Strategy Documents
Hand SI your playbook and have it followed.
What It Is
A strategy document is an attachment you have marked as strategy. Everything else in your library is material to send; a strategy document is instructions about how to engage.
It is the difference between giving someone a brochure to hand out and giving them your account plan to work from.
Why It Matters
Mandates set your rules — the things that are always true about how your brand communicates. A strategy document is narrower and more situational: this is how we approach these people, in this order, leading with these points.
Most businesses already have this written down somewhere. A segment plan, a campaign brief, a page of notes on how to handle a particular kind of prospect. A strategy document is how that becomes something SI acts on instead of something nobody reads twice.
How It Works
When you mark an attachment as strategy, SI reads the document and breaks it into discrete items — outcomes to aim for, directives to follow, talking points and proof points to use, things to avoid, notes on tone. Each item is tagged with the moment it applies to and how strongly it should be followed. You review that list and correct it before it takes effect.
From then on, when SI writes to someone the document applies to, it is working from the items that fit where that relationship actually is: the guidance for a first approach to someone who has never replied, or for someone who has gone quiet, rather than the whole document at once.
Scope decides who it applies to, exactly as it does for any other resource. A strategy scoped to one segment governs that segment.
Examples
A good strategy document
Says who the audience is and what they care about; what to lead with at each stage; the proof points worth using; what never to say or offer; and what outcome you are aiming for. Plain language throughout.
A weak one
A deck of slides with no sentences in it, or a document that describes your product rather than how to approach people. There is nothing in it to follow.
Info: SI follows a strategy without ever mentioning it. A contact is never told that a plan exists or that they have been categorised. The document shapes what gets said; it is not something that gets said.
