Ascend accelerating Commercial Excellence

Starting in November 2020, Ascend supported a world-leading manufacturer and distributor of climate solutions. The Group consists of several brands across the globe, mainly operating in a few core markets. Each brand has its own history and has been driven entrepreneurial with its own organizational structures, offerings, and ways of working.

With brands developed autonomously across different markets, best practices and expertise were to a large extent local with limited sharing. There was also a sense of markets being too different to have common ways of working. The objective of the project was to develop a Group standard best practice model for sales and marketing excellence to enable Group synergies and increase the end-customer direct sales and growth.

By continuous co-creation and anchoring with the client’s sales and marketing community, the client realized how much they had in common and that the perception of being different simply had to do with different terminology. Through workshops and common forums, the different markets have been able to share progress, ambitions and best practices on their way to reaching sales and marketing excellence!

Madeleine Gartz, project member & Jonas Nodler, project leader

It is often challenging for globally present companies to understand the brand situations and differences while aggregating commonalities into common strategies and ways of working. With high stakeholder involvement and close market co-creation, the joint Ascend and client team delivered and anchored a best practice model and strategy to enable increased end-customer direct sales and sales and marketing excellence, including:

• Sales & Marketing Excellence strategy and roadmap: A maturity assessment of the current commercial capabilities in each market identified both regional and Group commercial gaps and defined gap-closing activities that served as input to the Group functions and regional markets roadmap
• Commercial Operating Model: Based on two prioritized customer journeys, the team developed and anchored a common target commercial operating model, defined ways of working, roles and responsibilities, business technology and key measures of success
• eCommerce: Including strategy and way forward to facilitate an effortless customer experience to enable B2C growth with a Group common foundation, local roadmaps for adoption and development, and an MVP roadmap for local MVPs to be globally rolled out and an eCommerce Governance playbook

Through continuous stakeholder involvement, the common commercial operating model and way forward was adopted and anchored with small regional adjustments where needed. In addition, by mapping the customer and customer journeys together with the regional markets, the organization realized more commonalities than they initially thought.

With a common terminology, both in terms of customer segments, customer journeys and clarified typical roles and responsibilities, markets can understand each other better. It also provides the opportunity to realize synergies between markets better. With a structure for best practice sharing across markets and an eagerness to continuously improve commercial capability areas on both Group and regional level, the organization is accelerating towards excellence.