Commercial Excellence
Your business does good work and is not winning enough of it. We find what is holding revenue back and design how the business wins new work and grows its accounts. If you want us to, we then put the design in place with your team.
The problem
Most new business comes through two or three people, and when they are busy delivering, the pipeline goes quiet. The forecast moves every month and the board has stopped relying on it. Discounts are agreed deal by deal, and work that looked profitable when it was sold loses margin in delivery. Clients are happy with the work, and growth has still stalled.
The work is for chief executives, managing directors and PE operating partners whose business runs well and needs to win more of the right work, and for founders who still run sales themselves. It is the wrong fit if you want someone to sell on your behalf, run lead generation or marketing campaigns, or train a sales team as a stand-alone exercise. Where the open question is which markets to compete in at all, start with Strategy and Operating Model.
What we do
We design how the business wins work as a system the leadership team can run and measure. The work covers five areas:
- the go-to-market: the segments, sectors and accounts to target, and the proposition for each;
- a sales operating system, with the process, roles and bid discipline that let new work come from more than a few people;
- pipeline stages, qualification rules, true win rates and a weighted forecast the board can plan on;
- pricing and discount rules that protect margin, and a plan for growing the clients you already have;
- the commercial rhythm: the numbers the leadership team reviews every week, and who acts on each.
When the price or the proposition is what loses the work, the diagnostic says so before anyone spends more on selling.
As managing director of the UK subsidiary of a European Microsoft technology integrator, from 2021 to 2023, Stephen rebuilt its commercial structure and took the business into the public sector, utilities and manufacturing. The pipeline grew fifteenfold.
For founder-led firms
Where the founder still runs sales and delivery, the firm can only take on as much work as the founder can personally oversee. For these firms we design the growth plan and the systems that take the founder out of the day-to-day: the operating model, the first leadership roles, governance with a board agenda and reporting pack, the sales operating system, financial reporting, client delivery, and the induction of an operational lead. The founder’s own goals shape the plan, whether the aim is a sale or a firm sized to the life the founder wants.
We will tell a founder when the founder’s own role is what holds the firm back. The work is wrong for a founder who wants a plan without changing that role.
For a founder-led B2B sales and marketing agency, over an eighteen-month engagement, we designed the five-year plan and each of those systems, to take the founder out of daily delivery.
How an engagement runs
The diagnostic is two to four weeks of work with the people who sell and the people who lead them. If you decide to go on, we agree the scope of design, and later of implementation, one decision at a time.
1Diagnose
We interview the leadership team, the people who sell and a sample of clients, and take apart the last year of wins, losses, prices and pipeline. In a founder-led firm, we also map what the firm depends on the founder for. The report says what is holding revenue back and what to change first, with the evidence behind each finding.
2Design
With your leadership team, or with the founder, we design the targets, the proposition and pricing, the sales process and roles, the pipeline rules and the weekly commercial review, with named owners and dates. In a founder-led firm, the design also sets out the leadership roles and governance, in the order they are needed.
3Implement
We put the design in place with your team, as a continuation of the engagement, and run the first cycles of the weekly commercial review alongside the people who will chair it. Once they run it unaided, we hand it over.