It’s Not Just a Sales Problem: How the Building Blocks Architecture Scales Across the Commercial System

Introduction

When revenue targets are missed, the postmortem tends to follow a familiar script. The pipeline was light. The close rate slipped. Deals pushed. Sales didn’t execute. The prescribed remedy varies, but it usually involves some combination of more training, a new methodology, tighter inspection, some version of the “Harder, Faster, Longer, Louder” school of sales management, or—when patience finally runs out—a new sales leader.

Sometimes those are exactly the right responses. Sometimes the sales organization genuinely is the problem. And often it starts at the top. But more often than people want to admit, Sales is where the pressure is felt, not necessarily where the problem originated. Revenue targets are missed for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with what sellers did or didn’t do in front of a buyer. To be clear, I’m not saying Sales isn’t accountable or doesn’t mismanage opportunities. I’m saying that they’re not alone.

 The products weren’t positioned well for the market (product–market fit). Demand generation was generating quantity over quality. New hires weren’t ramped effectively because onboarding was built around an SME parade of presentations rather than actual skill development. Customer success was quietly losing the revenue the sales team fought to win (and sometimes because Sales over-promised). Operations was creating friction the sales force had to absorb without any structural authority to fix.

Blaming Sales when the commercial system is misaligned is like blaming the point of the spear for the throw.

This post introduces my Commercial Effectiveness Framework (CEF)—an architecture that extends the building-block logic I developed for The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement across every major commercial function. For senior leaders who have spent years watching sales improvement initiatives under-perform despite real investment, the CEF offers a different starting point: a whole-system view of where commercial performance is actually being won or lost.

The Architecture Behind the Building Blocks

When I wrote The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement, the core argument was this: effective sales enablement isn’t a handful of activities—it’s a system. One that requires specific elements working in coordination, each well-designed and well-executed, and all of them connected.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. 

 The framework organized those elements into 12 building blocks arranged in a visual architecture, supported by three foundational blocks. The blocks represent the functional elements—or performance levers—that must be in place, and in good shape, for a sales force to perform at its highest possible level. They are:

• Buyer Acumen, Buyer Engagement Content, and Sales Support Content comprise the top row.
• The second row includes Sales Hiring, Sales Training, and Sales Coaching.
• The third row includes Sales Process, Sales Methodology, and Sales Analytics and Metrics.
• The bottom row includes Sales Technology and Tools, Sales Compensation and Recognition, and Sales Manager Enablement.
• Those 12 core blocks are held together by three others: Systems Thinking, Communication Management (with the sales force and cross-functional collaborators), and optional Sales Support Services.

Systems Thinking and Communication Management aren’t optional. They’re the reason the 12 blocks can function as a system rather than a stack of independent initiatives. Think of the 12 core blocks as the performance levers you can push and pull on to improve sales performance, and the systems thinking and cross-functional collaboration as the way those core blocks get executed. Without systems thinking, you end up with well-designed blocks that don’t connect. Without cross-functional collaboration, you get well-intentioned silos. The support services layer is optional, based on needs of the sales force (RFPs, overlay/SME/sales engineer support, coaching services, and more, often with SLAs), but when needed, the operational infrastructure helps keep the sales force moving forward.

The framework was deliberately designed to be used as a diagnostic, as well. It’s a structured way to assess where a sales enablement function is strong, where it’s weak, and where gaps are costing performance. It works because the architecture reflects how organizations actually operate, not how we wish they did.

What I’ve come to see over years of applying and teaching this model is that the same logic that makes the Building Blocks framework work for Sales Enablement is the same logic that needs to be applied to every commercial function around it. Because the problem isn’t just that Sales Enablement isn’t always built well. The problem is that the entire commercial system is rarely built well—and almost never built with a shared architecture in mind.

One Architecture. Five Functions.

The Commercial Effectiveness Framework is what happens when you apply building-block thinking at commercial scale.

Think of the Sales Enablement building blocks as a single molecule—a coherent structure where the elements are defined, connected, and purposeful. The CEF is the next level up. It’s what you get when multiple molecules, each one a set of function-specific building blocks, are assembled into a larger integrated structure. Like the way atoms combine into molecules and molecules combine into something more complex, each function in the CEF has its own complete set of building blocks, and all five sets come together to form the commercial system.

The architecture is consistent. The elements vary by function. And every function includes the same three foundational blocks: Systems Thinking, Communication Management, and Functional Support Services (as needed).

That consistency is not cosmetic. It’s the point.

