Something is
commercially off.
Usually because the customer
is no longer the reference point.

"What you need is someone from outside — with no stake in the internal answer — who can help you see it clearly enough to act."

Not how large consulting firms work. How good advisory works.

Pricing, product and channel work when the customer is the reference point. In most organisations, gradually, they aren't. Internal logic — finance, procurement, operations, the boardroom — comes to outweigh customer logic. Decisions drift. The commercial engine loses traction. The P&L pays for it.

The CCO usually senses this. The hard part is naming it precisely enough to act on — and to defend the diagnosis upward and inward. That's the work.

Get in touch

From the work

Three situations.
The same diagnosis.

Different industries, different problems on the surface. In each case, a senior commercial decision had drifted from the customer — pulled by internal pressure that was real, legitimate, and quietly costly. The work was naming where, and what to do about it.

01

Commercial integration · Three-company merger · Heavy infrastructure

Three companies merging in a capital-intensive industry with long investment horizons. The right commercial combination kept getting obscured by internal politics.

The complexity was real — enormous infrastructure investments, long payback periods, overlapping products and customer bases across three organisations each with their own history and self-interest. The analytical challenge was significant. But the harder problem was human: each company's leadership had a legitimate case for their own assets, and that made it very difficult for anyone inside to see the commercially right answer clearly. The role was to cut through that noise as an external eye — not to do the politics, but to name what the economics actually said.

Acted as advisor to the leadership team — providing a clear commercial read of the combined entity that internal voices, each carrying their own bias, could not credibly provide themselves.

02

Technology scale-up · Investment allocation · Commercial engine design

A scale-up reinvesting heavily in product development. The product was already good enough to sell.

The team was circling on what to build next and how to allocate budget. Looking at the P&L made it clear: the constraint was the commercial engine, not the product. Investment was heavily skewed toward development with almost nothing toward sales capacity and execution. The diagnosis was simple. What followed was not just a message — it was building the commercial engine that made it possible to act on it: sales structure, priorities, and the operating logic the team needed to go to market with confidence.

Rebalanced the investment, designed the commercial engine, and gave the team something they could run. Then: go sell.

03

B2B services · Recurring revenue · 10-year cycle

A company cycling up and down for a decade. Strong at winning customers. Weak at keeping them.

The instinct was to fix sales or the product. The real issue was different: the customer could not draw a clear line from the solution to a specific number in their own P&L. When you are outside a customer's profit logic — when there is no visible causality between what you deliver and their revenue or margin — you become vulnerable the moment priorities sharpen. It is not just that discretionary spend gets cut. It is that when focus tightens, anything that cannot demonstrate a direct contribution to the P&L disappears from the conversation entirely.

Reframed the value proposition around the customer's revenue and margin — making the causal link explicit, measurable, and impossible to overlook when budgets came under pressure.

How I work

Not a methodology.
A process.

The goal is to get to what you actually need — before designing any solution. That means starting with a conversation, not a methodology. And it means the engagement is shaped by the situation, not by a predetermined scope.

1
A first conversation — usually 60–90 minutes
You describe the situation. I listen for where the problem actually sits — underneath what's being described.
2
A short written reading
A page or two with my read on what's actually going on — where the commercial logic has drifted from the customer, and what internal pressure has filled that space. Specific enough to be useful. Short enough to be honest.
3
A precise diagnosis and a clear first move
One or two things, clearly named — specific enough that you can decide what to do about it.
4
Implementation support if the work warrants it
From a few hours a week over a couple of months to a more intensive period if the situation requires it. The format follows the need.

About

Jesper
Lylloff
Shift Advisory
Copenhagen
Jesper Lylloff

I've spent my career inside commercial organisations — running P&Ls, leading sales teams and working on commercial excellence programmes across large and mid-size Nordic and international companies in both B2C and B2B. Most of that work has been international — across Europe, Asia and the Americas — including three years in the United States working with large pharma companies and early-stage SaaS businesses. That range of contexts, industries and commercial situations is what I bring into a first conversation.

Andel Energi CCO — subscription energy, B2C and B2B
Telia Denmark VP Sales — complex B2B, telecoms
TDC Customer Senior Director
Danfoss Commercial leadership — complex B2B industrials
US · 2021–2024 Independent advisory — pharma and SaaS scale-ups

Method & price

How an engagement works.

The starting point is always a conversation — usually 60 to 90 minutes. You describe the situation. I listen for where the commercial logic has drifted from the customer and what internal pressure has filled that space. By the end I usually have a working hypothesis.

If the hypothesis is worth testing, the next step is The Commercial Inspection.

The Commercial Inspection
Three weeks · Fixed price
One question: where has the commercial logic drifted from the customer, and what is it costing?

The work covers the P&L, the product-customer mix, the channel structure, and the incentive architecture. Not a full audit — a targeted look at where internal logic has quietly replaced customer logic, and what that drift has cost in margin, volume or strategic position.

The output is a diagnosis specific enough to act on — and to defend upward and inward. One or two things, clearly named, with a recommended first move.
DKK 97,000 Fixed. Three weeks.
What you get
A clear diagnosis of where the commercial engine has lost traction
A recommended first move specific enough to take to the leadership team
A document you own and can build on
What you don't get
A 90-slide deck
A methodology requiring a follow-on engagement
A team building the case while I sell the next phase
Sometimes the diagnosis is enough — the leadership team takes it from there. Sometimes the situation calls for a sustained presence during implementation: typically a day or two a week over six to ten weeks, at a day rate agreed at the outset. The format follows what the work actually requires.
Get in touch The first conversation is free. If there is no real fit, I will say so.

Insights

Thinking in public.
Where the practice meets the page.

Two streams. One stays inside commercial practice. One moves beyond it — into the public and political consequences of the same problem: what happens when the citizen, like the customer, stops being the reference point.

01

Commercial thinking

Where commercial decisions drift from the customer — and what it costs.

Cases and analysis of commercial drift, applied to real situations. Why brand follows commercial structure rather than driving it. How partner translation breaks down in B2B technology. What goes wrong when decisions are made by negotiation rather than by customer logic. Own cases from the practice, alongside sourced examples from the field.

Read the latest →
02

Public thinking · Substack

Strategy doesn't die in the boardroom. It dies in execution.

The longer reads. AI, efficiency, governance and liberal democracy — the thesis that the same drift from the customer that happens in commercial organisations also happens in public institutions. The citizen stops being the reference point. Hierarchies and barriers build up. Execution fails. Long-form pieces on Substack, with excerpts on LinkedIn.

Read on Substack

Get in touch

When does it make
sense to reach out?

If something feels commercially off and you're not sure where to start — that's enough reason to get in touch.

  • Margins declining despite revenue growth
  • The commercial model isn't matching the ambition
  • Previous work produced recommendations that were not acted on
Get in touch

No preparation needed. If there's no fit, I'll say so.

Email jely@shiftadvisory.dk
LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/jesperlylloff →
Based Copenhagen, Denmark