Commercial Excellence
Our Mission: Your Growth
At Alpha Returns Consulting, our mission is to organize manufacturing businesses for growth.
Our goal is to help you achieve your goals, deliver efficient growth, and help you stay ahead of the competition.
For too long, manufacturing businesses have self-selected themselves out of Commercial Excellence consideration, mainly because most believe they operate on thin margins and can't afford to structure themselves and perform at that level. We're here to confirm that affordability is not the issue, because if it was no business would ever grow in a mature market.
A customer centric culture, an understanding what really matters to your customers and why, and the utilizing those insights to fuel your Commercial Excellence journey is where the growth trajectory begins. In the commercial functions of a business, benchmarking, prioritizing, and executing toward world class is what Commercial Excellence is all about. When done right, it will deliver growth in profitability that outpaces revenue growth as well.
Benchmarking World Class
Not sure how you compare? Not clear what your (target) customer's value and why? The answers to these questions are hugely impactful and ones that need to be investigated objectively and thoroughly understood. The findings from this stage are quintessential - using real, statistically significant data mined from your existing and target customers, and competitors.
Define and Document Processes
This stage is best done concurrently with benchmarking. Understanding who does what, how that work flows between people and departments, and what process measures exist is key. In this exercise you'll also collect immensely useful information that will pay dividends later on when we begin prioritizing improvement opportunities.
Gap Analysis
This stage sounds easy, and in reality, it should be. Here we simply compare and contrast data and information gathered from benchmarking and your existing process measures. The key here is to be humble; everyone starts this journey somewhere. The best right approach is to understand the relationship between the gaps identified and the value of the opportunity that solving each would be worth. Armed with this list, we can now begin prioritizing and executing your Commercial Excellence journey.
Establish Process & Performance Metrics
Based on the Gap Analysis and your prioritized list, now we need to select KPIs and TTIs that will confirm progress toward your commercial improvement objectives. In doing this, you also need to understand where your performance for each of these are today and then implement a ramp in these metrics based on the improvement plans you've prioritized. In this phase, we'll help you identify the best right metrics and ensure that they are measured simply and regularly to enable your continuous improvement so you can have a scoreboard that enables you to celebrate successes with the team.
Develop Incentive Systems
Based on your newly defined processes and performance metrics, now you can define incentive systems for the commercial organization. One size rarely fits all here, and in fact it's a best practice to align these to the expectations of the different functional roles and their respective process contributions. Many of these incentive triggers may not tie to revenue directly though others will, and this is where collaboration with finance, HR, and/or other functional areas becomes critical.
Remember that it's the level of pay that gets people in the door to your organization, and it's the transparency and sensitivity of the pay that will determine their motivation.
Select, Train, and Develop Talent
With processes, roles and responsibilities defined, now you can begin the talent portion of the journey. Knowing what is needed for successful execution of your commercial processes is the input to knowing what and how to train your existing people. This same insight should fuel how key criteria for any external hires. A best practice is to develop a training matrix that includes both formal courses and on the job experiences. There will be some things that you need to consider as a baseline though and this should be the inputs into determining who is even eligible to get a seat on the bus.
Track, Measure, Improve, Rinse & Repeat
Your Commercial Excellence journey will now be underway, and the team aligned on where and how to generate growth. That said, it's important to maintain transparency as well as set a cadence to measure your KPIs and TTIs against the defined targets. Just like any other area of a manufacturing business, now you can apply continuous improvement. It will bring a gravity to it that will be hard to replicate!