Business Goal: Transform to Keep Pace
The way businesses need to operate has evolved monumentally in the past few years. From the pandemic forcing digitalization, to AI Agents promising massive optimization potential, or new trade paradigms and a multi-polar global order emerging, it seems like every business leader has one persistent goal – to transform to keep pace with change.
Many of our clients are hyper focused on transformation – especially when it comes to implementing GenAI and Agentic AI. Yet their transformation efforts are often stalled or not providing the RoI they desire. One of the culprits is silos. Silos limit the amount of investment leaders can access, and solutions designed within a silo are often too narrow for the impact to scale.
Tarun Bhatia
Vice President, Global Manufacturing Practice at Evalueserve
Transformation can no longer exist in a silo. In fact, Salesforce found that "81% of IT leaders say data silos are hindering digital transformation efforts," underscoring how AI solutioning, data, and insights need to flow across functions to enable coordinated business planning and drive incremental improvements in commercial excellence.
The Cost of Siloed Execution
In 2017, McKinsey’s Culture for a Digital Age identified functional silos as a major barrier to agility, noting:
Today, the stakes are even higher within an environment defined by AI acceleration, fragmented customer journeys, and real-time decision-making; silos have evolved to liabilities.
When sales, marketing, pricing, and channel teams operate in isolation:
- Customer acquisition costs rise due to misaligned messaging and disconnected targeting.
- Revenue leaks as upsell and cross-sell signals go unnoticed in key accounts.
- Retention suffers when pricing fails to reflect customer value or lifecycle stage.
- Emerging channels underperform due to lack of ownership or visibility.
Sales, marketing, pricing, and channel leaders must architect shared visibility, integrated processes, and data accessibility. High-performance commercial models are now built around customers, powered by data, and connected by design.
AI Enablement within Commercial Functions
With companies facing constant pressure – whether price competition and tariffs or decreased purchasing power and shifting loyalty patterns – attention has turned towards GenAI and AI Agents for a solution to drive growth and efficiency at scale, changing the speed and intelligence with which entire functions operate.
Snapshot of AI Possibilities
Marketing
AI elevates marketing from insight gathering to execution. AI can:
- Accelerate market and customer research for sharper segmentation
- Craft hyper-targeted messaging and dynamic value propositions
- Manage campaign workflows, optimize channels, analyze adoption, and adjust outreach in real time
AI transforms pricing into a proactive, data-rich discipline. AI can:
- Enable segmentation, predictive pricing and elasticity modeling for scenario planning
- Agents can optimize discounting, promotions, and rebates autonomously or by routing recommendations to domain experts
- Agents can trigger workflows for deal scoring, upsell, and SKU management
Pricing
Sales
AI arms sales teams with intelligence and prioritization at speed. AI can:
- Identify buying groups and wallet share expansion opportunities
- Build real-time battle cards
- Score leads, model attribution and update performance dashboards
- Personalize engagement
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How can AI reshape lead management?
Our domain experts curate a series of AI Agents that combine market signal detection, competitive intelligence, CRM mapping, and ML-powered classification to automate lead identification and scoring.
The results: Integration of these outputs back into CRM builds a rick database over time. AI-enablement increases coverage, improves lead accuracy, and accelerates conversion within existing sales budgets.
AI enhances operational efficiency and partner performance. AI can:
- Automate cost-to-serve, partner monitoring, and attribution modeling
- Simulate RTM, logistics, inventory and warehouse scenarios with digital twins for cost reduction
- Power dynamic quoting, forecasting, working capital optimization, and partner relationship management
Channels
Commercial Functions that Embrace AI Transformations Carve Out Time to Tackle New Challenges
AI frees up leaders’ and team members’ time to focus on problem solving and developing new strategies. These emerging areas include generating innovative approaches to competing in declining or stagnated markets; arresting value leakage from sales and supply chain, especially in times of disruption; pivoting digital advertising strategies in the face of AI-generated overviews decreasing click-through rates; and finding novel ways to reach customers amidst the increasing noise and content across channels.
Enter Commercial Excellence
If your customers experience a single, unified company, your internal functions should, too. Commercial excellence requires that your internal operations mirror the seamless experience you want to deliver. This means breaking down silos and fostering cross-functional collaboration so every team works toward a shared goal.
Anshul Jain
Associate Director, Industrial Goods and Automotive Practice at Evalueserve
Commercial Excellence, as a concept, invites a more holistic approach to AI-enablement in sales, marketing, pricing and channel because each functions' strategic needs, while they can be addressed in silos, can be addressed through a collaborative approach that provides significantly larger benefits.
In its essence, commercial excellence is intentionally orchestrating coordination between sales, marketing, pricing and channels.
The benefits of breaking these silos are well documented. To showcase a few: McKinsey research cites that implementing end-to-end transformation yields 10-15% cost savings; Accenture research cites that "Total Enterprise Reinvention" yields 10% higher incremental revenue and 13% higher cost reduction improvements; and Gartner research cites that sales and marketing organizations with aligned strategies are 3-times more likely to exceed their new customer acquisition targets.
Evalueserve’s AI-Enabled Commercial Excellence Framework helps clients integrate solutions across marketing excellence, pricing effectiveness, sales augmentation and channel management.
It moves away from "lift and shift" and force-fitting into what’s available in the market. Rather, it leverages Evalueserve’s D4 Framework to focus on "fix and shift" – diagnosing what needs to change, designing the vision, developing the AI tools, then delivering the managed solutions to enable that transformation.
