Interim Group Commercial Director — Delivery Recovery

A commercial leader who rations well

Start with the person, because the work depends on temperament as much as technique. The Interim Group Commercial Director will spend most of the next 12 months saying which customer propositions deserve scarce commercial attention and which do not, and that requires someone who is comfortable disappointing capable colleagues with a sound case. Expect us to ask about commercial teams you have run where the business took $760 million or more in revenue, employed 2,100 people and traded in two countries. You know the difference between local judgement that a market genuinely needs and variation that persists because nobody has challenged it.

Your experience of succession, joint ventures and professionalisation will be looked at closely. Joint ventures matter because they teach you to allocate effort where you do not control every lever; succession because the propositions you back must outlast you. Commercial economics is required at level 4. Revenue architecture and channel partnerships are each needed at level 3, as is the skill of carrying a board and its stakeholders with you. Your baselines have survived challenge both from a chief executive and from the people nearest the customer, and you can point to a well-supported proposition you withdrew, the evidence that justified withdrawing it and the capacity it freed.

Rationing commercial attention

Commercial capacity is finite: the time of category and account teams, marketing effort, promotional budget, partner attention. The director holds executive authority, under the Group Chief Executive Officer, to decide where it goes. That means writing down who allocates what, the thresholds below which local leaders decide for themselves, and the proof a proposition must show before it draws promotional spend, team time or any easing of commercial controls. It means ruling on inherited commitments, turning away proposals that load cost or risk onto another team without its agreement, and declining to fund any proposition whose case cannot say who will buy it, what it needs from elsewhere in the business and what happens if it underperforms. It also means settling the commercial leadership structure and resolving conflicts with operating leaders before capacity is committed, not once it has already been spent.

Priorities set, capacity moved, cadence settled

By the time the first ninety days are spent, the director and the Group Chief Executive Officer should have agreed the priority customer propositions, the rules for allocating commercial capacity between them, and who is answerable for each exception. Around month nine the shift should be visible in practice: capacity withdrawn from commitments that were paused or ended will have been moved onto the priority propositions, and the evidence for each move will be on record. When month 12 arrives, the board should be seeing proposition performance on a steady cadence, and the leadership structure and route for raising exceptions should be settled.

Choosing between propositions, in four sittings

We start with a video call, held in confidence, with the Group Chief Executive Officer in the first week, on how you would choose between competing propositions. Week three brings the Audit Committee Chair, who will want to see how allocation decisions are evidenced and recorded. In week five a cross-section of executives, one from each function, meets you in person. The seventh week is reserved for the full board. You can expect our reply in writing within three working days of each stage.