Name the decision and customer
Name the decision this brief supports and the customer group it covers. For each important answer, state whether it comes from customer evidence, a business policy, or an assumption that still needs testing.
- Decision this brief must support: [ ]. Accountable owner, date, and version: [ ].
- Customer segment, geography, and buying unit: [ ]. Distinguish a parent company, subsidiary, team, or workspace where it changes the decision.
- User, buyer, and other people involved: [ ]. Current workaround and the consequence of leaving it unchanged: [ ].
Define the problem and offer
Describe the work the customer needs to improve, the cost of the current approach, and why this offer is a better option. Include evidence for each promised benefit.
- Problem and its operational or financial consequence: [ ]. Evidence source and observation date: [ ].
- Desired outcome and reason to choose this approach: [ ]. Supporting proof: [ ].
- Buying trigger or change that makes action timely: [ ]. Important unknown that could invalidate the offer: [ ].
Describe how the customer buys
The sales motion should reflect the evaluation and adoption work a customer needs. A signup, product event, or positive conversation does not by itself establish a buying process.
- Evaluation steps, decision participants, funding owner, and likely objections: [ ].
- Route to market and first useful customer action: [ ].
- Onboarding effort, delivery constraints, value range, and explicit exclusions: [ ].
Set an outcome and a test
Set a target, deadline, and current baseline. If a key answer is unknown, assign a customer interview, data check, or small test to resolve it.
- Outcome metric, current baseline, target, and time window: [ ].
- Most important assumption to test: [ ]. Smallest useful test and accountable owner: [ ].
- What result would support continuing, changing, or stopping the approach: [ ].
Use and maintain the same brief
Use this context across account scoring, territory allocation, messaging, growth experiments, and tool selection. Resolve a conflicting assumption once and update the work that depends on it.
- Before proposing a workflow, explain how it follows from the customer problem and motion.
- Review when the customer, offer, evaluation process, or delivery model changes.
- List unanswered questions with an owner and next step. Resolve the ones that affect the current account, message, or workflow decision first.