Insights and articles

Diagnostic: start with an honest baseline, not a solution

Almost every failed transformation started with a solution. A CRM programme. A methodology rollout. A restructure. The results are uncomfortably consistent. Gartner finds 11% of sales organisations succeed commercially during transformation. McKinsey finds around 30% improve and sustain performance. Bain finds 88% of business transformations fall short of original ambitions. Different firms, different methods, same landing place. That is not bad luck. It is misdiagnosis. We have spent twenty years inside these systems, running them and rebuilding them. The pattern is unmistakable from the inside.

A commercial organisation is six interlocking elements. Culture, operating model, people, operations, strategy, experience. None is sufficient on its own. Pull one without the others and the system breaks. Sequence them one at a time and it breaks more slowly, but it still breaks. That is exactly why we created the COMPOSE Sales Model®. One system, six elements, designed to move together. And it is why every engagement starts with the COMPOSE Sales Model® Diagnostic. A short, contained piece of work that assesses the business across more than forty dimensions of a sales organisation. The operational spine and backbone. People capability and skills. The market opportunity, and the organisation's ability to win it. Not because assessment is fashionable. Because you cannot fix what you have not baselined.

Culture: the transformation underneath the transformation

Watch a transformation fail at the twelve month mark and you will usually find the same post-mortem. The structure changed. The process changed. The technology changed. The unwritten rules did not. People kept selling the way they always had, escalating the way they always had, protecting what they always had. The programme moved everything except the thing that governs behaviour. We have watched the reverse play out too, in three global software businesses. Build the machine properly, a well-oiled operating rhythm, a real enablement plan, a working cadence between sales, specialist sales, presales, marketing, and product, and the culture rises with it. Growth follows, towards double digits and beyond. Remove the system, and the decline starts almost immediately. Culture and the operating machine are not separate conversations. Each one holds the other up.

Culture is not a workstream and it is not a communications plan. It is the operating environment that decides whether every other change holds. Clear identity and direction. Honest performance conversations. Managers who coach rather than chase. Recognition that reinforces the behaviour the strategy needs. Leaders who treat culture as a precondition build transformations that stick. Leaders who treat it as a deliverable build transformations that revert. We treat the culture question as a design input from day one, never as a change-management afterthought. It is why Culture is scored in the Diagnostic alongside everything else, and why it sits beneath all three of our frameworks as the foundation they stand on.

Operating model: inherited, not designed

Ask a leadership team when their operating model was last designed, rather than adjusted, and the room usually goes quiet. Most commercial operating models are the residue of history. An acquisition here, a reorganisation there, a coverage patch after a bad quarter. The result is a model that is federated by accident, with segments served the same way regardless of value, spans of control that stretch managers past the point of coaching, and role definitions that blur who owns the customer. We have inherited these models ourselves, and rebuilt them after acquisition, where two commercial organisations had to become one without losing the run-rate.

The operating model determines who can succeed before a single hire is made or a single motion is run. It is the most consequential design decision in the commercial system and the one made least often. This is why PERFORM, our strategy and go-to-market framework, treats strategy and operating model as one design problem. Seven elements held in tension, from market potential through routes to market to rhythm of business. Strategy tells you where to play. The operating model decides whether you can.

People: enablement is not training

The most widely misunderstood discipline inside sales transformation, after transformation itself, is enablement. The default view is that enablement is training. Run the course, issue the certificate, expect the behaviour. It does not work, and every seasoned commercial leader has the unused content library to prove it.

Enablement is a strategic function. The connective layer that turns the company's strategy, products, and value propositions into what sellers actually say and do, at scale. Done well, it also owns pipeline creation. Not just the messaging sellers use once a pipeline exists, but the engine that creates it.

Plays without pipeline are messaging no one hears. Pipeline without plays is activity without a story. This is why PACE, our enablement and pipeline creation framework, builds both as one connected discipline. Plays and Pipeline Creation, Academy, Content, Engagement. Four components, one operating system, with the manager layer enabled first, because managers multiply or erase everything beneath them.

Operations: the system underneath the system

Sales operations is the most under-invested function in most commercial organisations and the one most likely to decide whether transformation produces a measurable result. When it is weak, sellers do admin instead of selling, forecasting is art rather than science, and leadership runs on instinct because the data cannot be trusted. We have walked into organisations running two records of truth, with tools bought for one purpose and used for another, and targets set with no process underneath them. Not because anyone chose that. Because nobody was choosing at all.

Part of the problem is how the tooling is framed. The CRM has been mis-cast as the destination when it is one node on a much larger graph. The real engine is the front office stack. CRM plus configure-price-quote, contract lifecycle and digital signature, enablement platform, conversation and revenue intelligence, cadenced outreach, incentive compensation, and the analytics layer, with AI on top and agents alongside. Designed as one architecture, the stack runs the process, masters the data, and holds the rhythm of business. Accumulated tool by tool, it produces sprawl and numbers nobody trusts. RISE, our revenue infrastructure and sales execution framework, exists for exactly this. Process, architecture, and rhythm designed together, scoped deliberately to the sales side of lead-to-cash. It is the only way the execution rhythm ever gets to hum.

Strategy: designed from the market back

The most consequential decision in a sales transformation is not which platform to buy. It is the design of the go-to-market itself. Who we sell to. Through which motions. With what coverage, at what economics, against which competitive frame. Most organisations never make this decision deliberately. They inherit a go-to-market that grew by accident and then wonder why the coverage does not match the opportunity.

Real go-to-market design starts from the market back, not the org chart out. Size the opportunity at segment level. Choose where to play and where, deliberately, not to. Fit the engagement model to each segment rather than applying one playbook everywhere. Then connect it to targets, incentives, and the rhythm that holds the organisation accountable. This is the other half of PERFORM, and the reason its seven elements begin with market potential. A strategy that is not anchored in the market is an opinion with a budget.

Experience: the constraint nobody holds

Every transformation optimises for someone. Most optimise for the company and quietly degrade the three experiences that decide whether the numbers ever move. The customer's, the partner's, and the seller's. A new process that speeds up governance and slows down the customer. A partner programme that serves the vendor and starves the partner. A technology rollout that gives leadership a dashboard and gives sellers another hour of admin.

The discipline is to hold all three in tension as a design constraint, and to test every material decision against incremental value for each. Customer experience decides whether revenue renews. Partner experience decides whether reach extends. Seller experience decides whether any of it gets executed at all. The seller is usually the forgotten one, which is telling, because the seller is the delivery mechanism for the other two. It is why Experience is one of the six pillars we score, and why every material design decision in our work is tested against all three.

AI: woven across, not bolted on

AI now sits inside every transformation conversation, and it is usually framed wrong. It is not a seventh pillar and it is not a separate workstream. It plays its role across the whole system. Sizing opportunity in strategy. Modelling territory and propensity in planning. Coaching, knowledge retrieval, and role plays in enablement. Forecast augmentation, agentic prospecting, and admin removal in operations. Next-best-action across the seller, customer, and partner journey.

The condition is the data and architecture underneath, which is why the AI conversation belongs inside RISE rather than next to it. Organisations that treated their data foundation seriously are converting AI into commercial performance. Organisations chasing agents on top of a fragmented stack are scaling their own inefficiency. The question is not whether to use AI. It is whether the system underneath is ready to let it work.