A good amount of my adulthood I have spent as an operator building and scaling revenue functions, driving revenue from €1 to €100M, interviewing 1000+ candidates, expanding into 15+ markets, and establishing partnerships in 60+ countries. This playbook draws on my decades of operating experience into a practical system with one goal — equip founders with commercial clarity, frameworks, insights, and direction in their journeys towards scaling technically ambitious companies. The first part of our Commercial Excellence pillar will answer, i) What does repeatable revenue look like at seed? ii) What needs to be true before scaling commercial teams? iii) What is the minimum viable structure to create clarity, traction and learning loops?
The first part of our Commercial Excellence pillar will answer,
- What does repeatable revenue look like at seed?
- What needs to be true before scaling commercial teams?
- What is the minimum viable structure to create clarity, traction and learning loops?
Building the Commercial Engine
Building a scalable and repeatable commercial function is the key for success of any company at early stage. The goal is not early traction but reaching Sales-Market Fit – the point where the sales motion is no longer dependent on the founder alone, but embedded into the architecture of the company, with a defined buyer, path to value, and where repeatable behaviours start to drive predictable compounding revenue.
One of the most consistent patterns I see is the rush to grow before a foundation is in place. Without clarity on who you are serving, how you win, and what it is worth, the commercial engine lacks architecture. Founders end up chasing activity over insight – and progress becomes impossible to measure, let alone repeat.
This Playbook outlines the 8 Commercial Building Blocks – core architectural principles that guide where to focus, how to move with intent, and build a commercial motion that compounds over time.
The 8 Commercial Building Blocks
- Mindset
- Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
- Elevator Pitch
- Battlecards
- Pricing
- Sales Operating Model (SOM)
- Sales Profiles
- Values and Language
Mindset
Everyone is a Sales Person
Sales is not about hiring a sales team. It is a company responsibility. In the best early teams, commercial thinking is embedded across product, engineering, ops, leadership – everyone participates in learning what lands, what breaks, and what matters most to customers.
Signal sits in sales – every conversation reveals friction, misunderstandings, or opportunity – and every insight should loop back into how you build, communicate, and make decisions. When the commercial layer is tightly integrated with the broader team, the company learns faster than the market shifts.
The shift in mindset is simple but non-negotiable – everyone sells. Everyone listens. Everyone builds trust.
- Forget job titles – every founder, engineer, operator must know how to communicate value and sell your product. Titles do not close deals, understanding does.
- Adopt a learning mindset – every conversation is a data point. Sales is an iterative process that requires constant improvement.
- Rejection is part of the game – every no is information and resilience is a requirement to win deals and learn at the pace of market demand.
Example: In an early-stage ML infra company the engineers can add value by being involved in early sales calls to help communicate technical differentiation. This shortens feedback loops, sharpens the roadmap and builds trust and credibility in ways no sales pitch alone will allow.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
Selling to the Right Customer
Precision beats scale at an early stage and the fastest way to lose momentum is chasing customers who were never a fit. Defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) ensures that every commercial effort is targeted, repeatable, and scalable – it defines where your traction will come from and where your resources should not go.
- Identify patterns in your best customers – industries, company size, pain points. Who converts fastest, retains longest, and requires the least friction
- Define negative ICPs – who do you not want to sell to and why? Who burns time, churn fasts or bloats CAC
- Align across your team – product, marketing, and sales need to be disciplined around a shared ICP
Example: a horizontal tool chasing both SMBs and enterprises discovered mid-market users shared ops pain, alongside 3x retention rate and 40% shorter sales cycles. Shifted focused led to a material increase in conversation rates (+30-40%).
Elevator Pitch
Clarity wins Deals
Your elevator pitch will become the foundation of the story you tell – to customers, to investors, to partners, to journalists, to employees.
A well crafted pitch travels beyond the first interaction. It is repeated, rephrased and amplified by others on your behalf – if it is clear and compelling. The discipline lies in knowing what is important and what is not, and leaving out the latter. Some elements
- Lead with the problem you are solving not the technology you have built
- Focus on the impact by speaking in numbers – what are you improving, by how much, and for whom.
