Let’s flip the script or at least the title of the newsletter. After all, how can you have a newsletter about “Commercial Strategy Evolution” if you don’t talk about the actual evolution? Changing the nomenclature to “Commercial Strategy” is the easy part and certainly rolls off the tongue easier than “Sales, Revenue, and Marketing.” The challenge is putting the three individual teams together and holding everyone accountable for combined strategies.
Commercial Strategy is evolving in many organizations; however, while we have paved the roads to Commercial Strategy, our HOV lanes are still under construction.
The three disciplines have commonalities and are already intertwined. Marketing creates the awareness to allow Sales to develop the consideration, and ultimately Revenue Management optimizes the conversion. Voila, behold the marketing funnel!
When you genuinely define all stages of the funnel, it is a wonder we considered this a visual for marketing alone. The funnel is a flow of strategies across the commercial disciplines that requires all brains in the game to optimize. In the absence of any one of the three disciplines, the flow is interrupted, and strategy is devoid of critical alignment.
Now that we have justified the evolution, how do we evolve? To own the title of a new combined discipline, we must share the knowledge between the siloes. This requires reach and vulnerability. The teams must be willing to allow access to their respective departments, and in return, those entering the new fold must be willing to “seek to understand” first while offering a point-of-view.
Here is where we naturally overlap in today’s approach to Sales, Revenue, and Marketing:
- Marketing creates campaigns by writing content and selecting images to create awareness, consideration, and a call-to-action to convert. The risk in today’s environment is that devoid of collaboration with sales and revenue; we risk creating awareness that misses the mark and misaligned KPIs that often find one team declaring success while the other is searching for the proof.
- Sales sells the dream, and Ops lives the nightmare…oh wait, where did that come from? Ha! Well, it is what can occur when sales teams are selling without alignment with all of their respective partners. Sales is very powerful in this equation as they go out and find the customer and, in doing that, wholly affect all departments across the organization.
- Revenue analyzes trends to determine the need to deploy marketing and sales strategies. In today’s environment, we find revenue teams creating campaigns and packages without marketing involvement risking full optimization of a full-funnel strategy in their quest for conversion. We also see our most significant power struggle between sales and revenue, each selling the same product to meet two different goals.
Here is where we need to go to merge the disciplines into one team under commercial strategy:
- The Marketing and Revenue disciplines already share the lanes of e-commerce or digital marketing. A thorough understanding of digital marketing for each discipline is the key to bridging the gap. Optimization is at its best when revenue can deliver the needs and knowledge of what converts to marketing that can deploy tactics on various platforms and create campaigns that serve all parts of the funnel.
- The Sales and Revenue disciplines had always shared blurred lines, initially in the reporting lines, when sales directed revenue. These disciplines have already undergone one evolution in differentiating the lines between the two and allowing revenue autonomy. Communication continues to be a critical component of the success of this partnership.
- Our industry previously combined Sales and Marketing disciplines in a Director of Sales and Marketing position. This was ideal when marketing was primarily creative and less analytical; however, as digital marketing evolved, the personality traits required for each role were opposing. The critical component for these two disciplines is ideation with collaboration on tactics, analytics, and an agreement on KPIs of success.
Here are some best practices to move your Sales, Revenue, and Marketing organization under one umbrella:
- Create a Commercial Exec Team which includes the directors of Sales, Revenue, and Marketing. This team will represent the leadership across the three disciplines in the newly combined team.
- Redefine the lanes for each discipline to allow autonomy while promoting collaboration. Each discipline must continue to “own” its area of expertise while collaborating. This mix of experience and new perspectives will pave new roads for commercial strategy and optimization.
- Meet with the Commercial Exec Team regularly. This meeting should be where decisions relative to all three disciplines are made, and the tough conversations occur. The regular cadence of these meetings is the “secret sauce” to Commercial Strategy Teams, as this is where the team will go through the stages of team development.
As with any team, the leader is key to making the team come together as one through the stages of team development. The leader must lead this process from beginning to end and understand that the cycle starts over again every time a new team member or dynamic is introduced.
Understanding the stages of team development is essential to any team but pivotal when combining three teams that are used to having autonomy. The most challenging of all of these phases is “Storming.” This phase of team development breaks down the walls between the siloes. A leader’s role in this stage is to assure the team that they are safe to storm and facilitate the process. It is not pretty; however, when done fearlessly, a powerful team emerges.
Okay, so let’s do this! We are Commercial Strategy, where three disciplines converge to create optimized strategies that flow in one direction to the bottom line. If we want to continue to move our industry forward, we must all get on the same page. We have to organize our evolving discipline together as one industry to avoid fragmented titles that leave the rest of the industry scratching their head.
As Tony Robbins says, “If you want to take the island, then burn your boats. With absolute commitment come the insights that create real victory.”
Let’s go to the island of Commercial Strategy and let go of the tug boats, yachts, and canoes that have left us vulnerable to the tides. We will rise together as one!
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.