International Commercial excellence
The term commercial excellence is used for a broad range of approaches, both by consulting firms and in larger organisations.
In this article I will give my view on what commercial excellence is and how it can be used for aspects of international expansion.
What is commercial excellence?
Commercial excellence is a process or skill that companies can build to control and optimize their commercial processes and success. You can compare it with a quality system like ISO or Kaizen, but then for the way you reach and interact with customers, manage your portfolio and generate turnover.
In stead of relying on that one marketing agency with brilliant ideas, jumping on the latest social media trend or hiring the right sales person, customer excellence gives you control on your marketing, sales and service organisation by collecting the right info, reviewing it against benchmarks and following best practices.
Most companies start with just commercial actions: sending out mailings, having sales meetings, following up on service calls. At a certain moment you need a new level to control these activities: with a marketing plan, a CRM system and monthly progress meetings.
Commercial excellence adds one level on top: making connections between activities and outcomes, comparing internally and externally and developing best practices specifically for your company.
What can these best practices be? Examples are:
- Tracking and calculating ROI of marketing investments
- A customer centric product development process
- Pricing strategies
- Continuous competitor reviews, up to product level
- Sales toolkits and approaches
Challenges for international expansion
Companies that start doing business abroad face a number of challenges that are not present in their home market. These can be addressed by what I call International Commercial Excellence approaches.
These approaches can be developed in parallel with ‘normal’ commercial excellence and even operational excellence techniques.
Examples of challenges specifically for international expansion are:
- What country to choose as your next market?
- How to overcome language barriers and quickly collect all necessary information on demand, competition and regulations?
- What is the best distribution strategy for the country?
- How to find and select the right local service providers, e.g. for marketing?
- Whether or not to invest in translations and product adaptions?
International commercial excellence
For me International Commercial Excellence is the art of defining learnings from every market entry, distributor change or marketing action and taking these to the next country, corrected for country size and other relevant characteristics.
International commercial excellence requires broad collection of data and complex analysis, as there are many variables. However, the gains can also be impressive, as market entry is often a substantial investment and savings on this investment can be substantial as well.
What can be best practices for International expansion?
- In countries with over 20 million people we set up our own sales office, in other countries we work with agents.
- We have our distributors interviewed once a year by an external party to measure distributor satisfaction.
- We have a growth path defined how quickly distributors should be able to grow their turnover with our products.
- For selecting our next export country we have a checklist with 8 aspects that we measure and review yearly.
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FAQ about Commercial excellence
Commercial excellence is a process or skill that companies can build to control and optimize their marketing, sales and services processes and success.
International Commercial Excellence is the process of defining learnings from every market entry, distributor change or marketing action and taking these to the next country, corrected for country size and other relevant characteristics.
