Building a repeatable commercial function across an agency group

The business question

Audience Collective brought together specialist agencies with different propositions, commercial practices and systems. The challenge was to build a shared commercial function that could represent those specialisms clearly and manage opportunities consistently across the group.

It required work on how the business sold, how people worked together and how performance was measured.

Define the proposition and the process

I developed Spark’s proposition before moving into cross-group commercial leadership. Across the group, I set out a repeatable sales process with defined stages, responsibilities and ways of managing opportunities.

The process was designed to support continual improvement. Instead of treating new business as a single top-line result, we examined what happened at each stage of the funnel and where performance needed attention.

Build the system around the work

I implemented and tailored HubSpot for more than 200 people, bringing agency CRM data into a shared system. Training and adoption were central to the work: a common process only became useful when people actually used it.

The reporting joined activity and opportunities into a commercial view that the board could use. Lead generation also moved towards an in-house approach, with attention to the quality and cost of opportunities.

What changed

New business volume more than doubled during the work. The shared CRM and dashboards became the board’s primary commercial view, giving the group a consistent basis for examining the pipeline and managing the sales process.

The engagement connected commercial strategy to operating practice: proposition, process, systems and adoption were developed together.

For a business bringing teams together or trying to make growth more repeatable, this shows how a clearer commercial model can be supported by the processes and reporting people use every day.