(Or: why finding your way using GPS isn’t a strategy, and neither is “do more marketing”)
“Strategy” is jargon, just like “synergy”, “pivot” (guilty as charged) and “deep dive” (guilty again). For a lot of businesses it’s a nice-to-have — mostly it’s just the prettier word for “plan”.
It isn’t. And confusing the two is where a lot of money and effort usually end up with little to show for; or the results were not was was intended.
The GPS Isn’t a Strategy
Let me illustrate:
Say you’ve got a client meeting at 3pm, at an office in an area you don’t know well. You jump in the car at a time that feels reasonable, turn on the GPS, and go.
That’s a plan.
It might be a perfectly good one — until school pick-up traffic and tradies knocking-off hit at the same time. The GPS just reacts, sending you down the same back streets as everyone else trying to dodge the same jam.
You arrive with enough time, hopefully, but maybe flustered. And flustered isn’t the mindset you want walking into a meeting you need to win.
Here’s what a strategy-first approach looks like instead:
- The Goal: Win 2x more sales.
- The Strategy: Always arrive at least 10 minutes early to sales meetings, because that improves mindset and win-rate.
- The Plan: Check for roadworks the night before. Check traffic at 1pm. Take the highway to avoid school zones. Arrive by 2:50pm.
A strategy is a statement of intent that your plans get built from. It’s not always right, and the plans underneath it can change and evolve. What stays fixed is the intent.
Same Problem, Bigger Stakes
Now put this in a business.
Sales have stalled, enquiries are down. “We’ll do more marketing” is the jump-in-the-car-turn-on-the-GPS answer. A plan gets thrown together, and the marketing team — if there is one — scrambles to do marketing, whatever that means this week.
Finding the right strategy starts with understanding the actual question: why have sales stalled and enquiries dropped?
Say you dig into last quarter and find it’s a pipeline issue. Traffic to the website hasn’t dropped. Fewer people are calling. And more people who do call decide not to go ahead.
- The Goal: Improve the pipeline so that when people reach the website they call, and when they call they convert — within 90 days.
- The Strategy: Strengthen the pipeline processes, because people are arriving but not converting.
- One Plan: Update the website so prospects know exactly what to do to call you when they land on it.
- Another Plan: Build a consistent, streamlined call and CRM system so every call gets optimised.
Notice there can be more than one plan under a single strategy, and none of them are pulled out of the air. If the strategy comes from a genuine deep dive (guilty, again) into what’s actually going wrong, the plans underneath it can only come from what that discovery turned up.
The strategy also gives you a measure of whether it’s working: in this case, “win more jobs” — and you could get as specific as “win 2x more jobs compared to the same month last year.”
Skip straight to throwing money at marketing by doing more social content, paying for ads to drive more traffic, and you’re playing what the industry calls the “Spray-and-Pray” methodology. You might get some results, just not the ones you hoped for, and no one can say why. Or everyone blames someone else (“marketing sent leads to sales, they didn’t convert”).
The other upside of a real strategy: different teams can look at it and build their own plans in support. A manufacturing ops manager might read the pipeline strategy and realise his team could easily put together a sample for prospective clients — something that improves conversion and costs nothing to produce. Now he’s contributing to the strategy too, without anyone briefing him on “marketing.”
Where This Lands for Fantestimonial
The Trust Strategy framework we use at Fantestimonial to help businesses improve their sales funnels, by helping prospects find the confidence to actually call or buy. It runs on exactly this logic: diagnose, then build the strategy, then build the plans to get there.
It’s the one rule we live by: strategy first, tactics second.
The framework exists to help founder-led businesses surface the trust and reputation they’ve already earned, so prospects can actually see it.
And the evidence backs the instinct: peer recommendations are the most trusted source of information for B2B decision-makers, at 73% — ahead of vendor websites, search engines, and review sites (Reddit x SurveyMonkey Business Decision-Maker Survey, Dec 2025–Jan 2026).
Or in other words: B2B business owners are most likely to have the confidence to call you, if they find that their peers are, or have recommending you to solve their business challenges.
If you believe that, all things being equal, people buy from people they trust, this is for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Strategy?
Strategy is a statement of intent that your plans can be built from. It gives anyone in a business or organisation clear understanding of where you need to go, and the guideline on how it might be achieved.
It doesn’t mean that it has all the answers or that it is right, but it is the intention based on the current knowledge of the goals and objectives of the business or organisation.
What’s the difference between Strategy and Plan?
Plans are specific actions that need to be taken to achieve a goal; and strategy is the intention of how to achieve that same goal.
Why do you need a strategy if both attempts to solve the same problem? A strategy has a unique advantage of unifying different plans, or rather making sure that different plans are running parallel tracks to get to the end.
For example, without a strategy, a marketing team can say, we’ll say, our plan is to drive more traffic to the website with Ads. And the sales team may be saying, our plan is to reject any sales calls that isn’t above a certain value so that they can really focus on better sales calls.
Both are trying to achieve the goal to get more sales, but when more traffic comes in and sales rejects most of it, then there will be a huge waste of potential or cost.
The strategy gives all departments an opportunity to use the same language to find common ground to achieve the result.
What’s the difference between Strategy and Goal?
A goal is an end destination. A strategy is like the criteria you want to get to the end destinations.
And Plans are the various itineraries that you can take to get there based on the criteria set by the strategy.
