Case Study 1:
A Global Intelligent Automation Company
From outside, a global data transformation and process digitisation specialist looked built to scale. Strong product, marquee customers, momentum. We were engaged first to establish the real position, the gap between claimed and actual scalability, then retained to close it. The assessment found an engine that won impressively and repeated unreliably. The channel produced a fraction of what its coverage implied. Sales operations reported activity rather than governed it. Management execution varied by manager, and incentives paid for behaviour the system did not need.
The evidence separated claim from fact. The channel had partners but no partner system, recruitment without enablement, coverage without governance. In the core, qualification and forecasting ran on judgement that did not transfer, cadence lived in the calendar but not in the method, and compensation pulled against the plan. In one line, the company could grow and could not yet scale, and the difference was measurable.
One programme, two phases, paced by what the organisation could absorb. Phase one rebuilt the channel as a system, with partner selection on evidence, enablement that transferred the method, and governance that made contribution visible. Phase two rebuilt the core go-to-market. One path to signature, one qualification standard, a consistent management cadence, capability evidenced rather than assumed, and compensation redesigned to pay for the behaviour the system needed.
Everything was built into the working tools and rhythm, the blueprint into the CRM, the cadence into the meetings managers actually ran. The original baseline served as the measure throughout, so progress was a comparison of evidence against evidence.
Channel contribution to pipeline more than doubled. The forecast came onto defined rules and held. Attainment spread across the sales force instead of concentrating in a few hands, and compensation stopped paying for volume the margin could not carry. The company could now answer the question the engagement opened with, its real position, from evidence. The answer had changed.
Case Study 2:
A Global Financial and Trading Data Company
A global provider of financial and trading data, born inside one of the world’s largest wholesale market intermediaries, owned an asset few companies ever hold: proprietary pricing from opaque over-the-counter markets, decades deep, effectively impossible for a rival to reproduce. It sold that scarce asset without a built system. Selling ran as traditional market-data licensing, the customer relationship largely mediated through giant vendor channels, and the average sales cycle stood at sixteen months. The ambition was to become a branded data company in its own right, diversifying beyond its sell-side base into asset managers, corporates and energy firms. That ambition needed a selling system the business did not yet have.
The gap sat between the quality of the asset and the consistency of the selling. Pursuits of complex institutional deals ran without a common path or method, so outcomes depended on which seller held the account. The value of the data, what it changed in the buyer’s valuation, risk and compliance work, was understood in the abstract and priced in screens and feeds. And with most revenue flowing through vendors, the company barely owned the relationships its growth plan depended on.
A Revenue System Build for institutional selling. The operating model was redesigned around how these buyers evaluate and decide, with one path to signature, a qualification standard every pursuit is held to, and the stakeholder coverage a complex data deal requires. Value-selling became method rather than aspiration, with enterprise licensing framed on the buyer’s locations, functions and workflows instead of counted screens. Specialist coverage followed: regional leadership, strategic accounts, buy-side and commodities specialists, client success.
Capability was coached against live institutional pursuits, and the company then did the thing that makes a system hold. It took the method as its own, named it, ran it and extended it without us. A system the client owns outlives every programme.
The outcomes are company-level and reported, and the method that produced them belongs to the company that ran it. The average sales cycle fell from sixteen months to nine. The diversification the plan required then happened through the system: in the years that followed, the large majority of new clients, up to nine in ten in a single year, came from outside the traditional sell-side base, and direct distribution more than doubled its share of revenue. Revenue grew from just under £150 million to just under £200 million at a steady 8% a year: consistent rather than spectacular, and reported as such, because the property that mattered was durability. Recurring revenue rose to 97% and renewals held near 98%, which is revenue that endures, sold by a system that repeats.
Case Study 3:
A European Identity Verification Platform
A sponsor-backed European identity verification platform had been assembled by acquisition. Two purchases in a single year turned one company into three, across two home markets, two languages and two regulatory regimes. The portfolio was broad. The commercial system was triple. Separate brands, separate sales leadership, separate targets and processes, and the same pipeline words meaning different things in each heritage. The assembly had also been expensive: revenue under €70 million carried a net loss above €40 million, because capability had been bought faster than the organisation could absorb it. The combined growth plan assumed one revenue engine. None had been built.
A Commercial Transformation to give the merged business one commercial spine. A new sales operating blueprint set one path to signature, one qualification standard and one management cadence across the heritages. CRM integration brought the separate estates onto one system with one data model, so pipeline and forecast meant the same thing in every market. Embedded training and coaching carried the blueprint into daily use, in-country and in-language, at a pace organisations still integrating could absorb while still selling.
The blueprint came first and the technology followed it, so the integration implemented an agreed way of working rather than freezing an argument. Definitions were settled openly with leaders from each heritage, because a definition imposed is a definition ignored, and expertise was deliberately transferred across borders rather than left in its country of origin.
