Commercial clarity
Go-to-market strategy divergence identified across leadership layer
EdTech · Series B
The challenge
The founding team had built a credible initial product and achieved early revenue traction across two distinct customer segments — enterprise and SME. The Series B was premised on scaling the enterprise channel. The investor needed confidence that the entire leadership team was oriented around this focus, not still pursuing the SME opportunity in parallel.
What Wexler Gray surfaced
Commercial Clarity scored at 41, with operators identifying a fundamental disagreement within the leadership team: the founder/CEO was committed to enterprise-only focus, while the VP of Product and VP of Marketing were independently building roadmaps and campaigns oriented towards the SME segment
Blind scoring revealed that three of eight operators observed different versions of the company's go-to-market strategy depending on which leadership function they assessed — a sign of active divergence rather than simple miscommunication
Bearing identified the root cause as a compensation structure that still rewarded the product and marketing functions on aggregate revenue metrics, creating economic incentives misaligned with the stated enterprise-only strategy
Outcome
The investor required the company to restructure its incentive framework before close, aligning product and marketing OKRs exclusively to enterprise pipeline metrics. The Series B closed on revised terms with a 6-month strategic review clause. Commercial Clarity improved to 63 in the post-close assessment cycle.
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