Customer, Product & Market Strategy: Commercial strategy defines the company’s proposition, the customers it serves and the competitive environment it operates in. Our expertise can help you to assess areas of opportunity and how these can be turned into competitive advantage and growth.
Customer Insight: At the heart of any company is the customer it serves and knowing what they value. Businesses have an increasing array of customer touchpoints and opportunities to gather data, but sometimes struggle to pull out the insights that matter. Fuse Insight helps businesses to see the “wood through the trees” by working with large data sets and finding the trends & insights which will make a meaningful difference to your customers, or your bottom line.
International Expansion: In a fast-moving global economy it’s important to keep on top of trends to protect the core business and take advantage of opportunities lying overseas. Whether it’s re-evaluating supply routes, optimising around foreign tariffs or finding new customer markets, Fuse Insight delivers fact-based assessments to ground key decisions across your business.
Transaction Services: Our consultants have considerable experience evaluating potential acquisition targets and carrying out commercial due diligence assessments. We complete a rigorous analysis of a target’s market, competitive position, company performance and business plan achievability. From here, we quantify areas of commercial value creation with enablers & risks clearly articulated. Our expertise in optimising commercial strategy makes us the ideal partner where growth and value are the primary drivers of the investment thesis.
Sales Channel Optimisation: Sales channel optimisation is the process of selecting, improving and managing all the ways a business delivers its products & services to customers. This involves analyzing current channel performance, identifying the most effective and profitable routes to reach target customers, and implementing data-driven changes to increase efficiency, drive sales, build stronger customer relationships, and maximize overall profitability.
Salesforce Effectiveness: Salesforce effectiveness is the measure and enhancement of a sales team’s performance in generating revenue and achieving wider objectives. This differs widely from one business to the next but has similar components such as developing a clear sales strategy, optimising sales workflows, ensuring the right people capabilities & training, incentivisation and utilizing systems to improve sales efficiency. Given the importance & investment placed in sales teams, ensuring this delivers strong returns is a vital part of a business’ commercial operation.
Marketing Optimisation: Marketing budgets often come under the closest scrutiny and can quickly be reduced when times are tough. Advances in data capture mean Marketing performance can be more accurately analysed to measure ROI across different media & campaigns. Often it’s about creating more rigour around the Marketing process – ensuring campaign objectives are clearly defined, ways to measure performance are set-up (including piloting) and results are adequately analysed.
Commercial Contracting: Successful commercial partnerships (customers and suppliers) rely on mutual value creation. For more strategic partners, understanding the importance of different objectives to each party lies at the heart of negotiations and in defining success criteria which can be used to evaluate commercial terms. Our experience supporting businesses through these types of negotiations lead to better outcomes for all, ensuring fairness and transparency and longer lasting relationships.
Pricing: Pricing is a complex discipline often covering thousands of products, different customers and a variety of other variables. It’s one of the key levers to optimise margins ensuring prices are neither too high, nor too low. Our consultants have a wide range of experience across different industries and can assess which pricing & revenue management frameworks will work best for your business.
Customer & Product Profitability: Standard financial reporting enables businesses to understand product profitability at a gross margin level (less cost of goods sold) and customer profitability based on key commercial terms such as price & financial incentives. This limited view of profitability can hide significant costs across R&D, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Logistics and wider processes. By allocating all material costs by customer & product the business can make more informed decisions to optimise profitability.
Customer Lifetime Management: Acquiring customers is expensive so businesses want to ensure they’re attracting the right customers and developing them into loyal advocates of your business. Customer lifetime value looks at the end-to-end lifecycle from initial awareness to loyal customer. Not all customers are equally valuable so segmenting customers is vital to develop actionable strategies balancing spend with income to maximise returns over time.
Product Lifecycle Management: Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the process of managing all aspects of a product's journey, from its initial concept or selection, to launch, in-life promotion and final withdrawal. We see businesses spending a lot of resources in the early stages to get products to market but can sometimes neglect the active management to maintain margins and timely exit. The result of this can be an increase in business complexity (too many products), costly discounts and redundant stock. Implementing clear rules and procedures can ensure products are actively managed and margins optimised.
Operating Model: The business operating model describes how a business delivers its value proposition by aligning its core components – people, processes and technology. For a business to be effective it needs to ensure assets are optimised around its strategic priorities to enable quicker decision making and execution without unnecessary waste or delays. It articulates the optimal organizational structure, where decisions are made and key responsibilities across teams & roles. These are then supported by clear processes across functions and the systems & data that underpin these. No function can work in isolation – delivering customer success relies on every part of the organisation pulling in the same direction.
Process Improvement: For an operation to be successful, it needs processes which support rather than hinder functional goals. Sometimes small changes can make big differences to how well a team can execute, reducing costs and improving business outcomes. We look at all aspects of a process to understand where the inefficiencies are and how they could be improved covering decision making, where work is completed, areas of waste or delay, and whether better data or systems are needed. Key to any change is support across the teams that manage the process, meaning cross-functional collaboration is an essential part of our methodology.
Commercial Turnaround: Sometimes speed to execution is vital. Our work with distressed businesses or those requiring urgent change is based on our ability to deliver results quickly. We start with a rapid diagnostic to understand where a business or function is underperforming and quickly gather options to restore profitability or growth. The key is to focus on how costs can be reduced quickly or areas of sales that should be prioritized to restore a business to health. It requires strong leadership within the business and a mandate to make decisions across a few people supported by the wider organisation to act with pace.
We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it.
