¿Cómo comunica e informa sobre el desempeño comercial y los resultados de su proyecto?

Commercial awareness, knowing your audience - I’ve always found that ‘integrity-first’ approach has yielded positive outcomes, regardless of seniority, experience or even which side of the supplier/customer fence you sit on. How can you demonstrate integrity, to get to know your audience better? Two key takeaways here: 1) Build credibility - it’s important to call on your past experiences and relate them to the audience, as it reassures the audience that you’re comfortable dealing with the situation or scenario. This builds trust, as you become a ‘safe pair of hands’. 2) Expectation setting - do not over-promise, or become a ‘yes man’. Your audience will like and respect an ‘honest take’. Always try to be an ‘anchor to reality’.

Antes de redactar cualquier informe, identifica quiénes serán tus lectores. ¿Son ejecutivos de alto nivel, colegas técnicos o clientes? Adaptar tu mensaje a sus necesidades te ayudará a captar su interés desde el principio. Ejemplo: Si estás presentando a ejecutivos, concéntrate en los resultados clave y en cómo impactan en los objetivos estratégicos de la empresa.

Commercial Awareness - Defining your metrics - Letting other people be involved in the KPI-setting, or goal-setting phase will always facilitate better ‘buy in’ to said metrics. Yes they have to be SMART goals but everyone says that and it’s old-hat thinking to just set and forget SMART goals like this. Instead, try to collaborate as much as possible and let other people input on how a projects success will be defined / measured. It makes commercial projects more enjoyable, but also empowers the team to drive toward their own goals. Think of it as a crowdfunded-metrics, if you would.

Commercial Awareness - Collect and analyse data - I’ve always found automation to be useful here. Let your team input on the implementation of dashboards and emailed reports. That way, various stakeholders can interact with the data on their own terms in their own time. Then back to basics - important analysis outputs should be put into an email to the relevant team, as detailed as possible (for the record) and this could be prior to, or post (or both!), meeting to discuss the commercial analysis so the colour and context is clear/not lost on email.

Commercial Awareness - Visualize and Present Information - best advice here is to get good at PowerPoint (or similar) or get friendly with someone that is (outsource it!), and practice public speaking as much as possible - any form, not just extreme high pressure scenarios such as speaking at a business event in front of industry titans; it could be making a family speech, chairing a meeting, or setting up quarterly reviews, or simple script practice in front of a mirror. There’s a psychology around design for complex data outputs. People love good design, so if you can visualise and simplify the outputs in a varied manner, automatically it becomes 1) Easier for you to talk about, 2) Likely to land better with the commercial team.

Commercial Awareness - Tell a Story - I love the inclusion of this part as the ability of a leader to bring commercial challenges to life in a productive, digestible way, is very rare and under-rated. Storytelling is something comes with practice, but takes a higher level of awareness of your own communication (at first, since it’ll become natural over time). I mentioned being ‘an anchor to reality’ further up the article, and this feeds into storytelling too as many people compartmentalise their inputs and impacts, without seeing wider context. A strong commercial leader will give people customer or supplier insight - “Here is exactly how it’s affecting the customer/supplier” and verbatim “here’s what they said about us!”