How to Write an Effective Strategy Report That Drives Results

A strategy report is an essential document that outlines a company’s goals, performance, competitive landscape, and future plans While strategy reports require time and effort to put together, they provide immense value by aligning stakeholders around strategic priorities and communicating progress towards objectives

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk through the key elements of an impactful strategy report and provide tips to make the writing process easier. Follow these steps and you’ll produce a polished report that informs, inspires and sets your business up for success.

Start With an Engaging Executive Summary

The executive summary should provide a high-level overview of the key insights and recommendations covered in the report, Think of it like an elevator pitch that quickly gets leadership and stakeholders up to speed on the core highlights

Aim for a 1-2 page summary that covers:

Objectives: The key goals this report is meant to address.
Current state: A snapshot of where the business is today.
Findings: Major takeaways from the analysis.
Recommendations: Proposed actions to drive the business forward.

The executive summary previews the main points, while the rest of the report provides the details and context. Use clear, concise language and avoid excessive jargon. You want readers to easily grasp the main ideas before diving into the full report.

Articulate Your Mission and Vision

Next, the report should communicate the driving forces behind your business – your mission and vision. Your mission explains your fundamental purpose and aspirations as a company. The vision is your view of the ideal future business state you’re working towards.

Clearly articulate:

What societal needs you address
What makes your company unique
Where you hope to take the business long-term

This grounds stakeholders in the broader company mission and end-goal. It provides crucial context for understanding the strategic choices and objectives laid out in the rest of the report.

Analyze the Competitive Landscape

Once you’ve established your purpose and direction, provide an overview of the market landscape and competitive forces at play. A data-driven analysis of your industry and main rivals helps contextualize your current positioning and opportunities.

Key elements to cover include:

Industry growth trends: Is your market expanding or contracting? What macroeconomic factors and consumer shifts are at play?
Competitor profiles: Who are your main competitors and what are their product offerings, pricing, strengths and weaknesses?
Competitive differentiation: Given the landscape, how do you currently differentiate or plan to differentiate? What sustainable advantages will allow you to compete and win market share?
SWOT analysis: Summarize your internal strengths and weaknesses along with external opportunities and threats. How will these inform your strategy?

Providing this snapshot of the competitive arena allows you to carve out a strategic position for gaining an edge.

Define Your SMART Goals

With context set, clearly define your specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals. These are the key results you aim to accomplish through your strategic efforts in a specific timeframe.

For example, a SaaS company might set goals like:

Acquire 5,000 new users over the next 12 months
Increase average revenue per user by 10% this year
Achieve $5M in recurring revenue by Q4 2023

The more precise your goals, the easier it will be to track progress and demonstrate success. Make sure they are realistic yet ambitious enough to drive growth.

Prioritize Your Initiatives

With SMART goals outlined, detail the key initiatives that will make them a reality. Group related programs and projects into strategic priorities or pillars. For example:

Product:

Launch premium features to drive upsells
Improve mobile experience to boost engagement

Marketing:

Refresh brand messaging and visual identity
Increase paid search budget to expand reach

Sales:

Expand enterprise sales team
Improve sales enablement tools and training

This section clarifies what you’ll focus on in the upcoming period to move the needle on objectives. Be selective – resist the temptation to include every possible initiative. Prioritize only what truly aligns with strategic goals so efforts stay focused.

Choose Aligning KPIs

Once you’ve mapped out goals and priorities, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll track to gauge progress. KPIs should signal whether initiatives are succeeding and you’re headed in the right direction.

Relevant examples might be:

Product: User retention rate, feature adoption, net promoter score
Marketing: Website traffic, lead volume, inbound sales opportunities
Sales: Sales qualified leads (SQLs), opportunity pipeline growth, customer lifetime value

Choose a focused set of KPIs directly tied to goals. Tracking too many metrics can muddy the picture. You want clear indicators of performance at a glance.

Outline Strategic Initiatives

With goals, priorities and KPIs defined, dedicate a section to outlining each strategic initiative in greater detail.

For every major project or program, articulate:

Owner: Who will drive and be accountable for execution?
Scope: What tangible objectives and outcomes will define success?
Timeline: What’s the project timeline and major milestones?
Resources: What budget, team members and other resources are required?
Risks: What potential implementation challenges or risks need to be monitored and mitigated?

Documenting this information ensures alignment on expectations and greater likelihood of effective execution. It also identifies dependencies and risks so they can be proactively managed.

Include Historical Performance Data

Provide historical context by including key performance data from previous time periods. For example, show KPI trends over the past 1-2 years.

You might also benchmark against competitors or industry averages. This quantifies starting performance levels and progress made leading up to the current planning period.

Visualizing past data alongside future targets conveys both where you’re coming from and where you aim to be. It builds confidence that the goals outlined are realistic yet ambitious enough to drive growth.

Close With Next Steps

Wrap up the report by recapping next steps to maintain momentum. Identify key upcoming milestones such as:

Leadership offsites to align on plan details
Assigning owners for each strategic initiative
Finalizing budgets and resourcing
Scheduling regular progress check-ins

Providing clear next steps drives rapid action on the plan and keeps stakeholders aligned. This propels the strategy forward from planning to execution.

