Building the (Commercial) Productivity Engine
Too many commercial teams are stuck in an increasingly frustrating loop where they are always busy but never seem to get better. Some metrics look fine on the surface with activity levels high like emails sent, demos delivered, and meetings held. And yet, despite the outputs, outcomes are suffering with stalled pipelines, lagging onboarding, and lackluster business reviews.
Most leaders will add more activities to “get out of the slump”. But many times, the actual problem here is the system in place.
Your commercial and customer-facing teams need an integrated vision and engine for productivity. Not necessarily a reorg or rename, but a designed system for clarity, capacity, and outcomes. And one of the most effective ways I’ve seen this in nearly 20 years of operations and enablement experience is by combining enablement, operations, and strategy into a single productivity engine that drives alignment across every stage of the buyer, seller, and customer journey.
The Problem of Fragmentation
Before going any further, I want to make something clear. I’m going to bring a lot of teams under the umbrella of “commercial productivity” for this. In fact, it’ll be all of the customer-facing teams (CFT). Your company may organize it differently or call them different names (GTM, Go-To-Market; etc.), but that won’t change the underlying principle being written about. For now, let’s say that commercial productivity work with anyone who has a hand on the lever of revenue and has a primary or secondary customer-facing role. Such as marketing, BDR/SDR, sales, renewals, customer success, professional services, and customer support.
That is a lot of teams.
And many of them sit under different leadership than commercial revenue.
However, all of these teams are vital touchpoints in the customer’s journey and have direct impact on their choice to consider, choose, implement, stay, and expand with your company. Because of this, strategy, enablement, and ops should align across all these functions.
Most companies have these teams in silos. Marketing launches a campaign, BDRs run outreach play, sales follow process playbooks, CS onboard and renew, PS implements, and support handle issues. While this is happening, a scrappy enablement team (or no enablement team) tries to hold it all together, and ops teams are trying to patch tools and cobble reports together. Meanwhile, strategy is either brought in late, or not at all.
I’m sure you can see where this leads. Firefighting, duplication, confusion, and a lot of work being done with not a lot of positive outcome to show for it.
If you feel that this example seems extreme, count yourself lucky. The vast majority of people are nodding their heads or taking a ibuprofen for the headache they are remembering.
Teams of great people and strong intent struggle to execute because their systems are broken, everything is a priority, and there is “no time” to pause, fix, and implement a better way. They are building the plane as they fly it.
Enablement becomes a fire extinguisher pointed at whatever “problem” has been defined that day. Ops simply manage the tools with the technical equivalent of duct-tape and twine, pulling vanity metrics, and strategy lives in slides instead of workflows.
The Commercial Productivity Engine
Pulling these invaluable teams together into a cohesive group (Commercial Productivity) allows three essential functions to act as one high-leverage team.
Enablement to drive skills, knowledge, and behavioral execution
Operations to streamline systems, data, and automation
Strategy to ensure every initiative maps to business outcomes
This isn’t theoretical, I’ve seen it work across many different sizes and types of organizations. When these teams act together, they are a true productivity engine. Important stakeholders have a seat at the strategy table, and are execute the vision more readily. This doesn’t remove sales leaders, or marketing, or CS from their respective roles, but it gives clearer opportunities to deliver consistent outcomes without burning out their people.
When the engine runs well:
Marketing, Sales, and CS are aligned on customer messaging and value.
Onboarding is consistent and measurable across roles.
Metrics reflect actual progress, not just activity.
Tools and automation reduce drag instead of adding it.
Teams understand why their work matters, and how it contributes to growth.
Customers receive a cohesive and consistent experience throughout their lifecycle.
Why This Matters
We are in a new era of work. The old productivity model of doing more, faster is breaking under its own weight. New and useful AI tools are shifting execution faster than most organizations can adjust. Some junk AI tools are destroying your productivity without you noticing yet. Budgets are tight because we don’t know what to expect internally or externally. And teams are stretched more than they have been in recent memory.
But we can take this new pressure and use it as an opportunity to rethink our operating models. Not to blindly streamline into a “lean team”, but to integrate and build real systems and capacity for their people.
