B2B information, media and events businesses, particularly those looking to scale or navigate towards an exit or capital event, often struggle to gauge what good looks like when it comes to their commercial key performance indicators (KPIs). But, without fully analysing your commercial health, how can you tell if you are fulfilling your potential, or if there are hidden roadblocks slowing your progress? This lack of clarity can lead to missed opportunities and suboptimal decision-making, which in today’s competitive landscape can be the difference between thriving and merely surviving.

By digging into their core commercial metrics, businesses can leverage historical performance data to inform strategic decisions that will strengthen their future value creation. For businesses focused on growth and value creation, a clear grasp of your KPIs — and the ability to use them to identify how to unlock value — can truly change the game.

Not only this, if your business is scaling and looking for a future exit or capital event, proactive engagement with these questions is invaluable from an investor’s perspective. Potential buyers will scrutinise your performance and reporting capabilities, seeking robust assurance of your projected growth, all rooted in verifiable data. Demonstrating your business’s capability in data reporting and data-driven decision-making for value creation will significantly bolster confidence in your forecasts and overall business capabilities.

A deep dive into commercial performance

An in-depth analysis of commercial performance goes far beyond a superficial look at top-line revenue. It requires a deep dive into the underlying quality of earnings metrics that truly drive performance, pinpointing the strengths and weaknesses across all revenue channels. This means leveraging historical sales data to analyse performance against industry benchmarks and trends across your critical KPIs, including:

  • Customer retention (volume and value): the percentage of existing customers and the associated revenue retained over a specific period, indicating customer loyalty and the sustained value they bring to the business.
    Average customer value (ACV): the average spend at a customer level over a year. When viewed in terms of year-on-year growth, it is a good indicator of a business’ pricing power, and ability to increase customer value over time.
  • Upsell revenue: the additional revenue gained from existing clients who increase their spend by upgrading to higher-value products, services, or larger packages, demonstrating the business’ ability to successfully expand client accounts.
  • Winback: the revenue generated through clients that had churned in a previous period and were successfully brought back as customers in the current / latest year, illustrating a business’s ability to re-engage and recover lost revenue streams.
  • Cross-selling: in multi-product or portfolio businesses, this reflects the extent to which existing clients are spending on multiple products from different categories within the business’s portfolio and shows successful diversification of client engagement and revenue streams, where appropriate.
  • Top spenders / Tier 1 performance: reviewing the above KPIs across different client tiers, and particularly top spenders, offers crucial insights into the health of the most valuable client relationships, revealing patterns in their loyalty, spending habits, and potential for further growth or risk of churn.

Collingwood’s latest Media Acquisition Report highlights the critical importance of these KPIs to buyers and investors, who particularly look for strong renewal rates in Information businesses (GRR>95%, NRR>110%) and high rebooking rates (80%+) and increasing AOVs in Events businesses to identify market leaders and investment opportunities.

But analysis isn’t just about looking in the rearview mirror. The resulting outputs are crucial for building accurate bottom-up forecasts, showing how strategic adjustments to commercial levers like retention, ACV, and new business can profoundly influence a business’s growth trajectory. This shift empowers business leaders to move beyond ‘gut feelings’ and instead make decisions firmly rooted in historical KPI trends and data-backed assumptions.

The analysis’ ability to model the impact of even marginal improvements in various areas empowers truly informed decisions, not only about sales strategy but also about broader resource allocation and strategic priorities. For example, B2B media businesses can leverage this analysis as a basis to optimise their product portfolio, identifying high-performing offerings for maximisation and / or modelling the potential future of the portfolio if certain products are retired, thereby ensuring every resource is aligned with value creation. Furthermore, improving the monitoring of your quality of earnings metrics is a crucial stage in building organisational resilience – a factor especially important during times of uncertainty in the wider market.

Real-world impact of commercial analysis

“Before Collingwood analysed our historic sponsorship revenues, we lacked sufficient visibility of KPIs and trends across our portfolio. We knew things were going well, but we needed deeper insight that went beyond the immediate sales numbers at hand. We now have the capability to easily track metrics including our retention rates, win back, ACV, and upsell revenue at a single or multi-event level and by tier. The work we’ve done with Collingwood is helping us to become more data driven and to inform strategic decision making based on real insight and analysis, rather than ‘going with our gut’ as had previously been the way.” – TAC Insights

Collingwood’s commercial analysis was built using our domain expertise to help companies like yours grow faster and achieve transformational outcomes. Ready to assess your commercial performance and unlock growth potential? Get in touch for a confidential discussion and learn how our tested methodology can help you maximise your business’s value: info@collingwood.group