Enterprise B2B SaaS companies benefit from integrating proven strategy and operating frameworks to drive alignment and growth. Practically, that defines the overall strategy of the business and the mechanics of how you execute it. This document provides the Strategy Framework – how you define the strategy – and it’s companion define the Operating Framework – how you turn that strategy into reality. I’ve based this on my own personal experience but drawn extensively on four frameworks that I like: The Rockefeller Habits, Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), The Advantage (Patrick Lencioni’s organizational health model), and The Business Model Canvas.
Each item below is a critical component that companies need to define and develop to keep their teams on the same page. For each, I’ll endeavor to provide a description, explain its use in the business, and summarize the high-level process for creating it.
These elements apply across all stages of a company’s growth and together form a coherent playbook for vision, strategy, execution, and team alignment. The goal in developing these things is “a good enough strategy we’re all aligned on” versus perfect strategy that we don’t do much with.
One key thing before we start: strategy is fundamentally about alignment. It’s about a shared set of concepts that the entire company has agreed to ensure that we are all headed in the same direction and making consistent decisions. The concepts can be used to drive strategy at the highest level all the way down to day-to-day decisions you make with prospects and clients.
The concepts in the plan are organized by how often they change. We start with the most general and unchanging concept – Mission – and grow into more specific and constantly changing concepts.
There are countless strategy frameworks available, each with its own merits. However, our perspective is that using a framework—any framework—is more important than finding the perfect one. The key is to commit to a structured approach and execute it well. A solid, consistently applied framework fosters alignment, clarity, and momentum, whereas endless searching for the “best” framework can lead to stagnation. The goal is not perfection but action—pick a framework, implement it effectively, and refine it as you go.
Rules of the Road
A couple of key rules and concepts to be aware of as you dive into planning:
Scope
The scope of all the things here is company wide. If something is in the strategy nobody in the company has permission to change it outside of a standard process – generally owned by the CEO and executed once a year. That includes editing or creating alternate versions of the strategy. The process of updating the strategy generally includes everyone on the leadership team – whatever that looks like now in your company – agreeing that these are the right ideas, concepts and strategies for the company.
It’s generally intuitive that an individual can’t change the mission of the company. It’s less intuitive that an individual can’t change the competitive strategy of the company – but that’s what we’re agreeing to as part of this plan.
Names and Terms
Words matter. Names are important. Terms are important. As part of this, we’re agreeing to use the same names for the same things. Specifically, if it’s in this plan and named a certain way we’re all agreeing to use that standard name or term. If we all agree to call the formal assessment we do an “Audit” an “Audit” it is. We aren’t going to call it a test, an independent verification or an assessment. We’re calling it an Audit.
Operationally this ensures we’re all on the same page about domain specific terms and how we want to talk about them in the market and internally – which should generally be the same way. As an example at Level Access we’d call our assessment process audits, assessments, tests, etc. and it led to no end of confusion with our customers. When we’d normalized to audits we ensured we had an industry standard term implemented across the entire customer lifecycle. As with scope if we don’t do this we’ll get ten different terms for the same thing which takes us out of alignment and makes execution more difficult.
Market
As part of the marketing plan we’ll define Total Addressable Market (TAM), Service Addressable Market (SAM) and the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) we’re targeting today. We are defining that so we have a tractable strategy for taking a big market and figuring out where to start in it. If you say to yourself, hmm, we should really carve out an area of the market in a different way or we should go after X kinds of customers…take a pause. That’s a good strategic discussion to have and we should have that in a structured fashion.
Update Timing
Different portions of the strategy are updated on different time intervals. OKRs are created, tracked and resolved on a quarterly basis. Everything else is reviewed and updated on an annual basis. Outside of that – absent a truly compelling need – we’re going to keep the strategy locked. That’s intended to give the concepts in these documents time to go into effect and have some impact. Accordingly, it’ll keep us from “lurching” between strategies and force us to be deliberate in our selection of a strategy. (What’s a truly compelling need? Use your best judgement. Typically, though, it’s when something in this framework contradicts what you reasonably think is an important business decision or strategy.)