Direction & framing for the company
Kommercial Strategy
Get the best odds
Substantial company decisions are often driven by circumstances. An opportunity presents itself - should we pursue it? Having an eye for new possibilities is certainly important, but it can be difficult or impossible, particularly in a growth phase, to discern whether a certain opportunity is beneficial in the long run, or indeed how to react to it.
Making this kind of decisions requires a clear view of the company's commercial situation - the goal, the way towards it, market position, audience, priorities and execution. It requires unfolding the task complex, and committing to a framing and direction. It requires a consistent decision foundation for planning the activities providing the best odds for the company to succeed in its growth journey.
In short, it requires a commercial strategy.
It takes visibility
A prerequisite for a guided growth process is a clear commercial strategy which can function as a checklist for decisions and provide company leadership with the necessary power of execution.
In many cases, particularly in relatively young businesses which have thus far grown organically, the commercial strategy is implicit and lives inside the minds of owners and top management. There is a shared idea about what the company does and is good at, and how this is turned into a profitable business. In order to be effective, this idea needs to be transported out of those minds and made visible, so that everyone can see the plan, and thus work towards the same direction.
Growth almost always includes establishing partnerships and collaborations. This also requires a clear and explicit strategy, to make sure it is the right partnerships, and that everyone agrees about terms and goals.
Business growth obviously also means organization growth. If the company's approach is casual and unstructured it becomes impossible to be sure that important knowledge or insight regarding the company and its business is properly propagated among employees, or used correctly during recruitment. It takes a few simple statements making the company vision clear, plus the overall practical measures required to enact it. These need to be clear and easy to understand so that everyone can internalize them and pull in the same direction on a daily basis.
From strategy to action
There is a multitude of opinions about what a commercial strategy is, and how to make one. At theView we consider a strategy to be an operational tool - or, in casual terms, if you don't know what you're supposed to be doing tomorrow in order to bring the company closer to its goal, you can look in the strategy and you will find out. This means it should not be a hefty volume. A typical strategy from theView is between 10-20 slides, with the core statements fitting on a single page.
In practical terms we execute a structured process, involving a number of workshops with leadership, whereupon we boil down the results into a highly potent "concentrate" consisting of commercial headlines for the business, which can be used to frame and direct leadership decisions for at least a five year period.
Along with the strategy we always provide a set of overall tactical elements, including some crucial milestones for the process, as well as the headlines for a market access plan.
The company's foundations
With the commercial strategy as their taking-off point, leadership can make decisions about growth and operations on a daily basis, but it does more than that. Because it presents the relationship between the core business and the market, it contains all significant statements about the company. It is thus suitable as a basis for branding, as well as for concrete marketing plans, right down to editorial schedules, activities and budget priorities.
