1. Audience

Management consultants advising industrial companies, corporate leadership teams, and transaction stakeholders on commercial performance and enterprise value creation.

2. Client Context

An industrial manufacturer of food processing and packing machinery had seen revenue decline from approximately €500M to €400M over one year. Following the decline, the company received an acquisition offer of €3.15 per share.

3. Situation

The company’s GTM performance had deteriorated across multiple areas. A commercial heatmap showed broad underperformance, but there was no single root cause. 

Different business groups had drifted from previously effective practices in opportunity targeting, discounting, and cross-selling. The issue was distributed across geographies and divisions, requiring a more granular diagnostic than a traditional top-down performance review.

A management consulting partner was engaged to diagnose the GTM issues and identify corrective actions that could improve performance and support enterprise value.

4. Analysis and Intervention

The consulting partner used Cien to analyze new business, existing business, and rep performance across groups, geographies, and divisions after doing an initial data quality assessment, which built confidence in the partner’s ability to analyze the company’s less-than-perfect data.

The analysis showed that performance issues were scattered across multiple pockets of the business rather than concentrated in one area. The consulting partner then provided targeted guidance to help each group return to proven practices around opportunity targeting, discounting discipline, and cross-selling.

Cien enabled this work by creating AI-driven GTM performance diagnostics and heatmaps that helped the consulting partner isolate where commercial discipline had deteriorated.

5. Outcome

Addressing the GTM issues contributed to an enterprise value uplift of more than 30%, or approximately $1.2B. The acquisition later closed at €3.60 per share, with an implied valuation of approximately $4B.

The client also requested clean data, live feeds, and dashboards, reinforcing the importance of direct access to trusted commercial data during high-stakes performance improvement work.

6. Why It Matters for Management Consultants

This case shows how consultants can connect GTM execution improvements to transaction-relevant value creation. Rather than recommending a broad transformation, the consulting partner identified specific areas where teams had moved away from practices that had previously worked.

7. Discussion Questions

1. How should consultants diagnose commercial underperformance when there is no single root cause?
2. Which GTM metrics are most useful in a transaction context?
3. How can clean commercial data improve management credibility during a strategic sale process?

About Cien.ai’s Case Studies

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