The research arm of The Executive Summary.

Critical Deal is the research arm of The Executive Summary, the publication for B2B operators making consequential decisions. We do the research that goes into those decisions.

The job

Critical Deal is a B2B research firm built for one job: research for the moments where being wrong is expensive. M&A diligence. Go-to-market launches. Partnership decisions. Vendor and platform selection. Investment theses. Re-pricing. Re-positioning.

Every engagement starts with the decision being made, not a research theme. Every engagement ends with a verdict, not a 90-slide deck. Every verdict is built to stand up in front of a board, an investment committee, or an acquirer's diligence room.

The team

A small, senior team of B2B researchers. No analysts working through templates. No offshore desks running interviews you'd want to re-do. Engagements are led, run and signed by senior researchers from brief to read-out.

The network sits behind the core team: vetted senior researchers across the UK, Europe and North America who join engagements where deep sector or language depth is needed. We bring in specialists. We never sub the engagement out.

What we don't do

• Annual brand trackers. Other firms do those well at scale.
• NPS programmes. Platforms exist. We're not one.
• Generic category reports. If the brief is "tell us about X", we'll ask which decision sits behind the question and reframe, or pass.
• Synthetic-only research. AI is in the toolkit. It isn't the evidence base.

What we believe

• Research framed around a decision beats research framed around a question.
• Primary evidence beats secondary evidence. Multiple sources beat a single source.
• Dissent surfaces the truth faster than consensus.
• The output is short. The evidence pack is long.
• Senior researchers on the engagement, end to end. No pitch-bait-and-switch.
• The bar is whether the work could survive an acquirer's diligence room. Anything below that is not decision-grade.
• AI is the accelerant. Buyers are the evidence. We use the first to be faster. We use the second to be right.

How we work with clients

Engagements start with a 30-minute decision brief: free, no obligation. If the work is a fit, we send a scope and a price within one working day. If it isn't, we'll tell you who else to talk to.

Most engagements run 3 to 6 weeks. Decision Briefs run 5 to 10 working days. M&A and multi-market engagements scale up from there. We size to the decision, not to a day rate.

The network

Critical Deal sits inside a small network of B2B editorial and practice operations. Same editorial DNA, different audiences. Reading them is the fastest way to understand the kind of operator, investor and CIO conversation we know best.