The pattern
Underperformance is almost never a missing strategy
By the time someone calls me, there is usually a plan. Often a good one. There may have been two or three. What there is not is a functioning motion underneath it, and a business that can see itself clearly enough to know which part has stopped.
In my experience commercial decline is a motion that quietly stopped inside a business that lost visibility. Somebody left. A process was outsourced to save money. A system change made an old habit inconvenient. Eighteen months later nobody remembers it used to happen, and the shortfall gets explained as market conditions.
More than once I have walked into a sales organisation that had figures nobody used. Not missing data, unread data: numbers that were not the ones the commercial team needed, that nobody looked at weekly, and that nobody had been shown how to act on. Before assuming the problem is strategic, it is worth checking whether anyone in the business can answer quickly where revenue actually comes from.
Restoring that is the first piece of work in almost every turnaround I run, and it has a name: commercial performance visibility and decision support. Reporting, measurement and the decision cadence around them. It is unglamorous, it is never what the board thought it was buying, and it is the reason everything after it holds.
Symptoms
What this usually looks like from the inside
- Stalled or declining growth that does not match what the market is doing
- A weak or unreliable pipeline, where forecast and outcome have quietly stopped correlating
- An underperforming team whose good people are working hard on the wrong things
- Unclear accountability, where several people are responsible for a number and therefore nobody is
- A commercial operating model built for a smaller or different business and never revisited
- Poor execution against plans everybody agreed with, repeatedly
- Customer concentration that nobody has quantified and everybody privately worries about
- Relationships held by one person, or worse, outsourced to an agency and no longer yours
Worked example
A contracting business, turned inside the year
I once took commercial ownership of six markets shortly after a merger. The business was contracting: the first half of that first year was down 11% year on year. I did not start with a strategy.
I listened to every country lead first. Then I rebuilt reporting, because the numbers that existed were not the ones the team needed, were rarely looked at, and nobody had been shown what to do with them. Then I restored direct client contact, which had drifted behind a third party agency and taken the team's influence with it. Only then the culture, which was the actual problem.
+20%
Fourth quarter of the first year, against the prior year
5 of 6
Markets growing double digits by that quarter
+44%
The full year that followed
~2x
Managed account gross merchandise value
The annual average for year one hid all of it. That shape matters more than the total: anyone can inherit a good year. Taking a contracting business and turning it within two quarters is a different claim, and it is the one I would rather be judged on.
The approach
Root cause diagnosis, then a turnaround plan
Establish ground truth
Ten working days. Every person interviewed individually, live client calls attended, existing data pulled, board packs read. A hypothesis formed early and then attacked rather than defended.
Restore visibility
Reporting rebuilt so the whole team reads the same numbers weekly, and reads them before I do. This also creates the baseline that everything afterwards is measured against.
Restore the core motion
Identify the one commercial behaviour that creates revenue in your business, find out when it stopped, and put back a written standard per person with a number and a start date attached.
Engineer a visible win
One result inside the first quarter, chosen to be large enough to be felt and certain enough to land. It buys the political capital that everything structural afterwards requires.
Rebuild the system
Only now: organisational design, prioritised initiatives with owners and mechanisms, playbooks, rate cards, forecasting and cadence. Then culture, last, because culture only sets around evidence of progress.
Hand it over
A written handover, planned in the first week and executed in the last six, then a fortnight of the team running it without me while I am still there to catch what breaks.
Honesty
What a turnaround costs
Turnarounds cost people. Not always, not many, but the honest answer is that some roles will not survive a genuine rebuild, on fit or on performance. I would rather say that at the start than discover in month four that we disagreed about it. Handled properly it is done quickly, respectfully and without leaving a legal problem behind, and that is a standard I hold myself to.
They also cost patience. Activity moves first, then pipeline, then revenue, in that order, and the gap between the three is where most turnarounds lose their nerve. A board looking at flat revenue in month three is often looking at a turnaround that is working. Part of my job is making sure they know which of the three they are actually looking at.
And they cost some comfort. I need access to the numbers, access to the people without their managers present, and the authority to change how things are done. Without those three things I am an expensive observer, and neither of us wants that. That authority is normally granted through an interim commercial director mandate, which is why most turnarounds I run are structured that way.
Questions
Common questions
How long does a commercial turnaround take?
The visible turn usually happens inside the first two quarters, and the structural work that makes it durable takes longer. In my own most recent case, the business was contracting when I arrived and five of six markets were growing double digits by the fourth quarter of that same year.
How do you tell a strategy problem from an execution problem?
Ask whether the business can see itself. If nobody can say where revenue comes from, which accounts grew, or what happens when a key person leaves, it is an execution and visibility problem, and a new strategy will not survive contact with it.
Do you replace the existing commercial leader?
Sometimes, and sometimes I work alongside them. If there is an internal candidate capable of leading the recovery, a shorter advisory arrangement is usually better value than an interim seat, and I will say so.
What if we just need someone to tell us what is wrong?
Then start with the commercial diagnostic. Two to four weeks, a fixed fee, and a prioritised plan you can act on with or without me.