Leading a market and the people in it.
Leading a market and its enterprise accounts: coaching teams and aligning sales, product, marketing and finance around one number.
The topic mark
Commercial leadership
What it covers
Most commercial leverage sat in the hand-offs between functions, where every team owned its own step and the outcome fell between them. Leading commercially meant holding the whole revenue system (the people and the parts) to one number and coaching the team that had to reach it. It was slower than it sounded, and it was the part that compounded.
The diagnostic
Ask four functions what the number is, separately, and write down the four answers. The spread is the alignment problem, and it is reliably wider than anyone in the room expects, including the person who thought they had already said it clearly.
Four moves, in order.
- 1
Setting one number
Making it visible and making the trade-offs against it explicit.
- 2
Aligning the functions
Sales, product, marketing and finance working from the same picture. Usually that meant removing the second picture.
- 3
Coaching the team
Building operators who did not need me in the room. The test was whether the motion survived my absence.
- 4
Holding the accounts
The enterprise relationships where the relationship was the strategy, and there was no delegating it.
The question that remained
An asset that can leave is priced differently from one that cannot, and an integration plan spends what the deal bought. Both started as things that happened, and became things worth reading properly.
Contact
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