By Wayne Benterman-Tassie, EMEA revenue leader with 18+ years’ experience across advertising, media technology, data, measurement and platform businesses
A multi-market advertising deal is a significant commercial milestone in an industry saturated with competing solutions that promise measurable outcomes. Signing the contract is the beginning of the commercial relationship, not proof of growth. Businesses must continually question where responsibility sits to realise an opportunity’s full commercial potential, ensuring revenue organisations effectively translate partnerships into sustainable revenue across markets.
The illusion of scale
Commercial agreements create a misleading impression of commercial scale. Doors appear to open across markets, but do local teams have the incentives, access or support needed to transform the opportunity into revenue?
Consider the stages of an enterprise transaction… months mapping stakeholders and building advocacy, an extensive period of test-and-learn, proposals, procurement negotiations, contracting and legal redlining.
Imagine discovering that despite securing commercial access following a multi-year cycle, the contract provides no clear route to local activation. The challenge is no longer winning the business but unlocking its value. For growing companies, that can mean the difference between successful international expansion and unrealised revenue resulting from poor execution.
Global strategy needs consistency, not uniformity
Global commercial strategy demands consistent ongoing cross-functional accountability. Objectives can be traded off in a protracted customer cycle, with concessions creating unintended barriers to activation, destabilising revenue generation and contribution. A meta-analysis of 149 studies covering 33,051 interorganisational relationships found that contracts, trust and shared norms were jointly associated with stronger relationship performance (Cao and Lumineau, 2015). Together with clarity on global versus local support, these foundations can differentiate an ad hoc vendor relationship from a genuinely reciprocal partnership.
International growth requires strategic alignment, not assumed identical execution across markets. Microenvironmental nuances, including advertiser maturity and agency relationships, sit alongside broader macroenvironmental factors such as technological innovation, regulation and economic conditions. Local business culture and buying behaviours also vary significantly between countries.
Global direction with an appropriate degree of local autonomy is crucial to unlocking value. If central leadership establishes the commercial objectives, value proposition, and accountability framework, local leaders will require the flexibility to adapt execution to their market conditions. Overly rigid global strategies hinder adoption and leave revenue unrealised, while excessive local autonomy fragments execution and weakens accountability. That balance is more art than science.
Where commercial value gets lost
Opaque responsibilities between commercial leaders and local teams create fragmented ownership, weak handovers, and gaps in activation. Local commercial teams may find themselves revisiting a value proposition already agreed centrally, increasing the cost-to-serve, delaying revenue generation and weakening partnerships.
Conflicting revenue attribution, territory ownership, and compensation structures can lead teams to prioritise individual targets rather than the wider opportunity. Multi-market commercial success can be cultivated through a culture of “we are all in this together”. Nurturing cross-market collaboration can reduce organisational friction and support open dialogue to resolve competing commercial objectives that erode value generation.
Strategic trade-offs require commercial modelling to determine whether the potential value justifies the financial sacrifice, rather than assuming strategic benefits alone warrant the investment. The sweet spot is unlocking both strategic and commercial value by repositioning a partnership beyond price, while ensuring that each market activation is commercially viable due to the variable local costs. This is fundamental for long-term commercial growth and upside.
The greatest threat to a multi-market agreement is not always external factors. Sometimes it is the internal friction that prevents a business from realising the value it set out to secure.
Measuring growth by outcomes
Sustainable growth is demonstrated through revenue generation and partnership expansion. Yet businesses can become blindsided by headline value, without a clearly defined multi-market strategy that quantifies commercial growth.
Multi-market agreements, extensive market coverage, and optimistic annual contract values may look impressive as projected value on paper but are not necessarily indicators of revenue performance. Distinguishing commercial milestones from realised outcomes is essential to measuring success.
Contractual terms are foundational to commercial potential, while customer onboarding, market activation, and solution adoption provide early indicators of commercial traction. Realised revenue, contribution, customer expansion, and retention demonstrate whether the strategy is translating into sustainable value creation.
Revenue leadership must recognise underperformance early enough to intervene. Delayed recognition risks organisational fatigue, particularly when commercial and operational functions have invested significant time and resources without sufficient realised revenue to justify continued prioritisation and support.
Ongoing commercial accountability requires global and local stakeholders to share visibility of performance, establish clear measures of success, and commit to rapidly addressing underperformance. Most importantly, commercial measurement should support decisions and nurture joint accountability, not simply report results.
Securing a multi-market deal can feel like the finish line. This perception of completion can create an assumption that accountability shifts from those securing commercial access to those activating the opportunity, when all parties remain responsible for delivering commercial success.
Realising that potential requires a degree of commercial selflessness, particularly when the greatest value sits outside an individual’s immediate remit. Clear ownership, rewarding collaboration and incentivising the right organisational values and behaviours are key to creating sustainable value across markets.
The measure of multi-market growth is not the agreements we secure, but the commercial value we collectively realise. As leaders, we must remain accountable for execution and long-term sustainable value, supported by early-stage joint business planning that aligns the growth aspirations of both the organisation and the customer.