The outcomes are company-level and reported, the work of many hands with management foremost, and are stated that way. On the spine the engagement built, the company carried the unification through to one brand, one group commercial leadership and harmonised targets and processes. The correction showed in the accounts. The annual loss fell by roughly 70% in a year while headcount came down about 13%, and two years on the group was earnings-positive. Revenue growth stayed in single digits throughout, reported as such, because the achievement was not speed. It was coherence: an expensively assembled roll-up became one company with its economics under control, and the sponsor that had entered as a minority investor then moved to majority ownership. Investors do not buy control of engines they doubt.
Case Study 4:
A Drone Autonomy and LiDAR Company
A global drone autonomy and SLAM-based LiDAR mapping company had proven demand beyond argument. More than 100 clients in 25 countries, deployment at over 60 mine sites, more than 4,000 autonomous underground flights, and reported revenue growth above 400%, all carried by just over 40 people. The product had found its market. The commercial system to reproduce that success had not been built, and demand was arriving faster than the company could sell, deliver, support and absorb it.
The way the company won existed but could not repeat internationally. There was no consistent route to market across very different territories, no settled split between direct selling and distributors, and no coverage model. Onboarding, training, support and repair ran informally around an installed base expanding faster than the capacity holding it. The danger was not weak demand. It was growth outrunning what the organisation could absorb.
A Revenue System Build, the revenue engine for the next size up, designed while hypergrowth was under way rather than before it. A hybrid route to market with direct teams in strategically important regions and specialist partners for access, demonstration and implementation everywhere else, run to one selling method and one governance. Channel coverage was tiered, with master resellers carrying territorial depth in key markets. The build interfaced explicitly with the customer success, training and servicing capacity rising beside it, because a sale of mission-critical hardware does not repeat unless deployment, training and uptime repeat too.
The channel was made a strategic route rather than fulfilment, with partners selected, enabled and governed to the standard. Regional offices opened to enable the partner network, not compete with it, and workflow and platform partnerships moved the proposition from data capture towards operational answers inside the customer’s own tools.
Across the build period the company grew from more than 100 clients in 25 countries to a reported more than 300 in over 40, from around 40 people to 130, with a reported 250% revenue increase and an oversubscribed A$32m Series A behind the expansion. The reseller network passed 40 partners. These figures are company-reported and company-level, and no single engagement, function or leader can claim them alone, this one included. What can be claimed is the translation. Established product pull became a commercial architecture built to repeat it internationally, and flagship customers moved from trial to near-daily operational use, the durability signal that outlasts any count of logos.
Case Study 5:
An AI Data Automation SaaS
A sponsor-owned leader in AI-powered data automation for financial services had scaled properly and then stalled. Two years of roughly 20% annual growth at software margins near 25%, then a year in which revenue slipped while profitability held. The stall arrived with the commercial apparatus fully built. Global revenue leadership, formal customer success, a broad partner ecosystem, cloud distribution, a steady stream of product and alliance announcements. Activity everywhere, growth nowhere. And the engine could not say why, because the numbers that decide whether growth is genuine, bookings by cohort, retention against churn, expansion by product, partner-sourced revenue, could not be read on definitions everyone trusted. A profitable company had lost the ability to see its own compounding.
A Commercial Transformation, engaged inside the stall rather than after it. The operating system for the full commercial engine, with marketing, sales, solutions consulting, professional services, support and customer success designed as one model. One data spine and one set of definitions, so the engine becomes readable. Explicit interfaces at every hand-off. A governance rhythm that makes facing the evidence routine. Build order and pace set by what an organisation already absorbing a strategic repositioning could take.
The work runs embedded, with the executive team making the structural choices, alongside a wider repositioning owned by the board toward fewer, purpose-built products and faster deployment. The operating system is being built to carry that strategy, not to compete with it, and the sequencing respects that a company can absorb only so much change at once.
The engagement is live, and the honest report is the one the discipline demands. Re-acceleration is not yet proven, and this case will not claim what the next set of accounts has not measured. What can be said is that the condition the stall exposed is being closed. The engine is becoming readable on one set of definitions and governed in one rhythm, so the company can see whether its growth is genuine while there is still time to act on the answer. When the numbers exist they will be reported as measured, in both directions, because that is the standard the work itself installs.
Case Study 6:
A Credit Automation SaaS
A SaaS provider of credit automation and risk management for financial institutions was growing, and nobody could fully explain why. The apparatus existed. The system had grown up alongside the company rather than been built for it. Deals were won differently each time, the pipeline meant different things to different people, and the Chief Commercial Officer sat inside every material deal, running the engine by hand. The growth was real. The evidence that it would repeat at the next size up was not.
Qualification was inconsistent, so the pipeline mixed deals with hope and the forecast inherited the mixture. Stage definitions had drifted until conversion measures measured nothing. The path to signature existed only as the Chief Commercial Officer’s judgement, which made the company’s most important process its least available one.
