In portfolio companies, "commercial excellence" is often just a slide with no owners.

Everyone nods when it's presented. No one owns it when the quarter misses.

Most "commercial excellence" programs in PE are theatre. They're built to look rigorous......frameworks, benchmarks, workshops. But they rarely move the needle. Why? Because they start with PowerPoint, not P&L.

Commercial excellence isn't a department or a buzzword. It's the hard work of aligning product, pricing, sales, and channels to drive profitable growth. That's operational excellence in the real world.

What it should look like:

1. Pricing discipline, not pricing projects.
Most portfolio companies run one "pricing initiative," declare victory, and move on. But pricing isn't an event. It's a muscle. It's monitoring realized margin weekly, fixing discount leakage, tying comp to gross profit and building feedback loops that keep it all tight.

2. Sales enablement that actually enables.
Half the "sales transformations" I've seen are just rebrands for sales training. True enablement means rebuilding sales motions around data, buyer journeys, funnel velocity, and conversion metrics. Then retraining the team to sell value, not features.

I watched a portco spend $2M on Salesforce and sales training. Six months later, the reps were still quoting from memory and tracking deals in Excel.

3. Channel strategy that understands trade-offs.
Everyone loves "omnichannel" until they see the CAC math. The fastest way to grow isn't always adding more reps or more leads. It's reallocating spend to the channels with the best unit economics and scalable lifetime value.

When done right, commercial excellence turns marketing, sales, and pricing from cost centres into investment levers.

When done wrong, it's a paragraph in the value creation plan and a post-mortem excuse six quarters later.

In most portfolio companies, the biggest unlock isn't a new product, new market, or new acquisition.

It's simply doing commercial excellence like it actually matters.