The five functions are:

• Product Enablement
• Marketing Enablement
• Sales Enablement (or Revenue Enablement)
• Sales Operations (or Revenue Operations)
• Customer Success Enablement

Each has its own 12 building blocks tailored to the specific work that function does. They all share Systems Thinking, Cross-Functional Collaboration/Communication, and the optional Sales Support Services. Sales (or Revenue) Enablement’s Communication Management block combines Cross-Functional Collaboration/Communication with Sales Force Communication, since they typically should be the one communication channel with the sales force. Together these functions form a complete commercial system—one that can be assessed, diagnosed, executed, measured, and improved as a whole.

The CEF framework visual shows all five function frameworks alongside each other, which makes the structural pattern immediately visible. But you don’t need to see the visual to work with the concept. Let’s start with the element that sits at the center of the entire system.

Market Acumen: The Center That Holds the System Together

Before walking through each function’s building blocks, one architectural element deserves its own treatment: Market Acumen.

In the CEF visual, Market Acumen sits at the center of the entire commercial system—not assigned to any single function, but as the hub every function orbits. That placement is intentional. Every commercial function depends on a shared, accurate, continuously updated understanding of the market: who buyers are, what they need, what competitors are doing, how conditions are shifting, and what signals from customers should be influencing how the commercial system operates.

This is a broader construct than Buyer Acumen, which is one of the 12 building blocks of Sales Enablement specifically. Buyer Acumen in the Sales Enablement context is the deep, structured understanding of buyer roles, challenges, objectives, and buying processes that sellers need to engage effectively in a sales conversation.

 At the commercial system level, Market Acumen encompasses that and goes further. It includes how Product understands product-market fit and evolving customer needs. How Marketing reads demand signals and competitive positioning. How Customer Success captures post-sale intelligence that feeds back into product and go-to-market decisions. How Sales Operations interprets market dynamics when designing territories, modeling quotas, and structuring the sales org.

 When Market Acumen is weak or siloed—when functions operate from different versions of market reality—the commercial system fragments: Product builds to solve problems the ICP doesn’t have. Marketing produces content that doesn’t address what key buyer personas need to know to move forward. Customer Success struggles to manage and retain accounts that were oversold. The center doesn’t hold. 

When Market Acumen is strong and genuinely shared across functions, it becomes a multiplier. It aligns the commercial system around a common understanding of the customer and competitive environment—the foundation on which every other building block performs better.

The Five Functions and Their Building Blocks

Product Enablement

Product Enablement is probably the most under-examined link in the commercial chain. When products don’t win in the market, the response is usually a messaging fix or a sales training refresh—both downstream interventions that treat symptoms rather than causes. There are limits to what sales enablement can fix.

The Building Blocks of Product Enablement reflect the full scope of what it takes for a product organization to drive commercial success: Market Acumen, Product Design (Market Fit), Product Development, Product Pricing, Product Launch, Product Management, Project Management, Advisory Board Management, Product Analytics, Training, Coaching, and Technology and Tools.

Market Acumen as a Product building block forces a hard question: how systematically does your product organization stay connected to what the market actually needs, as opposed to what it needed 18 months ago when the roadmap was set? How compelling are the problems that the products are designed to fix for your ICP?

 Product Launch is another instructive example. It’s a building block, not an event. Launches that arrive without adequate internal enablement for Sales, without aligned messaging, without sequenced training, consistently under-perform. That’s a product building block problem showing up downstream as a sales result.

Marketing Enablement

Marketing’s building blocks span the full scope of how demand is created and how sellers are prepared to engage meaningfully with buyers and support their decision. The 12 blocks are: Demand Generation, Messaging and Presentations, Content Marketing, Social Media, Event Marketing, Website and SEO, Email Marketing, Campaign Management, Marketing Technology and Tools, Buyer Personas, Marketing Analytics, and Advertising and SEM.

Buyer Personas is worth calling out specifically. When personas are shallow—built from internal assumptions rather than research, or treated as a one-time exercise rather than a living asset—the downstream effects spread across almost every other block. Messaging misaligns. Content misses. Campaigns attract the wrong ICP. The sales force wastes time on unqualified leads and then gets blamed for conversion rates. As a result, buyer engagement content, which is meant to support buying decisions and meet stage exit criteria, misses the mark.

Note, too, that Messaging and Presentations is an explicit building block within Marketing Enablement. This is the foundation for how sellers communicate value through content and leave-behind materials, to support the buying decisions when they’re not in the room. When this block is weak, no amount of sales skills training fully closes the gap. Buyers often make purchase decisions without a seller in the room. When the content they’re reviewing doesn’t answer the right questions, in the right way, for the right persona, at the right stage, deals stall or die quietly.

