STOP! Is This Really Commercial Insight?

Commercial insight is the holy grail of today’s sales organization. In an environment where customers are increasingly unable to appreciate differences in quality, reputation, service delivery, and product value between suppliers, commercial insight is what differentiates you from the competition and drives the greatest loyalty impact.

Yet it’s sometimes difficult to assess whether the goblet in front of you is truly a holy grail or merely a glittery imitation. Many organizations think they are arming their sales reps with commercial insights, but are in reality simply providing them with an array of facts, data, and observations that may be newsworthy, but fail to drive any real action.

The problem lies in distinguishing between thought leadership and true commercial insight. Thought leadership presents interesting, newsworthy information that customers likely wouldn’t have discovered on their own. It attracts customer attention and teaches them a new perspective, but unfortunately, that’s all it does. To drive action, a message must go beyond merely presenting a new idea to actually undermining an existing one.

While it’s easy to explicate what differentiates a commercial insight at a high level, we understand that in practice it’s often much more difficult to know whether the message in front of you is truly a commercial insight, and if not, how exactly to improve it. For this reason, CEB Sales has developed the Commercial Insight Audit, a free tool to help members understand the strengths and weaknesses of their commercial insights, and pinpoint areas for improvement.

The Commercial Insight Audit starts with a general review of the insight, guiding you through the most basic components of a good commercial insight to ensure you have them down pat. The Audit also delves deeper into your insight, helping you evaluate the strength of your insight on three important aspects:

Understanding of conventional wisdom of customer’s business. In order to reframe a customer’s way of thinking, you must first know how the customer currently thinks about their business. The Audit evaluates the depth at which you understand the conventional wisdoms held by a customer segment and the extent to which these viewpoints are held across the segment.
Highlighting what the customer has overlooked or misunderstood. As mentioned earlier, a message goes beyond thought leadership and becomes insight whenever it forces the customer to reassess what they thought they knew about their business. The Audit evaluates the power your message has to compel customers to take action.
Detailing the new customer approach. Most importantly, a commercial insight must lead the customer back to you as the supplier best able to help them take action on that insight. The Audit evaluates the extent to which your message leads the customer to your unique supplier differentiators.

We here at CEB Sales recognize that developing strong commercial insights is no easy feat. The Commercial Insight Audit is just the newest of a repertoire of tools and resources we have created to help you develop world-class commercial insights.

CEB Sales members, check out the new Commercial Insight Audit to evaluate the strength of your organization’s commercial messages. Also, review the Components of World-Class Insight and listen to the key takeaways and learnings from our popular Challenger Workshop Series on Insight Messaging.