For Gen Z professionals, and the senior leaders who will promote them

Every young professional I meet wants to be Chief Revenue Officer by thirty-five. Almost none of them want to learn how revenue is actually made. That is the gap. And it is the single biggest career opportunity hiding in plain sight in the consumer products industry today.

Here is the uncomfortable truth I share with every cohort at the Consumer Products Institute of Canada: strategy is cheap. The term is thrown around in social media posts, business articles and websites. Nail the strategy and you will win! Every competitor in your category has a strategy deck that looks impressive in a boardroom. What separates the businesses that dominate their markets from the ones that simply survive them is not the brilliance of the plan. It is the discipline of the execution. That discipline has a name. It is called Commercial Operations, and it is the least glamorous, most underestimated, and most powerful career accelerant available to a Gen Z professional in business today.

Let me explain why, and then let me tell you how to use it to your advantage, whether you are twenty-four and building your reputation or fifty-four and trying to figure out why your best people keep getting poached.

Part One: Why Commercial Operations Is the Discipline That Decides Who Wins

I have built my entire career and consulting practice around one operating principle: systems beat heroics, every single time. Commercial Operations is where a business strategy either becomes reality, reliability, and trust, or quietly becomes wallpaper on a shelf. It is the connective tissue between what your executive team decided at the strategic planning offsite and what actually happens when a category manager sits across the table from a retail buyer, or a customer opens an app to reorder. The academic literature backs this instinct. Christian Homburg’s research on systematic sales management confirms that durable performance is a product of process, not personality, and Katherine Lemon and Peter Verhoef’s landmark work in the Journal of Marketing confirms that value is created, or destroyed, at every touchpoint along the customer journey, not just at the moment of sale. I’ve practised and taught this concept to my own teams for the past thirty years.

This is where repeatable and adaptable sales processes earn their keep, and I want to be precise about both words, because young professionals often hear “process” and think “bureaucracy.” Wrong. A well-built process is the opposite of bureaucracy. It is freedom. It frees your best people to spend their energy on judgment and relationship-building instead of reinventing the wheel every Monday morning. I teach my professionals to think of themselves not as administrators, but as commercial architects. Your job is to reduce risk for the decision-maker across the table and to create credible signals that accelerate growth, whether that decision-maker is your VP of Sales or a retail buyer deciding how much shelf space to give you next quarter.

None of that works without data, and I mean real data, not a dashboard nobody reads. Integrated data drawn from your CRM, your retailer’s point-of-sale systems, your supply chain, your marketing spend, and your customer feedback loops, converted into analytics that turn into decisions, not reports. Research from McKinsey on data-driven commercial growth simply confirms what I have watched happen in boardrooms for thirty-five years: the organizations that convert data into hundreds of small, well-informed commercial decisions consistently outgrow the ones still debating one big decision a quarter.

Here is the part that matters most to your career and to your retail partners’ bottom line: this is not a zero-sum exercise. The best commercial operators do not simply extract more margin for their own company at the retailer’s expense. They build the analytics and the process discipline that grow the category for everyone at the table. When you can walk into a retailer’s office and show them, with credible data, how your recommendation grows their revenue and their profitability alongside yours, you have stopped being a vendor. You have become a partner they cannot afford to replace.

Part Two: How You Turn This Into Leverage

Now let us talk about you.

Every senior leader I coach and consult with is looking for the same signal, whether they say it out loud or not: who in this organization can I trust with more? Not who works the hardest. Not who is the loudest in meetings. Who consistently turns ambiguity into clarity, and clarity into results I can rely on without checking their work?

I call this system literacy, and it is a skill in itself: understanding how your organization actually allocates trust and authority, and reading the decision-makers, the risks, and the signals around you accordingly. Most young professionals wait to be noticed. The ones who get promoted early manage the signal instead. When you build a clean, trusted CRM process, translate a mountain of retail and consumer data into three insights that actually change a decision, and design a sales process your colleagues genuinely want to follow because it makes their lives easier, you are demonstrating precisely the capability every promotion committee is quietly screening for: the ability to create order, trust, and repeatable value out of complexity. That is not a junior skill. That is what directors and vice-presidents do all day.

This is also, frankly, how you separate yourself from your competitor peers and your internal competition. Everyone in your cohort can talk about strategy. Very few can operationalize it, measure it honestly, and improve it iteratively. Be the one who can. I ask my professionals to build what I call signal artifacts: a scorecard someone actually uses, a forecast that turns out to be right, a process improvement that saves your team real hours. Document the problem, the action, and the impact, in plain business language, and hold every piece of work you produce to one honest test: would a General Manager or a Sales Vice-President bet the quarter on this? That short list of proof becomes your case for promotion long before your annual review does.

Where AI Fits, and Where It Does Not

I would be doing you a disservice if I did not address artificial intelligence directly, because your generation will use it more fluently than any before you, and that is a genuine advantage. Use it as your analyst. Let it compress the time it takes to surface a pattern in data, build a forecast scenario, or draft the first version of an analysis, and Harvard Business Review’s recent research on AI in sales and marketing organizations confirms this is exactly where the tool adds the most value today.

But never let it be your decision-maker. That principle is mine, and it happens to be well supported: HBR’s own research on artificial intelligence is unambiguous that it should augment human judgment, never replace it. The retailer across the table is not negotiating with an algorithm. Your CEO is not going to bet the quarter on an output nobody in the room can explain or defend. The professionals who rise fastest in this new environment are the ones who use AI to get to a sharper question faster, and then apply their own commercial judgment, ethics, and relationship intelligence to answer it. AI is a phenomenal co-pilot. It is a terrible captain, and it should never hold the rank.

The Bottom Line

Commercial Operations is not the consolation prize for people who could not become salespeople. It is the discipline that makes strategy real, protects and grows profitability for vendor and retailer alike, and, if you take it seriously, it is the fastest and most credible signal you can send that you are ready for more responsibility. Master the systems. Trust the data. Use AI as your tool, not your excuse. And build a reputation, one repeatable, well-executed decision at a time, that senior leaders cannot ignore.

That is not a training programme. That is a career strategy.

Gerry Lubanszky

Founder, GoTo Market Solutions

Executive Director, Consumer Products Institute of Canada