How to Build a Sales and Marketing Strategy in Five Steps

To many people, strategy seems intangible. It looks like something a company either gets right or gets wrong, pulled out of thin air by people smarter than the rest of the room.

But strategy is tangible. A sales and marketing strategy is a set of written decisions about what your marketing has to achieve, what you will use to achieve it and who will do what by when. Building one is a skill, and any leader can learn it.

I wrote this method down in December 2015, when I was using it with clients of Outbound Creative, the outreach business for agencies I started that year. It has five steps, and you can run it on your own business. After the steps, I cover what my later work taught me to add, and a one-page template that collects the whole thing.

Step 1: Define your strategic objectives

In my experience, this is the step most people skip.

Too many companies run their marketing in a haphazard way. They act on whatever exciting idea comes up that week and never stop to ask what they are trying to accomplish.

The single greatest change you can make is to define your strategic objectives, and then evaluate every action against them.

Sit down and write them out. For this exercise, keep to sales and marketing: what do you want your marketing to accomplish? Some common examples:

• Growth: attract new opportunities and leads, generate new revenue, win new customers, get in the door with decision makers.
• Position: create awareness of your brand, demonstrate your expertise and experience, set yourself apart from the competition, clearly communicate the value you bring, attract the exact kind of clients you want to work with.
• How each interaction feels: provide value at every interaction, come across as professional yet approachable, authentic and confident, educate the prospect, start a relationship, and don't take up too much of the decision maker's time.

You will probably have several of these and some that are specific to your business. Write them all down. From here on, they are the criteria for every idea and every plan.

Step 2: Identify your assets

Next, list what you already have in place that can make the strategy work.

Assets take many forms. Some are things you own; others are skills or strengths. Writing them all down lets you build on what you already have instead of starting from scratch. Common examples:

• Channels you already use: your website, blog, podcast, newsletter, LinkedIn presence and other social media.
• Proof and material: case studies, testimonials, videos, books or educational content, and corporate literature.
• People and budget: in-house talent, people who can write, and money.
• Reach you have built: search rankings, trade shows and direct mail.

Step 3: Brainstorm solutions against your objectives and assets

Now brainstorm. You can do it alone or with a group.

My preferred method in 2015 was a mind map. In the middle of the page, write "Strategy for" and the name of the business or campaign. On one side, draw a bubble for strategic objectives and write each objective around it. On the other side, draw a bubble for assets and list every asset around that.

Then brainstorm off each asset, writing down whatever ideas it suggests. As each new idea goes on the page, check it against the objectives.

When the ideas on the assets side run dry, move to the objectives and look for any that nothing on the page serves yet. Where you find a gap, brainstorm ways to meet that objective and link them to it. Keep going on both sides until you are confident every objective has enough ideas behind it.

Then take a break and sleep on it for a night. Once your brain has been hard at work on a strategy, new ideas tend to arrive over the next 24 to 48 hours. Don't try to finish the whole process in one day.

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Zoom

The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

Step 4: Write out your ideas in detail and invite feedback

Next, write every idea out in full. Take them one at a time and work out the details behind each.

I did this in a shared Google Doc, because it let clients and team members comment on each idea and discuss it with me. Any shared document works.

When other people put a critical eye on your ideas, they see holes you missed, or they build on an idea and improve it. Bring someone into the process even if you run a very small team. An outside opinion is one of the most valuable ways to refine a strategy.

Step 5: Choose your best ideas and write an execution plan

The last step is to cut your ideas down to the essential actions that give the most return for the least time invested. Find your 80/20: the actions that will achieve your objectives and that your business can actually carry out.

That means leaving many good ideas out. That's fine; you can come back to them later.

Choose the strongest ideas and write a plan to implement them. I mean a real written plan: who is doing what, when it will be done, and a schedule. Too many companies come up with grand marketing ideas and never take them past the idea stage.

Set deadlines and stick to them. Treat your own marketing like any other client project. And don't overcommit to something too big: choose something achievable, and then make it happen.

What still holds, and what has changed

The five steps give you objectives, an inventory of assets and a short list of ideas with owners and dates. My later writing and podcast conversations add three lessons for choosing those ideas and judging the results.

Check the message and the market before the medium

In 2018 I wrote up a framework Dan McDade of PointClear taught me, the three M's: message (what you are saying), market (who you are saying it to) and medium (how you are saying it to them). When their marketing failed, the agencies and consultants who came to me usually blamed the tactic: the cold email, the ads, the content. In my experience the message, meaning the value proposition, was more often the problem. My rule of thumb was that the value proposition drives 80% of the results and the copy 20%.

The market matters too. In one client campaign I described in that post, we expected CFOs to be the best audience and CIOs the second; the CIOs produced three times the response rate and conversion to a call. Before choosing in Step 5, ask of each idea whether the offer is sharp and whether it is aimed at the right buyer.

Test two or three channels, then scale the one that works

The 2015 brainstorm produces a lot of ideas, and the temptation is to run all of them at once. I did that for a long time: a cold email campaign, then a podcast, then SEO, then webinars, each given one push and then left to die. The result is a lot of marketing that isn't really working and takes constant effort to run.

By 2018 the Bullseye framework from Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares had shaped how I thought about tactics: brainstorm every tactic, prioritize them, test two or three at a time, keep the ones that work and cut the rest. By 2021 I put it more simply in an episode of my podcast, crediting Russ Perry and Alex McClafferty, a business adviser I had worked with years earlier: most successful companies have one or two marketing channels that work really well for them. So the job is to test a few, two or three at a time, for about three months each. When one produces results, build a system around it so someone other than you can run it, and scale it until returns start to diminish. Then look for the next one.

At Content Allies, as I described in that episode, one test ran for about a quarter without showing positive signs. Another channel started working, and we doubled down on it. It worked so well that we started neglecting our first proven channel, which we knew returned more than we put into it, so we hired someone just to run that one.

In practice this changes Step 5. Choose two or three ideas to test and define what promising early results would look like for each. Review those signs after about a quarter, and build the scaling plan around a channel once it has shown it can produce results.

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Zoom

The approach described in this article, shown as a visual guide.

Use data as a guide, not the whole decision

The tests need measures, but in B2B the numbers rarely tell the whole story. As I said in a Leaders of B2B conversation (opens in a new tab) in December 2024, it isn't unusual for a B2B company to close 20 deals a year at half a million dollars each. The handful of interactions that moved one of those deals (a piece of content, a testimonial someone saw) usually can't be tracked. My point then was that "there's intuition plus data as a guiding light, but it can't be the full piece there." Read the results of each test with both.

A one-page sales and marketing strategy

The five steps fit on one page. Fill this in after the brainstorm and the feedback round, and keep it where the people named in it can see it.

If you laid every marketing activity your company runs today against a written list of objectives, how many would make the cut?