I DESIGN, YOUR TEAM BUILDS

I start by measuring what is there. Where your revenue comes from and from which customers. How much of your commercial time goes to existing customers and how much to new ones. Which steps a customer goes through and who sees them along the way. And what your ambition is for the coming years, because the organisation has to fit that.

The measurement has three parts. The maturity scan establishes how the work runs today: an online survey among your team and conversations with you and your commercial people. The pipeline analysis shows what that produces: your customer portfolio, the sales figures, your margins. And the parameter analysis sets down the characteristics of your company that decide which way of working fits.

What is interesting are the differences: what people say and what the figures show often do not line up. What comes out is the maturity of your commercial organisation as it runs today. How smoothly marketing, sales and customer service work together. Which roles exist and what they actually do. And how new and existing customers are divided.

This step shows your strengths and weaknesses in the commercial organisation. Together with your ambition and growth targets, they form the starting point to design and build your future commercial organisation.

The measurement leads to the design of innovation, acquisition and retention. Not everything at once. What is up first depends on what the measurement showed.

Designing here means making choices. Which customers you aim for decides what your marketing and sales process look like, alongside your customer service process, and that in turn decides which roles you need.

I draw up how the work runs: which steps a customer goes through, who carries each step, and what has to hold at every handover. Alongside that I set down which roles exist, where they stop, and what they decide for themselves.

At the end there is a build plan, or rather a renovation plan. Who does what, how different teams can work together better, which agreements hold, and in what order it is introduced.

This is a change trajectory, and a design on paper changes nothing. It all starts with communication and building support. A communication plan, internal champions, and the time to bring everyone along.

The training and guidance that make the change possible are hands-on. I am there when new things start: the first customer conversation in the new setup, the first time the marketing budget is drawn up, the first time the innovation meeting goes ahead, the internal communication of your market segmentation.

Whether it takes hold shows in what actually happens, not in what was agreed. Does everyone fill in the system, or only those who already did? Does the weekly meeting go ahead, or does it fall away as soon as things get busy? Where it slips back to the old way, we adjust.

The guidance stops when the new organisation runs without me there. You do not need an adviser who stays.