Sales Enablement

The Sales Enablement building blocks within the CEF are the same 12 that formed the original framework.

• Core Blocks: Buyer Acumen, Buyer Engagement Content, Sales Support Content, Sales Hiring, Sales Training, Sales Coaching, Sales Process, Sales Methodology, Sales Analytics and Metrics, Sales Technology and Tools, Sales Compensation and Recognition, and Sales Manager Enablement.
• Supporting Blocks: Systems Thinking, Communication Management, and Sales Support Services

If you know the original Building Blocks framework, these will be familiar. What’s different in the CEF context is the perspective. Sales Enablement doesn’t sit at the center of the commercial system—it sits within it. When the Product and Marketing blocks upstream are poorly built, Sales Enablement absorbs the cost. When Sales Operations and Customer Success downstream are poorly built, Sales Enablement can’t compensate for it.

That’s a structural reality, not a criticism of any individual function. Good Sales Enablement leaders already know this from experience. The CEF now gives them a shared language and a concrete architecture to make it visible to the leaders who can act on it.

Sales Operations

Sales or Revenue Operations exists in most commercial organizations, but the function’s scope varies enormously. Some teams own the full set of operations building blocks and, in organizations where Sales Enablement reports into Sales Ops, the enablement building blocks as well. Others leave critical ones like territory design, quota management, and sales process optimization either unassigned or under-built. Not because the people aren’t capable, but because the function is often chartered too narrowly, under-resourced, or scoped around reporting and CRM administration rather than the operational backbone it needs to be.

The 12 Building Blocks of Sales Operations: Sales Reporting, Territory Optimization, Account Assignments, Sales Compensation and Recognition, Sales Analytics and Metrics, Sales Model, Sales Quota Management, CRM and Sales Technology, Sales Management Operating System, Sales Org Structure, Forecast Management, and Sales Process Optimization.

Readers familiar with the Sales Enablement framework will notice that a few blocks appear in both: Sales Compensation and Recognition, Sales Analytics and Metrics, and Sales Process Optimization. That’s not a mistake. These are genuinely shared responsibilities that require coordination between both functions. If Sales Ops designs a comp plan without understanding the behaviors Sales Enablement is trying to reinforce, the two work against each other. If the CRM isn’t configured to support the sales process and methodology, adoption suffers, and no amount of training fixes a broken tool.

When Sales Ops and Sales Enablement aren’t aligned on these shared blocks, sellers pay the price. Forecasts miss. CRM adoption stalls. Reps get conflicting signals from their comp plan and their coaching. And all of it gets labeled a sales performance problem, because that’s where the number lives.

One block deserves a specific callout: the Sales Management Operating System, or smOS. This is the management cadence, operating rhythm, and structured practices that allow managers to actually lead, inspect, coach, reinforce, and develop their teams consistently. Without a well-designed smOS, everything else upstream is at risk. You can build excellent training, great content, and solid process, and watch it fade without consistent reinforcement. The smOS is what makes adoption stick at scale.

Note that the smOS is a block in the Sales Ops framework, but is also part of the Sales Management System, which is one of the systems supported by Sales Enablement. Sales Ops owns the decisions in the smOS—what are the management activities and the cadence for each; what are the team and individual meetings and the cadence for each, etc. Sales Enablement then owns the training and support for managers to execute the elements in the system. This is how systems thinking works. Elements are interrelated and interconnected. Like the shared blocks discussed earlier in this section, the smOS is another block and system that requires cross-functional alignment and collaboration.

Customer Success Enablement

Customer Success Enablement completes the commercial system—and in many organizations, it’s where significant revenue is quietly lost. Retention failures, expansion misses, and preventable churn events don’t usually trace back to a single cause. They trace back to weak building blocks.

The 12 Building Blocks of Customer Success Enablement: Employee Engagement, Service Delivery, Process Optimization, Service Analytics, Feedback Management, Product Knowledge, Tools and Technology, Training, Sales Support, Customer Acumen, Coaching, and Project Management.

Customer Acumen is the mirror image of Buyer Acumen on the sales side—a structured, disciplined approach to understanding customers deeply: their business challenges, their internal dynamics, their evolving success criteria, and the risks that could drive them toward a competitor or out of the relationship entirely. Without strong Customer Acumen, Customer Success teams tend to be reactive. They’re often excellent at managing the account they have; they’re less effective at seeing risk or opportunity before it arrives.

The Sales Support block also deserves attention. CS teams carry a lot of knowledge about what customers actually need post-sale—context that, if systematically fed back to Sales and Marketing, could sharpen messaging, improve positioning, and reduce the kind of churn that starts on day two of a new engagement. When that feedback loop is broken, the commercial system loses intelligence it can’t afford to lose.

