The Rosetta Stone of Commercial Operations

Winning sales organisations excel at these five essential capabilities

- Chris Dent, Greg Callahan And Thomas Whiteley

In most companies, the sales operations function has failed to keep up with an increasingly complex selling environment. This group has traditionally focused on activities such as forecasting and incentive management, but with the proliferation of digital tools, digital engagement models and multichannel selling motions, sales operations must evolve. That’s why more business-to-business (B2B) companies have been transforming these operations. The reconfigured “commercial operations” function now performs new activities and has a broader, more strategic mandate.

In their search to define this new commercial operations function, sales executives often want to tinker with organisational design. But, in fact, success is less about where the capabilities reside and more about tightly linking the capabilities to the sales and marketing organisations.

Bain & Company and Dynata research on 200 B2B companies in the US, combined with our experience working with hundreds of sales organisations, find that 14 capabilities underpin the commercial operations group (see Figure 1).

Sales operations groups have traditionally covered some of these capabilities, such as the three capabilities in the category of sales and marketing execution. Now, for the first time, commercial operations groups are taking up some of the other capabilities, such as those under the commercial strategy and planning category.

While investing in all capabilities might be ideal, sales leaders with finite budgets and tight time frames rarely have that luxury. They look instead for indicators about where they can get the highest return on investment (ROI). Our data analysis, again, reinforced by long experience working with sales organisations, identifies five capabilities that are fundamental table stakes for all B2B companies:

1. Market opportunity definition

2. Go-to-market strategy and design

3. Incentives and goal setting