Kantar’s SaaS business was growing. The commercial system had to catch up.

Kantar was expanding its SaaS platform business inside an organisation with deep roots in traditional consulting and research.

That created an interesting commercial tension.

The product model was changing faster than the sales model around it.

A consulting-led organisation can rely heavily on relationships, expertise and bespoke engagement. SaaS growth requires more repeatability: clearer target segments, more consistent pipeline visibility, stronger CRM discipline, repeatable sales motions and a commercial system that can scale across markets and teams.

Kantar had strong market credibility and a growing platform business, but the go-to-market model was still uneven across regions.

Pipeline visibility differed by market. CRM adoption was inconsistent. Sales teams were working with different levels of structure and enablement. The commercial motion therefore depended too much on local habits and individual experience.

That mattered because SaaS growth compounds only when the commercial system can scale with it.

The business needed more than strong people selling a strong platform.

It needed a common operating rhythm around who to target, how to engage, how opportunities moved through the funnel, how performance was measured and how sales teams adopted new ways of working.

The challenge was therefore not to replace consultative selling.

It was to preserve its strengths while introducing the discipline and repeatability required by a scaling SaaS business.

That meant tightening account priorities, refining value propositions and outreach, improving funnel governance, increasing CRM adoption and creating enablement programmes that could work globally.

One of the practical challenges was adoption.

With around 200 sales professionals across different countries and backgrounds, simply introducing a new framework or sending out training material would not have been enough. The new commercial logic had to become visible, usable and engaging enough for people to participate in it.

That is why initiatives such as the Kantar World Cup became useful. What started as a relatively simple gamification idea created a shared commercial moment across markets, helped reinforce the new ways of working and encouraged teams to engage with the broader transformation.

Over time, the result was a more scalable commercial system around the platform business, with stronger funnel visibility, broader sales engagement and better adoption of a SaaS-oriented go-to-market motion.

During that period, the platform business achieved around 30% annual growth, revenues moved beyond $100 million, and approximately 200 sales professionals participated in the enablement effort.