Ten domains. One commercial system.

The ten Commercial Transformation Index (CTI) domains are ICP, Positioning, Pricing, Website, Marketing, CRM, Sales, Operations, Retention & Customer Success, and Automation. Together they describe how commercial value is defined, presented, captured, delivered and kept. CTI assesses each domain on its own terms and in relationship to the domains it depends on and affects.

CTI assesses ten domains because commercial performance is a system property: organisations underperform not only where individual functions are weak, but where the systems that create, capture, convert, deliver and grow customer value are fragmented or poorly connected. Ten domains is the resolution at which a constraint can be located without splitting a single commercial capability across categories.

CTI groups nine domains by the principal commercial job they perform. Define covers ICP, Positioning and Pricing. Present covers Website and Marketing. Capture covers CRM and Sales. Keep covers Operations and Retention & Customer Success. Automation is the tenth domain and is assessed across all four stages rather than within one of them.

Structurally, yes: in the Full CTI Audit the evaluation criteria are distributed evenly across the ten domains, so no domain is privileged by design. In a given organisation their consequence differs. A domain that several others depend on, such as ICP or CRM, can constrain more value when it is weak than a domain at the edge of the system, which is what the relationship analysis is there to show.

It can. Because each domain depends on what others produce, a weakness upstream limits what strong capability downstream is able to return. An imprecise customer definition, for example, can reduce the return on capable marketing, sales and retention even though each of those functions reports itself as performing. CTI assesses relationships in their own right so that this kind of constraint can be located.

Each domain is assessed against its own criteria and produces its own reading, so a ten-domain profile is meaningful domain by domain. The whole-system result is not simply the sum of those readings, because the dependencies between domains are assessed as well and domain-level differences are retained rather than averaged away.

Through two relations, held in one governed model. A domain depends on another where it cannot do its commercial job properly without what that domain produces, and it directly affects another where its own condition changes what that domain can achieve. Many pairs run both ways. Automation is modelled as a layer across the system rather than a stage inside it. An assessment reads evidence in each domain against the domains it depends on, so a weakness can be traced to where it originates rather than to where it surfaced.

Automation is not a stage in the commercial cycle. It acts across every other domain and amplifies whatever it is applied to: automating a reliable process multiplies its value, while automating an unreliable one multiplies the error. CTI therefore assesses Automation against the maturity of the processes and data it touches, rather than as a capability in isolation.

CTI assesses Retention & Customer Success as how systematically customers are onboarded, supported, retained, expanded and learned from. It sits at the end of the value chain and feeds evidence back into ICP, positioning and sales, which is why weakness here is often created upstream and why its evidence is read alongside the domains that precede it.

Yes. A strong CRM does not compensate for weak positioning, and a high-traffic website does not compensate for poor qualification. Whole-system maturity reflects how reliably the domains work together, so an organisation can hold an excellent reading in one domain while its commercial system as a whole remains constrained by the relationships around it.

Domain readings describe the state of each of the ten domains. A Commercial Maturity Band describes the operating state of the whole commercial system that those readings and their relationships produce. Two organisations can share a band with very different domain profiles, which is why CTI reports both the band and the profile beneath it.

The Free Website Audit and the In-Depth Website Audit observe evidence that is visible from outside: principally the Website domain, with observable signals about Positioning and Marketing where the website makes them legible. They do not examine internal systems, so they cannot read CRM, Sales, Operations, Retention & Customer Success, Automation or Pricing governance directly.

CRM, Sales, Operations, Retention & Customer Success, Automation, Pricing and most of ICP cannot be observed from outside an organisation. They require evidence from inside it: what the business reports about how it runs in the Commercial Maturity Assessment, and reviewed supporting material in the Full CTI Audit.

The Full CTI Audit applies its structured criteria across the ten domains on a 250 point scale, against evidence an assessor has reviewed. It assesses each domain and the relationships between them, and returns a validated Commercial Maturity Band, a CTI Score, and the constraints that are limiting value elsewhere in the system, in the order they should be addressed.