Use caseInvestor due diligence
Test a target's commercial story with the customers management did not choose, including accounts that recently left, check its position with rivals' buyers, and keep what you heard as the starting record for the value creation plan.
Reference calls show the accounts a management team is proudest of. A deal team needs the rest of the book, and the market the target competes in.
Upload the customer list shared in the data room, split by tenure, size and status, and invite accounts from across it, including those that canceled or downgraded in the last year, alongside the ones management put forward.
Buyers using competing products and prospects evaluating the category are recruited, each screened for fraud, which tests the deck's claims about differentiation and share gains against the people the target has to win.
Each commercial claim in the management presentation, such as sticky retention, pricing power or a product lead, is rewritten as questions customers can answer from experience, so every claim meets evidence from outside the deck.
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GrowwAnswers are read claim by claim and segment by segment, because a retention story that holds for large accounts can fail for the long tail.
Customers explain what keeps them, how embedded the product is in their work and what could push them to leave, and recent leavers say what actually did, which shows whether retention rests on value or on switching cost.
Customers of the target and of competitors describe how they compared options and what tipped the choice, which tests claims about differentiation and pricing power with the people who made those choices.
What customers said before the deal becomes the starting record for the value creation plan, naming the accounts at risk and the fixes customers asked for, so the first hundred days start from customers' priorities.
Commercial due diligence tests whether a target's market position and growth prospects are as strong as the management case says, and customer research sits at its center. Interviews and surveys with the target's customers probe satisfaction, dependence on the product, renewal intent and the reasons they chose it, and reference accounts supplied by management are balanced with accounts drawn from the full customer list, including recent leavers. Research with competitors' customers and prospects tests claims about differentiation, share gains and demand. Results are read by segment, since retention often differs sharply between large and small accounts, and the work is structured around the investment thesis so each claim meets specific questions. The competitive part follows the logic of competitive benchmarking, in which the target and its rivals are judged by their own users on the same dimensions and gaps are weighed by how much each dimension decides purchases.
The investment committee will be asked to accept a renewal rate. Any member who wants to can open the transcripts behind that assumption and read how customers talked about renewing, before the model is signed off.
Exclusivity gives a deal team a few weeks. Interviews need no call to arrange, so the customer program runs in parallel with the model and the legal work, instead of queuing behind them for calendar slots.
If a fifth of the large accounts describe a rival's roadmap as a reason to leave, that minority can matter more than the contented majority. Themes keep it visible with its quotes, and the committee weighs a risk an average would bury.