Questions founders ask before the Stress Test

The call is a fast stress test of your commercial architecture, meaning the whole machinery that produces revenue: who you sell to, what you say, how deals move through the pipeline, and who owns what. Oliver asks a handful of pointed questions, pokes holes where they need poking, and tells you on the call where it is leaking.

20 minutes, no slides, no report. Most people leave that call wanting the full Stress Test, which is the two to four week diagnostic that follows if it is a fit.

Founders, CEOs and owners of B2B companies that have a product the market wants but are still standing still. Usually because growth depends on the founder recognising what works. Typically 2 to 30 million euro in revenue, 25 to 200 people.

We are most useful when there are enough closed deals to look at for the patterns to show.

Two to four weeks. You choose the stakeholders. The most important people are interviewed in person by one of our Commercial Architects, and the rest answer digitally through our platform, so every answer comes back in the same format.

We score all six pillars against a fixed rubric and deliver a report with maturity scores, gap analysis, and a clear recommendation on what to do first. The logic is borrowed from bank regulation. You learn nothing by asking whether things feel fine, because everyone says fine. You learn by pushing the structure against a scenario it would rather not think about, and watching which part gives first.

The Stress Test costs 8 000 EUR. That covers the interviews, the report and access to the platform while the work runs.

What the platform subscription costs afterwards is set once we know what you need. Strategy sessions are bought separately at 500 EUR each.

No. The Stress Test is all you need to buy. The report is yours whatever you do next.

Some clients take the report and do the work themselves. That is a perfectly good outcome and we would rather that than a subscription nobody opens.

A fractional CRO comes in and runs your sales organisation for you. We do something else. We build the system and hand it over. When we are done you own your ways of working, your commission model and your forecast. You are not renting them from us.

Plenty of clients bring in a fractional CRO afterwards, to run what we built. That order works better than the other way round, because even a very good CRO without an architecture inherits the same lack of clarity and has to start by guessing.

RevOps keeps the revenue engine running: the tooling, the data, the reporting and the process hygiene across marketing, sales and success. It assumes the engine is already designed. Commercial architecture is the design itself, who you sell to, what you say, how deals move and who owns what. We build the architecture and hand it over; RevOps then operates and maintains it. If your dashboards are clean but the number still cannot be explained, the gap is architecture, not operations.

A traditional sales consultant usually improves execution: better outreach, better calls, better close rates, coaching the team you have. That helps when the system is sound and the doing is weak. We work one layer down, on the system that decides what should be done and in what order. When we are finished you own a documented architecture, not a set of tips, and it holds after we leave because it lives in the company rather than in a slide deck.

An interim or fractional sales manager runs your sales organisation for you, and that is the right call when the system is already defined and you need experienced hands. The trap is hiring one before the architecture exists, because even a strong manager then inherits an undefined system and spends their first quarters rebuilding it by guesswork. Build the architecture first, then decide whether you need someone to run it. Many clients bring an interim leader in afterwards, and it works far better in that order.

During the Stress Test: around three interview hours per person, plus structured input. The most important people are interviewed in person, and you can include more people than that, who answer digitally through our platform.

Working with the report afterwards is lighter and designed to fold into the meetings you already have. The platform and AI write most of the work between sessions. If you go on to Optimization, the time depends entirely on what gets built.

You own it. Each part ends with an activation plan your team executes against.

If you need hands, we build the automated flows and agents ourselves, and Structsales does the CRM implementation. Either way it is a separate conversation and a separate engagement.

Possibly not, and we will say so. A Stress Test reads patterns in deals that already happened. Before product-market fit there are too few deals for patterns to show, so you would be paying for an expensive opinion.

We tell you that on the call rather than three weeks into the work.