The Connective Tissue: Systems Thinking at Commercial Scale

Every one of the five function-specific frameworks shares the same foundational structure: 12 building blocks across the top, supported by Systems Thinking, Communication Management (with Cross-Functional Collaboration), and Functional Support Services at the base.

That consistent foundation is what transforms five independent frameworks into one integrated system.

Systems thinking, as I apply it, is the discipline of understanding how the elements of a complex system interrelate—how changing one element affects others, how feedback loops operate, where leverage points exist, and where well-intentioned interventions might create unintended consequences elsewhere. John Kotter described this best when he wrote that change management is like an office where every item is connected by string. Move the lamp, and it shifts the stapler. Pick up the phone and it opens a drawer. It’s funny to envision but makes a great point. In the original Sales Enablement framework, systems thinking is what prevents leaders from optimizing a single block while inadvertently degrading the ones adjacent to it.

At commercial scale, that discipline matters more, not less. Five functions. Sixty-plus building blocks across them. Multiple handoffs, dependencies, and feedback loops between them. Without systems thinking as a foundational discipline (and someone paying attention to the interactions), commercial improvement efforts can devolve into functional optimization that produces local wins at the expense of system-wide performance. (Can you spell “silos?”)

Cross-Functional Collaboration (part of Communication Management, along with communication to the sales force) is the mechanism by which systems thinking becomes operational. The CEF doesn’t work if each function builds its blocks in isolation and then hopes for alignment downstream. Product needs to collaborate with Marketing on positioning and launch readiness. Marketing needs to collaborate with Sales on messaging and lead quality definitions. Sales needs to collaborate with Operations on quota design, territory structure, and technology adoption. Customer Success needs to close the loop back to Product, Marketing, and Sales with what’s actually happening after the contract is signed.  Alignment is like grease—a lubricant. And if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, it’s what turns individual oar strokes into thrust when six oarsmen row in unison, in the same direction.

None of this is a new idea. But having a shared architectural framework—one that each function can point to and say, “Here are our blocks, here’s where they connect to yours”—makes those conversations more structured and less political.

Functional Support Services, the third foundational row, acknowledges that each function requires specific operational and administrative support to do the work at all. It’s not glamorous, but under-resourcing it is expensive.

From Framework to Plan: Developing a Commercial Effectiveness Plan

A framework without a development process is just a picture. The CEF includes a structured approach to turning the architecture into an actionable plan that actually drives commercial improvement.

The process flows from people and data inputs, through a design and analysis sequence, to a Commercial Effectiveness Plan as the final output.

It starts with Bricks in the Wall—identifying Charter Partners. These are the leaders across the five commercial functions (and any other stakeholders that should be included) who need to be part of building the plan. Charters fail when they’re designed in a room with too few of the right people, or when the people in the room don’t have the authority to commit their functions. Getting the right charter partners engaged early is the prerequisite for everything that follows.

With Charter Partners identified, the Commercial Effectiveness Charter Design process begins. This establishes how the work will be defined, owned, and measured—producing an Aligned Charter as the first interim output. Consider using RACI / RASCI to define roles and ownership.

A charter isn’t a strategy deck. It’s an operational agreement about scope, ownership, accountabilities, and success criteria. Without it, even well-designed building block improvements will be contested, underfunded, or quietly deprioritized when the next initiative comes along.

Running in parallel are two essential inputs: a Sales Force Situation Assessment and a structured review of Data, Metrics, and KPIs. These aren’t audits for their own sake. They feed the subsequent analysis, and together they produce a clear picture of Impacts, Needs, Outcomes, and Priorities—the diagnostic layer that keeps the plan grounded in reality rather than executive aspiration.

Next comes the Building Blocks Gaps Analysis—a systematic assessment of each function’s 12 blocks against current state. Where are the blocks strong? Where are they weak? Where are they GEFN (Good Enough For Now, with future improvement to come later)? What’s missing entirely and needed? Where is the gap between current state and required state large enough to represent a meaningful drag on performance? The interim output is a set of Prioritized Gaps to Close to Deliver Prioritized Outcomes. Note the phrasing: not a list of things that could be better, but gaps explicitly connected to the outcomes the organization needs to achieve. That linkage is what keeps the plan from becoming a wish list, or that horrible state where nothing is a priority because everything is a priority.

