The selling system
Activity→Stage→Probability→Forecast
Organises and measures what the seller does.
Commercial Decision Risk
Value creates intent.
Risk determines commitment.
Organizations keep improving the way they sell, the selling system. The customer still owns the decision. The real commercial challenge is understanding what makes an organization willing—and able—to commit.
Observations from fifty years in commercial work—now being examined through research and developed as a thesis open to challenge.
01
The starting observation
An outcome is not the same as seller performance.
Sales often reads the result backwards: a win confirms good performance, a loss suggests poor performance, and everything else becomes “no decision.” But an outcome records what happened—not why. Different customer decision mechanisms can produce the same seller result and require entirely different responses.
Inside organizations, goals are set, budgets approved, capacity planned and forecasts believed—while the decision that must validate them still belongs to the customer. That mismatch is where commercial risk accumulates.
Decision interface
The customer decision system
Condition→Decide whether to act→Choose route→Commit
Owned by the customer; influenced, never controlled, by the seller.The hidden category
“No decision” is not one mechanism.
The label can conceal materially different points of failure or choice: recognising the condition, deciding whether to act, choosing how to respond, or converting intent into organisational commitment. When these are collapsed into one outcome, the Selling System cannot learn what produced it—and reaches for the same familiar remedies.
An outcome tells us what happened.
Learning begins by asking why.
02
Decision readiness
Three risk questions shape decision readiness.
Business Risk may create a reason to act. Decision and Fulfilment Risk can still prevent commitment. CDR treats them as analytically distinct—not as a checklist or a process the seller can own.
Business risk
What makes the current condition consequential enough to examine?
Problema—not merely pain—is the condition, constraint or possibility that may create a reason to act.
Decision risk
Can the organisation reach, authorise and absorb this commitment?
The priorities, governance, exposure and personal consequences behind organisational consent.
Fulfilment risk
Can both parties make the commitment work in operating reality?
The capability, dependencies, resilience, adoption and governance required after signature.
A proposition under examination
Decision viability rises when perceived risk of staying > decision risk + fulfilment risk
This expresses a relationship to investigate. It is not a score, forecast or claim that organisational decisions can be calculated.
03
Beyond the signature
Commitment only becomes real through fulfilment.
Supplier revenue and buyer value are symmetrical: neither is realised by the signature itself. Delivery, adoption, governance, continuity and recovery convert the commercial promise into operating reality.
That is why commercial responsibility cannot end at award—and why fulfilment belongs inside the decision, not after it.
Customer condition→Decision→Mutual commitment→Fulfilment→Realised value / earned revenue
04
The work
Advice and mentoring where decisions carry consequences.
I advise organisations and mentor people carrying real commercial decision responsibility. The work is independent, practical and close to the decision—especially when the commitment is consequential and uncertainty remains unresolved.
01 / Advisory
Consequential commercial decisions
Separate Business, Decision and Fulfilment Risk—and distinguish the outcome from the performance behind it.02 / Mentoring
Commercial leadership and judgement
A confidential space to examine choices, challenge thinking and strengthen decision practice.03 / Research
Research, writing and speaking
Turn long-practised observations into propositions, alternative explanations and research questions open to challenge.About Håkan
Fifty years in commercial work is not proof that I am right. It is enough time to know which questions refuse to disappear.
The person you read is the person you work with. I do not sell frameworks or programs; I stay close to consequential decisions while uncertainty remains unresolved.
My perspective comes from both operational sales and commercial leadership—not observation from the sidelines. Since beginning at IBM in 1977, I have worked across sales, marketing, management, transformation and advisory assignments in roughly fifty countries.
The current work brings those observations into a research agenda. It asks how commercial outcomes can be understood without confusing seller performance with customer decision mechanisms; how perceived risk shapes commitment; and how fulfilment converts commitment into buyer value and supplier revenue. These are propositions to test, not conclusions to defend. The thesis comes first. The book may follow when the argument has survived challenge.
Continue the conversation on LinkedIn →1977Commercial career began
≈ 50Countries worked across
2Selling and decision systems
1Question still unfolding
A conversation, not a funnel