A structured assessment of how the organization negotiates — where value is captured, where it leaks. Not a survey. A diagnostic that reveals patterns leadership can't see from inside the system.
Most organizations have never actually looked at how they negotiate. They know their outcomes on individual deals, but they haven't mapped the patterns across deals, counterparties, and teams. A Commercial Capability Review is a disciplined diagnostic that does exactly that.
We work through three stages. First, we interview key commercial people — negotiators, deal leads, legal, finance — and pull transaction data from your past 18 to 24 months. We're not looking for war stories. We're building a factual inventory of how deals move, who influences outcomes, where decisions get made slowly or badly, where information gets lost. Second, we identify patterns. Some organizations consistently overpay in certain categories. Others leave value on the table because their walk-away positions are set too high or too conservatively. Some have process failure points — information doesn't move between preparation and the table, or post-deal analysis never happens. Third, we present findings with specificity. Not "improve your negotiation skills." Rather: "Your procurement team has no authority framework, so counterparties exploit uncertainty about who can actually decide. Here's where that's cost you in the past six months."
The output is a diagnostic report that leadership can act on. It identifies capability gaps that matter, prioritizes them by commercial impact, and connects them to specific interventions — whether that's process design, targeted capability building, or structural change. Most organizations are shocked at how much of their negotiation performance is structural, not about how smart the people are. Once you see it, you can fix it.
Your teams are conceding too early, and nobody can explain why.
The pattern is clear in the results but invisible in the room. A capability review surfaces the structural gaps in preparation, process, and decision-making that drive premature concessions.
You’ve invested in negotiation training, but outcomes haven’t shifted.
Training without diagnosis treats symptoms. This review identifies whether the real constraint is skill, process, incentive design, or something upstream that no workshop will fix.
A new commercial leader wants to understand what they’ve inherited.
Before redesigning anything, you need a factual baseline of how the organization actually negotiates, not how it thinks it negotiates.
Post-M&A integration is creating commercial friction.
Two organizations with different negotiation cultures, processes, and risk tolerances are now operating as one. This review maps where the friction sits and what’s driving it.
Cost-out or trade term optimization initiatives keep stalling.
The target is clear but execution underperforms. The review diagnoses whether the issue is strategic (wrong approach), structural (wrong process), or capability-based (wrong skills in the room).
We work with commercial teams to structure negotiations that protect value and change outcomes.