Season 1 of this newsletter had one job: demolition.
Six issues, and by the end, not much was left standing. Seat pricing that can't survive a product that does the work. Comp plans that pay for a moment when the business now lives or dies on a motion. NRR paraded on board slides while it quietly masks decay. A moat, the bespoke calibration accumulating inside every customer, that most companies are digging by accident and defending not at all. A GTM machine performing, expensively and flawlessly, for a buyer who now forms the shortlist inside a model before your CRM ever fires. And the thesis that tied it all together, value that can't be measured won't be paid for, and whoever measures value owns the customer.
I wrote all of that from the inside. Not from a research desk, not from a briefing deck. Twenty-plus years building commercial engines at Virgin Media O2, Cloudinary, Emarsys, and now across 20+ software businesses in one of the UK's largest PE-backed portfolios. When I said the model was dead, it wasn't a hot take. It was a post mortem I'd attended personally, more than once.
Then my inbox told me what Season 2 had to be. The most common reaction to Season 1 wasn't disagreement. It was three words: "this is us." And almost every one of those messages, from CCOs, from founders, from operating partners, ended with the same word. How.
How do we actually price this? How do we pay people? How do we measure it? What does the org look like now?
Fair. Diagnosis without a blueprint is just well written anxiety. So here's the deal.
Season 1 was the argument. Season 2 is the build.
The rule for this season
One commitment before we start, and I'm making it because I've sat through too many strategy reviews that violated it.
Season 2 will not be frameworks with boxes. It will not be "it depends." It will not be a maturity matrix with your logo in the bottom left quadrant and an invoice attached. It will be the actual mechanics, commercial architectures with the trade offs named, comp structures with the numbers worked, the measurement instrument specified to the level you could hand your RevOps lead on Monday morning. Where there's a hard call, I'll make it and defend it. Where the honest answer is "nobody has solved this yet," I'll say that too, and then tell you what I'd do anyway, because that's the job.
This is the material I use inside real businesses, in real boardrooms, with real money on the table. Some of it will make people uncomfortable. Good. The comfortable version has boxes in it, and you've already read that everywhere else.
What's coming: the season, issue by issue
Issue 02: The Operating Model. The spine comes first, because every lever that follows hangs off it. The new commercial operating model in full, and the org design that underpins it, what happens after you dissolve the wall between selling and serving, the roles that stop existing, the roles that don't exist yet, and the operating cadence of a company built around continuous value realisation instead of an annual renewal calendar. The forever business, drawn as an org chart. Get this wrong and everything downstream is redecorating.
Issue 03: Building the Instrument. With the shape of the company set, you build the thing it runs on, because the Season 1 finale wasn't rhetoric: whoever measures value owns the customer. This is the working specification for Value-Realised Retention. How to define a verifiable outcome your customer will sign before the contract starts. How to weight retained revenue by the margin it actually carries. How to instrument usage depth as a live signal instead of a renewal-season autopsy. If you build one thing this year, build this.
Issue 04: Winning the Machine. The GTM rebuild, and the build side answer to Season 1's GTM Collapse. How to become the name in the answer when your buyer asks a model who to shortlist: the authority architecture, the query bank you should be auditing monthly, and the board-level metric that tells you whether you exist in the only funnel that now matters. The motion redesigned for a buyer who arrives late, pre-decided, and ready to close in days.
Issue 05: Pricing by Design. With the instrument in place and the buyer arriving pre-decided, you can finally price like you can see. The hybrid architecture in full: the committed base that gives your CFO and theirs a number to plan on, the consumption layer that scales with reality, the outcome layer that captures what you can now prove. Including the part nobody writes about because it costs vendors money: how to share efficiency gains with your customer on purpose, so your pricing survives your own product getting better.
Issue 06: Paying for the Motion. The comp rebuild, with actual numbers. What replaces the bookings quota. Why consumption territories and greenfield territories must pay differently. The pod model where sellers and CS share one number, what it does to behaviour, and exactly where it breaks. This will be the most argued about issue of the season, because comp is where the operating model stops being a slide and starts being someone's mortgage.
Issue 07: The Boardroom Issue. The season finale, written for the people who own the value creation thesis, because that's the room I work in. How to diligence a SaaS business when its NRR can lie. What to ask a management team that says "we've deployed AI." The 100 day commercial model plan for a portfolio company entering the agentic era. Season 1 ended by telling boards their dashboards were hiding the truth. This ends by handing them the new one.
Why this season matters more than the last one
Here's the uncomfortable timing truth, and I'm aiming it at three targets.
First, the consultancies. When Season 1 started, saying "the commercial model is the problem" was contrarian. It isn't anymore. The big firms have arrived, and they're doing what they always do: repackaging a diagnosis into a framework with boxes, attaching a seven figure engagement, and selling you a mirror at consulting rates. They will tell you what's broken. They will not build you the replacement, because the replacement requires operator scar tissue that doesn't live in a practice deck.
Second, the leaders who'll buy it. Some of you will read the diagnosis, nod, commission the strategy review, and file the output next to last year's transformation programme. That's the same laziness I've been calling out all year: buying the appearance of action because the real work is hard. A framework on a shelf is not a rebuilt operating model. It's an alibi.
Third, the clock. The advantage is no longer in knowing the model is broken. Within a year, every board in software will have heard the argument. The advantage is being eighteen months into the rebuild while your competitors are still procuring the deck. The companies that win the agentic era won't be the ones that diagnosed best. They'll be the ones that built first, measured first, and were already compounding when the herd arrived at the starting line.
Season 2 is for the builders. It starts in two weeks with the operating model everything else hangs off.
Build the model the product deserves.
First published in the Agentic Commercial Model newsletter on LinkedIn, July 30, 2026. Read the original on LinkedIn.