Run the 20-Point Commercial Analysis on your own firm

This is the diagnostic I run at the start of almost every commercial strategy engagement, published here in full. Twenty statements across four dimensions, each scored 1 to 5 by your leadership team, producing a mark out of 100 and, more usefully, a map of where your growth is stuck. I’ve spent about ten years refining it and I still open paid engagements with it, which makes giving it away look like a strange decision. It isn’t. The questions were never the valuable part of the exercise. What matters is the honesty of the answers and what you do about them afterwards, and both of those are yours to supply whether I’m in the room or not.

So: no email wall, no cut-down version with the good bits held back. This is the whole instrument, and a leadership team can run it in an afternoon.

What the analysis surfaces

Every firm I’ve run this with shows some version of the same gap: what the firm can actually do exceeds what the market believes it can do. The technical work would survive any scrutiny a client could throw at it, while the website says “full-service, client-focused, experienced team” in roughly the same order as every competitor’s. Partway through one session I asked the leadership team why a client should pick them over anyone else. Eleven capable people went quiet. Each of them knew the firm was good; none of them could say why in a single sentence. That silence is the thing this exercise exists to surface, because once a team has heard it in their own boardroom, deciding what to fix first becomes much easier.

Statement 15 measures the gap directly. The other nineteen tell you where it comes from and what it costs you.

How to run it

Get everyone who owns a piece of the commercial outcome into one room: the managing partner or CEO, practice or department heads, whoever runs marketing and sales. Somewhere between six and twelve people works. Fewer than that and you’re scoring one person’s opinion; more and the discussion sprawls past usefulness.

The sequence matters more than the venue.

1. Everyone scores all twenty statements alone, in silence, before any discussion. Twenty minutes.
2. Go through the statements one at a time. Each person reveals their score before anyone argues.
3. Debate each statement to a consensus score. Budget about ninety minutes.
4. Add the twenty consensus scores for a total out of 100, and keep the individual sheets.

The scale for every statement: 1 is not in place, 2 is early stages, 3 is developing, 4 is strong, 5 is best in class. “Best in class” means best in your market, judged on evidence.

The twenty statements

Brand Clarity & Culture

Purpose, values, and whether the firm’s identity is built to outlast its founders.

1. Your brand purpose is defined and well communicated, internally and externally.
2. Your brand values are defined and well communicated internally.
3. You can easily explain the benefits your ideal client gets from working with you.
4. You choose employees, clients and suppliers based on a consistent set of values.
5. Your brand and client relationships are institutionalised and scalable; they don’t depend on the personal network or presence of the founders.

Statement 5 is the succession question in disguise. If the founders stopped answering their phones tomorrow, how much revenue would leave with them? It’s also the valuation question, because acquirers pay for revenue that stays when the founder goes.

Visual Identity & Narrative

How the firm looks and sounds, and whether it holds a position a competitor couldn’t claim.

6. Your visual identity is well defined, well documented, and used consistently.
7. You have a tone of voice used consistently, in external communications and in the internal, transactional ones nobody thinks about.
8. You have a clear answer to “Why us?” Your brand has focus and is clearly different from its competitors.
9. You know exactly who your ideal client is, and you’ve narrowed down a niche in the market.
10. You have a defined channel strategy: you know where your audience pays attention, what to say there, and you show up consistently.

Statement 8 is the hinge of the whole exercise. I’ll come back to it.

Strategy

Where you compete, and how marketing connects to the business plan.

11. You know which of your services generate the best long-term client relationships and value.
12. You have a clear view of which service lines are most exposed to commoditisation, and a plan to evolve your value proposition before the squeeze arrives.
13. Your high-level business goals translate directly into marketing goals and KPIs the whole team understands.
14. You understand your lead-to-cash process. Leads are captured, qualified and followed up in a defined way.
15. The quality of your external brand presence matches or exceeds the reality of your internal technical excellence.

Authority & Assets

Whether your credibility keeps working while the partners sleep.

16. Your website works as a 24/7 validation engine: it answers complex objections, pre-sells prospects before they speak to a human, and produces leads regularly.
17. You communicate with your market regularly and deliberately, and what you publish carries a real point of view.
18. You have a transparent system for acquiring leads, and cost per acquisition is known and actively managed.
19. Your technical documentation and sales materials are better than your competitors’; they remove friction and can carry a sale on their own.
20. The people in your firm are visible and recognised as experts in their own right, so your reputation is carried by humans the market can name.

How to score honestly

The instrument is only as good as the discipline in the room.

Score the real number, not the one in the strategy deck. Statement 6 asks whether your visual identity is used consistently; the honest test is the last proposal a junior sent out, the current slide templates, the email signatures. Score what a sceptical prospect would experience this week, because that is what they’ll experience.

