How to brief an outsourced sales team so the first month is not wasted.

A brief for an outsourced sales team fits on one page and answers five questions: what you sell, who buys it and why now, what a good meeting looks like, who takes it, and what we must not say. It takes an hour to write with us and it is the single input the rest of the engagement is built from. The board, the messaging, the qualification and the cadence all come out of it. An engagement without one is pointed at "the mid-market" and left to guess.

The five questions

1. What do you sell, in the buyer’s words?

   Not the product name and not the category you would like to own. What the buyer would say they bought, a year later, if a peer asked. One paragraph. If it takes a page, the campaign will take a page too, and nobody reads a page.

2. Who buys it, and why now?

   The kind of company, by what it is doing rather than what it is: growing, hiring, moving, launching, losing someone. The person inside it who owns the problem, and the person who signs. And the trigger - the event that makes this the quarter they act. The triggers become the signals the board is built from.

3. What does a good meeting look like?

   Title, company size, the problem they have said they have, what they need to have agreed to before the calendar invite goes out. Write the bad meeting too: the title that looks right and never buys, the company that is the right size and the wrong shape. Qualification is agreed here, in writing, and measured against later.

4. Who takes the meetings?

   A name, a diary and a promise. Who runs the first meeting, how quickly after it is booked, and what they do afterwards. This is the question most often left blank and the one that decides whether the meetings turn into anything.

5. What must we not say, and who must we not call?

   Claims that are not yet true. Clients who have not agreed to be named. Competitors, partners, existing customers, the company your co-founder used to work for. The list is short and it saves an awkward email in week two.

What to leave out

• The deck. The rep is opening a conversation, not presenting. Give us the three sentences a good salesperson would say in a lift, not the forty slides they would show in a boardroom.
• The wish list of industries. "Any B2B company over fifty people" is not a market; it is the absence of one. Three sectors where you have a story beat twelve where you do not.
• The script. You know the product; we know the opening. The words are written together in week one, from the brief, and rewritten from what gets answered.

What happens next

The board is built against the brief - the companies that fit, the signals that put them there, the people to speak to - and shown to you before anyone is called. This is where the brief gets tested: if the market it describes turns out to be forty companies, or four thousand, you find out in week one rather than month three. Then the messaging is written from the signals, the qualification is agreed, the rep is briefed, and in week three the first dial goes out.

To write yours, use the one-page brief template: the five questions as boxes, written up as you type.

The clients whose engagements worked wrote the brief themselves and then argued with the board. The ones that did not tended to send a deck and wait.