A mid-market PE firm had eight B2B software portfolio companies. All had strong products. All struggled with similar commercial challenges-weak sales processes, inconsistent marketing, reactive customer success, no revenue operations. Each company tried to solve problems independently, reinventing wheels and making the same mistakes. Meanwhile, a competitor systematically built commercial excellence across their portfolio, sharing best practices and pooling resources. Their companies grew 34% annually vs. 12% for the first firm. Same markets, different approaches, vastly different outcomes.
Most PE portfolio companies have capability gaps, not strategy gaps. They know what good looks like but lack resources, expertise, or bandwidth to build it. Traditional approach is company-by-company intervention-expensive, slow, and inefficient. The firms generating superior returns take a portfolio approach, systematically building commercial capabilities that compound across companies and hold periods.
Portfolio transformation isn't about imposing templates. It's about identifying common capability gaps, building reusable solutions, creating forums for best practice sharing, and providing expert support that no individual portfolio company could afford alone. Companies that participate in portfolio-wide commercial excellence programs achieve 2-3x better growth than those going it alone while requiring less company-specific resources.
Assess each portfolio company against commercial excellence framework covering sales effectiveness, marketing ROI, customer success maturity, revenue operations sophistication, and pricing discipline. Identify common gaps and company-specific needs. Create capability heat map across portfolio.
Common Portfolio Gaps:
Nearly Universal (80%+ of companies):
Very Common (60%+ of companies):
Create standardized playbooks, templates, and processes that can be adapted across companies. Don't start from scratch for each company-build once, deploy many times. Playbooks cover sales process design, customer success programs, RevOps implementation, pricing frameworks, and enablement content.
Example Playbook Library:
Facilitate knowledge sharing across portfolio through CRO councils, VP Sales roundtables, RevOps forums, and customer success peer groups. Companies learn faster from peers facing similar challenges than from consultants. Create safe spaces for honest discussion of what's working and what's not.
Typical Forum Structure:
Portfolio companies need expert practitioners, not just advisors. Build bench of commercial operators who can parachute into companies for 100-day programs, capability buildouts, and transformation initiatives. One expert supporting 6-8 companies is more efficient than each company hiring separately.
Support Model:
Portfolio Program Participants
Independent Approach
Data from analysis of 150+ portfolio companies across 20 PE firms, 2020-2024
Economics of Scale: One expert supporting 6-8 companies costs 60% less per company than independent hiring while delivering better outcomes through specialization.
Faster Learning: Companies adopt best practices 3-4 months faster through peer sharing than discovering independently.
Better Retention: Portfolio company leaders stay longer when connected to peer network-reduces turnover and preserves institutional knowledge.
Exit Positioning: Demonstrable commercial excellence capabilities that are documented and portable command premium valuations from acquirers.
Fund had 12 B2B portfolio companies across software, services, and manufacturing. Each had similar commercial capability gaps but was trying to solve them independently. No knowledge sharing, duplicated efforts, inconsistent results. Portfolio companies were growing 8-15% annually despite strong markets, limiting exit options.
Built portfolio-wide commercial excellence program including:
GP Perspective: "Portfolio-wide commercial excellence was the highest ROI investment we made. Companies learned faster, executed better, and exited at premiums. We've replicated this model across all our funds." - Managing Partner
In an environment where financial engineering no longer drives returns, commercial excellence is the primary source of value creation. Firms that systematically build GTM capabilities across portfolios generate 3-4x better fund returns than those leaving it to individual companies.
Keys to Portfolio Success:
Portfolio transformation isn't overhead-it's the operating system for superior value creation across the entire fund.