A Revenue System Build aimed at the located constraints. One path from first conversation to signature, held to one qualification standard. Pipeline stages and measures rebuilt on agreed definitions. Deal governance that caught weak deals early without the Chief Commercial Officer inside each one, and a cadence through which leadership ran the system rather than substituted for it.
The processes were wired into the CRM and the working rhythm. The engagement then turned to its real objective, coaching the Chief Commercial Officer from operator in every deal to owner of the system.
Within two quarters the pipeline was clean enough to forecast from, and the forecast held. Win rates held steady while the Chief Commercial Officer’s involvement in deals fell by more than half, which was the result that mattered. The way the company won now existed outside one person’s calendar, and new sellers ramped against a defined method rather than by watching.
Case Study 7:
A US Managed Detection and Response Provider
A US managed detection and response provider was scaling its commercial team faster than the system meant to carry it. Methodology existed on paper and tools were in place, but management execution varied by manager, and what the best sellers did reached the newest ones slowly or never. In a besieged market, the difference between method and improvisation is the difference between a pipeline and a list.
The constraint was transfer, not knowledge. The methodology was sound and unevenly applied. The tools recorded rather than governed. Management execution depended on the individual manager, so performance was the average of habits rather than the product of a system.
A revenue performance system built as one piece. The methodology made operational, the tools configured to govern it, and management execution defined as a cadence every manager runs the same way. The design was deliberately unheroic. Nothing in it required exceptional people. All of it required consistent ones, which is the property that scales.
A full year of embedded coaching made it stick, managers inside their own pipeline reviews, sellers inside their own live deals. The coaching tapered as the evidence showed the system holding, and then it was gone, with the standard remaining.
Execution converged upward. The spread between the strongest and weakest managers’ teams narrowed each quarter, and new sellers reached productivity markedly faster, raising the hiring pace the company could absorb, the constraint that had prompted the work. A year after the coaching ended, the system still ran to its own rhythm. The performance belonged to the company, not the programme.
Case Study 8:
An Enterprise Software Company
An enterprise software company was rebuilding how it sold, because its market had moved from products to outcomes. Buying coalitions, longer evaluations, value questions a feature list cannot answer. The apparatus of a mature sales organisation was present. What had to change was the system inside it. How selling was governed, what capability meant, how accounts were planned, and what the compensation actually paid people to do, because a salesforce does, reliably, precisely what its compensation pays for.
The load-bearing elements were the ones drifting. The business management system reviewed activity rather than governed pursuit. No competency framework defined what a solution seller must be able to do. Account planning was an annual document rather than a practised discipline. And the compensation, built for a product era, paid for transactions, the one force guaranteed to defeat the other three.
A Revenue System Build around four interlocking elements. A business management system governing pipeline and big pursuits on evidence. A competency framework stating, testably, what solution selling requires. Account planning rebuilt as a working discipline, run in cadence and tied to the pursuits it should produce. And compensation, owned by the reward function and redesigned alongside the build at an explicit interface, so incentives pulled with the change rather than quietly against it.
The elements rolled out to one architecture, sequenced by what the regions could absorb. One recalibration was needed and made openly. The framework’s first assessment cycle graded harder than the organisation could absorb, and the standard was re-anchored once rather than allowed to be quietly ignored.
Win rates on governed complex pursuits rose nine points as scrutiny arrived early enough to matter. Pipeline sourced from account plans climbed from 11% to 31%. Capability became measurable, so development spending finally had a target. And because compensation paid for the new behaviour, the change held after the programme ended, the test most sales transformations fail.
Case Study 9:
A Data Insights Partner to Global Consumer Goods
A specialist provider of data management and analytics to global consumer goods companies was scaling by acquisition, and the acquisition had brought a second way of winning. Its own pipeline definitions, its own selling motion, its own view of the customer. Both ways worked. But a company running two commercial models is not one company, and the combined growth plan assumed one. Cross-selling ran at 6% of pipeline against a thesis built on it, and consolidated forecasts, assembled from two dialects, missed by 20% or more.
A Commercial Transformation centred on integration. One marketing and sales operating system, with the acquired business brought onto one blueprint rather than left beside it. One ideal customer profile across both heritages, one path to signature, one qualification standard, one pipeline architecture, and the capability to run it owned by the company’s own leaders.
The blueprint was designed with leaders from both heritages at the table, so the model was chosen rather than imposed. Where the evidence favoured the acquirer’s practice it was kept, and where it favoured the acquired company’s, that was kept instead. Managers were then coached to run the cadence through live deals.
Within a year the combined business sold as one company. Cross-selling rose from 6% to 19% of pipeline, though converted revenue lagged the pipeline by two further quarters and is reported that way, because pipeline is a promise and revenue is the proof. Forecast variance came inside 6%, and ramp for sellers moving between the businesses roughly halved. The thesis that the two companies were worth more as one finally had a system capable of proving it.
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