How to Improve Commercial Performance

Every organization is focused on securing the next dollar of revenue in the most efficient way possible. Of course, this quest for efficiency isn’t limited to the selling side of the commercial equation. Buyers are also tightening their belts and seeking to maximize the value they get from sellers.

As you explore commercial performance improvement opportunities, consider these three paths to enhance the way you sell and support customers:

1. Reassess your offers and pricing

Do you need to simplify your offers and packaging?

When your portfolio of offers becomes broader and more nuanced over time, the resulting complexity taxes your internal operations. It inhibits your ability to innovate and overwhelms your sales professionals. It can also burden your customers, potentially hindering their interest in buying from you.

Take a fresh look at what you’re offering, especially if you’re navigating a recent merger or acquisition. Assess offers and evaluate opportunities to simplify and rationalize. Identify which offers and packages are mission critical for your customer segments and consider how customers could buy more in the future. If you sell through channel partners, also consider how well current offerings and packages align with your partners’ strategies.

How might you increase price realization?

Sellers will often use discounts to secure customer commitments. Yet these tactics can lead to significant revenue and margin “leakage,” limiting top- and bottom-line growth. If you’ve identified this as an issue, consider intentionally designing discount policies, programs, and procedures. Activate these high-impact levers through buying programs and policies and then enforce consistency through your quoting systems. This is also an opportunity to implement automation and other deal/win desk process improvements.

Is it time to increase focus on product-led growth?

Product-led growth (PLG)—where your product is the hero—can be a powerful strategy for efficient, scalable growth. In particular, it can accelerate your new-logo strategy in small and midsize business markets, targeting untapped opportunities and solving critical pain points.

PLG leverages your product as the primary driver of acquisition, retention, and expansion of customers, reducing reliance on traditional sales methods. Offering seamless, self-service user experiences can help quickly build trust and demonstrate value, leading to higher conversion rates and loyalty. Consider implementing PLG with a freemium or trial model while ensuring that core features address key customer problems.

Other important to-dos:

Optimize onboarding with intuitive tutorials and in-app guidance.
Continuously gather user feedback to enhance your product.
Use data analytics to identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

2. Restructure sales for speed and efficiency

How can you optimize sales and success incentives to “land and expand”?

You will always have opportunities to pursue large-scale deals that require a long sales cycle and significant business development investment. But you also want to improve at a complementary motion: the “land and expand.” Like larger pursuits, capturing a small-sized initial win can still require a long sales cycle and significant resources. It can be difficult to marshal those resources when the potential payoff is more strategic than financial. And once you secure a win, you need to orchestrate resources to increase your footprint. That typically extends beyond your sales teams to include customer-support and customer-success groups.

As “land and expand” motions become more critical, it can cause a breakdown in traditional account segmentation and resource assignment. Instead of finely tuned static account coverage models (typically driven by historical sales), consider agile/dynamic resourcing that aligns sellers and partners based on prospective opportunities.

How could you strengthen performance in lifecycle selling?

With recurring and consumption-based business models gaining steam, the customer interaction “center of gravity” is no longer the initial sale. These models necessitate a continuous-selling approach, with engagement targeted to the lifecycle stage of the customer relationship and/or specific product. In many cases, the major drivers of revenue growth occur post sale. To be efficient at lifecycle selling, you’ll need to redefine roles, motions, and incentives for your pre-sales, sales, support, success and renewals teams.

How can you better leverage new partnership models?

Old-school channel relationships were distributor and reseller programs; today’s partnerships are much more collaborative. From selling and sourcing to delivering and serving, deep collaboration is critical with cloud services and other offerings that require ongoing customer interaction. Structuring these collaborations can be tricky, with more ambiguity about what direct sellers vs. partners should be doing. That’s why incentives must be carefully structured so that these sellers complement rather than trip over each other.

3. Reinvent commercial operations using AI and automation

What high-impact strategies can be used to improve seller and customer experience—resulting in revenue acceleration and reduced costs?

Empower sellers with insights. Sellers often spend more than half their time assembling information about their target account’s needs, buyers, and influencers; competitive activity, usage, and consumption; and satisfaction and billing status. They typically must compile and reconcile this information from multiple sources using different tools. You can dramatically enhance seller effectiveness by streamlining access to the information they need.

Enable self-service. “No-touch” operations aren’t just for consumers. Customer-facing functions, including transactions, support, and product configuration, can also be better implemented via self-service. That, in turn, drives higher efficiency and higher customer satisfaction among even the largest customers.

Implement AI-powered selling. High-velocity selling—and its fully automated cousin, agentic workflow—rethinks the customer/seller interaction with AI at the core. Using smart tools that automatically consider account history and status, sellers benefit from guidance about the most effective pitch at each stage in the lifecycle. The results: accelerated outcomes and higher revenue per seller.

Ready to ignite more efficient growth? Contact KPMG to discover how leveraging data-driven insights and targeted improvements can optimize your operations. Empower your organization to drive substantial value and remain competitive in a rapidly evolving marketplace.

CEOs and strategy leaders face increasing pressures to preserve margins, drive growth, and deliver lasting value. To make that happen, many are turning to performance improvement initiatives.

Let’s start a conversation about getting there Improve Your Performance With KPMG

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