Strategic Analysis

The other views are working tools — you read them with your sleeves rolled up, hunting for the next fix. Strategic Analysis is the opposite. It’s the report you forward. A written brief that pulls the whole audit into one narrative: where you stand in your market, what’s putting you at risk, and where to put your attention.

What it’s for

The four working views answer “what do I do next.” This one answers “what’s going on, and why should anyone care.” It’s written to be read by someone who wasn’t in the data — a boss, a board, a colleague who controls the budget. It gives them the landscape, names the risks in plain terms, and points at where the focus belongs, without making them learn the donuts and signal states first.

How it’s built

The brief reads as a single piece of writing, broken into sections by subject. Each section makes a claim about your position and backs it. Where a claim leans on specific evidence from your audit, a Sources popover sits beside it — open it to see exactly which buyer questions and pages the claim rests on, and click through to read them. Nothing in the brief is floating opinion; it all traces back into the report.

Narrowing it

The brief responds to the global filter like the rest of the report. Narrow to one funnel stage, signal state, or set of tags and the brief shows only the sections that touch the slice you’re looking at — useful when you want to forward the part of the story that’s about one topic rather than the whole audit. Where the brief describes a change between runs, it renders as formatted text so the before-and-after reads cleanly.

Using it

Read it yourself first to get the shape of where you stand. Then send it. When you need to make the case for the work — for the budget, for the headcount, for the quarter’s focus — this is the artifact that makes it. It’s the story you can hand to the person who signs off, told in a way that doesn’t need this guide to understand.