J12 Commercial Excellence Playbook — the 8 Building Blocks for Scalable Sale
Part 1/10
A good amount of my adulthood, I have spent as an operator in commercial and sales roles, scaling revenue from €1 to €100M, interviewing 1.000+ candidates, expanding offices into 15+ markets, and establishing partnerships in 75+ countries. Sales is for sure the most important thing that you must be able to do as a founder at seed, but I’ve learnt that most prefer to spend time building their businesses — I hope collecting my two decades of learnings into a playbook can become your shortcut to perfecting commercial excellence.
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An Introduction to Commercial Excellence
Commercial excellence means finding Sales-Market-Fit (SMF) and reaching an inflection point where you have a repeatable, scalable engine embedded into your company that drives continuous sales. This requires discipline, creativity and obsession.
So where to begin?
The most common mistake I’ve seen throughout the years are attempts to scale companies on shaky foundations. This leads to bad habits and damaging consequences like unscalable commercial decisions, wasted money, time and energy. So here are the 8 building blocks I suggest to put in place for a foundation built to scale.
The 8 Commercial Excellence Building Blocks
Mindset
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Elevator Pitch
Battlecards
Pricing
Sales Operating Model (SOM)
Sales Profiles
Values and Language
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Mindset
Forget job titles. Everyone is a sales person.
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Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Defining the common characteristics and behaviours of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is the key to ensure you do not burn energy chasing the wrong targets. Drill this into your team, not just you as a founder or your management team. A lot of startup selling is founder-led, but to effectively scale and unlock a wider base of potential customers, you will need a sales force who is disciplined around ICPs.
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Elevator Pitch
Crafting a slick elevator pitch is a skill. Both art and science. It challenges you to think about the clearest way to describe your company and the benefits it provides, ideally in one sentence. If you cannot easily explain your value and why someone needs what you have, then how do you expect potential customers to?
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Battlecards
You do not have competition because you are so unique right? Wrong.
Everyone has competition in fighting for eyeballs and wallets. A focused positioning that differentiates you and your proposition is critical to cut through the noise of competition. Battlecards are your armour going into battle — a 1-page overview of you, your competition and why you are going to win. Create these early on and refine them over time. Like the content of your cards, the competition rarely stands still for long.
Further Readings: Battlecards by Xtension.
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Pricing
There is no one size fits all when mastering pricing — it is shaped by what you sell, how you sell, to who you sell, and your revenue model. Therefore, the key is iteration. As a startup you need to be opportunistic, although that does not need to create the wild west of selling. Define your price list, then establish some basic rules which allow for flexibility, but with guardrails on pricing discounts, free trials, pilots, offers etc.
Pricing is a topic on its own and I will write more detailed content on this in the future. But for now, I’d recommend the sources available below.
Further Readings: Pricing Course by Bessemer Venture Partners, Pricing Strategy Guide by Price Intelligently, A Practical Guide to Pricing by Simon Kucher.
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Sales Operating Model
A Sales Operating Model (SOM) is effectively your sales playbook. It defines the framework around how you plan resources, structure yourself, incentivise, manage, and lead your sales function to meet or exceed your revenue goals. A SOM needs to be created alongside your marketing and communication strategies and cross-functionally with the broader company. It should form a holistic Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy for your proposition(s).
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Sales Profile
As a startup it is a luxury, but an appropriate degree of role specialisation works best in the long run for employee performance. The characteristics of a new business seller (hunter) differs to those of an individual whose goal is to cultivate a relationship, protect/grow revenue and value over a sustained period of time (farmer). Both require different job descriptions, objectives, success metrics/KPIs, incentive models and focus on execution.
The alternative school of thought is to have a single owner of the customer through the entire end to end journey, from acquisition to billing. In this model, one individual is responsible for finding and onboarding new customers through to managing the relationship, and overall account once signed up. This builds strong and binding relationships, good awareness of the customer, a holistic view for the individual and true accountability and ownership, end to end. The challenge is that individuals become a little schizophrenic in their behaviours, toggling between the hunter and farmer mindset on a given day, often to the detriment of doing either as optimally as possible.
Further Readings: What Sales Teams Have in Common by Harvard Business Review, The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge, Specialised Sales Teams by Aron Ross.
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Values and Language
Your values are the guiding principles on how you want to sell. They shape behaviours and drive outcomes. Defining sales values sets out how you want your company to be represented in the market. It sets the bar towards where you should steer your hiring strategy.
Words are important in sales. Choose the language and tone of voice you want to use to describe your company, pitch your value proposition and speak to customers in. Language matters — so own it.
Getting a uniformed way of selling pays off. Standardising the process and those working with it will shorten your path to great outcomes. It will make it easier for you to measure, contrast and compare, objectively too.
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Sales 3Ps
These building blocks can be summarised under the 3Ps of sales. This is a simple way to think about your sales foundation to scale and repeat.
Not everything listed needs to be in place from day one (neither could it be expected), but within the first 24 months, an optimised sales organisation will have most areas nailed down. Many areas will need constant fine-tuning depending on revenue momentum, successes, failures, pivots, and other variables that require your start-up to be agile in commercial excellence execution.
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Access the google slide templates here:
The J12 Commercial Excellence Playbook — All Template Slides (2022).