Strategic Direction
What problem do you solve—and how do you gain confidence that buyers will actually pay for a solution? How will you extend your value beyond your current product or service offering?

Business Planning
How do you align all your functional areas behind a focused product or service offering to a defined customer?

Strategy Offsites
How do you not only build on the collective experience of your management team, but also ensure a shared view of your market and your challenges?

Positioning
In what areas are you the best in the industry? How do you ensure that every employee has the same answer to the most important prospect question: "How are you better?"

Product Roadmap
How do you build a multi-revision product map that is influenced by your internal capabilities, but driven primarily by the needs of your prospects and customers? And how do you gain confidence that your roadmap also preempts competitor moves?

Target Markets
Your value proposition is irrelevant unless it is tied to specific, identifiable customer segments. To whom are you selling and what are you saying? Whether by industry or psychological profile, how do you identify prospects quickly to help sales and marketing teams focus?

Pricing
How do you move from cost-based pricing to value-based pricing? Are you priced to beat a competitor with a similar product or to convert prospects to a new approach? How do you ensure that your pricing makes sense both competitively and across your entire product line? What is your pricing saying to your sales force about priorities?

Communication Strategies
Does your target market know your differentiation? Do your communications, brand identity, and naming reinforce corporate goals?
Who are your key influencers (buyer, I.T., press, analysts, ...) and do you speak to each in the language that influences them via a channel that reaches them?

Executive Communications
Does your organization adopt change as quickly as you need? Does your executive team to articulate vision effectively internally and externally to the point that communications itself becomes part of your competitive advantage?

Senior Management Coaching
Are your executives and directors peak performers across the full range of their responsibilities? Do your strategists sometimes stumble in building a compelling case? Do your operational leaders struggle with delegation of routine tasks? Do peer groups collaborate, make decisions, and deal with conflict smoothly, effectively, and routinely?

Demand Generation/Promotions
From lead development to purchase decision, how do you help your sales organization fill its pipeline and close sales? Does your sales team actually use the leads they receive? How effectively are your sales promotions and marketing communications driving revenue? Are all of these efforts resulting in sales you wouldn't otherwise get?

Compensation Plans
Do your best reps just sell as much as possible and assume that their compensation will take care of itself? Not even close. What behavior does your comp plan drive? Is it retaining your performers? How is your comp plan reinforcing your revenue goals?

Press/Analyst Meeting Preparation
First question regarding analysts: are you "telling" or "asking"? It should vary by timing, offering, and analyst. If you are "telling," how do you keep analysts receptive? On the press side, how do you convince jaded editors to actually listen to your story?

Sales Order Process
It seems so easy—get the deal and send in the order. But an effective sales order process combines sales team pricing flexibility with management oversight, minimal rep paperwork with minimal staff rework, "selling what you've got" with customer feedback on long-term needs, and more. Does yours?

Sales/Management Reporting
What is your "dashboard" into your business? Is it driven by an effective analysis and forecasting function? Does your management team have insight early enough to make effective pricing, promotion, sales incentive, or product lifecycle decisions? Are your processes delivering information "automatically" so that reporting is timely and dependable—especially during crunch times?

Sales Tools/Training
Does your sales training result in greater sales? Is your sales team equipped with the tools to represent your company? Do they think so?

Sales Incentives
You've learned long ago that top sales reps work for something beyond a commission. What short-term actions are you taking to make sure your reps and resellers stay motivated and on track to hit their numbers?

Copy Revision
From brochures to ads to datasheets to presentations, is your value and differentiation clear? Do you view existing drafts and tools with the dissatisfaction of knowing that, while the content is accurate, the impact remains weak?

Interim Management
Are you filling senior positions in marketing, sales management, or sales operations? During the search, how are you ensuring that the teams reporting to these open positions are focused, efficient, and supporting corporate goals?