Aligning strategy and execution: the playbook for commercial success

Commercial CX: Bridging the divide between strategy and execution

In today’s fast-paced market, many Customer Experience (CX) businesses are struggling to increase revenues and maintain margins while meeting rising consumer expectations. Challenges such as recruitment and retention issues, fluctuating demand, uncertain supply lead times, network dependencies and inflation add to the complexity. Acquiring new customers is tough, but it’s also a golden opportunity for those who can innovate and adapt.

While it sounds straightforward to bridge the gap between strategy and execution, achieving it requires embedding financial teams into operational environments to establish a competitive edge. Multiskilled teams can translate financial objectives into operational metrics, ensuring company goals permeate every department and are broken down into individual KPIs. Clear goals lead to clear strategies and, ultimately, results-driven execution.

Planning is crucial in this innovative culture and forms the foundation for turning ideas into sustainable, positive returns on investment. By analysing historic data, future growth expectations and industry trends, businesses can predict performance effectively.

5 Steps to Effective Planning:

1. Financial Modelling and Scenario Analysis

Ensuring the commercial viability of a project is the first step in the customer acquisition process. Financial modelling combines finance, operations and sales metrics to forecast a company’s future results. By using historic data and making educated assumptions on the unknown, businesses can visualise potential outcomes through scenario modelling. This hands-on approach allows stakeholders to see the impact of specific changes on profitability.

2. Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

KPIs measure progress towards specific goals and drive decision-making. Efficient execution requires setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) KPIs aligned with business objectives.

3. Process Ownership and Accountability

Clearly defined KPIs must be effectively communicated to teams, helping them understand expectations, their impact on the bigger picture and how they’ll be evaluated and rewarded.

4. Reporting Automation and Performance Tracking

Leveraging automation tools like Snowflake for data centralisation and Power BI for visualisation enables full transparency, allowing teams to instantly react to performance deviations and seize or mitigate potential risks.

5. Create a Culture of Continuous Improvement and Consistency

A mindset of continuous improvement is fundamental for long-term success. With shared innovation and consistent behaviours, organisations can achieve steady growth and stay ahead of competitors.

Too often, operational effectiveness is mistaken for strategy, but both are crucial. Neglecting strategic positioning leads to wasted efforts, while ignoring day-to-day operations hinders the leverage needed for that positioning to succeed long-term. Strategy is about making choices to create a unique, valuable position – but consistent execution is what ultimately delivers that value.