Six Functions, One Wrong Commercial Hypothesis

A wrong commercial hypothesis produces six symptoms in six functions, and from inside none of them look related, so the cause goes unnamed.

By Harinderpal Hanspal on February 2026. Updated October 2026

A wrong commercial hypothesis rarely produces one clear failure. It produces six symptoms, owned by six functions, and from inside none of them look related.

Sales sees a pipeline aimed at the wrong buyer: high activity, low conversion, a missed forecast. Support absorbs adoption failures from deployments that technically worked. Finance holds a revenue model that will not produce the plan. Operations carries integration burdens the pilot never surfaced. Legal faces liability and data terms nobody resolved at launch. Channel finds that its distribution assumptions do not hold.

Each team can describe its own problem in detail, and each description sounds like a local execution issue. So the organization responds locally: sales training, more support headcount, a revised forecast, an integration task force. None of it is aimed at the cause, so the symptoms keep recurring.

No single function can see all six. The people with the broadest view, the initiative's leaders, have the least incentive to name a cause that indicts their own decision. Tracing six symptoms to one cause takes a view across every function, held by someone independent of the initiative's outcome.

Sales usually shows the pattern first, as conversion below forecast.

Go deeper: Pilot purgatory and the Stop verdict draws the six-function picture, and The committee nobody mapped covers how to tell which cause is behind weak conversion. If an initiative is already stuck, start at when it isn't delivering.