- Say it in 30s without slides
Example: instead of saying “we build enterprise-grade intelligent workflow automation for finance teams”, say “we help finance teams reduce manual reporting time by 80% with AI-driven automation”
Battlecards
Positioning with Precision
You win by knowing the terrain – not by claiming uniqueness.
Every company operates within a competitive landscape – legacy systems, in-house tools, generalist platforms, or simply inertia of doing nothing. Advantage only becomes actionable when it is understood and defensible, internally and externally.
Battlecards are internal tools for strategic clarity. They provide competitive insight and inform how you sell, speak and sequence your product. When done well they drive consistency across the company – from handling objections to shaping product roadmap and the investor narratives.
As the market evolves so should your intelligence. Build the habit. Keep them current.
- Create concise 1-page reference sheets for top competitors, both the direct and adjacent
- Map key differentiations clearly – what you do, what they do not, and why it matters to the buyer
- Anticipate common objections and pair these with evidence-based responses found in use-cases, performance, buyer needs
- Embed technical proof points where relevant as deployment speed, integration layers, benchmarks, etc.
- Treat battlecards like code, versioned, reviewed, and iterated
Battlecards are not sales collateral but part of the operational foundation that supports clarity in commercial execution as you scale.
Example: A platform focused on secure model deployment faced repeat objections around using native cloud security tooling. Their battlecard clarified differentiation in traceability, audit layers, and compliance workflows—anchored in enterprise buyer needs.
Further Readings: How To Make Sales Battle Cards by Xtensio, 'Product Overview' Battlecard Template by Klue
Pricing
Signaling Value with Structure and Intent
Pricing is both art and science. It reflects how you position your product, the alignment between you and your customer, and the confidence you have in the value you deliver.
The most common early mistake is underpricing – often paired with too many bespoke offers, one-off discounts, and lack of defined rules. This creates inconsistency, erodes trust, and stalls the ability to scale.
For data and AI companies the pricing model is critical. How do you set price in a world of usage variability, evolving inference costs, and outcome expectations without inviting commoditisation?
There is no universal model when mastering pricing. It is shaped by many variables – what you sell, how you sell, to whom, and under what cost structure. The only constant is to test the willingness to pay early and often.
For data and AI companies, evolving along a pricing maturity curve – from activity-based (tokens, usage) then shifting toward more sophisticated models that aligns with customer outcomes – workflow completion, business outcome, or per-agent deployment. These models defend margin, align incentive and reflect value more accurately. , outcome, and per-agent.
You can be opportunistic without becoming chaotic. Define clear guardrails by defining your price list, set thresholds for discounting, and clarify the logic for pilots, trials, and enterprise terms. Structure enables flexibility without eroding control.
- Anchor pricing to perceived value—not internal cost
- Offer tiered pricing options aligned with customer size, usage, or complexity
- Avoid training the market with persistent discounts as this becomes difficult to reverse and weakens market perception
- Monitor unit economics and know which deals improve your margin, and which do not
- Review pricing quarterly against usage data, customer feedback, product maturity and evolve the model deliberately over time
Example: a data infrastructure company initially priced at €99 per seat. After structured testing of willingness to pay, they moved to €499 with no resistance—unlocking margin, improving LTV, and increasing perceived value across procurement conversations.
Further Reading: Pricing Course by Bessemer Venture Partners, Pricing Strategy Guide by Price Intelligently, A Practical Guide to Pricing by Simon Kucher.
Sales Operating Model
The Blueprint for Scaling
The Sales Operation Model is the structural foundation for how you sell. It defines the process, cadence, roles, and metrics that turn ad-hoc selling into a repeatable and accountable system.
Your SOM is not a standalone document. It should be created alongside product, marketing, and leadership – anchored in the way your company goes to market and how your customers make decisions. Without structure sales become reactive. With it, sales becomes a pursuit with clarity on performance, consistency in execution, and confidence in planning.
