An engineer’s solution might be genuinely brilliant. But it’s worth nothing until it’s in the right buyer’s hands. Commercial culture is about making sure that happens – consistently, deliberately, and in a way that everyone in the business contributes to. Engineers can and should help their ideal buyers engage with, understand the value of, and buy into their solutions. That’s not selling. That’s creating and connecting value. And “this is how we do things around here” is as good a definition of culture as any. The job is to design that culture intentionally – so it works for your engineers, your clients, your leadership, and your business. When it’s designed well, everyone benefits. And everyone lifts.
Why this is harder than it looks
- Some engineering firms have no commercial culture at all. Work lands on their lap when clients call, and they deliver it well. But they’re not actively creating or connecting value – they’re waiting. Others have a commercial culture that evolved by accident – habits, norms, and unspoken rules that nobody designed and nobody particularly wants. Either way, the starting point is the same: decide what “this is how we do things around here” should actually look like in your business. Not what it does look like – what it should look like, designed deliberately to serve your engineers, your clients, and your growth. Then build towards that.
- Commercial culture is a leadership problem before it’s a people problem. If your leadership want their engineers to sell better, they have to sell that idea to their engineers first. Not announce it, not mandate it – sell it. Help people understand why it matters, what’s in it for them, and what it actually means for how they work day to day. Engineers who don’t believe commercial activity is part of their job won’t do it regardless of what’s written in their job description. That belief has to be earned through conversations, not instructions.
- Your systems either support or undermine commercial behaviour – and most engineering firm systems were designed purely for technical delivery. If your engineers are only ever measured on project outcomes, if commercial conversations never come up in one-to-ones, if there’s no shared language for talking about pipeline or client opportunity – then even motivated engineers have no structure to work within. Training can’t override a system that’s working against it.
What good looks like in practice
- In firms with a genuinely strong commercial culture, the first rule is that everyone lifts. Every client-facing person understands that their role is to work on the business as well as in it. They don’t wait to be asked – they think steps ahead. They know where their clients are likely going next and they’re ready to help them get there. That’s not a sales behaviour. That’s a professional service behaviour. And it’s entirely compatible with being a brilliant engineer.
- Commercial thinking is visible in the language of the business. Teams have a shared vocabulary for talking about pipeline, opportunity, value, and next steps. It comes up in meetings, in project reviews, in appraisals. Not as pressure, but as a normal part of how work gets discussed. When commercial language is absent from a firm’s internal conversations, commercial behaviour tends to be absent too – because what gets talked about is what gets done.
- Leaders model the behaviour they want. They don’t just champion commercial development – they participate in it. They share what they’re learning, they coach their people through difficult commercial situations, they make it safe to try and fail and improve. When leadership pulls back on this, so does the team. The culture lives or dies at the leadership level, not the training level.
Where most engineering firms go wrong
- They treat it as a training problem. They put their engineers through a sales programme, see some initial enthusiasm, and then watch it fade within weeks as the existing system reasserts itself. Training without system change is like pushing water uphill. The right sequence is: diagnose the system, design the conditions, then train your people to maximise their performance within those conditions. Most firms do it the other way round and wonder why nothing changes.
- They try to change everyone at once. Broad culture change that attempts to move an entire organisation simultaneously almost never works. What works is finding the people who are ready – who have the belief, the drive, and the credibility in front of clients – and helping them become visible proof of what’s possible. When your team sees a colleague having genuinely valuable commercial conversations and enjoying it, the culture shifts faster than any top-down initiative could achieve.
- They confuse activity with culture. More client meetings, more LinkedIn posts, more proposal templates – these are activities, not culture. Culture is what happens when nobody’s watching. It’s the conversation an engineer has with a client at the end of a project when they could just pack up and leave. It’s whether they spot a follow-on opportunity and take it to the right person, or let it quietly disappear. That behaviour is shaped by belief, system, and habit – not by being told to do more of something.
Where to start
Start with an honest audit of your current system. Not your people – your system. What does your business currently measure and reward? What commercial behaviours, if any, show up in how you evaluate performance? What language does your leadership use when talking about clients and growth – and how often? The answers will show you where the biggest gaps are between the culture you have and the culture you want.
Then pick one thing to change. Not ten things – one. A shared language for commercial conversations is often the highest-leverage starting point because it gives people something concrete to use immediately. Once people have a common way of talking about commercial activity, the behaviour starts to follow. Build from there, consistently, with leadership visibly leading the way.
The thing worth checking in your business
Ask yourself honestly: when did your leadership team last have a substantive conversation about commercial development – not revenue targets, not pipeline numbers, but how your people are actually growing in their commercial capability? In firms where that conversation happens regularly, commercial culture tends to be strong. In firms where it never happens, or only happens when results are disappointing, the culture reflects that too. The frequency and quality of that leadership conversation is one of the most reliable indicators of commercial health in a technical business. It costs nothing to change – and it’s one of the highest-leverage things a leader can do.
Want to know where your team actually stands?
Use the free commercial diagnostic tools to find out exactly where the gaps are in your team’s sales effectiveness, and what to do about them. Takes 10 minutes. The report is specific and actionable.