Demand evidence for every 4 and 5. This borrows from David C. Baker, who tests values by asking firms to name one difficult, costly decision made because of each value on the website; if nobody can, the value is decoration. Apply the same standard across the scorecard. A 4 on statement 14 means someone can open the pipeline report on the spot. A 5 on statement 2 means everyone in the room can recite the values from memory and point to a hire or a fire they shaped. One team I worked with scored its values 5 out of 5 without debate, and later in the same session a member admitted that commercial pressure had overridden those values in hiring more than once. The score survived, but only because the team could also point to harder decisions that went the values’ way. Make sure yours would survive the same challenge.

The silent first round exists for the third rule: divergence is data. Anything truly defined gets scored tightly, because everyone is describing the same documented fact. When the managing partner says 4 and the marketing lead says 2, believe the 2, and pay attention to the spread itself; a statement that scatters across the room is telling you the thing exists as private opinion, and has never been settled as a shared fact. In my experience the statements with the widest spread are usually the first ones worth fixing.

How to read the result

Ignore the total at first. Two firms can both score 62 with entirely different problems, so the shape of the scorecard tells you more than the sum does.

Start with the 1s and 2s: this is where growth is stuck. Most teams produce between two and four of them, and they connect more often than they land at random. The strongest leadership team I’ve run this with scored twelve of the twenty statements at 4 or above, a total of 75 out of 100, and still came away with three 2s: founder dependency, “Why us?”, and knowing which services create the most long-term value. Three separate statements, one root. The firm hadn’t decided who it was for, so it couldn’t say why clients should choose it, so it couldn’t tell which clients were most valuable, so every important relationship kept routing through the founders’ personal credibility.

A 3 is a consistency gap. The firm knows what to do and does it in bursts, which means the effort never accumulates into a reputation. These tend to resolve once the strategic questions upstream of them get answered.

The 4s and 5s are your foundations, provided they survived the evidence rule; whatever you build next stands on them.

Then trace the chain, because low scores are usually one problem wearing several disguises. Without an answer to “Why us?” (statement 8), your communication has no point of view, so publishing becomes a chore performed for a KPI dashboard. One marketing lead told me, with impressive honesty, that over half of his firm’s publishing happened only because the OKRs demanded it and would stop the day they were removed. Without a point of view you can’t choose channels sensibly (statement 10), and scattered channels make cost per acquisition untrackable (statement 18). Statement 8 sits upstream of more of this scorecard than any other, which is why I called it the hinge.

The last reading rule is the most cheerful one: the biggest gap is the biggest upside. If your delivery outruns your visibility, the expensive part is already built. Growing technical capability takes years of hiring and training; getting the market to see capability you already own is faster and cheaper than any other growth available to you. Low scores are good news. They’re growth you haven’t collected yet.

What to do next

Resist the urge to build a twenty-point action plan. A scorecard with six weak statements doesn’t need six projects; it needs the one decision the others are waiting on, and in most professional firms that decision is statement 8.

If 8 is low, treat it as a strategy decision instead of a copywriting brief. A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin’s questions from Playing to Win are the right frame: where will you play, and where will you refuse to play? “Sameness isn’t strategy,” as they put it. Baker adds a test I use in every positioning discussion: if no competitor would ever claim the opposite of your positioning statement, the statement says nothing. “Our people make the difference” fails instantly, because nobody claims to hire terrible people.

If 5 is low, start moving relationships from individuals to the firm this quarter. Pair a second senior person onto your ten most important client relationships, write down what only the founders currently know about each account, and let someone else lead the next renewal conversation. David Maister’s work explains why this is slow: clients trust people, and institutions only earn trust through repeated contact with trustworthy humans, so the fix is developing more of those humans and giving them the stage.

If 11 is low, the fix is a spreadsheet. Service lines down the side, client types across the top, revenue in the cells, with gross margin and client tenure added alongside. Gale Crosley’s revenue segmentation tool in At the Crossroads is the fullest version of this exercise. The data already sits in your billing system; the analysis takes about a week, and it usually rearranges the firm’s beliefs about which work matters most.

Whatever you choose, book the re-run now: same people, same twenty statements, twelve months from today. The first run is a baseline. The second one tells you whether anything changed.

Where the thinking comes from

The instrument is mine, and several of its statements stand on other people’s shoulders, so you should know whose. David C. Baker’s The Business of Expertise shaped the positioning statements and the conviction underneath them: expertise comes from seeing the same situation many times, which only happens once a firm narrows its focus. The Trusted Advisor, by David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford, together with Maister’s Managing the Professional Service Firm, sits underneath statements 5 and 20, the ones about trust living in people. Playing to Win by Lafley and Martin is behind most of the Strategy section, and Crosley’s At the Crossroads supplied the revenue segmentation exercise above. If this playbook helps you, their books will help you for longer.

Block an afternoon this month, print the twenty statements with one sheet per person, and keep the room silent until the first round of scoring is done. If the result confuses you, or the room argues to a standstill on one statement, tell me what you found through the contact page. I read everything.

Rik