Context
Commercial strategy is the architecture behind how a company makes money. Licensing, pricing, packaging, enterprise agreements, discount authority, and the internal rules that govern how deals get structured. Most companies treat these as separate problems owned by different teams, which is how inconsistency, margin leakage, and field confusion quietly compound over time. The problem looks different at different scales. Enterprise vendors face layers of historical complexity. Growth-stage and mid-market companies face the opposite challenge, building commercial architecture for the first time. AI-native platforms face a third variant, designing packaging and pricing for products whose unit economics are still being discovered.
The companies that get this right treat commercial strategy as a single discipline. One that aligns monetization with product strategy, supports the sales motion, gives partners a clear role, and protects revenue quality at scale.
Brushton helps leadership teams design and modernize the commercial architecture underneath their business. That includes enterprise agreement frameworks, licensing model design, pricing governance, GSI engagement models, marketplace packaging, and the broader commercial rules that shape how revenue gets generated, shared, and recognized.
What we help clients solve
- Redesign licensing models to support recurring revenue and cloud motions.
- Structure enterprise agreements that balance customer flexibility with long-term revenue objectives.
- Build pricing governance and discount authority frameworks that protect margin at field speed.
- Develop GSI sales playbooks that move beyond logo partnerships into real pursuit execution.
- Package AI and cloud products for hyperscaler marketplaces without cannibalizing direct revenue.
- Sequence international market entry through the right mix of direct, channel, and alliance motions.
- Define how revenue should be generated, shared, governed, and measured across products, partners, and motions.
Core capabilities
How we work
We typically start with a commercial diagnostic. How is revenue actually generated today, where does leakage occur, which commercial rules are slowing the field, and where is the monetization model misaligned with the product and buyer. From there, we redesign the elements that matter most, whether that's the licensing model, the EA framework, discount governance, the GSI engagement playbook, or the investor-facing commercial narrative for a company approaching a funding round.
Commercial strategy work is cross-functional by nature. It touches sales, finance, product, partner, and legal. We design recommendations to be usable across all of them, not just defensible in a board deck.
When partner programs also need restructuring, this work connects to Channel Strategy & Partner Ecosystems. When incentive design is part of the picture, it flows into Incentive Design & Revenue Architecture.
Why Brushton
Brendan co-architected Microsoft's Licensing 6.0 program and the Enterprise Agreement channel model, which drove 120% ARR growth in the first year after launch. He founded the Microsoft Dynamics Deal Desk, which delivered $119M in annual commercial impact on a $1.4B business through renewal discipline and discount governance. At Cisco, he built next-generation Enterprise Agreement frameworks for Security and Collaboration and developed the Flat SKU model that simplified SaaS software sales through distribution. At Sage, he negotiated a 5-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS and architected commercial models that grew mid-market revenue 35%.
Brushton has also worked on the other end of the scale, including commercial strategy for an AI-native e-commerce platform preparing for Series A, covering investor-grade commercial diligence and go-to-market architecture.
This is where operator experience matters most. Commercial strategy is where small design choices produce compounding revenue effects over years, and the mistakes are expensive and hard to reverse. Clients work with Brushton on this practice because the patterns are already in our muscle memory, at enterprise scale, at SMB and mid-market scale, and in the AI-native environments where the patterns are being written now.
Ready to redesign your commercial architecture?
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