10 Years. 10 Insights.

Insight 3: Build a Unified Commercial Strategy

This is the third post in a ten-part series marking Inkberry's 10th anniversary. Each post covers an insight drawn from a decade of working with B2B founders and leadership teams on growth strategy.

One of the most common patterns I've seen working with companies over the last decade is marketing, sales, and business development each operating from their own plan and in their own silo. Nobody is doing anything wrong, exactly. But everyone is working at less than full effectiveness, because their efforts aren't connected.

A unified commercial strategy fixes that. And it's not about organizational structure. It's about making sure everyone is working toward the same definition of growth, at the same time, in complementary ways.

Why It Matters

When marketing, sales, and business development are aligned, you get more from the same people and the same spend. Effort compounds. Two plus two starts to equal five. When they're not aligned, you get duplication, gaps, and missed opportunities that are often invisible until you look for them.

How to Build One

Start with corporate goals, and make them transparent.

A unified commercial strategy has to be built on a clear corporate strategy. That means your growth priorities need to be articulated and shared, not just understood by the leadership team. Every department needs success metrics that tie directly to those corporate goals, so everyone understands how their work contributes to the company's success.

Align on where growth is coming from, and where it isn't.

This is where the work gets specific. Which customer segments or markets are expected to drive the most growth? How much is coming from new customers versus existing ones? Which products are projected to contribute most to revenue? And just as importantly, which segments or products don't need as much marketing and sales intervention to hold their pace?

Nobody loves making predictions. But educated guesses about where to focus, made collaboratively and transparently, allow your teams to prioritize people and spend in a way that actually reflects corporate priorities. You can always adjust when you learn something new.

Align on the how.

If your goal is to grow revenue through channel partners, then marketing, sales, and business development should all be working to support that. Marketing develops partner-facing content and campaigns. Sales targets and develops partner relationships. Business development builds the partnership strategy. Everyone is pulling in the same direction.

The how can also apply to less obvious situations. If you're looking to improve profitability by changing pricing on certain products or segments, marketing and sales need to be aligned on how that message goes to market and what role each plays in executing it.

Align on the when.

Timing matters more than most companies realize. Are your marketing campaigns, ads, and outreach in market at the same time your sales team is doing outreach? Is customer service prepared for the conversations a new campaign is going to generate? Coordinating the timing of initiatives across departments multiplies their impact.

Make sure incentives match priorities.

This is often one of the most overlooked elements of unifying a commercial strategy. I've seen BD and sales teams working on opportunities that aren't the highest corporate priority simply because of how they're compensated. If your incentive structures don't reflect your commercial priorities, your commercial strategy won't yield the best results. How you reward and recognize effort needs to align with where the company wants to go.

Understand how each department's actions contribute and connect.

Where in the customer journey is marketing responsible? Where does sales take over? Who owns the existing customers? These handoffs need to be defined and understood across teams. When they're not, things fall through the cracks and your results aren’t optimized.

A Better Working Environment, Not Just Better Results

There's another benefit worth mentioning. When commercial teams are aligned and each department understands how the others contribute to the whole, it goes a long way toward preventing the kind of friction that shows up in almost every siloed organization. Sales thinks marketing isn't generating the right leads. Marketing thinks sales isn't following up on them. Business development feels like it's operating in a vacuum. These complaints are common, and they're almost never really about the people involved. They're about a lack of visibility into what each team is actually doing and why. When everyone understands how their work connects to a shared commercial strategy, and how each department's contribution fits into the bigger picture, it changes the dynamic. People stop working against each other and start working as a team. That's good for both morale and results.

A Note on Structure

Some organizations formalize commercial alignment under a Chief Commercial Officer who oversees marketing, sales, business development, and customer service. Others invest in CRM and sales tracking platforms to help coordinate activity. Both can help, but neither is the foundation. The foundation is a commercial strategy that's aligned to corporate strategy, with department-level plans that interconnect and support one another.

That's what makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Want to talk through what a unified commercial strategy could look like for your organization? Let’s talk.