Commercially Managing A Business

COMMERCIALLY MANAGING A BUSINESS

Being a commercial manager means being consistently being the jack of all trades. It’s  a consuming role, needing you to stretch yourself across different facets of business including managing teams, and sales and marketing efforts among other things. Commercially managing a business also demands some financial management and contract negotiation skills in a very competitive and uncertain economic and domestic landscape.

You need to have the ability to take on all these responsibilities daily in order to move the business forward.

In this article, we’re going to look at how to be a successful commercial manager in your business.

How to commercially manage your business

Make time for strategy

The first thing to do when commercially managing a business is to make time for monitoring workflow. To ensure you are efficient and productive, scheduling and tracking your time is important. Make sure you schedule strategic time and jot down all activities that you need to spend your time on during the week.

Use your team as an instrument of success

Your team is the vehicle that can drive you towards success, so you need to empower them sufficiently. Building a business is a collaborative effort, so you need to be an exceptional communicator ready to maximise the effective efforts of your team. You need to be transparent, distribute information equally across your team, and foster collaboration, loyalty and engagement.

The best way to do this is involve your team by, have performance reviews and automating tasks promptly among other things.

RELATED: Ready, set, react: Embedding flexibility into your business

Plug into the industry

Top-tier commercial managers are only able to predict trends before they happen when they’re keeping abreast of industry trends; this goes beyond just your competition. You need to focus on consumer patterns, and developments economically and politically too.

Make sure that you extensively read up on your industry-set Google alerts, for example. Use social media to keep up with current trends and participate in online conversations as well as key players in the industry. This also helps make you a thought leader.

Keeping up with industry trend in 10 simple ways

Make sales and marketing your best friend

Along with keeping up with trends in and around your industry, as a commercial manager, you need to know current sales figures and the latest marketing campaigns. Your efforts in sales and marketing mean that you must be part of generating leads, pitching new ideas with your team, and with clients.

Always assess sales and marketing data and strategise for the best results. Look for  insights that allow you to understand the market better and what challenges you can expect so you can avoid them. Speak to the relevant people, your customers.

Build a solid network

You will need to spend considerable time building relationships if you want to commercially manage a business. Be the best client liaison in the market, attend events and have a solid online presence. It is your job to be connected to potential customers and business prospects.

The name of this game is networking!

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Keep up with technology

It is also in your best interest to keep up with technology. Every technological advance is a means of upping your game. Not only to scale business growth internally, but also to meet the needs of your customers with convenience. Technology doesn’t always advance as fast as business does, however, so you need to pace yourself with every advancement and add them to your products and business model.
 

Make sure you’re aware of project management tools, social media and CMS systems. Read tech and marketing blogs and know where these products can have the most impact on your business, and its productivity and profitability.

Conclusion

Become the best commercial manager will take grit, it will be challenging, but thrilling when done right.