Running a commercial organization is hard – no one denies that. How do we come up with a unique value proposition that will resonate with customers? How do we coach our reps to become commercial teachers? How do we keep our employees focused on their jobs now that the fourth season of Mad Men is on?
But you would think that one of the easier parts of running a commercial organization would be knowing who owns what tasks. You put Employee #1 in charge of voice of the customer, Employee #2 in charge of sales support, Employee #3 in charge of customer portfolio management, and you take care of commercial strategy. Sounds simple enough, right?
Actually, no. The results from MLC’s Commercial Integration Diagnostic show that:
- 67% of companies don’t know who is in charge of Voice of the Customer
- 63% don’t know who is in charge of Commercial Strategy
- 64% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Portfolio Management
- 54% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Segmentation
- 50% don’t know who is in charge of Customer Experience Management.
The only attribute where everyone agrees on ownership? Sales productivity.
As you would expect, if you don’t know who is in charge of an activity, it becomes very hard to succeed at it. When we divided the survey population into two groups – those who knew who owned an attribute and those who didn’t, there was a clear correlation between clarity of ownership and effectiveness at the given activity. Indeed, even if the group agreed that an attribute was very important, the organization found it hard to succeed with that attribute unless they also knew who owned it.
That relationship makes our last finding even scarier: there is a close relationship between how important an attribute is to the success of the organization and whether there is clarity of ownership, and it isn’t what you’d hope. The more important an attribute is, the MORE likely it is that the organization is unsure who is in charge.
Let’s look at the graph above again. The top five attributes with lack of clarity around ownership are voice of the customer, commercial strategy, customer portfolio management and customer segmentation (we exclude channel management because many participants did not deal with channel partners). The bottom five are sales productivity, customer-focused sales process, role design, brand development, and coaching. Excluding brand development, the top five were universally agreed to be more important than the bottom five. Would you rather have clarity of ownership around commercial strategy or role design?
The problem here isn’t necessarily that companies haven’t assigned ownership, it’s that they’re not communicating that ownership effectively to the organization as a whole. Many of the CMOs we spoke to could immediately identify who they had put in charge of each attribute, but they hadn’t communicated those ownership decisions to their teams.
Of course, in the hurly burly whirl of implementing a plan, things can change, and ownership of attributes may transition over time as the needs of various projects change. But making sure that you are clearly communicating ownership decisions, and making one person accountable for each attribute (so the organization at least knows who is generally in charge) can go a long way towards resolving ownership uncertainty in your organization.
MLC members, contact your account manager to take the Commercial Integration Diagnostic and find out what ownership looks like in your company.
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