Sales Manager Assistant and FY27 Sales Strategy

A data-led shift in how we coach sales people at Brennan. The visible artefact is the rep 1-pager a manager opens before a weekly 1:1. The broader strategic work behind it is the FY27 pivot toward data-informed decisions about where reps' strengths actually sit, how their roles should be shaped around those strengths and how skills transfer happens deliberately rather than by chance.

The problem

A sales manager I work with had been doing his weekly 1:1s the same way for years. Open the CRM, pull the pipeline view, eyeball the changes since last week, pick the deals to dig into, write the talking points on a Post-it, walk into the meeting.

The Post-it wasn't the problem. The problem was that the cognitive work behind the talking points was happening in his head every time, from scratch. The same patterns of analysis, the same kinds of questions, the same shape of coaching, reinvented week by week, rep by rep. He's an excellent coach. He was also reinventing the wheel for every rep on his team.

That's the small version of a bigger pattern across Account Management and Business Development. Coaching depth varies with how much capacity the manager has on any given week. The data that should inform the conversation sits across CRM, the sales engagement platform, the marketing engagement signals and a handful of analyst reports nobody opens often enough.

The visible artefact: the rep 1-pager

The 1-pager is what the name implies. A single page summarising one rep's performance and pipeline state, structured to surface the things a manager would otherwise have to discover by exploration.

It's not a dashboard. Dashboards are for monitoring. The 1-pager is for conversation. The job it does is put the manager and the rep on the same page within the first 90 seconds of a meeting so the remaining 28 minutes can be spent on coaching rather than reconciliation.

Six design choices that did the work

Lead with momentum not territory. The first thing a rep sees on their 1-pager is the change since last review. New opportunities, advanced opportunities, slipped opportunities, closed business. It leads with the diff rather than the full pipeline or the quota attainment.

The reason is conversational. Reps already know their pipeline. What they want to discuss is what changed. Leading with the diff puts the conversation in the active voice straight away. "Walk me through the three deals that advanced this fortnight" is a coaching question. "Walk me through your pipeline" is a status update.

One metric not eight. Sales 1-pagers from major CRM vendors typically display eight to twelve metrics at once. Win rate, average deal size, days in stage, activity counts, conversion rates, pipeline coverage. Each is defensible on its own. The combination is unreadable. This one leads with quota attainment as a percentage with a trend arrow. Everything else is supporting context. The rep knows whether they're on track in the first three seconds. The manager knows what tone the meeting needs to start in.

Coach the question not the deal. The most expensive thing on the 1-pager is the section labelled "three questions worth asking". Three prompts, generated for this specific rep based on the state of their pipeline, that a manager could open the meeting with. Things like "what's the next decision the buyer needs to make on the [Account] opportunity and what's blocking it" or "the [Account] deal has been in stage three for 42 days, what's your current theory of why".

These questions didn't come out of a model. They came out of months of watching what a great sales coach actually asks. The model encodes the pattern, it doesn't invent it. The output is decent because the input was opinionated.

The reason questions matter more than data points is that reps come to 1:1s with deflection ready. Ask "how's the [Account] deal going" and you'll get a confident summary. Ask "what's the next decision the buyer needs to make and what's blocking it" and you'll get a real answer or a real silence, both of which are useful.

Motivational without being saccharine. The 1-pager includes a section at the top right that recognises something specific the rep has done well in the period. Not "great month, keep it up". Something like "your discovery call to qualified pipeline conversion improved this fortnight, the third consecutive period of improvement".

The hard part is making this real. The temptation is to write something positive about everyone every period. The discipline is to leave the section blank rather than fill it with something hollow. Reps notice immediately. A blank recognition row this period and a populated one next period is a real signal. A populated row every period is meaningless.

Brand it like a coaching tool not a management tool. A 1-pager that looks like a performance review will be received like a performance review. The visual treatment is deliberately warm and rep-facing. The colour palette signals competence and confidence rather than surveillance. This sounds like a frivolous design point. It isn't. Reps fight the data when they feel surveilled and engage with it when they feel coached.

Two-sided not one-sided. The most useful version of this 1-pager includes a column for the rep to fill in before the meeting. Their version of where they think the deals stand, what they need help with, what they're confident about. The manager arrives with the system-generated view. The rep arrives with their narrative view. The meeting reconciles the two.

This wasn't on the first version. I added the rep-side column after watching three meetings where the manager and rep talked past each other for 15 minutes because they had different mental models of the same accounts. The 1-pager became dramatically more useful as a coaching artefact the moment it carried both perspectives.

The companion artefact: the Presales leadership dashboard

The 1-pager solves the rep-and-manager conversation. The Presales lead has a different problem and the same root cause. Specialist Solution Architects sit across multiple practices (Modern Workplace, Cloud and Infrastructure, Cyber, Data and AI, Networking), every active opportunity competes for their time and the data needed to decide where the next two hours of SA effort should go is scattered across CRM, Presales request systems, the qualification scores coming out of Deal Coach and whatever the practice leads are carrying in their heads on any given day.

The Presales dashboard is the analogue of the 1-pager for the Presales lead. Same design philosophy. Not a monitoring screen, a decision surface. The job it does is help the Presales lead answer four questions in under 90 seconds. Where is the work? Who's overloaded? Which deals are in trouble? What needs my decision this week?

Sitting it next to the 1-pager closed a loop the AM and BDM coaching motion couldn't close on its own. The Presales lead now sees, at the same fidelity the Sales Manager sees their reps, where Solution Architecture effort is actually going, where the qualification quality is thin, and where the practice mix is starting to skew against capacity.

The strategic work behind it: FY27

The 1-pager sits inside a larger shift toward data-led decisions about how the sales organisation is shaped.

The traditional answer to "how should we develop this rep" is whatever the manager's intuition produces in the moment. A combination of recent behaviour, gut feel, recent meeting impressions and whatever training catalogue happens to be in front of them. That works when managers have time. It produces inconsistent outcomes when they don't.

The FY27 work is to base those decisions on data instead. Where does this rep actually win? Where do they actually stall? Which deal profiles light them up and which ones drain them? What does their pipeline shape say about whether they're being deployed against the right segments?

The strategic move underneath is treating employee satisfaction as a first-class outcome alongside performance. A rep deployed against the wrong segments will look mediocre on the leaderboard and unhappy in the role at the same time. A rep deployed against the segments where their strengths show up is going to perform better and stay longer. The data we have now makes that decision possible to take. Until recently it wasn't.

Skills transfer is the third leg. If the data shows a rep has unusually high conversion on a particular deal type, that's an opportunity to capture how they do it and codify it for the rest of the team rather than leaving the pattern stranded in one person's head.

What's next

The 1-pager generates weekly now. The cadence of pipeline change is too fast for that. The next version generates nightly and carries forward "what we agreed last time, what changed, what we should follow up on" so each 1:1 builds on the previous one rather than starting from scratch.

The strategic work has a longer arc. The data warehouse, the rep skills model and the role-fit framework are all live but they need more operating data before the recommendations they produce are trustworthy enough to drive role decisions on their own.