The Revenue Engine Review tells you in three weeks where your deals are dying, from your own pipeline rather than your own account of it, and what to do about it in the next ninety days. Where it finds gaps, I build what is missing, and where the engagement warrants it I take the Chief Revenue Officer seat on a fractional basis. It is built for how a regulated buyer decides: not on which product is technically superior, but on which one solves a specific pain they can identify and quantify, and which their signatory can defend to a committee, a risk function and, if it goes wrong, a regulator.
Most vendors in this market get to their first million on the founder. The founder knows the problem, knows the buyer, and closes on credibility. Then the founder runs out of hours, a salesperson is hired, and the number stalls, because what worked was never a process anyone else could run. The same thing happens to an established vendor entering the UK or Irish market: a proven product, a new set of buyers, and a sales motion that was built somewhere else. In both cases the demos land, the pilots hold up, and the deals still die. Procurement asks questions that get answered badly, the champion goes quiet, legal review takes a quarter, and the renewal that was assumed safe turns into a negotiation.
Before you know they exist, inside the answer ChatGPT or Claude assembles when the buyer asks who does what you do; you are in that answer, accurately, or you are not in the deal. In the first meeting, when a feature tour meets a buyer who arrived briefed, sceptical and wanting validation, not information. In qualification, when nobody can name the pain, the urgency and the decision criteria, so the deal is a hope with a meeting scheduled. In the paper process, when security, data and AI governance questions arrive and the answers are not ready. And at renewal, when expansion was assumed rather than earned, though the cheapest revenue you will ever win is inside accounts you already serve.
Two things. Compliance has left the back office, so the person buying regtech is now a board-accountable executive rather than a compliance officer with a budget line, and accountable people buy slowly and with evidence. And their diligence is sharpening. Under the EU AI Act, DORA and the outsourcing rules, a regulated firm now has to evidence what its vendors’ AI does and who is accountable for it. The vendors who answer cleanly move through diligence in weeks; the ones who cannot watch deals stall in legal review. I write the due diligence questions regulated firms put to their vendors. You will be answering them either way, and it is better to have prepared with the person who designs them.
The clock starts when your pack arrives, not when the engagement is signed. What you cannot produce is itself the first finding.
A scoping call, then a one-page list of what I need: the CRM pipeline export with stage dates, twelve months of won and lost deals with reasons, three lost-deal post-mortems however informal, the current deck, one-pager, website and pricing, two recent proposals, two diligence questionnaires as you answered them, the standard contract and the renewal book. Your team gathers it; the three weeks begin when it lands.
Every open deal re-scored in your own CRM against a qualification standard, MEDDPICC where committees decide, SPICED where one or two people do. Pain, urgency and decision criteria named or marked absent. This is usually the uncomfortable page. Alongside it, a reading of how your firm appears to the AI systems buyers now ask first, and whether what they say about you is accurate.
The value proposition tested against what a regulated buyer’s signatory would need to defend internally. A paper-process readiness check: what diligence will ask about security, data, AI and governance, and what you cannot yet answer, including whether you have a named reference. A pricing and packaging read, where margin sits and where procurement will push. And the renewal book: which accounts renew in the next twelve months, which are at risk, which could expand, and whether anyone senior owns the relationship or it has been left to run.
The diagnosis stage by stage. A ninety-day plan built from the re-scored pipeline: the deals to pursue, the deals to drop, the renewals to secure, and the fixes to the engine in the order they matter, each with an owner. And a short note written for your board and investors.
Your pipeline re-scored in your own CRM, with the deals that are real separated from the ones that are scheduled hope. A diagnosis of where deals die, stage by stage, from the data. Your value proposition rewritten as a signatory would need to defend it. The list of diligence questions you cannot yet answer and what it takes to answer them. A pricing and packaging read. A renewal and expansion plan for the accounts you already serve. A ninety-day plan built from the pipeline, with owners, and a board note you can table as your own.
A build engagement of six to twelve weeks producing the commercial infrastructure a team can run without the founder in the room: ideal client profile and trigger events, the sales deck with vertical variants, the leave-behind, the qualification playbook and scorecard, the competitor playbook including “do nothing” as the silent competitor, pricing architecture and the ROI calculator a buyer uses to justify the spend internally, the diligence evidence pack, the case study template, and the fixes that get you cited accurately by the AI systems buyers ask first. Every item on that list has been built and used for a vendor in this market, not described.
If the review finds you lack the references, case studies and independent commentary a regulated buyer trusts more than anything you say about yourself, the build includes producing them. It does not include campaigns, and it is not an agency.
Where the engagement warrants it, I run the engine the build creates, as fractional Chief Revenue Officer: a fixed number of days a month on an agreed minimum term, owning pipeline, forecast and the senior conversations, until the revenue supports the seat full time.
It is not lead generation, an outsourced sales team or PR. It is not a sales hire, and not a substitute for one once the revenue supports it. It is not fundraising advice, though the board note is written knowing investors will read it. And when I advise a regulated firm on buying technology I take no payment from vendors, so I do not advise a vendor and its prospect on the same purchase.
A three-week, fixed-scope review that works from your own pipeline data rather than your account of it, and diagnoses where deals die across five stages: the machine shortlist, the first meeting, qualification, the paper process, and renewal. It ends in a re-scored pipeline, the diagnosis, a ninety-day plan, and a note your board can read.
Often, yes. The review is about the engine, not the person running it, and a good sales leader is usually the first to want the pipeline re-scored by someone outside the firm.
Yes. The five stages are the same wherever the buyer is regulated and the signatory is accountable. The detail of the paper process changes; the shape of the problem does not.
They do, and then they check. A growing share of first passes through your market now happens inside the answer an AI system gives the buyer before any referral is followed up. If that answer is wrong or empty, the referral has to work harder than it should.
Eighteen years as the buyer you are trying to reach, then the vendor’s seat.
At HSBC Alternative Investments I signed off the platforms and service providers behind a business whose assets grew from $200 million to $31.6 billion, which means I sat through the committee, the risk review and the procurement process from the inside and know which questions are real and which are theatre. I then held C-suite seats on the vendor side: at Backstop Solutions I led EMEA SaaS expansion in the three years before the business was acquired at ten times revenue, applying the practices on this page, and at Leo Regtech the fractional Chief Revenue Officer seat, as an affiliate, that took the firm through its first £1 million of revenue. For Xpanse AI, an Irish data science platform, I built the commercial infrastructure from a first draft of the firm’s own material and the chief executive’s insight into the product and its buyers: pricing architecture, ROI calculator, qualification and competitor playbooks, vertical decks and one-pagers, a market opportunity briefing, and the assessment of how the firm appears to the AI systems buyers ask first. Through the Vendor AI Oversight Review I write the diligence questions those buyers now put to their vendors.
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