Commercial Excellence
Client Renowned global marketing agency with office in 120 countries
Client’s challenge  Our people are smart marketers but we need them be great business people – consultative in their approach, insightful in their thinking and confident to engage with client leaders from any discipline
Initiative sponsor Group CFO
Target population Agency senior executives who make decisions that drive the P&L in key markets
Cultural context
  • Little formal development beyond area of specific marketing expertise
  • Affiliated teams – little real integration across the business
  • Reactive sales and pricing mind-set
  • Service is everything attitude
  • Focused on revenue not profitability
  • Operations run with limited business processes or discipline
  • Immature L&D function just focused on delivering a few traditional courses
Performance outcomes required Senior client facing leaders to:

  • Work with mix of service and commercial thinking
  • Negotiate fees in line with commercial pricing disciplines
  • Create compelling value propositions for agency solutions
  • Tighter management of project delivery
Our embedding solution – key characteristics
  • Regional leaders fully engaged in selecting target markets and participants
  • 3 day regional workshops – lots of agency specific activities teams focused on how best to translate learning into actions
  • Teams create plans to focus on local priorities and embed afterwards
  • Tight 3 month timescale – enough to apply learning and stay engaged
  • Combination of action learning, face-to-face training and team coaching
Business impact
  • New processes developed and put in place to identify new business opportunities, manage client relationships, control projects
Other outcomes
  • People who don’t just know what to do, they know how and why to do it
  • Some real professional services best practice put in place