Plan. Do. Review. Properly.

Commercial teams spend a lot of time measuring execution. There is good reason for that: if it gets measured, it is more likely to get done.

Did the customer agree the activity?
Did the new price go live?
Did the promotion appear in store?
Did the range change happen?
Did the new product launch?

These are all legitimate questions, but they can also create a false sense of completion. An action appearing in market does not necessarily mean the business has captured the value it expected from it.

I was reminded of this recently while reviewing a UK FMCG price increase.

The price increase had reportedly landed. Retail prices had moved and the implementation could be seen in market, yet the brand was behind plan and the RGM team were coming under pressure to explain the gap.

The immediate concern was understandable. Sales were down in some places and the obvious hypothesis was that the increase had affected sales velocity more severely than expected. It was a reasonable place to start, but it needed to be tested properly.

Start with what actually happened

One of the principles I keep returning to in Sales Capability Forensics is to work from the brand and the point of purchase back.

That means starting with what happened in the market rather than with the internal account of what was supposed to have happened. What price did the shopper actually see, what did they buy, what happened to rate of sale, where did distribution change, which customers gained or lost, and how did the result compare with the assumptions used when the original decision was made?

In this case, that meant going into the EPOS data and testing the price-elasticity hypothesis properly.

There were differences between customers and products, as you would expect, but overall sales performance was broadly consistent with the elasticity assumptions that had supported the original price increase. There were areas that warranted further investigation, but there was no broad evidence that consumer response to price could explain the size of the gap to plan.

The review then moved through the other factors affecting brand performance. Distribution changes explained part of the variance, as did customer and channel mix, shipment phasing and other external effects. Taken together, these provided a much better explanation of what had happened to sales, but they still did not fully reconcile the performance back to the original plan.

At that point the review needed to return to the value case itself.

Go back to the original plan

Businesses are generally good at constructing business cases before taking significant commercial decisions. There will be a model, a set of assumptions, an expected implementation timetable and a financial value attached to the activity.

Once execution begins, however, that original economic logic can become fragmented across the organisation.

Sales will look at customer performance. Marketing will look at the brand. RGM will look at price, promotion and mix. Finance will look at revenue and margin. Supply will look at availability. All of those views are valid, but unless they are eventually brought back together against the original value case, the business can know a great deal about performance without knowing whether the planned value was actually delivered.

For this review, we went back to the original CPI model and built a bridge between expected and realised value.

At its simplest, the logic was:

Expected value → timing impact → volume impact → price delivery impact → realised value

The bridge forced the review back to the assumptions made when the CPI was approved and tested them against what had actually happened by customer and SKU.

That is where the execution gap became visible.

One of the planned actions had not been implemented by a large online retailer during the period under review.

This had not been obvious from the wider market picture. Retail prices had moved across most of the customer base and the programme therefore appeared to have landed. At the same time, the brand performance discussion had quite reasonably concentrated on demand, distribution, customer performance and the potential impact of elasticity.

The bridge brought those separate pieces of information back together and showed that part of the gap had a much simpler explanation: some of the value assumed in the original plan had never entered the market at the expected time.

The CPI implementation itself had gone largely to plan, and was controlled and well executed. Consumer response was broadly within the range anticipated in the original business case, while distribution, mix and other factors explained much of the subsequent performance. The remaining gap included value that had not been realised because a planned customer action had not taken place when expected.

That is an important distinction, particularly when commercial teams are being held accountable for an outcome. Without the bridge, an execution issue could easily have continued to be discussed as a price or sales-velocity issue.

Plan, Do, Review

This is why I continue to find Plan, Do, Review useful as a commercial discipline.

The value of the framework depends on what sits inside each stage.

Plan

A good plan should establish a value hypothesis, not simply a list of actions.

If we take a particular action, with these customers, across these products, at this point in time, we expect a particular commercial and financial result. The assumptions behind that expectation need to be sufficiently clear that they can be tested later.

Without that, Review quickly becomes a comparison of actual performance against a headline target rather than an examination of how the business arrived there.

Do

Execution is the translation of that value hypothesis into the market.

Commercial teams will naturally focus on customer agreement, timing, availability, implementation and communication, but there is an important difference between confirming that an action occurred somewhere in the market and confirming that the whole programme was executed as planned.

Where activity is spread across multiple customers, products, channels and time periods, a partial execution can easily look complete when viewed at aggregate level.

Review

Review should connect market performance back to both the execution plan and the original economic case.

For me, that means answering three questions.

Did we do what we planned?

This is the execution check: whether the agreed activity occurred, across the expected scope and at the expected time. Or, in this case, did we actually load the price change into the system?

Did the market respond as expected?

This is where we test the commercial assumptions around volume, elasticity, distribution, mix and customer behaviour.

Did we capture the value we expected?

This is the economic reconciliation between the original business case and the realised outcome.

These questions belong together. Looking at one or two of them can produce a plausible explanation of performance, but not necessarily a complete one.

The forensic layer

This is also where the idea of Sales Capability Forensics becomes useful.

I do not see forensics as a post-mortem process that begins when something has gone badly wrong. It is the discipline of following the evidence through the commercial system until the outcome can be properly explained.

The answer may sit in consumer response, distribution, promotional effectiveness, customer execution, timing, assumptions in the original plan, or some combination of them. The important point is that the analysis should continue until the gap between the plan and the outcome is sufficiently understood.

That also means looking beyond the numbers themselves and considering the capability that produced them.

Person

Who owned the action, who knew whether it had been implemented, and who was responsible for identifying and escalating a variance?

Process

How was execution tracked, how frequently was expected value reconciled with realised value, and was there a mechanism for identifying a customer-level implementation delay before it became embedded in the wider brand performance discussion?

Asset

Did the organisation have the data, tools and analysis required to connect the original business case to actual customer and SKU performance?

These three elements matter together. Strong people working with a weak process will still struggle to maintain control of value capture. A sophisticated dashboard will not compensate for unclear ownership. Equally, a well-designed process will be limited if the underlying data cannot connect commercial execution with financial outcome.

For me, this is what makes something a business capability: the combination of Person, Process and Asset required to deliver an outcome consistently.

Execution is an economic outcome

The principle extends well beyond pricing.

A promotion may run without generating the incremental profit anticipated in the plan. A distribution gain may be secured without producing the expected rate of sale. A new product may launch without achieving its intended mix contribution. Customer investment may be spent without generating the return assumed when the money was approved.

In each case the visible activity is only part of the execution.

The original business case will normally have been justified by an expected economic outcome, which means the Review needs to reconnect what happened in market with the value assumption that justified the activity in the first place.

This is particularly important in larger commercial organisations because the activity and the outcome are often observed by different teams. Sales can confirm implementation, Marketing can explain brand performance, RGM can assess price or promotion, and Finance can report the resulting P&L, while the underlying value equation remains only partially reconciled.

The point of the forensic review is to connect those views.

In this case, the process began with a brand behind plan and a reasonable concern that a recent price increase might have damaged sales velocity. The EPOS evidence suggested that elasticity was broadly in line with expectations, the wider performance review explained further elements of the gap, and the final bridge back to the original value case identified an execution shortfall that had not previously been visible.

There was nothing particularly exotic about the analysis. What mattered was continuing the Review until the original plan, the market response and the realised value could be considered together.

That, for me, is the standard commercial teams should be aiming for.

Plan. Do. Review. Properly.

Or load the bloody price!