Interim Chief Growth and Partnerships Officer — Integration (Technology)

Scarce commercial capacity, rationed on purpose

Sellers, solution architects, partner managers and marketing budget are finite, and every proposition believes it deserves more of them. The interim officer will decide how that capacity is allocated across customer propositions, with the executive authority to make the allocation stick.

The calls this executive owns

You will set which commercial decisions sit with you and how much pricing and deal authority stays with local teams, and choose the evidence a request for funding, capacity or control has to bring. Commercial commitments will continue, wait or end on your ruling, and a proposal whose cost or risk lands on a team that never agreed to take it stops there. Investment will be declined where the case assumes customers will adopt, ignores the product or partner dependencies, or has no downside view. You will set the leadership structure and how matters escalate, and resolve conflicts with operating leaders ahead of any commitment of money or people.

What a good allocation looks like on a platform business

It favours propositions where adoption is evidenced rather than forecast. It counts the cost of serving a customer as well as the revenue the customer brings. It treats partners as channels with their own economics rather than as logos on a slide. And it can explain to a disappointed product team exactly why their proposition received less this year, in terms that team can test for itself.

Checkpoints for the Regional President

In the first ninety days you and the Regional President should agree the allocation of commercial decisions and the rules for distributing capacity across propositions. Come month nine, propositions and partnerships should have been reprioritised under those rules, with commitments that lack an adoption case paused or ended. By month 24 commercial leadership and escalation should be settled, and proposition performance reviewed on a regular board cycle.

Seven markets and a willingness to say no

The commercial teams you have led sat in businesses of at least $265 million in revenue and 500 people, across seven or more countries, and through a restructuring you kept what the board heard in line with what the sales and delivery numbers showed. You have laid a contested downside before a senior leader in plain terms. Restructuring, professionalisation and cost transformation experience are examined, as are commercial economics at level 4 and, at level 3, revenue architecture, the running of channel partnerships, and work with a board and its stakeholders. You stay answerable after decisions are made, including for the unglamorous closing of commercial exceptions. You can tell the Regional President what is still uncertain and still commit to a recommendation, and no single country head can veto your decision to stop a commitment.

Four meetings, from the Regional President to the board

The Regional President opens with a call by video, held in confidence, in the first week. The Audit Committee Chair follows in week three, most likely looking at how commercial commitments are controlled and evidenced. Week five brings an in-person panel of executive leaders from each function; the seventh week is set aside for the full board of directors. Our response to every stage arrives in writing within three working days.