What is Commercial Management Operating System?

World leader on Strategic Thinking, Richard Rummelt wrote The book "The Crux: How Leaders Become Strategists" which is about managing phenomena and obstacles, solving challenges that offer you competitive advantage. The most difficult part of strategic thinking is the discovery or diagnosis part which is about discovering where is the obtainable growth to go after and understanding phenomena that make or break your success. The Operating System for Commercial Management is a tool that does the Sherlocking, making data meaningful and support your discovery process. It is a tool that brings the phenomena you need to understand to the surface and help you make better questions. The technology runs on algorithms that do the Sherlocking work for you and you can concentrate on insights and priorisation. 

The technology's role is to give you access to meaningful phenomena and help you manage and measure them. It is a tool that uses internal and external data to stay up-to-date with changes in the market and help you adopt to the changes in the markets.

BACKROUND

When we started the development of 180 OPS, we recognized multitude of challenges that companies had in their everyday management and operations. The difficulties companies have result in operational and management inefficiency as well as in insufficient capabilities and fragmentation. In an overall performance these challenges manifest themselves in sub-optimal growth and profitability of a company (See Figure 1). BTW! If this feels too theoretical, check out USE CASES with more specified answers and tools.

Any of them sound familiar to you :) We made it our mission to find new ways how to create a tool that would aggregate data, analyze it with algorithms and deliver answers that alleviate the challenges and create a shared view to the markets, risks and possibilities. The process of discovering and learning can be pictured as AI-augmented Double Diamond process. Enabling a shared view is about unity, collaboration and synergies instead of different KPI’s and turf wars. Commercial Management OS is not a new ERP or CRM, its role is to aggregate data from different internal and external data sources and deliver meaningful answers. Primary question to answer is: “Where is the growth” which is about connecting portfolio with markets. To make answers more actionable we also need answers to more advanced questions: “Why these companies, what makes them opportunities or risks right now”, which takes us to timing related question “When” and resource allocation related question “How”. (See figure 2)

These answers create a bridge between strategic decision making and everyday operational management. The big bold value promise that we are redeeming is, that we help our customers to succeed by providing them new perspective, a single source of truth, a platform that defines priorities and narrative that brings everyone together.

One highly beneficial feature is, that we are analyzing everything in monetary form. Value in terms of turnover, potential, risk and opportunities need to be presented in hard currency. The question: "Where's the money?" needs to be answered. Everything else is just noise.

Potential in this context means 100% market share with current portfolio. When we look at the market in monetary terms by industry classification, we can prioritize target groups and sectors. This is much more inspiring approach because different business sectors and companies will have very different potentials. What this analysis can not analyze is market saturation. We need specific data about customer’s need status, whether their need is already satisfied or not. This question will enable us to divide market to addressable, obtainable and active markets. Some offerings could be older and widely adopted which means that winning market share is about replacing competitor. More about this here: How to segment markets by urgency: Addressable, Obtainable and Active Markets

The magic and game changing insights are about approaching the data with Outside-in and Bottom-up perspective. Financial data flipped 180 decrees to represent customers and markets has a story to tell. We need to get to that story to find shared narrative and perspective, to be able to define priorities. Our role is to aggregate company's own data, combine it with external data sources (Outside-in) and use algorithms to make sense of it all. More about this combination here: Next generation of Datadriven intelligence by connecting internal and external data

The modeling learn from history (time series analysis), which means that that this approach offers optimal value for large and midcap B2B companies that have history, they have a wide offering portfolio, lots of customers, and they serve diverse customer types. If the company has a group structure, subsidiaries, divisions or M&A history, the benefits are likely to be even stronger. These types of companies are most likely to have un-tapped synergies, blind spots, inefficiencies and potential to make a major impact on growth and profitability. 

Our tools and analysis allow companies to make most of what they already have and create a solid platform from it. However, this approach doesn’t give direct answers to questions about innovation related questions directly. However, it can help us quantify addressable market potential that we just can’t plug-in to yet. Discovering how we change that can help innovate new and win new market share.

We have reverse engineered 180 OPS to meet the needs of both strategic and operational needs. In G2 technology categorisation "Commercial Management OS" does not have a spot (yet), but our solution is a combination of these established areas of tech bundled for purpose:

Our focus is to answer critical questions on a single spot and also to distribute new answers to tools that the company’s employees are already using. This makes the adoption faster and easier, time to impact is much shorter. There are other tools that are widely used for financial and profitability management and Commercial management OS’s role is not to replace solutions that work but bring new answers. The views to the data and the advice available from 180 OPS should be made available where they are most needed: in CRM or Contact Center tools for example. The new data and advice this technology produces maximal impact when used with other tools that the company is already using, eg. In marketing automation and reporting.

One way of defining what Commercial management OS is, is the Central Brain. It doesn’t make automated choices, but it delivers the data and answers for the persons deciding or planning and enable triggering of activities in other technologies.

Most companies’ management has aspiration to become more datadriven and create solutions to make decisions based on data and facts. The work is often quite company specific, slow, and expensive. This is not just technical challenge, because analysts and datascientists are notoriously scarce resource to hire and even if you have been able to hire them, most of their time is often spent in ways that are less than optimal (eg. Reporting and making lists to various needs). The tool also meets utility requirements and alleviate the resource scarcity related challenges.

We recognized that there is a clear need for a low risk and cost-efficient tool that can be rapidly deployed, gives answers to strategic questions as well as tactical and operational, has strong utility value and support the creation of shared view and purpose, sense of unity.

THERE ARE THREE PRIMARY AREAS, WHERE WE DELIVER VALUE TO OUR CUSTOMERS: 

1. UTILITY VALUE: PRODUCTIVITY

• Rapid deployment, speed to impact
• Easy access to data and rapid answers
• Reduced reporting needs
• Automated data distribution to where it is needed most, upgrading the capabilities of existing tools 
• Free analysts from excel production and free their time to answer priority questions
• Reduce the pain of not having enough analyst resources

2. STRATEGIC VALUE: INSIGHTS, DISCOVERY AND MEASUREMENT

• Discover where the growth comes from: what to sell to whom, why and when
• Bottom-up and outside-in driven insights are a game changer
• Monetization of potential - Everything analyzed in hard currency
• Capacity to do company wide offering management and strategic segmentation
• Improved capacity to understand impacts, set goals and priorities
• Measure what matters most: Continuous access to trends and developments, effortless monitoring of direction

3. CULTURAL VALUE: SHARED PERSPECTIVE, UNITY AND PURPOSE:

• Bridge between strategic decision making, tactics and operations
• Drive open and inclusive culture, scale innovation potential
• Customer and market centric KPIs driving shared perspective, unity and purpose
• Glue between development programs, business units and spesialists
• Empower, inspire and energize teams with purpose, unified goals and synergies

Learn more:

Next generation of Datadriven intelligence by connecting internal and external data

How to allocate resources by current value and potential

How to segment markets by urgency: Addressable, Obtainable and Active Markets

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