Before anyone deploys anything, someone has to decide how the commercial organisation is meant to work: which customers deserve which effort, who owns what, who decides what, and what happens when two people want the same thing.
Most organisations have never written those answers down. They are carried in habits, in seniority, and in a few people’s heads. It holds until the target moves, and then it stops holding.
We design the desired state with your teams, in options rather than as a verdict, and we turn the option your leadership picks into a governance that has names, dates and rules.
Design sounds abstract until you list what actually comes out of it. These are the objects we build with your teams. Not every mandate needs all six, and the order changes with what is already in place.
Which customers are strategic, which are managed, which are served. Written with criteria rather than with reputations. In one portfolio we mapped, roughly seventy per cent of the pipeline sat on twenty customers, and no one had ever said it out loud.
Who owns an account across countries, who executes locally, who supports, and how many accounts one person can actually carry. The capacity question is where the honest arguments happen.
The meetings, their rhythm, their room, their output, and the rules that travel with them. This is where design stops being a description and starts being a calendar.
How an opportunity is found, qualified, prepared and reviewed, in a way that survives the departure of whoever invented it. Written for your industry, in your words.
A recurring, low-ceremony format where people rehearse the conversations that decide deals, in front of their peers. It is a design object that keeps producing capability long after we leave.
Two or three indicators your leadership will actually look at, chosen because they move before revenue does. At strategic accounts, the one that usually opens eyes is your share of what that customer spends in your category.
Most of the value of this station is not the document. It is that a room of people finally settles questions that everyone had learned to work around. Here are the ones that come back in almost every organisation.
| The question | What it costs while nobody answers it |
|---|---|
| What makes an account strategic? | Everyone protects their own list, effort spreads evenly across customers who deserve very different things, and the accounts that could double stay at the same level of attention as the ones that never will. |
| Who owns a customer that buys in three countries? | Three relationships, three sets of conditions, three versions of the story, and a customer who arbitrates between parts of your own house. |
| How many accounts can one person really carry? | Plans get written for an organisation that does not exist. The model looks elegant and dies on contact with a calendar. |
| Who decides a pricing exception, and by when? | Deals age in the space between sales, finance and production while each waits for the other to move first. |
| What does the second contact in an account look like? | The relationship sits on one person. When that person leaves, the account is renegotiated from zero, and sometimes lost. |
| What is the sales team allowed to promise alone? | Either everything, which the plant then cannot deliver, or nothing, which slows every opportunity by two weeks. |
A consulting firm arrives with the answer, and the organisation spends the following year deciding whether it agrees with it. We arrive with two or three defensible answers, each with its own price in people and in time, and we make the leadership team choose. That choice is what creates the ownership deployment will need.
Options put on the table for the desired state, each of them buildable. A single recommendation is easier to write, and far easier to leave in a drawer.
On one mandate, a chief executive refused a ceiling on the number of accounts per manager. Rather than defend the model, we rewrote the capacity logic with him. The version that survived was his, which is exactly why it survived.
Every object is circulated before the session, in a form people can mark up. The room is for deciding, and the reading happens before it.
The centrepiece of this station is usually a two day working session. It is designed as a set of stations rather than as a deck: each station takes one part of the model, and the room works on it with the material in front of them.
Eight interviews before a single recommendation. A governance model built in six workstreams. An executive sponsor in a thirty minute slot every two weeks. A two day workshop run in stations. The design phase alone runs over three to four months.
A one page preparation sent to the owner, who is in the room from the first minute to the last. The objects shrink to a four indicator dashboard, a cadence, and a monthly one to one. The design phase is an afternoon, and it is the same gesture.
The vocabulary changes, the depth changes, the price changes. What does not change is the order: understand the gap, decide the target organisation, give it a governance, then stay while it is deployed.
A model that nobody runs is a document. The next station is where the meetings get chaired, the minutes get written, and the rhythm gets handed over. See Support the deployment ›
Design exposes what your teams will need to be able to do. The competence lane runs in parallel from the first day, and the pitch club is where the two meet. See our programmes and modules ›
Usually by writing down six objects: who owns which customers, who decides what, which figures are reviewed, at what rhythm, what happens when a target slips, and who arbitrates. Most of these questions have an implicit answer already. Writing them down is what makes them discussable.
A description of how commercial work actually flows through a company: roles, decision rights, review rhythm and the figures that trigger a conversation. It is the layer above the tools and the methods, and it often gains from being settled before them.
No. The same six objects apply to a company of twelve people, with smaller objects and a shorter workshop. The difference is the scale, not the sequence.