March 2026 · 5 min read
We evaluated 700+ companies' commercial strategy — their pricing, messaging, packaging and buyer enablement. Here's what we found.
B2B SaaS companies with high commercial strategy scores are 11x more likely to be a market leader than those that don't. The relationship is clean and monotonic — it goes in one direction without exception.
PE-backed companies are the worst-performing funding group, despite having the most resources, the most board oversight, and the most explicit growth mandates.
Here's how we got here and what the data shows.
An investor friend was frustrated. "I ask them about their pricing at every board meeting. They say they'll get back to me and then I never hear from them." This happened with every commercial strategy issue — pricing, packaging, messaging, buyer enablement. The company had lots of opinions and no shortage of ideas — but no hard data to act confidently and decisively.
PE-owned companies miss their initial value creation plans by 40% on average. Not because the strategies are wrong — because there's no reliable way to measure whether the strategies are working. Marketing has HubSpot. Sales has Salesforce and Gong. Customer success has Gainsight. But the commercial strategy layer — messaging, pricing, buyer experience, trust signals — is white space.
All signs pointed to the same problem. Not a lack of strategy, but a lack of measurement. Without data, decisions get delayed, action stays tentative, and accountability stays soft.
I decided to solve it.
I spent 14 years at NIQ building global measurement businesses. Every major global brand used our data and insights to understand consumer behavior and track performance over time. Executive teams' bonuses depended on Nielsen-reported data, so it had to be right.
Remidi started with a standard scoring model that evaluates companies' commercial strategy across 30+ dimensions. We start with deep research to understand what a buyer experiences and how easy it is for them to decide to buy. Every company is rated on the same model for competitive benchmarking and tracking performance over time.
commercial strategy breaks into four dimensions:
We scored over 700 companies to establish industry benchmarks and to validate that our scores correlated with outcomes. We looked at "winners," companies holding a G2 Leader badge with 200+ reviews, versus "everyone else."
The results? Companies with high commercial strategy Scores are 11x more likely to be market leaders.
Zero market leaders below a score of 30. The rate climbs through each band without exception. Companies in the top tier are 11x more likely to be a market leader than those in the lower tiers.
As an example, one company we evaluated — a financial planning SaaS platform — had a commercial strategy Score of 68 out of 100.
Remidi
commercial strategy assessment · March 2026
A 68 puts them in the Market Ready tier — 71st percentile across our database. A useful metric to track over time. Beyond the score, we identified pricing as the biggest upside opportunity and delivered a 90-day improvement plan.
Now they had the data to act and the benchmarks to hold the team accountable.
Of all the funding categories in our database — bootstrapped, seed, Series A through D+, public — PE-backed companies have the lowest winner rate, only a third of the universe average.
| Dimension | Winners | PE | Field | PE Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | 72.8 | 59.5 | 56.5 | -13.4 |
| Pricing & Packaging | 63.5 | 40.2 | 40.0 | -23.3 |
| Buyer Experience | 73.0 | 55.5 | 52.7 | -17.5 |
| Trust & Credibility | 73.0 | 58.7 | 53.6 | -14.3 |
| Messaging & Positioning | 78.8 | 69.9 | 66.8 | -8.9 |
This was the finding that surprised us most. PE portfolio companies aren't short on capital or board-level attention. But they score at or below the field average on the dimensions that matter most to buyers — and their biggest gap is in Pricing & Packaging, where they trail winners by 23 points.
Five of the top 10 PE deficits in our sub-dimension analysis are pricing-related: pricing transparency, tier structure, upgrade path clarity, value metric alignment, and entry point accessibility. PE companies aren't making it easy to understand what they cost, how the pricing works, or how to start small.
The pattern makes sense once you see it. Post-acquisition priorities tend to favor financial engineering, sales team expansion, and operational efficiency. The buyer's actual experience of evaluating and purchasing the product — transparent pricing, self-service access, clear upgrade paths, published proof points — gets deprioritized. Not intentionally. It just falls below the cut line.
The gap is fixable. That's what the rest of this series will cover.
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