Business opportunities often emerge and accelerate in response to major external events—market shifts, new innovations, technological breakthroughs, and geopolitical developments. These forces can create significant “super‑growth” potential for companies prepared to act.
Yet many organizations still have untapped potential within their existing business portfolios and markets. The question for 2026 is whether companies are fully utilizing the opportunities already available to them and whether they have a firm grasp on the new ones rapidly taking shape.
The “Three-Stepper” offers a straightforward and effective approach to doing both: maximizing existing opportunities while capturing emerging ones with clarity, speed, and confidence.
Step 1: Truly Understand Your Customers—and How They Buy
In today’s rapidly evolving markets, companies must develop a far more nuanced understanding of their customers and even their customers’ customers. Buying strategies are shifting, expectations are rising, and new opportunities emerge almost daily.
To stay ahead, organizations must not only track these changes but also understand how clearly their customers grasp the products, services, and solutions available to them.
The companies that win are those that guide customers from day one: acting as educators, not adapters. They shape the market rather than react to it. This requires clarity on how customers make decisions, how they develop their understanding of needs and opportunities, and how value can be created immediately.
The year 2026 continues to reveal remarkable trends in commercial development and sales. While many approaches exist, several stand out as particularly transformative, including:
- AI‑Powered Co‑Selling and Predictive Selling
- Digital Sales Rooms and Immersive Buying Experiences
- Data‑Driven and Predictive Outreach
- Ethical AI and Compliance Leadership
- Subscription and Consumption‑Based Sales Models
- Customer Experience–Driven and Hybrid Engagement Models
- Unified Revenue Teams and GTM Engineering
These innovations can significantly accelerate commercial and sales excellence. Yet the essential question remains: Which of these are relevant to your company—why, and when should you act?
To summarize:
Do you understand how your customers buy, how they learn about their needs, and how you can create value for them immediately?
Step 2: Make Sure You Have the Right People
Jim Collins famously said, “If you don’t have anything, make sure you have the right people.” This reflects a fundamental truth: even the most advanced commercial and sales capabilities depend on human capital.
To capture growth opportunities, companies must focus intensely on their people. This means understanding the current talent landscape—not only from an operational perspective but also from the viewpoint of the Board of Directors. Too often, organizations lack a fact‑based understanding of whether their talent strategy truly aligns with their commercial and sales ambitions.
Leading companies invest in developing competencies, mindsets, and individual strengths not through isolated programs, but as an integrated part of daily business. They also recognize the strategic value of Talent Market Mapping: identifying external talent pools and aligning recruitment strategies with the company’s commercial maturity and growth objectives.
To summarize:
Do you have the best talent in place, and are they being developed effectively as individuals and as a team? Do you maintain a professional, data‑driven Talent Map that clarifies what the market offers and how quickly new talents and competencies can be brought onboard?
Step 3: Use Technology as a Catalyst for Commercial Excellence
Technology adoption offers almost limitless opportunities to elevate commercial and sales performance. It opens new horizons while enabling companies to extract far more value from existing CRM, ERP, and analytics systems.
However, technology must serve a clear business purpose. Organizations should define the growth ambition first, then explore which technologies meaningfully support it.
Key questions include:
- Where does the company already possess strong assets that can be leveraged further?
- Which technologies deliver the greatest value to customers?
- Which tools increase speed, competitiveness, and support for commercial and sales talent?
To summarize:
Do you recognize the technology trends that best support your commercial activities and sales growth strategy? Are you confident your existing systems are being fully utilized to enhance commercial and sales excellence?
Food for Thought: The Value of the “Three-Stepper”
This three-step approach—unique customer understanding, talent excellence, and purposeful technology adoption—can be crystallized quickly, insightfully, and with reasonable investment. The benefits are concrete and can be implemented immediately. The time to meaningful customer value is short, and the impact on business growth can be significant.
Organizations that master these three dimensions position themselves not only to compete but to lead.
