Most commercial plans die between two meetings that never happened. The design was usually fine. The rhythm was never installed.
And the target has moved since the plan was written, so a deployment that only executes the original document is already behind. We deploy against the situation in front of us, and we correct as the field talks back.
We chair your first reviews, we write the minutes, we equip the people who will hold the rhythm after us, and we hand the room back on a date agreed in writing.
Almost every organisation we meet already knows what it should do with its strategic accounts. What it lacks is a meeting that holds, with an owner, a grid, a written record and a date for the next one. That is what we install, and we install it by running it ourselves first.
A pilot on a handful of accounts, never the whole portfolio at once. Small enough to actually happen, visible enough to convince the sceptics.
We run the first reviews with your people in the room, on your real accounts, and we write the minutes the same day.
Your owner runs it, we sit at the back, we debrief afterwards. This is where most of the learning happens.
The rituals that proved useful go to the rest of the portfolio. The ones nobody missed get dropped, on purpose.
The exit is written into the proposal before the work starts, with what has to be true for it to happen.
Governance stays a word until someone writes down who meets whom, how often, for how long, and what happens when they do. Most firms stop before that line. Below is an illustration of a typical set of rituals for strategic accounts, of the kind we design and then run with a client.
| Ritual | Rhythm | Who is in the room, and what comes out of it |
|---|---|---|
| Account meeting | monthly, thirty minutes per account | The account owner, the local sales manager, technical. Performance and pipeline tracked, actions decided, escalations raised. Short on purpose, so it survives a busy month. |
| Owner and local relays | every two weeks | Coordination between whoever owns the account globally and the people who execute locally. The single most neglected meeting in multi-country organisations, and the one that decides whether the global plan reaches the plant. |
| Strategic review | quarterly | The account owner, the leader, the local relay, and the executive sponsor. Strategic alignment and the decisions that only a sponsor can unblock. |
| Owners committee | monthly | All account owners together with leadership. Priorities aligned, progress reviewed, blockers named, and the cross-account learning that otherwise never travels. |
| Must-win deal pit stop | every two weeks, while it is live | The deals that decide the year, each with a written winning plan and closing plan. |
| Account strategy reset | annual | Market position, account plan, growth ambition. The moment where the desired state gets revisited, because the target has moved again. |
Because we spend our time in the meetings rather than in a diagnostic phase, things surface that were on nobody’s agenda. Some of them are commercial. Many are only partly so, and some have very little to do with selling at all: an incentive pulling the other way, information that reaches no one, a decision waiting three weeks in another department. Below are the patterns we meet most often, across industries and levels of maturity. A training provider never sees them. A consulting firm sees them and writes them in a report. We see them, we say them, and we are still in the room the month after to ask where the repair stands.
A market, a customs process, a product history or a twenty-year customer relationship held by one individual, with nothing written down. The business runs on their calendar, and the day they are away it stops. That risk appears in no commercial dashboard.
Focus, margin and new segments are asked for. Volume, or last year’s portfolio, is what gets rewarded.
A plan changes, a sample ships, an approval lands, a price moves, and no signal reaches the people who needed it. Teams then spend their week chasing internally what a system could have pushed to them in a second. The subject goes past reporting the pipeline: it is putting the pipeline in motion.
Technical, quality, production, legal, credit. Opportunities slow down wherever the urgency of the field ranks lower than the local queue, and the sales team carries the blame for a delay it has no hand on.
Each of these came out of a room we were sitting in, months after the diagnosis phase would have ended. That is the difference between a report and a presence.
The customer is a group, the ownership is national. Two or three countries serve it with their own contact, their own conditions and their own version of the story. Everyone is doing their job properly, and the group quietly buys from whichever part of the house is cheapest.
The system of record is filled in as a reporting duty. The working pipeline lives in a spreadsheet, a notebook or a head, so what reaches management is a translation produced the evening before.
Most of the commercial review goes to results already delivered, and a handful of minutes to the deals that can still be influenced. Everyone leaves informed. Nothing in the pipeline has moved.
A pricing exception, an arbitration between two clients, an escalation to another function. No forum owns it, no cadence forces it, and the deal ages in the gap between two departments while each side waits for the other.
None of this is on the brief when a mandate starts. Part of it we can repair inside the governance we are installing. Part of it belongs to the executive committee, and our contribution is to name it precisely, with the evidence, at the moment the room can act on it.
In every organisation, a few people will carry a change better than the hierarchy will. Finding them early and giving them a visible role is the least visible part of our work, and the one that decides whether anything survives our departure.
We find them by noticing who describes the organisation as it actually works, and who has already tried to fix something without being asked.
They co-run a station of the workshop, present the dashboard to their own peers, or hold the central file. On our last mandate, two of the three people who designed the model were the client’s own.
A catalyst with no mandate burns out. Part of our job is to get their role written down, and to make sure their leadership says it out loud.
Roughly the share of this work that happens in a room with people watching. In one month of a recent mandate, seventy two hours of consultant time went in without a single day in a room. In the month of the workshop, seventy six hours produced two days in a room.
Deployment support is sold in days, and the days are counted. Some clients buy a standing line of days for the year and call them when the field needs them. It is a deliberately unglamorous commercial model, and it is the honest one for work that lives in preparation, meetings and minutes.
Sized to the decision at hand. On a group-wide mandate that means the equivalent of two days a week during the heavy months. On a smaller organisation, two days a month. There is no team parked in your offices.
The people who will chair the meetings get the coaching posture, in sessions spaced far enough apart that they have to try it in between.
Your method, your industry and your accounts, packaged so your teams prepare without us. It stays in your own approved environment.
Half-day refreshes requested by the teams themselves, on a rhythm agreed in advance, with a check that it is a genuine refresh.
The exit sits in the proposal from the start, with the conditions that have to be true for it to happen. We would rather argue about them at the beginning.
An industrial group selling across several European markets, with a commercial organisation that already knew what it wanted and had never managed to hold the rhythm. Names and figures are left out on purpose. The sequence is the point.
Two other mandates, at very different scales, are described on the Advisory page ›
If the roles, the thresholds and the segmentation have never been settled, deployment will keep hitting the same wall. That work sits one station earlier. See Design commercial governance ›
Deployment reveals what your teams cannot yet do. That is the moment training earns its place, and the reason the competence lane runs in parallel with this work. See our programmes and modules ›
Deployment is often a calendar problem before it is a method problem. When the new rituals compete with a full week, the old rhythm wins. Working on the calendar first tends to be more effective than adding another method.
Installing the operating rhythm with your managers, sitting in the first reviews, training internal catalysts who hold that rhythm afterwards, and surfacing what blocks along the way, including what sits outside the sales team.
On a date agreed at the start. The support is built to be retired, and the catalysts are chosen so that the rhythm survives the handover.