I saw this tension very clearly at Kantar, where the platform business was expanding inside an organisation with deep roots in consulting and research. The underlying product model was becoming more scalable, but the commercial motion around it was still uneven across regions. Pipeline visibility differed by market, CRM adoption was inconsistent, and sales teams were operating with different levels of structure and enablement. The challenge was not that the organisation lacked strong people or customer credibility. It was that the commercial system had not yet evolved at the same pace as the business it was being asked to grow.
A consulting-led business and a scaling SaaS business place very different demands on the commercial organisation, even when they serve many of the same customers. Consulting can rely heavily on expertise, relationships, reputation and bespoke engagement, particularly when experienced people know their clients well and can shape opportunities through judgement. A SaaS platform still benefits from all of those strengths, but sustainable growth depends much more heavily on repeatability. The organisation needs clearer target segments, more consistent pipeline visibility, stronger CRM discipline, a more predictable sales motion and a common operating rhythm across markets.
The mistake would have been to treat that shift as a rejection of consultative selling. Kantar did not need to replace relationship-based commercial expertise with a rigid transactional process, because that would have thrown away something genuinely valuable. The real task was to preserve the quality of the customer conversation while introducing enough structure around it to support a business that was scaling differently. That meant becoming more deliberate about target industries and accounts, tightening value propositions and outreach, improving funnel governance, increasing CRM adoption and creating enablement that could work across countries rather than depending entirely on local practice.
This is where many business-model transitions become harder than they first appear. Leadership may recognise that the economics of the offer have changed, but the existing organisation has usually been shaped by years of incentives, systems, habits and assumptions that made sense under the previous model. Salespeople have learned which opportunities deserve attention, managers have developed their own forecasting logic, Marketing has built campaigns around familiar buying journeys, and Finance has become accustomed to particular revenue patterns. Changing the product does not automatically change any of those behaviours.
The resulting friction is easy to misread. Management sees inconsistent growth in the new offer and begins questioning positioning, demand or sales capability. Sales may argue that the new proposition is harder to sell than expected, while Marketing sees insufficient follow-up and Product sees the commercial organisation reverting to familiar offerings. All three observations can be partly true, but they may still describe symptoms of a broader issue. The organisation is trying to scale a new business model through commercial routines designed for the old one.
One of the clearest signs is uneven visibility. A scalable business model usually requires management to understand where growth is coming from, how opportunities are progressing and where performance is breaking down. If every region defines pipeline differently, if CRM usage depends on individual preference, or if opportunities are managed largely through personal knowledge, leadership has limited ability to distinguish between a market problem and an operating problem. That becomes increasingly important as the business grows because informal knowledge stops scaling long before revenue ambitions do.
This was part of the work at Kantar. Funnel reporting and performance governance were introduced to create stronger visibility, while CRM transformation and Salesforce scoping supported a more consistent commercial infrastructure. These changes were not administrative additions to the sales process. They were part of building an operating model capable of supporting a platform business that needed to scale across markets and teams.
Adoption, however, was just as important as design. With around 200 sales professionals across different countries and backgrounds, simply introducing a new framework or distributing training material would not have changed the commercial motion. The new way of working had to become visible and usable enough for people to participate in it, particularly when established habits were already functioning reasonably well for parts of the business. That is why initiatives such as the Kantar World Cup became useful, because they created a shared commercial moment across markets and helped reinforce the broader transformation through participation rather than instruction alone.
This point is often underestimated during transformation. Leaders spend a great deal of time defining the future operating model and relatively little time examining what the existing system rewards people for doing today. If the new proposition requires disciplined qualification but incentives still reward volume, behaviour will follow the incentive. If the strategy requires cross-selling a platform but account ownership discourages collaboration, the organisation will protect familiar boundaries. If CRM is positioned mainly as a reporting burden rather than a tool for managing a different commercial model, adoption will remain superficial.
The business model can therefore change on paper while the commercial system quietly keeps pulling the organisation back towards its previous shape.
That tension becomes particularly visible in companies moving from project-based or service-heavy revenue towards more recurring and scalable offerings. The sales conversation often needs to move from solving a one-off problem towards building a longer-term value case, while management needs better visibility into progression, conversion and retention. Marketing may need to support a more defined buying journey, Product may need stronger feedback loops from the field, and Sales management may need to coach against a more consistent process rather than rely primarily on individual experience. None of those changes is dramatic in isolation, but together they determine whether the new model can scale.
The same principle applies beyond SaaS. A manufacturer moving towards services, a professional-services firm introducing productised offers, or an acquisition-led business trying to cross-sell across a broader portfolio can face the same problem. The economics and proposition evolve first, while systems, incentives and habits continue to reflect the organisation that existed before the change. The commercial consequences are then attributed to individual performance even though the deeper issue is that the operating model has not caught up.
This is why business-model change should trigger a commercial review rather than only a product or strategy review. Leadership needs to ask whether the current segmentation still makes sense, whether Sales is pursuing the right opportunities, whether the funnel reflects the new buying process and whether CRM captures the information required to manage performance. It also needs to examine whether Marketing, Sales and Product are interpreting the new model in the same way, because misalignment becomes more expensive when the organisation is already dealing with a structural transition.
At Kantar, the broader result was a more scalable commercial system around the platform business, with stronger funnel visibility, broader sales engagement and better adoption of SaaS-oriented selling practices. During that period, the platform business achieved approximately 30 per cent annual growth, revenues moved beyond $100 million, and around 200 sales professionals participated in the enablement effort. Those outcomes do not prove that one intervention caused the growth, but they do show the scale of the transformation the commercial system was supporting.
The more important lesson is that companies should not judge a new business model through an old commercial lens. If the market opportunity is real but growth remains uneven, the problem may not sit in the proposition itself. The organisation may still be targeting, selling, measuring and managing the business according to assumptions that belonged to an earlier stage.
Changing what the company sells is visible and often strategically exciting. Changing the system that allows the organisation to sell it repeatedly, consistently and at scale is less visible, but it is usually where the harder transformation takes place.
