# The story file

*Step 2 from the CA Craft Beer Summit talk, November 11. Keep it beside your own PowerPoint template, with your colors and your layouts. The template sets how the deck looks; this file sets what it says, so the deck comes out the same every month and nobody has to relearn the report.*

*How to use it: fill in the blanks. The lines in italics are Coastline's monthly sales review from the talk. Delete them when yours is done.*

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## Who it's for

- **The main version:** ____________
  *The sales team, at the monthly review.*
- **The short version:** ____________
  *Leadership, the same month cut to three slides: the headline and four numbers, what's behind it, and where the team goes next.*
- **Any other version:** ____________
  *A distributor's version, with the same data for a different audience.*

## What each section answers

**The sections that are there every month:**

1. ____________ *(Coastline: the month against goal)*
2. ____________ *(what worked, with a win from every rep)*
3. ____________ *(each rep against their own goal)*
4. ____________ *(the initiatives, each against the accounts outside it since it started)*
5. ____________ *(next month's focus)*

**The sections it picks:** ____________
*It picks three from: by distributor, by brand, both sections, chains against independents, regulars gone quiet, a new-account story. Each picked slide says why it was picked.*

**The last slide, the parking lot:** ____________
*Ideas it found that we haven't dug into yet. In the last few minutes of the meeting: are these worth following up on, and does anyone know something that explains them? What the team says goes back into the context file.*

## What it builds from

- **The numbers:** ____________
  *The weekly review from step 1: the numbers it already built and tied out. No new math, only the story.*
- **A guide to the fields:** ____________
  *How to use each field in the review: which column is the goal, which is the actual, what counts as a win.*

## The words

- **Words we use:** ____________
- **Words we never want to see:** ____________
  *For a start: "this isn't just X, it's Y," "here's the thing," "delve," and a stack of dashes.*
- **How numbers are written:** ____________

## Lock in what works

This is habit 3: lock in what works.

- **What stays the same every month:** ____________
  *The five sections above, in that order, on our template.*
- **Asking what it would change:** ____________
  *Once it has run a few cycles and we've told it how things landed, we ask what it would change. It recommends. We decide.*

## What it can't claim

- ____________
  *A chart shows what changed alongside a push. It isn't proof the push caused it, so the slide says so.*

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Jeremy Carney · Central Coast Analytics · jeremy@centralcoast-analytics.com