Commercial Spend Effectiveness

According to a recent report by Campaign and GfK, ‘proving effectiveness’ is the Number 2 Top challenge for European marketers. In fact, most companies we work with have always considered what we call Commercial Spend Effectiveness (or CSE for short) as a key business priority. 

However, many companies find it hard to understand the value that their sales and marketing investments deliver. One argument is that the world is a faster-paced, more complex place now, and as a result CSE is increasingly harder to do, but this does not hide the fact that we have helped our clients to get significantly better at it.

We get the best results when we work with our clients’ sales and marketing teams to build capabilities and create a culture of setting objectives, defining the right metrics, tracking and evaluating the results. We do this based on four key principles:

• Better CSE starts with setting objectives that are based on delivering strategic priorities.  We build capabilities to set clearer behaviour-based objectives at the planning stage that factor in both short- and long-term impacts, which in turn, shape better metrics. Even in fast-paced environments, time spent aligning on objectives here pay dividends further down the line. 
• Being realistic about what can be achieved with available resources helps prioritise what to measure. Being clear and transparent with everyone about how to achieve the objective makes it easier to quantify and articulate the measure of success.
• Only selecting measures and metrics that make sense to teams who will execute commercial investments. Once sales and marketing teams agree on what they want to achieve, it’s much easier for them to prioritise investments only in those campaigns or promotions that will help them execute to deliver the results. 
• Tracking and evaluating the results. These are the key areas that are often overlooked, but without which, no one will know how effective the investments have been. Tracking during execution helps to learn and course correct, and good evaluations accelerate the shift from “I think” to “I know”.

Ultimately, driving CSE comes down to capabilities, ways of working, and talent. 

Our approach builds sales and marketing teams’ capabilities to deliver incremental wins and, through continuous improvement, realises significant improvement in CSE.