In a changing world it is key that you and your organisation know what commerciality is and how you bring it to life.
Firstly, what is “Commerciality”?
It can be defined as “A commercial quality or character, the ability to produce a profit”.
That sounds very clinical, so perhaps three simple ways to help you and your organisation to explore what commerciality means to you might help:
Charging what you are worth, your true value.
In most professional organisation there is an element of value slippage. You might recognise people who don’t charge their full rate, bill all of the time they spend with a client or do lots of free or heavily discounted work.
This often come about from two different perspectives. The first is not valuing experience or time. If you think about your career, how much expertise have you built up over the years of doing your job? Your clients will benefit from these years of experience in what to do and say (and very often what you don’t do and say!). It’s easy to dismiss this experience, but very often what makes you effective and efficient in your role is just that, the experience that gives your clients exactly what they need. The second is around having the confidence in pricing. This is a more complex area, and one we will explore in a later blog.
Linking to your values, purpose and motivators
It is easy not to see this link day to day. Think about what motivates you individually, and what your values, purpose and vision are for your organisation. Then take a moment and link together how acting in a more commercially proactive way bring these values, purpose and motivators to life. Your vision might be to serve the whole community, and by having a commercial approach in 80% of your work may allow you to do pro bono work 20% of your time to support those in most need. The key here is the 80% supports the 20%. Commercial activity unlocks and aligns with your organisations and your personal motivators.
Seeing your value and worth from your clients perspective, your perspective then your business perspective.
A big stumbling block we see is professionals only seeing value and price from their own perspective. If you pause and see this from two new perspective you might get a very different view:
Value to your clients – what is the ultimate value your clients get when they deal with you? How do they benefit personally and professionally? What does your work, experience, service or solution give them that they didn’t have before? How important is this to them? What would be the impact of not having this support or professional guidance? When you answer some of these questions you develop a much clearer sense of how acting in a more commercial way benefits your clients.
Value to your organisation and your organisations values – Yes, a commercial approach will generate value for your organisation, and what does your organisation do? Not just for your clients, think about the whole entity and its economic value. You might consider some of the following: the tax it pays as an organisation, the community or environmental work it does, the salaries it pays to its employees, the groups and people it supports, the added values to charity and not of profits it supports, the events it runs, the connections and network it builds for its employees, suppliers and clients. All these things add economic value because of taking a commercial approach.
What gets in the way?
A few things stop you and your organisation bringing commerciality to life. A lot of this misunderstanding is around what commerciality is. Beyond that, not enough time is spent understanding what commerciality means at a fundamental level and how this benefits you, your organisation, your clients, your suppliers and wider community in which you operate.
If you want to chat about how you and your firm can bring commerciality to life and empower your teams to take a more positive view of commerciality, then please get in touch, we have keynote talks, training and facilitated workshops to help you and your teams.
