Most commercial assessments examine whatever the last one examined. The result is thorough in places, absent in others, and impossible to compare between businesses. Our framework fixes the scope: twenty-three topics, five groups, applied the same way every time — so that the finding is a property of the business rather than of who happened to run the review.
Under deal pressure the natural instinct is to investigate what looks interesting. That is exactly how the unglamorous constraint gets missed, because it rarely looks interesting until it is the reason the plan failed.
Why a framework at all
Three problems recur in commercial diligence, and a fixed scope addresses all of them.
Coverage. Time is short and attention gravitates to the visible. Sales execution gets scrutinised because it is where the symptom appears; pricing governance and operating cadence get skipped because they are dull. A fixed list forces the dull topics into the room, and the dull topics are disproportionately where the constraint sits.
Comparability. If every assessment covers different ground, findings cannot be compared across a portfolio or across time. A fixed scope means the same question was asked of every business, which makes patterns visible that a bespoke review would never surface.
Interaction. Commercial problems are rarely isolated. A win-rate problem may originate in the proposition, the pricing, the targeting or the qualification, and grading each area separately hides the connection. Assessing all twenty-three lets you see which of them are causes and which are consequences.
The structure: a roof, three pillars, a foundation
The five groups are not a flat list. They stand in a relationship, and that relationship is the substance of the method.
Proposition sits above everything. If the right customers no longer want what you sell, at that price, in that package, nothing further down the engine can compensate. Better demand generation reaches more of the wrong buyers faster. Better sales execution converts more of a promise the market has stopped believing.
Three groups carry the load beneath it. Marketing and demand, sales execution, and retention and expansion. These are the working parts of the engine, and each can be strong or weak largely independently of the others.
People, data and cadence run underneath all of it. The right people in the right roles, one source of commercial truth, and an operating rhythm that turns plans into progress. Unglamorous, and load-bearing: without it nothing improved in the other four groups stays improved.
Findings are read top-down. A weakness in group three means something different if group one is sound than if it is not. In the first case it is an execution problem. In the second it is a symptom, and fixing it directly will waste a year.
The five groups
| Group | The question it answers | Topics |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Proposition, Pricing & PMF | Do the right customers still want what you sell? | CVP & market fit · Product lifecycle · Differentiation · Packaging & bundling · Pricing model & levels |
| 2 · Marketing & Demand | Do the right buyers know you exist? | ICP & segmentation · GTM strategy · Brand & positioning · Demand generation · Lead management |
| 3 · Sales Execution | Do you convert interest into revenue? | Pipeline & forecasting · Sales methodology · Customer acquisition |
| 4 · Retention & Expansion | Do you keep and grow what you win? | Account growth · Churn & retention · Customer success |
| 5 · People, Data & Cadence | Is the engine run with owners, data and rhythm? | People & leadership · Incentives & comp · Scaling strategy · Sales tools & CRM · Process governance · Commercial terms · Cadence & KPIs |
Twenty-three topics: five, five, three, three and seven. The weighting is deliberate. Proposition and demand carry more topics because they contain more independent ways to be wrong, and group five carries the most because the operating infrastructure has the widest surface area.
What good looks like, and how it fails
A framework that only lists topics is a table of contents. What makes it usable is knowing what a strong answer looks like in each group, and what the characteristic failure is.
Proposition, Pricing & PMF
Good: the business can state who it is for and who it is not for, and the losses it records are to named competitors rather than to no decision. Price holds under pressure and discount is a decision rather than a habit.
The failure we see most: fit has quietly narrowed. The company has become excellent at one customer profile and stopped winning elsewhere, which reads as focus right up until the segment saturates.
Marketing & Demand
Good: demand is largely earned, acquisition cost is flat or falling, and the business can say which channel produces customers who stay rather than merely customers who sign.
The failure: growth is bought. Volume tracks spend almost linearly, and the plan has no answer to what happens if the budget is cut.
Sales Execution
Good: pipeline stages describe something the buyer did rather than something the seller feels, forecast error is consistent enough to correct for, and win rate varies by segment in ways the team can explain.
The failure: the number depends on two people. Attainment is concentrated, the methodology exists on paper, and what actually works is a set of personal habits that will not survive their departure.
Retention & Expansion
Good: renewals are worked months ahead by a named owner, churn reasons are investigated rather than recorded, and expansion comes from adoption rather than indexation.
The failure: retention is occurring rather than being managed. It is high because switching is hard, nobody has had to defend it, and the first competitor to make migration cheap will find out.
People, Data & Cadence
Good: one agreed source of commercial truth, a weekly rhythm that produces decisions rather than updates, and compensation that pays for the behaviour the strategy requires.
The failure: the commercial function runs on one analyst and a spreadsheet. Numbers are assembled by hand, so they arrive late, cannot be interrogated, and nobody quite trusts them enough to act.
How each topic is assessed
Every topic is assessed on the same two axes, which is what makes the output a plan rather than a report card.
- Current state — evidenced from data and interviews, not self-reported. Where the evidence does not exist, that absence is recorded as the finding rather than filled with an assumption.
- Materiality to the value thesis — how much this topic matters to this plan. A weak partner channel is critical in one business and irrelevant in another. Grading without reference to the thesis produces long lists of true and useless observations.
The combination is what produces sequence. A topic that is weak and material is a priority workstream. Weak and immaterial is noted and left alone, which is as important a judgement as the first. Strong and material is a strength worth protecting, and worth saying out loud, because commercial assessments are chronically bad at recording what already works.
Evidence comes from three places: the systems (CRM, pricing, billing, usage), the people (commercial leadership, sellers, and where possible their predecessors), and the customers, including at least a few who left. Where the three disagree, the disagreement is usually the finding.
From assessment to plan
The assessment is only worth commissioning if it produces something a management team will run. Three things convert one into the other.
Sequence by dependency, not by prize. The largest opportunity is frequently the one most dependent on foundations that do not yet exist. Instrumentation first, then the things that stop value leaking, then the things that build.
Name owners inside the business. A workstream owned by an adviser is a project. A workstream owned by someone who will still be there next year is a plan.
Say what stops. Every added workstream needs something removed to make room, or the team will quietly decline it. Plans that ignore capacity are the ones that stall in month four.
The output is typically eight to twelve prioritised workstreams from twenty-three assessed topics, each with an owner, a first milestone, the number it moves and its dependencies. Most of the twenty-three do not become workstreams, and should not. Knowing which fifteen to leave alone is a substantial part of the value.
Frequently asked questions
What does the 23-topic framework cover?
The full commercial function across five groups: proposition, pricing and product-market fit; marketing and demand; sales execution; retention and expansion; and the people, data and cadence that hold the engine together. Twenty-three topics in total, applied identically to every assessment.
How is it different from a commercial due diligence?
A commercial due diligence looks outward at market attractiveness and competitive position. This framework looks inward at whether the business has the capability to capture the growth in the plan. They answer different questions and are usually complementary rather than alternatives.
How long does an assessment take?
Two to four weeks in a deal context, running alongside financial diligence. The binding constraint is access to systems and to people rather than analysis time.
Are all 23 topics assessed on every engagement?
Yes, that is the point of a fixed scope. Depth varies with materiality to the value thesis, but every topic is looked at, because the constraint is frequently found in a topic nobody thought to examine.
Is the framework proprietary?
Yes. It was developed by Altius Partners from work across mid-market commercial functions and is applied on every engagement.
Ready to aim higher?
If you want the whole commercial engine assessed rather than the part that happens to be visible, this is the framework we run on every mandate.