I went to a networking event recently. Within five minutes I had met two business consultants, three sales consultants, and two lead generation experts.
I felt the cringe rising before I had even finished the handshakes.
Because here is the thing. Anyone who actually knows sales would not be finding their clients at a networking event. That is not how it works when you are genuinely good at what you do. And standing in a room full of people flogging strategy documents told me everything I needed to know about the quality of what was on offer.
My Pet Hate
Sales strategies. Standalone ones. The kind sold as a deliverable in their own right, packaged up in a presentation or a binder, handed over with great ceremony, and then quietly filed somewhere it will never be looked at again.
If someone offers you one of these, decline politely. Or at least do not expect it to produce revenue.
Here is why.
You get binders, not buyers. The typical output of a standalone sales strategy engagement is somewhere between forty and a hundred pages of sales jargon, market segmentation diagrams, competitive landscape matrices, and glossy frameworks. It looks thorough. It signals that a lot of work was done. And it collects dust with remarkable consistency. Documents do not close deals. People do.
Nobody thinks about who is implementing it. This is the question that never gets asked during the strategy presentation. The consultant hands over the playbook and exits stage left. You are left with a document and whoever you have on the floor, which is often a rep who was doing something else entirely six months ago and has never used the methodology described in chapter four. The gap between a strategy as written and a strategy as executed is where most of the value disappears.
Off the shelf does not work. Every market is different. Every audience is fractured in its own specific way. There are dozens of viable go-to-market approaches for almost any category and the right combination for your business depends on factors that no generic framework can fully account for. The strategy that worked brilliantly for a software company in Sydney in 2022 does not transfer cleanly to a services business in Brisbane in 2025. The consultants who sell it as if it does are either naive or not particularly interested in your results.
A lot of it is written by people who have never sold. This one I want to be direct about because it matters. I have met sales consultants who have spent their entire careers selling strategy to businesses without ever having carried a personal revenue target, managed a pipeline, or sat across from a procurement team trying to justify why your price is higher than the competitor’s. It is visible almost immediately to anyone who has actually done the work. The language is right but the texture is missing. The frameworks are clean but they have never been tested against a buyer who just said no for a reason you did not see coming.
Or written by people whose sales experience ended before the internet or AI. This is the other version of the same problem. Genuine commercial experience from twenty-five years ago is not meaningless, but markets, channels, buyer behaviour, and the entire competitive landscape have changed enough that a strategy built on pre-digital assumptions is going to miss in ways that matter.
What Strategy Actually Should Be
I am not saying strategy has no value. We sell it at Outsold. But what we sell is something different from a document.
An old mentor of mine called it Strategy Assurance. The principle is straightforward. You only write strategy you intend to deliver. You test what you write before you scale it. You deliver what you planned and you prove it works before you recommend that a client hires a rep to execute it. The strategy and the execution are not separate products sold to separate budgets. They are the same engagement.
That changes everything about how the work gets done. It means the people writing the strategy have skin in the game. If the approach does not work in market, it is our problem to fix, not yours to manage around. It means every recommendation we make is grounded in what we have actually tested, not what a framework suggests should work. And it means that by the time a client is ready to invest in building out a team or scaling a channel, they are doing it with evidence rather than optimism.
Sales Is Still a Contact Sport
That is not a metaphor. It is a description of how the work actually operates. You take knocks. You hear things you were not expecting. You lose deals you thought you had. You learn things about your market, you Pivot, you strategies, and your offer that no amount of desk research will surface, then re-strategise.
If you are evaluating sales strategy and the person pitching you cannot tell you about the last time a deal they were personally responsible for went sideways and what they did about it, or willing to actually deliver on the strategy they write, then it’s expensive toilet paper.