- Codify the end-to-end commercial process from prospecting to qualification to closed deals
- Align the sales rhythm with product development and marketing strategies
- Define key performance indicators (KPIs), win rates, deal cycles, ACV, pipeline coverage etc
Your SOM should evolve as you scale—but it must exist from the outset.
Example: A B2B infrastructure platform saw stalled conversions and long deal cycles. By introducing MEDDIC as a qualification framework—integrated across CRM, sales calls, and weekly pipeline reviews—they shortened sales cycles by 25% and improved forecast accuracy.
Sales Profiles
Hiring sales talent is not a volume game. It is a matter of fit and structuring roles to align with your customer journey, product complexity, and internal maturity. Too many early companies default to generalists, over-index on charisma, or hire before they know how they sell.
Early sales roles shape more than pipeline—they set the rhythm for how your company communicates value, handles friction, and builds trust at the edge. Getting this right requires structure, not instinct.
Two distinctive archetypes are found in most commercial organisations,
- Hunters focused on net-new business. They navigate ambiguity, remain resilient with cold pipelines, and open enterprise doors
- Farmers focused on expansion and retention. They grow existing accounts and relationships, manage renewals and ensure value delivery compounds over time.
Both are critical but should not be conflated. Role clarity is a precondition for performance.
- Design roles with intention and do not hire until you can articulate the job clearly
- At the early stages full-cycle can work with one person owning the full funnel but it needs boundaries and measurable outcomes
- Align incentives to behaviour and make sure compensation reflects the motion e.g. outbound volume vs. expansion margin
- Set 2–3 core KPIs per role as everything is not equally important.
- Prioritise slope over pedigree for early sales hires i.e. curiosity, rigour, and learning speed matter more than perfect credentials.
Example: an AI company initially tasked a single hire with both closing new accounts and managing customer expansion. Growth plateaued over time. By separating the role and tailoring comp and KPIs to each motion – the new business increased 60% within one quarter, and NRR doubled in two quarters.
Further Readings: What Sales Teams Have in Common by Harvard Business Review, The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge, Specialised Sales Teams by Aron Ross, Performance Management Framework by Quantum Light Capital.
Values and Language
How you sell is as important as what you sell.
Your sales values are operating principles shaping behaviours, guiding hiring, driving outcomes, and reinforcing how your company earns trust at the edge. Left undefined, culture defaults to individual preference. Defined clearly, it scales.
Early commercial culture sets the tone for your entire organisation. It influences how decisions are made, how pressure is handled, and how value is communicated to the outside world. The goal is not uniformity but coherence.
Language is an extension of that culture. The words you use to describe what you are building, the product value and customer relationships should be deliberate, consistent, and repeatable across every function—not just sales.
- Define 2-5 commercial values that are behaviour rather than aspirational
- Standardise language early on how you describe your product, how you pitch, the terminology used for workflows, users, value, how you handle objection etc
- Embed values into hiring, onboarding, coaching – culture is not taught once but reinforced constantly
Example: a B2B AI company codified “Earned Transparency” as a core sales value. This meant in practice discussing limitations alongside capabilities of their product with customers, particularly with technical buyers. This resulted in shorter sales cycles, increased trust from compliance teams, and a material drop in post-sale churn by 30%.
3 Pillars of Commercial Excellence
These eight building blocks fall into 3 sales pillars that form the foundation of a scalable sales motion and provide a structure for thinking clearly about how you build, operate, and refine your commercial motion.
- Positioning: ICP, messaging, elevator pitch, competitive differentiation
- Process: GTM channels, sales playbook, KPIs, tooling, measurement, pricing
- People: mindset, sales profiles, hiring, incentives
The pillars need constant revisiting and recalibration as context shifts. Momentum, complexity, customer behaviour, product maturity—each of these will test and reshape your commercial infrastructure as you grow.
