THE FIRST STEP
Commercial Story Audit
Find out what is actually stopping the decision, before you spend money fixing the wrong thing.
A bounded, fixed-fee diagnostic for complex B2B firms where good opportunities keep stopping between interest and decision. It identifies where your commercial story is losing buyer confidence, what agreement is costing the buyer, and what to fix first.
Start a conversationWhen this is the right first step
- Good conversations repeatedly fail to become decisions.
- Sales cycles run longer than they should, and the reason is unclear.
- You have been told you are too expensive, but your clients do not seem price-sensitive once they are in.
- Proposals go quiet.
- Buyers ask for more information and then go dark.
- The founder still has to be in the room for the value to land.
None of that means the business is badly run. It usually means the commercial story was built to win the meeting, and the decision happens somewhere else.
It is also worth doing before you spend
- You are about to commit to a new website, a marketing programme or a sales hire, and want to know what actually needs fixing first.
- Growth, investment, succession or a sale means the commercial case now has to work for people who were never part of building it.
What the audit looks at
The audit does not assume the problem is messaging. It examines the commercial system a buyer actually moves through, and finds the first point where movement is lost.
Does the buyer believe this will work, in their environment, run by them?
Can they justify the cost, the risk, the disruption and the change to people who were not in the room?
Can the case travel through the stakeholders, approvals and procurement it has to survive, and is the next step small enough for someone to own?
These are the same two problems described on the Why deals stall page, taken one level further. Solution confidence is whether they understood and believed it. Defensibility and passage are what saying yes actually costs them.
Why deals stallTHE PROCESS
How it works
An initial conversation establishes the symptoms your buyers are displaying and the commercial question the audit is there to answer. It takes roughly thirty minutes.
I review an agreed set of materials: typically website, proposal, pitch deck and any available win/loss information. I am looking for where the story loses coherence, what the buyer has to accept on faith, and where the cost of yes becomes visible.
A structured working session where I present my initial findings and you push back. This is where hidden context comes in and the picture sharpens.
A written diagnosis with the findings ranked by their likely impact on the decision, and a clear recommendation on where to start.
THE DELIVERABLES
What you get
A Commercial Story Score. A structured read of where friction sits across solution confidence, decision defensibility and decision passage. Scored and explained.
An executive diagnosis. One page. What the binding problem is and why.
Findings, with their evidence marked. Each finding is labelled with how strongly the evidence supports it, so you know what is confirmed and what still needs testing.
Priority fixes. What to do now, what can wait, and what to avoid doing.
A recommended next commercial move.
Typically delivered within two weeks of materials arriving.
SYNTHETIC WORKED EXAMPLE
Morrowgate Process Systems is fictional. The situation is not.
A strong solution is reaching the wrong kind of yes
Buyers have confidence in Morrowgate's solution. Four out of five technical evaluators in this year's pipeline confirmed that the product does what it claims. The problem is that confidence in the solution is not the same as confidence in the decision.
Solution confidence arrives before a defensible reason to change. Four late-stage opportunities have stalled at the point where the buyer's internal champion needed to take the case to a committee or CFO. In every case, the case was strong technically but the cost of the decision — disruption, change management, the implicit admission that the existing system was wrong to choose — had not been addressed.
The next decision is too large. The three proposals reviewed in detail all asked for a significant commitment at first engagement. There was no intermediate step small enough for the champion to own without executive sign-off. Reducing the decision size at first engagement would address both the passage and the defensibility problem simultaneously.
What this is not
- Website rewriting, copywriting or design.
- A sales training programme.
- A review of your product or service quality.
- A workshop format. The working session is part of the diagnosis, not the deliverable.
- Open-ended consultancy. The scope is fixed.
A defined, fixed-fee engagement
Every audit is scoped before work starts and the fee is agreed in advance. There are no hourly rates, no scope creep and no bill for further engagement.
That first conversation establishes whether the audit is the right tool for the situation you are facing. If it is not, I will say so and, where I can, point you somewhere more useful.
Common questions
What if you tell me something I already know?
Then you have it confirmed and can stop arguing about it internally. More often the useful surprise is which of several known problems is the binding one.
What if I disagree with the findings?
Useful, particularly on the inferences. Every finding is labelled with how strongly the evidence supports it, so we can separate what is visible in the material from what needs testing with your buyers.
Our materials are out of date. Should I fix them first?
No. Out of date materials are evidence in themselves, and fixing them before the diagnosis is exactly the spend the audit exists to prevent.
Does my sales team need to be involved?
Not necessarily. It helps, but the audit is not a performance review and I do not report on individuals.
What happens after the audit?
Whatever you decide. Implementation is separate work, scoped after the diagnosis, and there is no obligation to use me for it.