ToldorSold?

Commercial Assessment

A Commercial Assessment is full buy-side commercial diligence on a B2B SaaS target, run with the seller's cooperation and alongside the financial, legal and technical workstreams, not in place of them. It answers whether the growth potential is real, whether the commercial engine works without the founder, what the market says when nobody is preparing the answer, and how the company should be selling instead. It runs in 6 to 12 weeks and ends in our commercial opinion, the levers for the negotiation and what should change after the close.

Runs with seller cooperation. Primary interviews and live sales call observation are what separate this from a Commercial Thesis Review.

What’s involved

  1. Scoping with you before anything is opened: which questions decide this deal, which layers of the method run and how deep, how the data is handled, and when findings are reviewed with you as they form.
  2. The company’s own documents, read with an operator’s calibration. Billing and contract exports, price books, the operating plan and the CRM, set against what normal looks like in this segment, so each headline claim in the deck is either confirmed or restated on a basis you can defend.
  3. The reachable market for this product at this price point through this motion, the real competitive set by category, and where the company actually wins.
  4. Primary interviews, weighted toward the accounts nobody prepared: churned customers, lost prospects, former staff and channel partners, alongside current customers.
  5. Live sales calls observed across discovery, demo and negotiation, with the seller’s agreement, and a capability read on the commercial team: who sells, who does not, and whether the large deals close without the founder.
  6. Our commercial opinion: whether we would put our own money in, on the commercial case alone, scored with the arithmetic shown, with the opportunities and risks behind it and the confidence behind each finding.
  7. What to do with it: levers and questions for the negotiation, what would move the opinion, and what the first 100 days after the close should hold.
  8. Delivered in the format your team works in: HTML report pages, a presentation for your investment committee, a working model in Google Sheets or Excel, or an interactive report like our case example.

Who this is for

  • You are in or approaching exclusivity on a B2B SaaS target and the commercial case is the deciding question.
  • You are leading a round and need a commercial opinion your investment committee can interrogate, with every figure traced to its source.
  • Your investment committee wants an independent read on a category the deal team does not operate in.
  • The financial, legal and technical workstreams are covered and nobody is testing whether the thing still sells.
  • The seller’s story is plausible, internally consistent and entirely untested by anyone without a stake in the outcome.
  • You intend to operate the company afterwards, not only to hold it, so you need the upside sized and sequenced rather than the risks listed.

What it costs

Fee
EUR 55,000 to 85,000
Duration
6 to 12 weeks

Fixed fee and fixed timeline. Fees are never contingent on a transaction closing, because the entire value of this work is that it has no stake in the answer. Before work starts, we agree the concrete scope of the engagement with you: the timeline, the deliverables and their format, and the number of key meetings and interviews.

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