A classic due diligence review checks the balance sheet, cash flow, legal risks, and sometimes the management team. What it rarely checks: whether the growth assumptions behind the investment case are actually achievable operationally. Yet that’s exactly what determines, after closing, whether the investment turns into a success or a long wait.
Here are the four areas I examine as part of a Commercial Due Diligence — the ones most standard reports leave out.
Area 1 — ICP Clarity, Not Market Size
Most investment cases include a TAM/SAM/SOM calculation. It’s rarely wrong, but rarely relevant either. What actually matters: does the company have a clear picture of which segment it serves today, and how efficiently?
Concrete things I check:
- Who is the “ideal customer” in one sentence — not a gallery of personas?
- What’s the closing rate in that exact segment versus adjacent segments?
- What’s the customer acquisition cost in the ideal segment versus attempts in adjacent segments?
If the company can’t answer these clearly within 10 minutes, that’s an early warning sign — regardless of how good the growth forecast looks.
Area 2 — Pricing Resilience Against Competition and Economic Cycles
Pricing assumptions in investment cases are often optimistic. Three tests I run:
- What happens to the price if competition intensifies? Specifically: are competitors 10%, 20%, or 50% below? Where’s the company’s pain threshold?
- What happens in an economic downturn? Which existing customers would cut back or cancel first? What share of revenue depends on them?
- What would a 10% price increase for existing customers trigger? Rarely tested, often revealing.
Pricing is the lever where investment cases most often turn out too optimistic — and where a post-investment acceleration programme has the greatest leverage.
Area 3 — Sales Efficiency, Not Just Sales Growth
“We’re growing X% a year” is the most common line in pitch decks. What it doesn’t say: at what cost. Four metrics I check specifically:
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC) relative to customer lifetime value (LTV). An LTV:CAC ratio below 3 is often problematic, below 2 almost always.
- Time to revenue. How long from first contact to the first paid close?
- Sales cycle variability. If a sales cycle is supposed to take 3 months but actually ranges from 2 to 14 months, there’s a process problem.
- Sales team productivity. What share of the team generates what share of revenue? Does the business hinge on one person?
Area 4 — Scalability of the Sales Structure
If a company is meant to double, can its sales setup keep pace? Three concrete checks:
- How well the sales process is documented. If sales methods live only in the founders’ heads, scaling carries risk.
- The hiring market for sales profiles. In some industries, senior sales talent is readily available; in others it isn’t. That significantly affects how realistic hiring plans are.
- Existing channel partner structures. A company with established distributor or partner relationships scales differently from one running direct sales — both have advantages and drawbacks, and both need to be examined.
Pre- vs. Post-Investment
Pre-investment, Commercial DD is an early-warning system — it helps stress-test valuation assumptions and identify negotiation points.
Post-investment, the same logic becomes an accelerator — I check which of the four areas the portfolio company has gaps in, and work operationally to close them. Typically within a Markt-Sprint (a focused, results-driven 4-to-8-week sprint), followed by a longer mandate or handover to internal structures.
What This Looks Like in Practice
I bring PE/VC context from my own investor-relations track record — over €600,000 in capital raised for a sports-tech mandate, and currently engaged on the investment case of a major Chinese bank with an earnings portfolio above €20 million. Both mandates show the same thing: the operational view complements the financial model, it doesn’t replace it.
Book an initial conversation — 45 minutes, and we’ll work out which of the four areas matters most for your deal.