Your commercial engine in 100 days: from random deals to deliberate pipeline

Intro

Ask a CEO of a SME or scale-up how “sales” are going and you often hear:

• “It depends on the month.”

• “When X is on fire, we do great.”

• “We’re strong when the market is good.”

That’s another way of saying:

“We don’t really have a commercial engine.We have activity and hope.”

In “100 Days to Make Your Mark as a CEO” I encourage CEOs to use their first or next 100 days to get a much clearer picture of how revenue actually happens.

Time to buy the book!

What is a commercial engine?

Your commercial engine is the combination of:

• who you go after (ideal customer profile),

• how you create and capture demand (marketing & sales),

• what steps you follow from first contact to signed deal,

• how you review and improve that process.

It’s not a software tool.It’s not a single “sales hero”.It’s a repeatable way of turning opportunities into business.

Without it, you get:

• feast-or-famine months,

• dependence on a few people,

• difficulty planning capacity and investments.

Step 1: Clarify who you want to sell to

Many companies still operate with:

• “everyone who needs X”,

• “all SMEs”,

• “anyone in our territory”.

In your 100-day window, make this sharper:

• What size of company do we serve best?

• In which sectors do we have the strongest case?

• Which types of decision-makers do we understand best?

• Which situations (triggers) make people buy from us?

Write down an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that is specific enough for your salespeople to recognise:

• “HR managers in SMEs with 50–250 employees in service sectors, who struggle with X and Y.”

• “Retailers with at least 2 locations who want more repeat customers and don’t have a loyalty system yet.”

You can still accept business outside this profile, but your focus becomes clearer.

Step 2: Make your sales process visible

Ask a simple question:

“If a good opportunity appears tomorrow,what are the typical steps until we send the first invoice?”

Often you’ll hear:

• “It depends.”

• “Everyone does it their own way.”

• “We have stages in the CRM, but nobody uses them consistently.”

In your first or next 100 days, map a simple, shared process, for example:

1. Lead / first contact

2. Qualification (fit with ICP, timing, budget, need)

3. Discovery (understanding their situation and problems)

4. Proposal / solution design

5. Follow-up & negotiation

6. Commit / verbal yes

7. Contract & onboarding

Then ask:

• Where do we lose most deals?

• Where do things get stuck?

• Where do we waste time on non-fit prospects?

This gives you concrete places to improve.

Step 3: Introduce a regular sales / pipeline rhythm

A commercial engine needs rhythm, not heroic sprints.

Even in a small SME or early-stage scale-up, it helps to have:

• a weekly sales or pipeline meeting (short, focused) with:

  • key deals,

  • bottlenecks,

  • support needed.

• a monthly commercial review with you as CEO and other leaders:

  • pipeline coverage,

  • hit rates,

  • lessons from lost deals,

  • link with marketing and delivery capacity.

The goal is not to create pressure for the sake of pressure.It’s to make your commercial reality visible and discussable.

Step 4: Connect marketing and sales

In many SMEs and scale-ups, marketing and sales are still separate worlds:

• marketing talks in leads, content, campaigns;

• sales talks in deals, quotes, closing.

As CEO, your 100-day focus should include:

• agreeing on a shared definition of a qualified lead,

• aligning on who does what at each stage,

• reviewing together which campaigns or channels actually produce revenue, not just clicks.

This alignment is often low-hanging fruit, especially in B2B environments.

Step 5: Decide what you won’t do commercially

A key part of building a commercial engine is saying no:

• to customer types that always drain margin and energy;

• to discounts that undermine your positioning;

• to custom work that blocks your team for weeks without strategic value.

During your 100-day reset, use what you learn from customers, sales and finance to decide:

• “These are the deals we will actively chase.”

• “These are the deals we will only accept under conditions.”

• “These are the deals we will stop doing.”

Your salespeople need clarity more than they need motivational speeches.

What can realistically change in 100 days?

You won’t rebuild an entire commercial organisation in three months.But you can:

• sharpen your ICP,

• define and visualise a simple sales process,

• start a weekly pipeline rhythm,

• connect marketing and sales around shared numbers,

• stop at least one type of bad business.

The effect of these “boring” moves is often bigger than a rebrand or a new slogan.

How this links back to your role as CEO

In “100 Days to Make Your Mark as a CEO” your role is not to:

• rewrite every sales email,

• join every customer meeting,

• micromanage every negotiation.

Your role is to:

• make sure the company knows who it is trying to help,

• ensure there is a clear, realistic commercial process,

• create a rhythm where your team can improve that engine over time.

Even if you’re not a “salesy” CEO, this is part of your job.

How a sparring partner can help

Sometimes it’s hard to see your own commercial engine clearly from the inside:

• you are attached to old ways of selling,

• people don’t dare to say certain things openly,

• tools (CRM, marketing platforms) blur the underlying reality.

A neutral sparring partner can:

• ask basic but sharp questions,

• help map how business really comes in today,

• translate your 100-day observations into a few concrete commercial moves.

You don’t need “more hustle”.You need a clearer engine.