Consulting Guide: Sales Operating Model Redesign

What this guide is for

How to redesign a sales operating model around signal-driven account selection and named decision-maker engagement, rather than around territory geography. The guide is built for the practitioner running the engagement rather than for the executive who commissioned it. The practitioner needs a structure that holds up across multiple engagements and an artifact that can be adapted to the specifics of each client without losing the discipline that makes the work repeatable.

Stratenity consulting guides are written to be opened during the engagement rather than read once before it. The structure assumes the reader is in motion, with a client meeting tomorrow and a deliverable due next week. The guide produces decisions and artifacts at the level of detail that the next two weeks of the engagement actually require.

The structure of the work

The work is structured into four phases that each produce a named artifact. The first phase produces the engagement scope and the evidence base. The second phase produces the recommendation and the supporting analysis. The third phase produces the operating cadence the recommendation will be operated against. The fourth phase produces the handoff artifact that the client operating team will run from after the engagement closes.

Each phase has explicit acceptance criteria. The phase does not advance until the criteria are met. The discipline of acceptance criteria at the phase level is what prevents the engagement from sliding into a series of overlapping conversations that produce material without producing commitment.

The decisions the engagement will face

A small number of decisions determine the outcome of the engagement. The first is the framing decision in week one. Most engagements that drift are engagements where the framing decision was not made explicitly in the first week. The framing decision names the question the engagement is answering and the boundaries the answer will respect.

The second is the evidence decision in week three. The team decides what evidence the recommendation will rely on and commits to assembling it. The decision matters because evidence assembly that runs into the recommendation phase produces a rushed recommendation.

The third is the operating cadence decision in week six. The team decides how the recommendation will be operated after the engagement closes. The decision is made in week six so that the operating cadence is designed alongside the recommendation rather than retrofitted at handoff.

The artifacts the guide produces

The guide produces four artifacts in sequence. The scope and evidence pack. The recommendation memo with supporting analysis. The operating cadence document. The handoff package for the operating team. Each artifact is short by design. The discipline of short artifacts forces the team to make the decisions that the artifact represents rather than describing the option space.

Closing

Consulting Guide: Sales Operating Model Redesign is the discipline of running an engagement that produces decisions rather than options. The guide does not eliminate the judgment the engagement requires. It compresses the procedural work so that the judgment can carry the engagement.