Strategy Also Needs the Backstory

When we talk about Revtech and how software in the space improves our understanding of how we are growing revenue, vendors focus almost exclusively on the sales organization. Yet almost every function has questions that need answers about the top line.

Strategy is no exception, and it may be the most underserved function for these questions. Corporate strategy, and arguably other strategies like product strategy or brand strategy, have a different pattern of thinking about the business that matters more the higher you go in an organization. It prompts a different set of questions that also depend on context from the ground, and it needs unfiltered answers that sit outside the structure that comes from forecasting.

Sales execution and forecasting exist to answer one question: are we going to hit the number? How that number got made barely comes up. That's a numbers exercise, and most people treat it like the whole picture. The picture is bigger than that. It leaves out the backstory (yes, that's right), how the number got made, and the backstory (yes, I said it again) is the part strategy actually depends on. Most leaders don't go looking for it until something's already gone wrong.

Why Strategy Questions Stand Apart

Let's take two of the most fundamental decisions related to strategy. Whether you use Lafley, Five Forces, or another framework, two questions that are true for almost any business strategy are:

• What markets you're playing in
• How you expect to win in them.

Structured data and systems can keep count of what happened in the markets or other markets. They might give you structured fields on win/loss reasons. It can give you what happened as trailing indicators. These information systems don't give you the why or how, nor do they tie into what's happening right now in the field. Assessing these two questions go beyond a count or aggregation of data. In markets, for example, you want to understand if you're even participating in those target markets, which is a strategic alignment question. If you are, you want to understand how that is proving out in performance and whether you're winning (or losing) in the way you expected to win in question 2. These are questions beyond delivering the numbers. In fact, delivering the numbers can mask strategic risk if it's just about hitting a target. So while your classic GTM stack, from forecasting to enablement to CI to automation, orients to the what on sales effectiveness, it doesn't say much about the how or why.

The Same Number Can Hide Two Different Problems

A good quarter and a broken strategy can look identical on a forecast call.

If the team isn't selling in the markets the plan called for, or isn't selling the way the plan called for winning, execution isn't aligned with the strategy. That holds whatever the number looks like.

Winning in those markets without winning the way the strategy expected points to something else: the strategy itself isn't working. The market was the right call. How the team won in it wasn't what the strategy expected.

Same quarter. Same number on the slide. Two different problems, and a forecast call can't tell you which one you're looking at.

What Leaders Need To See

What helps is simple to describe and hard to build. Before the review starts, the ground-level detail needs to already be sitting there next to the number: what got sold, where, and how, taken straight from the record of what happened.

The leaders who've already built this know which problem they have, execution or strategy, before anyone in the room has to ask. They're looking at what happened, and drawing their own conclusion from it.

That's the strategy stack. It sits alongside the ops stack that already tells you the number. Right now, most companies only have the second one. The ones building both will know the difference between a good quarter and a good strategy while there's still time to do something about it.

Connect with Jason Ambrose on LinkedIn.