Built from inside revenue teams, not observed from outside them.
More than five years inside B2B revenue teams, across enterprise, scale-up, expansion, and early-growth commercial systems in EMEA and Turkey. The same failure kept appearing in all of them. Kihon Labs exists because field experience alone could not explain why, and because a diagnosis nobody acts on is just an expensive opinion.
Why a practitioner went back to the research.
Cem trained as an electrical and electronics engineer in Istanbul, then moved into B2B sales after an MSc in Barcelona. He has spent every year since inside commercial systems rather than around them, across enterprise, scale-up, expansion, and early-growth companies.
Read the full story →
Those years were deliberately spread across very different stages. Enterprise at SAP and Veritas, where the process was mature and the cycles were long. Mid-market at Preply, where the segment had to be built from nothing. Early-stage at Delfos Energy, where the question was not how to scale a system but how to build one that could scale at all. Different products, different buyers, different maturity levels.
The same failure kept appearing in all of them. The system that produced results at one growth stage became the constraint at the next. Qualification frameworks built for one segment broke under another. Coordination that worked through direct conversation failed once roles and handoffs multiplied. Teaching made the gap sharper: standing in front of postgraduate students, explaining how a commercial system should be structured, exposes every place where the answer is really just precedent dressed up as principle.
So he went looking for the method rather than another opinion. That search led to preparation for an Executive DBA at EADA Business School, delivered in partnership with Le CNAM-Paris, focused on hidden cost and commercial dysfunction in GTM and RevOps systems. Kihon Labs is what came out of it: a practice that treats revenue as a system with inputs, failure modes, and measurable output, diagnoses where that system is losing money, and then closes the loss.
Research that has to survive contact with a real system.
The doctoral work behind Kihon Labs is designed as intervention research, not observational study. That distinction is the reason this practice exists in the form it does.
The researcher goes in, not around the problem
Intervention research enters a real organisation, changes something inside it, and measures what happens. The intervention is the instrument, and the same interview and document sequence keeps one engagement comparable to the next.
A framework that cannot be applied is not a finding
Every element of the diagnostic has to be usable by a commercial team on a Tuesday afternoon, with the data they actually have. Anything that only works in a paper gets cut, because the method is judged by what it changes, not by how it reads.
Client work and research feed each other
What surfaces in an engagement sharpens the research. What the research corrects goes back into the next engagement. The framework you get is not a fixed product, it is the current best version of something under continuous testing.
Most consultants apply a method. This one is being written, tested, and corrected in the same systems it is applied to.
What actually happens when we enter a system.
No two commercial systems fail the same way, but the sequence for finding out is consistent.
He talks to the people doing the work
Structured interviews across every role, from first call to forecast sign-off. The pattern almost never matches the one leadership describes, and that gap is usually where the money is.
He reads the data against what they told him
Pipeline history, conversion, cycle length, CRM hygiene, territory coverage. Numbers alone hide dysfunction, interviews alone exaggerate it, and the diagnosis lives between the two.
He puts a euro figure on it
Every dysfunction found is converted into cost using a defined model, not a guess. If a number cannot be defended in front of a CFO, it does not go in the report.
He stays for the part that is actually hard
Finding the problem takes weeks. Changing how a team works takes longer, and fails without someone accountable in the room. That is the part most advisors skip.
The classroom is where the method gets stress-tested.
Teaching postgraduate students at four business schools in Barcelona is not a side activity. It is the fastest way to find out which parts of a framework hold up and which parts are just confident phrasing.
Students ask the question clients are too polite to ask
A room of postgraduates has no commercial reason to accept an argument. If a framework rests on precedent rather than logic, someone finds the seam within minutes.
Explaining forces precision
Anything that cannot be taught clearly is not yet understood clearly. Every concept in the diagnostic has been rewritten because a version of it failed to land in a lecture hall.
The material is the same on both sides
Strategic Sales Management, Customer Experience Management, and Leadership. The frameworks in the syllabus are the ones used in the field, not a simplified teaching version.
The record behind the practice.
Questions about the person behind the practice.
Is this a one-person practice?
Does teaching at four business schools create a conflict of interest with client work?
What is the doctoral research actually about?
Why trust field experience from a small number of companies?
Three ways to keep reading.
See what the diagnostic measures
The six dysfunction families, the signals that reveal them, and how they turn into cost. It is the same structure every engagement starts from, whatever the sector or stage.
Read the method it is built on
Where the socio-economic approach comes from, and how a diagnosis becomes a change that holds.
Test it on your own system
Ten questions, two minutes. The fastest way to judge a method is to point it at something you already know is broken.
The best way to judge the method is to use it on your own system.
One call, 30 minutes. We will review what is stalling, and where the cost is actually sitting. You will leave with a concrete next step, whether that is Kihon Labs or not.
Book a diagnostic call