When AI-Enabled Commercial Excellence programs are implemented, our clients see a continuous improvement on KPIs such as sales velocity, win rates, and marketing RoI; gain a 360-degree assessment of each customer in their portfolio; access deep insights on competitors, markets, and technologies; and see an increase in SQLs and net-new customer acquisition.
Spotlight
A global automation solutions provider faced challenges with inconsistent account potential estimation across business units and regions, causing misalignment between sales and channel planning.
To address this, they launched a Commercial Transformation Program to build a scalable model for estimating current and future automation spend, thus aligning sales and channel strategies.
Evalueserve segmented 300+ customers by vertical, region, and automation maturity. Automation and GenAI tools accelerated data gathering, while domain experts conducted primary research to capture CAPEX, OPEX, procurement behavior, and spend triggers.
We created a "rule of thumb" algorithm to estimate automation spend per production unit by customer type, layered in forecast models, and applied regression on historical purchases.
The result: an AI-assisted account heat map, scenario simulator, and wallet share potential tool to guide sales prioritization and channel strategy based on RoI.
AI-Assisted Account Heat Map
Scenario Simulator
Four Cross-Function Transformation Enablers
When companies seek to transformation commercial excellence processes, they must look at both foundational and new processes across all relevant functions. However, foundational processes are difficult to change, because they are well engrained into and have proven sufficient for daily operations. Because of this, stakeholders tend to solution within their silo. Our experience indicates there are four key enablers for commercial excellence transformations:
1. Art-of-possible solutioning rather than either-or debates.
When running diagnostics and designing solutions, we encourage our clients to think big, maybe even bigger than they are prepared to implement immediately. Expanding the vision into what could be ensures comprehensiveness; it breaks down silos so that the benefits of cross-functional collaboration can materialize during brainstorming.
Diagnosis and Discovery workshops are key to understanding the as-is state, the needs, and the priorities of the functions. They achieve alignment and subsequent buy-in of the functions, bringing together stakeholders of a continuum of functions to craft a joint AI vision, while defining a clear ROI and impact in functional terms.
Vishal Suri
Vice President, Insights & Advisory at Evalueserve
2. Expanded mindsets – thinking enterprise first.
AI transformation is time consuming and costly. When run in too many silos, corporations do not optimize their investments. Enabling spaces for corporate leaders to align on enterprise-level solutions streamlines investment.
Spotlight
A global gas turbines OEM approached Evalueserve to transform its aftermarket sales and pricing processes. The client had long maintained detailed pricing and specification data for its own and competitors’ products. However, the static, siloed nature of the data led to inaccurate bids, missed product updates, and pricing errors.
A quick fix could have been a dynamic dashboard with automatic updates for product changes. While effective, we recommended a more robust solution: an enterprise-level SaaS platform focused on pricing.
- Digital catalogues and pricing modules enabled efficient lifecycle management, access to current pricing, and bid consistency across regions.
- AI-driven price optimization allowed fast, complex quote configuration based on market and regional factors.
- Real-time monitoring improved visibility for production and fulfillment planning.
Efficient Lifecycle Management
Fast Quote Configuration
This enterprise approach delivered a 25x RoI in configure-price-quote processes within a year and proved scalable across other divisions.
3. Built-to-purpose AI tools with humans in the loop.
One size does not fit all.
At Evalueserve, we believe that the most impactful AI is purpose built to our clients’ specific needs. Not only does this address the variation within commercial groups’ workflows, structures and data sets, but a tool build to purpose increases the likelihood of successful implementation.
Keeping humans in the loop – from developing the AI tools and workflows, to assessing the quality of inputs and outputs – assures consistency and accuracy, another driver of longevity of AI investments.
4. Implementation that builds bridges.
The benefit of a built-to-purpose solution is that it comes with built-to-purpose implementation – designed to maximize stakeholder buy in from early stages and ease process transition. Commercial excellence transformation makes a case for 'the more champions, the merrier'.
Spotlight
A global automotive battery manufacturer partnered with us to enable faster, smarter commercial decisions across 10+ internal functions and 20+ markets. Their goal: strengthen competitive positioning, optimize pricing and deliver on-demand intelligence to sales, marketing, and product teams.
Following Diagnostic Workshops, we established a scalable, AI-powered Commercial Intelligence Engine.
Centralizing market, competitor and pricing information into this platform – Evalueserve’s Insightsfirst – became the first step towards accelerated insights. That was five years ago, when the platform was fed data via research and news APIs.
Today, we work in tandem with sales, marketing and product functions to drive AI innovation and improve their commercial excellence.
Increased Bid Turnaround
Reduced Response Times
Semi-automated competitor intelligence and market monitoring deliver ready-to-use sales battle cards, increasing bid turnaround 3-fold. GenAI helps users analyze pricing benchmarks, discount trends and deal models to strengthen negotiation. Built-to-purpose AI Agents have cut response times to market intelligence queries by 60%.
The Cross-Function Commercial Excellence Playbook
AI-enabled commercial excellence requires functions to re-imagine their foundational processes, integrate their data and technologies, and launch new workflows that enable teams to maximize commercial results. The amount of change can be massive and is usually not feasible in one budget cycle.
A cross-function playbook sets forth the guiding principles and roadmap for commercial excellence. This facilitates investment planning, generates stronger buy in, and improves governance and continuity. It supports stress-testing ideas to ensure flexibility as technology evolves. Additionally, it enables groups such as information security, data protection, legal and compliance, and audit to review and green-light initiatives with a holistic understanding.
We encourage our clients to take that step back, create a space for human-to-human collaboration across functions, and together generate a commercial excellence transformation playbook.
About the Author
Whitt Ellis
Director of Operational Excellence for Insights & Advisory at Evalueserve
