Five Steps to Transform Your Commercial Area into a Business Accelerator

Have you thought about developing your Commercial area to the next level?

In this article I share how you can indeed grow your Commercial area to the next level and turn it into a Business Accelerator, producing a positive impact on your margin and profit as well as building the relationship with your customers.

Over the last years, businesses, and the way we do business, have evolved from having transactional operations to the need of adding value to both the corporation and your customers.

Do you wonder why you should transform your commercial organization?

The answer I give to my clients is: a successful Commercial area must Collaborate with its customers to speed up business growth by having a cooperative and partnership approach.

Let me introduce Collaborative Business Planning, a methodology composed of five simple steps which will transform how you interact and manage your customer accounts:

1. Connect: What keeps your customers awake at night? What is their mid-term plan and what is your contribution? There’s always more than one way to connect with the business and having a Joint Business Plan (JBP) is key. Do you want to learn how to develop a JBP and follow it?
   
   
2. Create: Once you understand customers’ needs (priorities, strengths, business opportunities, market share, penetration), you are ready to develop your value proposition. In simple terms, your value proposition is an integrated proposal that will go beyond helping customers reach their targets: It will contribute to their strategic choices, communicated on their language and terms.
   
   
3. Align: Working closely with your customer allows you to receive their feedback, which you can incorporate into your proposals, transforming them into joint plans. You can also align key performance measures (KPI’s) so both parties are aligned on what success looks like.
   
   
4. Execute: Ensure you execute as aligned (time, quality, resources, KPI’s, etc.) and follow up accordingly, based on the proposal (JBP) and key factors defined. Remember, strong execution is the name of the game.
   
   

5. Business analysis: Once you have finished the process, you need to measure, based on joint KPI’s and targets. Did you reach, exceed or not them? By incorporating analysis since step 3 (Align), you will be able to adjust any challenge you may have on the execution stage, but most importantly, show your customer how the joint plan is impacting strategic choices.

All steps are important and following them will ensure a successful and strategic account management.

All these may sound familiar in corporations, but:

Do you have the capability, the cultural elements and methodologies to do so?

Contact us at TalentDevelopment@grupoazimuth.com if you want to find out how to improve your results and transform your commercial organizations into business accelerators.