Strategem turns a complex product or service that takes too long to explain into a bespoke visual model people can point to and use. Where the model goes to work depends on where the explanation breaks. That might be a campaign pulling the wrong buyers, a deck that adds a slide with every release, sales calls that run on whoever explains the offer best, judgement calls that still wait for one senior person, or marketing, sales, and product telling three different stories.
Bring the explanation that keeps breakingWe'll look at what's going wrong. If there is a useful model to build, that becomes paid work. If not, we'll say so.
Find your starting point
What it costs
Deals slow down in rooms you are not in. New people take years to reach confidence, and the company's ceiling quietly becomes one person's calendar.
The founder joins the important calls because the team still cannot explain the offer without them. See where founder-dependent sales begin.
The homepage and the sales call don't describe the same buyer, and the demo adds a third.
The first call goes well. Then your champion has to explain the offer to finance or a technical lead without you in the room. By the third retelling, half the argument is gone, and the deal stalls in a meeting you can't attend. See what your champion needs for the next room.
Anything that does not fit the SOP still comes back to one senior person.
What Strategem does
We look at what you're already using, from the homepage and ads to the deck, demo, sales calls, proposals, and working notes. Then we mark the point where people lose the thread and test the model in that same place.
We go through what you're already using and mark the moment the buyer or team stops knowing what follows from what. That moment is the brief.
We pull out what another person needs when the original expert isn't there. What matters? What connects? What changes? And where is the line?
We choose a form that fits the job, such as a chain, map, matrix, sequence, decision tree, or a small set of connected models. Then we replace internal language with words another person would actually use.
We put the draft into the real ad, email, sales call, proposal, onboarding, or working session. Where people hesitate, misread it, or return to the old explanation, we revise. A model that only works in the deck isn't finished.
The engagements
A campaign that attracts the wrong buyer needs a different model from a sales call that wanders or a delivery decision that still waits for the founder.
We start with the place that keeps breaking. That tells us what kind of model to build, so we don't force one model to do five different jobs.
The homepage and the ads explain what you do, yet the replies come from people who don't have the problem or can't buy the work. We choose one buyer and one problem, draw the model around the moment they recognize it, then turn that into the campaign and copy.
The buyer sees the modules, features, integrations, and proof as separate pieces. We draw one model that shows the problem, how your offer changes it, and why that change is worth buying.
Each seller qualifies the buyer differently, important questions arrive late, and the founder joins when somebody needs the full picture. We put the Offer Model into the call itself, so the team knows what to show, what to ask, and what the buyer needs to decide next.
Pricing exceptions, unusual client cases, and decisions that don't fit the process still go to one senior person. We ask how they size up the case, what they check first, and where they draw the line, then turn that into a set of models the team can use while doing the work.
The website, sales call, and demo can make the buyer feel like they met three different companies. A messaging document lasts for two weeks, then each team returns to its own version. We draw one model from the pitch people are actually using and bring it into the meetings where the story usually changes.
The Marketing Model, Offer Model, and Offer Model plus Sales Conversation each deal with one buyer-facing problem. Codify and Knowledge Alignment involve more people and more of the day-to-day work. We start with the smallest piece that can solve the problem you bring.
Case study
The software helped Lean manufacturing teams coach improvement work remotely, spread what worked across sites, and make ROI visible. The product made sense. The sales story was still a tour of every feature.
The demo moved through coaching, collaboration, business-case tools, integrations, and reporting. Buyers understood the features, but still had to work out why they were more valuable together.
A consultant could use the software with a client, help more teams deliver improvements, spread successful work across sites, and show management the return.
The Triple Multiplier Effect showed the value in one equation: more people delivering improvements × more improvements spreading across sites × more visible ROI = more value delivered faster.
The company stopped selling to factories and sold to consultants who bring the software into their own client engagements. Longer engagements followed, and the lifetime value of a software user rose by 40 percent. In the same year the company joined a startup incubator run by a large consulting firm and secured funding.
The Triple Multiplier Effect
More people delivering improvements, multiplied by improvements spreading across sites, multiplied by visible return on investment, creates more value delivered faster.
The team used the model with investors, operating companies, and consulting partners (the same drawing, all three rooms). That year, the company joined PwC's startup incubator and secured funding.
Who this is for
Strategem is for companies selling complex B2B software, technology, engineering, or industrial services. If somebody senior still has to join and explain how everything fits together, there may be a model worth building.
Direct answers
A bespoke visual model shows how the important parts of your product, service, decision, or method fit together. It is drawn for one real explanation problem, not taken from a template.
Strategem helps when something important takes too much explaining. That may be a complex product, a deal that stalls after the first call, a champion who cannot retell the case, or work that keeps returning to the same expert or founder.
No. We draw the model around the real situation in front of us. A model for a sales call has a different job from one that helps a team handle an expert's exceptions.
No. We use the introductory call to look at what keeps taking too much explanation and decide whether there is a useful model to build. The model itself is paid work.
Two workshops. The first is diagnosis: the problem, the customer, the stakeholders and how each of them has to be spoken to. Between them we draft the messaging and build candidate models. The second fuses the model into how you actually sell. You then use it in the field, and we meet again about three weeks after handover to correct whatever real conversations exposed. Nothing counts as finished until the model has worked in the setting where the explanation was failing.
The price depends on who is buying, because a committee sale and an expert-led sale are not the same job. For a multi-person B2B company with committee buying, the opening workshop is €5.000 and a full engagement starts at €15.000. For a smaller or expert-led company, the workshop is €1.500 and the full engagement is €5.000. The price is fixed before we start, iteration until the agreed acceptance test passes is included, and if we stop early you pay only for the phases that finished. No day rates and no open end.
Strategem was founded by Dr. Fritz Hermann, who holds a PhD in organizational psychology and spent a decade as a CMO, with work across banks, insurers and Premier League clubs. The extraction runs as structured interviews on your own real cases, won, lost and difficult, using grounded qualitative method from that background. We draw while we listen.
The first conversation
That might be the homepage, an ad, the deck, a demo, a call, a working document, or a decision. We'll find where people lose the thread and decide what a model would need to do.
You leave knowing what is breaking and whether there is a useful model to build. We don't build a free model on the call. If the work makes sense, we'll explain the paid project and where we would test it first.
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