?
  • Can my sales processes adapt to my customers’ needs?

Commercial excellence is built through conversations with your customers, leveraging your sales and marketing data, and empowering your organization.

customer experience growth

get started

Cutting-edge commercial capabilities

A multitude of capabilities are responsible for driving commercial excellence. These include, but are not limited to: go-to-market model, channel partner programs, sales process design, account management, marketing practices, sales enablement, and analytics support. The importance of these capabilities depends on your industry of operations, and the competitive landscape in the underlying geography.

As organizations operate in the digital mode today, each of these capabilities is driven by a digital component in addition to a people and process component. So, for example, reinventing your channel strategy calls for digital capabilities for your channel partners, new incentive structures, as well as training programs that can align your brand identity to the experience delivered to your end customers.

At Nextrday, we have helped our customers achieve commercial excellence by understanding the output of their commercial capabilities and helped them boost their profit margins by several percentage points.

see how we did it

Alexandra van der Stap workshop drawing on board

Start accelerating
your growth today.

Through optimizing your strategy, planning and go-to-market approach and ensuring all processes, tools and capabilities are in place to execute successfully.