Commercial by Design
The Commercial Readiness Assessment
Everything to this point has described the method. This is where you apply it to your own company.
The five conditions of a commercial engine can be looked at plainly, and what follows turns each of them into five questions. It is meant to be answered honestly and quickly, in a single sitting, by someone who actually knows how the company sells. Twenty-five questions. Rate each from 1, meaning not true, to 5, meaning fully true. The goal is not a high score. It is an accurate one. An assessment graded gently is worth nothing, and the most valuable result is the uncomfortable one, because it is the only one that tells a company what to build first. The version here is for reading with a pen. The same assessment can be taken online, and scored for you, at gainadvisory.com/commercial-readiness-assessment.
The scale
Rate each statement from 1 to 5. Add each dimension’s five answers for a score out of 25.
ONE. Commercial Truth
Whether the company knows, on evidence, who actually buys and why.
We can name the specific person who controls the budget for what we sell, not only the person who uses it or admires it.
We can state, in the buyer’s own words, the pain that opens that budget.
Our belief about why customers buy rests on evidence from real buyers, not on our internal theory of the market.
We have recently tested our assumption about who the buyer is, rather than inherited it from our earliest deals.
If the few people who understand our market best left tomorrow, a new person could learn who to sell to and why from something other than their memory.
Common failureselling to the beneficiary who enjoys the outcome instead of the buyer who feels the pain and controls the budget.
TWO. Positioning
Whether the promise attracts the right buyer and repels the wrong one.
Our positioning would not fit ten other companies without changing a word.
Our promise repels the wrong buyer as clearly as it attracts the right one.
A stranger reading our positioning would know immediately who it is for and who it is not for.
We have deliberately chosen who we do not serve, and we hold that line under pressure.
We describe what we do the same way to customers, to investors, and to the board.
Common failurea promise broad enough to feel safe, which is another way of saying generic enough to be ignored.
THREE. Repeatability
Whether the motion closes deals that do not run through the same few people.
Deals close that do not run through the founder or one indispensable individual.
More than one person can carry a deal from first contact to signature.
New commercial hires reach productivity by following a defined motion, not by shadowing a single star.
We can explain why we win in terms of a process, not a personality.
Our forecast holds when a key person is out, on leave, or gone.
Common failuremistaking a talented person’s results for a system the company owns.
FOUR. Fit
Whether the motion matches how each real buyer actually decides.
Our sales motion matches how the buyer actually makes this decision, not how we wish they would.
Where we sell to more than one kind of buyer, we have designed a distinct motion for each, rather than forcing one motion onto all of them.
We know the real reasons our deals stall, and they are not filed under timing or budget.
We have identified and removed the specific risks that make our buyer hesitate at the end.
When the market tells us the motion is wrong, we change the motion instead of pushing harder.
Common failuretreating a stall as a timing objection and following up, instead of finding the risk hiding underneath it.
FIVE. Adaptability
Whether the company keeps learning, and whether that learning belongs to the organization.
We change our commercial playbook because the market moved, not because a crisis finally forced us to.
What our best people know about winning lives in the organization, not only in their heads.
When someone learns something important in the market, it becomes something the whole company can use.
We revise the motion on evidence, and we hold it firmly enough to actually test it. Pencil, not Sharpie.
The company would keep improving commercially even if the people who built the system left.
Common failuredocumenting the steps and believing the judgment transferred with them.
Reading the result
Add each dimension’s five answers for a score out of 25.
20 to 25, Built. The condition holds and would survive a test.
14 to 19, Forming. It is real but not yet dependable. It works when the right people are in the room.
8 to 13, Assumed. The company believes this is true but has not established it on evidence.
5 to 7, Absent. The condition does not yet exist. It is being run on hope, or on a few people.
The total, out of 125, is worth less than the shape. A company does not fail commercially because its average was low. It fails at the weakest condition highest in the order.
What to build first
Do not simply repair the lowest score. Read the five in sequence, because the sequence is not negotiable. Commercial Truth comes before Positioning, Positioning before Repeatability and Fit, and Adaptability runs underneath all of them. The first priority is the first condition, from the top, that scores below Built.
A weak condition high in the order quietly caps every condition beneath it. A strong, repeatable motion built on an Assumed Commercial Truth is not a strength. It is a faster way to the wrong place. Fix the highest weakness first, then the next, and let the conditions beneath it improve on a foundation that can finally hold them.
That is the whole discipline, turned back on the company running it. Not whether readiness matters. Where you stand, and what to build next.
You cannot hire your way out of a commercial engine you have not built.
The Commercial Readiness Assessment
Take the interactive assessment