The Force Field Analysis adds the final layer of diagnostic rigor. For each prioritized gap, it surfaces the factors—structural, cultural, resource-related, or otherwise—that will support or resist the change required to close it. The interim output is an Analysis of Factors to Address to Achieve Outcomes. Leaders who skip this step produce plans that look solid on paper and stall in execution, often in predictable ways that a good force field analysis would have surfaced upfront.

All of this feeds the Commercial Effectiveness Plan—the final output that translates the diagnostic work into a structured, prioritized roadmap for building out the commercial system.

The planning process reflects the same discipline as the framework itself: start with the right people, get aligned on scope and success criteria, diagnose honestly, prioritize rigorously, and build a plan that addresses the factors that would otherwise undermine it.

Using the CEF as a Diagnostic Starting Point

If your revenue performance isn’t where it needs to be, the CEF offers a starting point that most commercial improvement efforts skip: an honest, function-by-function assessment of your commercial system and how well it’s aligned.

Not, “What’s going wrong in Sales?” but, “Across all five functions, which building blocks are genuinely strong or GEFN, which are missing entirely, which are weak, and where are the gaps most likely to be costing us performance?”

That question surfaces a different kind of conversation. It shifts the frame from blame to diagnosis. It makes it possible to prioritize interventions that address root causes rather than symptoms. And it gives every commercial function a shared language for talking about their own work and the dependencies between them.

You don’t need to complete a full formal gaps analysis to start. You can use the five function frameworks as a structured assessment—walking through each block, asking whether it exists, whether it’s well-designed, and whether it’s actually being used effectively. Even a rough review reveals patterns. You might find:

• Functions where one or two blocks are excellent and the surrounding infrastructure is absent.
• Blocks that every function claims to own but no one is actually building.
•  Critical dependencies that no one is actively managing.

That’s where commercial effectiveness work begins: not with a plan first, but with an honest picture of what’s actually in place and how well it’s working. If you’re familiar with my process for developing a sales enablement plan that delivers results, it’s the same process extended across the functions. Always diagnose before prescribing.

Start with a cross-functional review. Bring representatives from Product, Marketing, Sales, Sales Operations, and Customer Success into the room, along with any other relevant stakeholders. Walk through each function’s building blocks. Rate each one. Note the handoffs and dependencies. Within a few hours, you’ll have a clearer picture of your commercial system than most organizations ever do.

Then prioritize ruthlessly—not based on what’s easiest to fix, but based on what’s most likely to move the metrics that matter most.

Closing Thoughts

While The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement included some intentional overlap with Sales/Rev Ops and HR—such as compensation and the Sales Management Operating System—it was, at its core, a book about systems thinking applied to one commercial function: Sales Enablement.

The Commercial Effectiveness Framework is what happens when that same thinking scales across the whole system. Proponents of the expanded Revenue Enablement have broadened the concept of Sales Enablement a bit, but not enough.

Revenue under-performance isn’t just a Sales problem. It’s a commercial system problem—and commercial system problems don’t respond to function-specific fixes applied in isolation.

Five functions. Five sets of building blocks. One shared architecture, three consistent foundational blocks, and a development process designed to turn the framework into an actionable plan.

If you’ve ever felt the frustration of watching well-designed sales initiatives fail to move the needle—and suspected the cause was somewhere upstream or downstream of Sales—the CEF is the framework that makes the whole picture visible. As good as it is, there are limits to what Sales Enablement can fix.

Multiple molecules, one coherent structure. When every function’s building blocks are strong, well-connected, and grounded in systems thinking and cross-functional collaboration, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

That’s what commercial effectiveness looks like. And it’s achievable—but only if you’re willing to look at the whole system.

Resources and Further Reading

For readers who want to further explore the architecture behind the Commercial Effectiveness Framework and its roots:

• Download The Building Blocks Meet the Commercial Effectiveness Framework slide deck.
• The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement — available at Amazon, td.org/books, or wherever business books are sold.
• “Considerations for Implementing Revenue Enablement/Commercial Effectiveness:” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/considerations-implementing-revenue-enablement-mike-kunkle-rezke/

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About Mike Kunkle

Mike Kunkle is a sales effectiveness and sales enablement expert, speaker, and author with more than three decades of experience helping organizations improve commercial performance through disciplined, systems-based approaches. He’s the founder of Transforming Sales Results, LLC—a thought-leadership, research, and publishing platform focused on sales enablement, sales management, and commercial effectiveness—and the author of The Building Blocks of Sales Enablement. His forthcoming book, The CoNavigator Method for B2B Sales Mastery, is expected in 2026. He publishes the Sales Enablement Straight Talk newsletter on LinkedIn and writes regularly here at MikeKunkle.com.