Sales Strategy Template: What the Number Actually Requires

Search for a sales strategy template and the results divide into two piles that answer different questions. One pile is presentation decks: a title slide, a market slide, a personas slide, an execution slide, designed to be shown to a board. The other pile is articles that describe what a sales strategy contains and gate the actual template behind a form.

What a sales leader usually wanted was a page that can be filled in on a Tuesday and be demonstrably wrong by March. That is the difference worth building for. A deck is judged on whether the room agreed with it. A plan is judged on whether the arithmetic inside it held, and the only plans that get better are the ones capable of being contradicted.

This page carries that template, what belongs in each line, the test that finishes it, and the arithmetic between three of the lines that tells you when the year does not add up.

What this template has to do that a launch plan does not

A go-to-market plan answers which segment and which problem, for one product or one motion. It is a bet about the market. The seven-line version of it, with a test on each line, is in the go-to-market strategy template, and it is the right artefact when the question is where to point.

A sales strategy is the layer underneath. It assumes the segment question is settled and answers a harder one: how the number gets produced by the people you actually have, in the periods you actually have, against the coverage you can actually reach. It carries capacity, quota, entry standards and a stop list, none of which belong on a launch page.

The distinction matters because the two documents fail differently. A launch plan fails by pointing at the wrong market. A sales strategy fails by being arithmetically impossible while every individual line reads as reasonable.

The template

Eight lines, one page. Copy it into a document.

SALES STRATEGY: <team or motion>       Owner: ........   Period: ........

1. THE NUMBER
   New revenue this period: ..........
   Of which from new logos: .........   From expansion: .........
   Test: are the two halves owned by different named people?

2. SEGMENTS
   Segment A: ................  Named accounts: ......
   Segment B: ................  Named accounts: ......
   Explicitly not covered this period: ......................
   Test: can somebody build each list without asking a question?

3. MOTION PER SEGMENT
   Segment A is reached by: ..................................
   Segment B is reached by: ..................................
   Test: does each motion name a channel with one owner?

4. COVERAGE
   Accounts one seller can genuinely work per period: ......
   Sellers assigned: ......   Accounts reachable: ......
   Accounts assigned but not reachable: ......
   Test: is the last number stated rather than assumed to be zero?

5. CAPACITY
   Fully ramped sellers: ......  Ramping (counted at part weight): ......
   Expected attrition this period: ......
   Measured attainment, last four periods: ......
   Implied capacity: ......    Gap against line 1: ......
   Test: is attainment measured rather than set to full?

6. THE ENTRY STANDARD
   A conversation becomes an opportunity when: ...............
   Agreed in writing by: ......... and ......... on ........
   Test: would two people place the same ten accounts identically?

7. THE STOP LIST
   What this team stops doing this period: ...................
   Test: does stopping it cost something real?

8. THE WEEKLY NUMBER
   The one figure reviewed every week: .......................
   Current: ........  Target by <date>: ........
   Test: can it move without anyone reclassifying a record?

Lines four, five and seven are the ones most often deleted, and they are the three that make the rest of the page load-bearing.

Filling each line so it holds

The number, split. New logo revenue and expansion revenue behave differently, arrive on different clocks and are produced by different work. A single figure lets a shortfall in one hide inside a surplus in the other for most of the period. Two figures with two owners surfaces it in month two.

Segments, with a count and an exclusion. Write each so a list can be built from it. Companies with a field service operation and fewer than fifty office staff is buildable. Ambitious mid-market companies is not, because nobody publishes their ambition. The exclusion line is the one that makes the segment mean anything: a plan that excludes nothing has not chosen, and the cost of the exclusion is the evidence that a choice was made.

Motion per segment. Different segments earn different motions, and the failure mode is running one motion at everybody because it is the one the team knows. A motion needs a channel and one named owner. A channel with three owners has none.

Coverage, stated as a number. This is the line that produces the most argument and the most value. Decide how many accounts one seller can genuinely work in a period, multiply by the sellers assigned, and compare it to the accounts on the list. The difference is the part of the market that will hear nothing, and naming it converts a silent failure into a decision about what motion reaches it. The carve dimensions and the seams they create are worked through in territory planning.

Capacity, at measured attainment. The formula is sellers multiplied by quota multiplied by attainment, and the third term is the one usually set to full attainment. A model built on the assumption that every seller hits quota describes a team that does not exist and will overstate capacity by exactly the amount the assumption is wrong. Ramp and attrition are inputs rather than risks. The two directions to run the capacity model in, and why the gap between them is the whole output, sit alongside this line.

