What a Commercial Strategy Actually Is, and How to Build One

A commercial strategy is a set of five connected trade-offs that decide who you sell to, what you sell, what you charge, how you reach buyers, and what you will not do. It is not a plan, a budget, or a slogan. A technical SMB in Mexico that treats it as a document will write something; a technical SMB that treats it as a set of choices will outcompete the rest of the corridor.

What the term usually gets mistaken for

Three documents are routinely called “the commercial strategy” and none of them are. A business plan is a financing case for a bank or a fund. A marketing plan is a calendar of campaigns and content. A sales plan is a quota and a territory split. Each assumes the underlying commercial choices have already been made; when they have not, the documents that flow from them are fiction dressed in tables.

Henry Mintzberg’s 1987 article “The Strategy Concept I: Five Ps for Strategy” (California Management Review, Vol. 30, No. 1, Fall 1987) lays out five definitions of strategy that travel together: plan, ploy, pattern, position, and perspective. The last two are the ones the documents miss. Position is the location of certain products in certain markets. Perspective is an internal, collective way of perceiving the world - the ingrained character of the firm, what personality is to a person. A commercial strategy has to fix all five, not the first one.

What a commercial strategy has to decide

Five decisions, and each one constrains the next.

1. Who you sell to. A defined customer profile with a verifiable problem, a budget, and a reachable identity - not “industrial companies in Mexico,” but the SCIAN subsector, the size band, and the role of the buyer.
2. What you sell. The product or service bundle, scoped tightly enough that engineering can build it and sales can describe it on one page.
3. What you charge. The pricing tier, the basis (per seat, per project, per unit, per outcome), and the discount policy. Pricing is part of strategy, not a downstream decision; it sets who can buy and who walks away.
4. How you reach buyers. Channels, motions, and roles: direct sales, channel partners, inside sales, self-serve, or a hybrid. Each one implies a different cost to serve and a different customer relationship.
5. What you will not do. The explicit list of segments, products, channels, and deal types the firm turns away. Strategy that does not name what it excludes has not actually chosen.

Why the technical-firm case in Mexico is harder

Two structural facts make these five decisions harder for an engineering-led SMB in Mexico than for a counterpart in a larger market.

The first is the buyer universe. According to INEGI’s 2024 Censos Económicos definitive results (Comunicado de Prensa 79/25, published 24 July 2025), the 2024 count found 7,093,631 establecimientos employing 36,592,279 personas ocupadas nationwide. Size bands break down within the census’s main study segment - the 5,468,180 unidades económicas of the private sector and parastatal firms, whose economic data covers 2023 - as follows: Micro (0 to 10 personas) held 95.4 percent of units and 16.0 percent of valor agregado censal bruto (VACB); Pymes (11 to 250) held 4.5 percent of units and 29.7 percent of VACB; Grandes (250 or more) held 0.2 percent of units and 54.3 percent of VACB. Most of the firms you could sell to are micro; most of the value sits in the band your sales motion is least built to reach.

The second is the trade-off between reach and concentration. Porter’s Five Forces framework, as published on Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness page, names five competitive forces - threat of new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of buyers, threat of substitute products or services, and rivalry among existing competitors. In Mexico, buyer power is unusually concentrated in a handful of large private buyers and government entities, and substitute pressure is high because in-house engineering teams are a credible substitute for almost any technical vendor. That pushes a commercial strategy toward defensible niches and high switching costs, not broad horizontal reach.

The framework: a five-question strategy test

Run these five questions against any current commercial plan, in order. Each question has one acceptable level of specificity: a name, a code, a number. If an answer is a paragraph, it is not yet a strategy.

1. Customer. Name three real companies you have sold to in the last 12 months that fit the strategy you claim to be running. If you cannot, the strategy is aspirational.
2. Product. State in one sentence what you sell and what you do not sell. The “not” half is the test: if it is missing, the offering is a portfolio, not a product.
3. Price. Quote a current list price and a current floor (the lowest price actually signed in the last six months). If the gap between list and floor is larger than 25 percent, pricing has not been chosen.
4. Channel. Name the channel through which 50 percent or more of revenue actually arrived last quarter. If no channel clears 50 percent, there is no motion; there is a collection of motions.
5. Exclusion. Name the customer type, product variant, or deal shape the firm turned away in the last 90 days. If no one has been turned away, the firm has not chosen; it is reacting.

A pass requires five named, dated, verifiable answers. A fail on any one is the place to work.

How to ground each answer in Mexican public data

The five-question test is only as good as the evidence behind it. Three free sources cover most of what a technical SMB in Mexico needs to ground a commercial strategy.

INEGI’s DENUE (Directorio Estadístico Nacional de Unidades Económicas) is the firm-level directory, refreshed twice a year. It carries the SCIAN code, the size band, and the geographic location for every establishment in its scope. Use it to verify that the customer profile you have chosen actually exists at the volume you assume.

INEGI’s Censos Económicos 2024 (Comunicado 79/25) is the value layer. The size-band shares cited above let you put a revenue order of magnitude on a segment and discount for informality without a paid report. For a SCIAN-specific number, pull the census tabulados.

Data México, run by the Secretaría de Economía, is the visualization layer. It does not replace DENUE for an establishment count, but it lets you sanity-check a sector’s exports, employment, and state-level concentration in minutes, with charts you can paste into a board pack.

The combination is enough to validate every one of the five answers without a subscription. A commercial strategy grounded this way does not need to be exact; it needs to be defensible when a board asks where each number came from.

What makes the strategy fail

Four failure modes show up again and again in the technical-SMB segment, and they are all strategy failures, not execution failures.

The strategy is a copy. A founder reads a Boston or Bay Area playbook and ports it without translating the buyer profile, the channel, or the price basis. The result is a plan that reads well and converts no one.

The strategy is a wish. Every answer is aspirational - “we sell to large enterprises,” “we have a premium product” - with no naming of an actual buyer, an actual price, an actual channel.

The strategy is a pile. The five decisions exist in five different documents owned by five different people, and no one is responsible for keeping them aligned. Drift between pricing and channel is the most common symptom.

The strategy is a slogan. It is a phrase on a slide (“we are the trusted partner of choice for industry X”) with no exclusion list, no price floor, and no named channel. Slogans do not constrain decisions; they decorate them.

A commercial strategy passes when the firm can name the buyer, the product, the price, the channel, and the exclusion - and can change any one of them on a Tuesday without rewriting the others. The framework above is what makes that test possible.

The diagnostics in Ascend’s free resources walk a team through the same five questions with the Mexican data sources wired in, so the first draft of a commercial strategy takes a day, not a quarter.