overview / 01-1KE / 03-shaping-the-strategy
Stage 2 · Shaping the Strategy
Last updated at 2026-06-15 18:09 AEST.
Once the platform understands the deal, the next question is "so what should we propose?" This stage answers it. It looks at what the customer needs and recommends the approach — which of your services, products, and partners to bring to the table. It's the moment the opportunity turns into a concrete plan you can review and approve.
The simplest way to think about it
This is the recommendation a seasoned sales engineer would scribble after reading the brief: "Here's what I'd pitch — these services, this product, this partner, delivered this way." 1KE produces that recommendation in a structured form, and — crucially — only ever suggests things your organisation can actually deliver and sell.
What goes in
The strategy is drawn from what the previous stage already established, plus a check of what your business can offer:
- The deal's understanding — the customer's needs, environment, and constraints.
- The requirements your team has reviewed and approved as in-scope.
- Your organisation's catalogue — which vendors, products, and service families are valid for you to recommend.
- What's actually sellable — which kinds of work (advisory, implementation, migration, managed services, support) you have the commercials in place to deliver.
This is what keeps the recommendation honest: the platform can only pick from things your organisation genuinely offers and can price. It won't recommend a product you don't sell or a service you can't staff.
What comes out
A clear, structured recommendation for the deal — the services to deliver, the products and vendors to use, how the work would be delivered, and the overall mix of the engagement. Unlike the final proposal, this isn't a document. It's a recommendation you view and adjust inside the platform, designed to be quick to read and easy to change.
You're the checkpoint
This stage is deliberately a decision point. The platform proposes; a person disposes. Someone on your team reviews the recommended strategy, tweaks it if needed, and approves a version. Only an approved strategy is allowed to flow into solution design and proposal writing. Nothing reaches a customer on autopilot.
Why versions matter here
Every time the strategy is generated, the platform saves a new version and records the exact inputs that produced it — the deal understanding and the approved requirements at that moment. That has a practical payoff: if the deal changes later (new requirements come in, or your catalogue changes) after a strategy was approved, the platform can tell that the approved strategy is now out of date and prompt you to refresh it, rather than quietly building a proposal on stale thinking.
Built-in safeguards
The recommendation is constrained to the catalogue and commercials you provided. It can't drift into recommending things outside what your organisation supports.
The recommendation is validated for completeness and correct shape before it's stored, so a malformed result never makes it through.
The strategy stays inside your organisation, and the moment a new version is generated it appears on every open screen — no refresh needed.
Each run adds a version rather than replacing the last, so you always have the full history and can compare or roll back.
Where it sits
This stage moves the deal into its "solutioning" phase. With an approved strategy in hand, the platform can do the engineering thinking — designing how the recommended solution would actually be built. That's the next stage.
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