The entry standard, in writing and dated. This is the interface between whoever creates conversations and whoever closes them, and the two are measured on opposite quantities. Where it is not agreed in advance, the bar moves with whichever number is short that quarter and neither side can prove anything. The test is cheap: take ten accounts nobody has looked at, have both sides sort them independently, and compare. A disagreement of more than one or two means the criteria are a preference.

The stop list. One named thing, retired by name. The test is whether stopping it costs something real. Retiring an initiative nobody was running is bookkeeping.

The weekly number. One figure, reviewed weekly, that cannot be improved by reclassifying a record. Meetings held is harder to fake than meetings booked, and both are harder to fake than pipeline created.

A descriptionReads well, constrains nothing

• Mid-market companies ready to modernise
• No account count attached
• Nothing named as out of scope
• Every campaign runs the same message
• Coverage cannot be computed from it

A decisionSomeone downstream can act on it

• Logistics firms, 50 to 400 staff, operating their own fleet
• Named count attached to each segment
• Enterprise and owner-operators excluded by name
• The first line of the message is implied by the cut
• Coverage arithmetic runs on the count

The arithmetic that contradicts you

Lines one, four and five sit on the same page because they disagree with each other more often than a plan can survive, and the disagreement is invisible while they sit on separate pages.

The figures that follow are invented for the illustration and describe no real company.

Suppose line one asks for four million in new logo revenue. Line five carries ten sellers, of whom two are ramping and are counted at half weight, with one expected departure, giving eight and a half effective selling units. At a quota of six hundred thousand each and a measured attainment of seven tenths over the last four periods, the implied capacity is three million five hundred and seventy thousand. The plan is short by four hundred and thirty thousand before the period starts.

Now read line four against the same page. Suppose the segments add up to twelve hundred named accounts and the honest answer to how many one seller can work in a period is eighty. Ten sellers reach eight hundred of them, so four hundred accounts are assigned and will not be contacted. Neither number is wrong. Read together, the plan requires more revenue than the team can produce, from a market the team cannot fully reach, and both facts were knowable in week one.

Those collisions are the most useful output the template produces. The honest responses are visible once the numbers sit together: lower line one, raise the quota assumption and defend it, change the segment mix so the same effort meets larger contracts, or move part of line two to a motion that does not consume a seller's personal attention. Hiring is on the list and it is the slowest item on it, because a hire arrives immediately as a cost and produces on a ramp.

Is this strategy finished

• ~Depends: The number is split into new logo and expansion, with a named owner for each
• ~Depends: Each segment carries a count, and something is named as out of scope
• ~Depends: Every motion names one channel and one owner
• ~Depends: Accounts assigned but not reachable is a stated number rather than an assumed zero
• ~Depends: Attainment comes from the last four periods rather than from the quota
• ~Depends: The entry standard is written, dated and signed by both sides
• ~Depends: The stop list names something whose removal costs revenue
• ~Depends: The weekly number cannot be improved by reclassifying a record

What is a field, not a line

The commonest way this page bloats is by promoting attributes into lines. Pricing becomes a line because discounting is a problem. Competitors become a line because one of them got loud. Tooling becomes a line because a renewal is due.

Each of those is a constraint on how the eight lines get executed rather than a decision the strategy makes. Leaving them beneath the page as working detail keeps the eight lines comparable across periods, which is what makes the page worth re-reading in six months.

Stage definitions belong in the same category. Which stages a pipeline should carry, and what an exit criterion has to look like to survive two people reading it, is a separate design question with a longer answer, covered in pipeline stages that earn their place.

When the page gets rewritten

A sales strategy is rewritten when a line stops being true, not on a calendar. Three triggers are worth naming in advance.

The measured attainment on line five moves by enough to change the capacity figure. The reachable-accounts number on line four turns out to be wrong once the period has real data behind it. Or the entry standard on line six starts producing arguments again, which usually means the segment definition drifted underneath it.

Rewriting quarterly instead produces a document that changes when nothing has happened and holds still when something has. The behaviour half of any rewrite, and the constraint check that decides whether the change is worth funding at all, is in the four enablement decisions.

The short version

A sales strategy template is eight lines with a test on each: the number split by source, segments with counts and an exclusion, a motion and an owner per segment, a stated coverage gap, capacity computed at measured attainment, a dated written entry standard, one thing that stops, and one weekly number that cannot be gamed.

Keep lines one, four and five on the same page so their arithmetic can contradict you, because that contradiction is the only output of the exercise that was not already an opinion. Fill in the exclusion and the stop list even though both are uncomfortable. And rewrite the page when a line stops being true rather than when the quarter turns.

If the collision the template produces is between the number and the coverage, the answer is a motion that reaches the unreachable half without consuming a seller's attention. See what one campaign against your own segment produces, with the qualification criteria agreed in writing before anything sends.