I have a problem with the phrase commercial strategy because it sounds like something done by people in cheap suits.
They fly in on Monday, interview twelve executives, build a spreadsheet, and spend three weeks turning everything you already know into a 74-page PowerPoint. Then they stand in front of the board and tell you to improve customer centricity, strengthen differentiation, and optimize your go-to-market.
Everyone nods. Nobody knows what to do on Monday.
I don’t think that is strategy.
Commercial strategy, at least the way I think about it, is deciding what has to change about a company for the market to respond differently. That might mean changing the product, the customer, the price, the positioning, the distribution channel, the business model, or something else entirely.
The difficult part is that you usually do not know which one when you start. That is the job.
The Consultant’s Map
Traditional strategy consulting is built around an understandable desire to make strategy systematic. You break the market into segments, measure the TAM, study competitors, interview customers, build a matrix, score the options, and select the quadrant with the highest expected return.
There is nothing wrong with any of those things. I use data, study competitors, pull apart pricing, look at unit economics, talk to customers, and try to understand exactly how the business works.
The problem begins when the tools become the work.
Analysis can tell you a great deal about the company you have. It can tell you where customers are coming from, what they pay, where margins disappear, who your competitors are, and where things are breaking down.
What it cannot do on its own is tell you what the company should do next.
That requires imagination and judgment.
Finding the Move
Most companies come to commercial strategy with a problem that sounds fairly specific. Growth has stalled. Sales are weak. A new product is not landing. Customer acquisition is too expensive. Investors do not understand the story.
The natural response is to attack the problem where it appears. If growth has stalled, improve marketing. If sales are weak, fix sales. If investors are confused, rewrite the deck.
Sometimes that is exactly right.
But sometimes marketing is doing a perfectly reasonable job selling an offer that nobody particularly wants. In that case, improving the marketing simply makes the company more efficient at pushing the wrong thing.
The real answer might be a different customer, a different proposition, a different price, a narrower product, a broader product, or a completely different route to market. It may even sit somewhere nobody initially considered relevant to the problem.
That is what I mean by commercial strategy. It is not optimizing one part of the machine. It is looking across the machine for the change that matters most.
The useful question is not simply, Why isn’t this working? It is, What could we change that would make it work differently?
The Problem Refuses to Stay in Its Department
One of the reasons I distrust overly structured approaches to commercial strategy is that the answer rarely respects organizational boundaries.
A marketing problem can turn out to be a product problem. A product problem can turn out to be a positioning problem. A positioning problem can turn out to be a distribution problem. A distribution problem can turn out to be an economic problem. An economic problem can turn out to be a financing problem.
Customers do not experience companies as org charts.
They see the product, what it costs, what it promises, where they encounter it, what alternatives they have, whether they trust it, and whether buying it makes sense. All of those things interact.
This is why I usually want to understand the whole commercial system before deciding where the problem lives. If you define the problem as “marketing” before looking at the product, or “sales” before looking at the proposition, you have already restricted the set of answers you are willing to find.
Sometimes the correct answer really is better marketing. But you should arrive there after looking at the business, not because the marketing department happened to be the one that called.
Intuition
There is another part of this that makes traditional business people uncomfortable: intuition matters.
I do not mean intuition as some mystical substitute for evidence. I mean pattern recognition built from spending enough time around products, markets, brands, technology, finance, and companies.
Sometimes something feels wrong before I can explain exactly what is wrong with it. Sometimes an opportunity looks much larger than the way the company is currently framing it. Sometimes two things that everyone has been treating separately seem obviously connected.
That feeling is not the answer. It tells me where to look.
Then I go into the business. I look at the economics, the customers, the competition, the constraints, and what has already been tried. I try to understand whether the idea survives contact with reality.
Analysis is very good at telling you what is happening inside the system you already have. It is less good at proposing a different system.
That is where imagination matters.
The most valuable strategic move is often not hidden in some unexplored row of the spreadsheet. It comes from looking at the same facts and seeing a different possibility.
The Report Is Not the Product
This is probably where I am least sympathetic to traditional consulting.
A company does not need another intelligent description of its problems. It needs to know what to do.
Reports, decks, research, models, and analysis can all be useful, but they are artifacts of the work. They are not the work itself.
The product is the decision.
If I spend weeks studying a company and produce an impressive document that leaves the founder with the same set of choices they had when we started, I have not accomplished much. The useful outcome is a recommendation specific enough that something can actually change: sell this instead of that, focus on this customer, change the price, reposition the product, abandon this channel, put more money behind that one.
That recommendation should be supported by analysis, but analysis is there to make the decision better. It is not there to protect the consultant from having to make one.
There is always uncertainty. Commercial strategy does not produce mathematical proof that a decision will work. At some point someone has to understand the evidence, see the possibilities, and make a call.
That is commercial strategy as I understand it: getting close enough to the business to see the move that changes how the market responds, and being willing to decide what that move should be.