Are you getting the best out of your commercial teams? (business strategy, marketing, sales, innovation)

To be successful, firms must have strong commercial organizations with excellent strategic and analytical thinking capabilities and the ability to operate in rapidly changing market environments.

Business and marketing leaders need to consider:

• Is my commercial organization equipped with the right capability (processes, skills, experience and enabling technology) to achieve our growth and profit objectives?
• Do we have a Capability Development Road Map that addresses priority gaps at the right time to ensure that our most important new product launches and investments are successful?
• How will I know if our capability is improving versus the right competitive benchmarks?

Answering these questions objectively is critical to success as it determines whether a firm is properly equipped with the right capability to deliver the marketing plan and beat competition.

Multi-client studies indicate that 70% of marketers do not have a formal marketing background and this is even higher in B2B specialty chemical and materials companies!

Marketing capability assessments should be conducted by an independent internal or external source that can provide comparisons across business units within a company and to external benchmarks in similar industries. The assessment should identify strengths (that can be shared and leveraged) and priority gaps (not all gaps are significant).

After a business has a common understanding of their performance vs. benchmarks, Visual Roadmaps help teams set and communicate priorities. Defining a clear, consistent line of sight from commercial investments and milestones to enabling capability is key. Below is an simplified example of a commercial capability development roadmap.

Market Edge partners with clients to assess and build the right capabilities needed to grow and sustain performance.

Examples of our work include

• Design and execution of a commercial capability assessment for a specialty chemical company (>20K global employees) and the subsequent development of a revised corporate learning strategy
• Partnering with a leader in agriculture to assess global marketing capability in >50 countries to identify business unit specific priorities and a three year capability development roadmap
• Multiyear tracking of commercial capability improvement to evaluate and drive return on Learning and Development investment

Learn more about how to utilize a Marketing Capability Assessment in your organization