When I joined AXI, the assignment initially looked fairly contained.

The company was considering one or two acquisitions and wanted to strengthen its commercial engine, particularly by building a more structured inbound capability. There was already Salesforce in the organisation, HubSpot was being considered, and the intention was to create a more systematic approach to generating and converting demand.

That was a manageable brief.

But the environment changed almost immediately.

Instead of one or two acquisitions, AXI began executing what would become 10 acquisitions in a relatively short period of time. Each new company brought its own customers, propositions, people, processes and commercial habits into the organisation.

The challenge therefore stopped being simply, “How do we build an inbound engine?”

It became a much bigger question:

How do you build a scalable commercial system while the organisation it needs to support is changing underneath you?

‍The existing commercial environment was already fragmented. Different business units approached the market differently. Customer and prospect information was spread across systems. Salesforce existed, HubSpot was being introduced, and there was no single commercial view connecting target accounts, marketing activity, sales follow-up and the opportunities created by the acquisitions.

At the same time, every acquisition created new growth potential.

There were customers buying from one part of AXI who could potentially buy from another. Newly acquired capabilities created new propositions to take into existing accounts. The combined customer base created opportunities for cross-sell, whitespace analysis and more coordinated account development.

But those opportunities only become valuable if the organisation can actually see them and act on them.

So the commercial problem was changing faster than the original project scope.

Building another campaign or adding another tool would not solve it. The company needed a commercial operating system capable of absorbing new businesses while still giving Marketing and Sales a common view of where growth could come from and what to do next.

That meant connecting systems, consolidating data, identifying target accounts, enriching contacts, creating usable priorities for Sales, and building inbound and outbound motions that could continue operating while the company itself kept expanding.

In other words, the goal was no longer to build a marketing engine for the AXI that existed when the assignment began.

It was to build an engine flexible enough for the AXI that was emerging.