Make Strategic Reports Easy With Templates

There you have it – a step-by-step guide to producing strategy reports that drive real business results. While thorough strategic planning takes time, you can simplify and accelerate the reporting process using templated frameworks.

Tools like Databox make it easy to build professional, automated reports tailored to your business objectives. Their pre-made Strategy Report template provides the core structure from executive summary to KPI tracking. You simply plug in your company specifics.

Leveraging templates eliminates the need to create reports from scratch every period. With the foundational components in place, you can quickly update, customize and distribute polished reports that impress stakeholders.

Focus your energy onsharpening strategy and execution, not manually building reports. With the right tools, you can painlessly produce professional reports that steer your business towards success.

how to write a strategy report

4 Tips For Creating First-Rate Business Strategy Reports

To make sure your reports continue to be effective, month after month:

âKeep it simple. Only include the most important data that is relevant to your audience, but make sure your reports allow readers to drill down to supporting data should they want further explanation.

âProvide context. Quantitative data is great, but also include qualitative dataâthe stories that provide context around why the data is what it is.

âMake it pretty. Branding and attractive formatting go a long way in making your report look professional, especially if youâre delivering it to a board or executive team. (Trust usâtheyâll notice.)

âAutomate as much of the process as possible. ClearPoint strategy reporting software automatically generates reports and even distributes them ahead of your scheduled meetings, so attendees can familiarize themselves with what will be discussed.

âRemember, strategy meetings are only as good as the reports that precede them! A good report calls attention to problems, celebrates wins, and keeps meetings on track to be productive. So itâs crucial to be thoughtful about the components of your report(s) and the audience(s) youâre tailoring them to, as well as how to gather the right data to include for each.

After building your initial set of reports, itâs equally important to find a way to create all future reports quickly and easily. ClearPoint users can produce consistent, attractive, and accurate monthly reports with just a few clicks. It also allows you to create reports that show linkages between your projects and goals so everyone can see how the various components fit together.

Business Strategy Reports: Purpose & Contents

Thereâs no âone size fits allâ strategy reportâaccurate report generation requires you to know your audience. You likely have a large amount of insightful data, but not everyone needs or wants to see all of it; nor will everyone necessarily be viewing the same data sets. Your management team, executive team, and board of directors will all be looking for different levels of data. For example, the executive team will want to see what progress has been made toward the organizationâs goals and any areas where progress is off track, and a Project Management Office might just want to look at project status and details of executing the key milestones.

Here are the components of a sample strategic report:

This reminds your review team of the overall objectives, or goals, and helps put the information in context.

Next, show data around the measures that support those goals. Include a chartâor grids, color-coded icons, heat maps, dashboards, etc.âthat shows the latest performance data, along with a target to help readers visualize progress toward that goal. If you can link data points and efforts to objectives, all the better.

Include some qualitative analysis provided by the person who is closest to the data. Why are you in danger of missing a target? Was it due to something beyond, or within, your control? Qualitative data helps readers determine whether or not additional help is required to reach the target.

The individual closest to the data (the âmeasure ownerâ) should make a recommendation of what to do next. This could be to continue on the same track, make an adjustment of some sort, bring in additional resources, or prepare for missing the target.

Depending on the audience, you may want to include information about what youâre working on to achieve the goalsâthese are your projects (also known as initiatives). Provide high-level information about timelines, percent complete, spending, and milestones.

Over the course of the strategy review meeting, you need to capture any decisions or action items. The resulting tasks should have clear deliverables that express what should be accomplished and the due date of when the owner should complete the action item. For future management reports, youâll start with this list of action items from the previous meeting.

A Plan Is Not a Strategy

FAQ

What is included in a strategic report?

The strategic report should provide a company’s shareholders with a holistic and meaningful picture of a company’s business model, strategy, risks, development, performance, position and future prospects including relevant non-financial information.

What does a strategic plan report look like?

Strategic reports should encompass these key areas: goals, performance, issues, and solutions. As in any other report, you should define your goals first. Everything else – your strategy, most important metrics, how you define success – depends on what you’re looking to achieve.

How to write a strategy report?

The title can be several words long, and it can aim to explain the goals it hopes to achieve. After you compose an engaging title, you can write an introduction to your strategy report. Try to make this introduction about a paragraph long, and ensure that it explains the report’s purpose and what tools and methodology you used to create it.

Why should you write a strategic report?

Writing a strategic report can be crucial for your business growth. In this type of report, you look at your strategy (either overall business strategy or by department – marketing, financial, etc.) and analyze its performance over a specific time period – usually monthly or annually.

What makes a good strategy report?

A good strategy report usually covers the following primary areas: Defining any strategy starts with defining your goals. You don’t know what to do until you know what you want to achieve. That’s why a strategic report needs to include strategic objectives – your long-term marketing goals that help you accomplish your vision.

What is strategy reporting?

Strategy reporting—also referred to as management reporting, enterprise performance management, and business strategy reporting—is the process of taking performance data and turning it into actionable insights that can be used to drive your organization forward. Did you make progress toward your goals in the past month or quarter? Why or why not?