Illustrative specimen · figures are synthetic · this is the format, not a real client
LYKOV ONLINE
Specimen · the format you receive
What a Decision Sprint delivers
Every engagement ends in one document like this: a decision made, the evidence behind it, and the evidence against it. The example below is built on a fictional company and invented figures, so you can see the shape of the work before we ever speak.
How to read this. “Nordkust Systems” does not exist and every number is synthetic. What is real is the structure — the charter agreed before analysis, the evidence graded by how much weight it can bear, the rival explanations tested against it, the options laid out as a trade-off, the decision recorded with its dissent, and a 90-day plan that gets verified. Yours would carry your company, your data, and your decision. Use the tabs to move through it.
Executive summary
Read first
Recommendation
Concentrate on mid-market. Stop treating enterprise as a volume channel and re-qualify it as a small, selective motion.
The evidence points to an upmarket-execution problem, not market softness. Large deals convert at roughly half the mid-market rate and consume disproportionate cycle time, while most losses are to no-decision rather than to competitors. Reallocating capacity toward mid-market is expected to lift blended win rate and shorten payback, at the cost of slower logo-size growth.
Confidence: moderate — quantitative evidence strong, interview sample small (n=8)
What this decision is worth. Nordkust was about to fund two additional enterprise account executives (~€260K fully loaded) against a segment the evidence shows it is not yet equipped to win. The value at risk on this single call is roughly €400K over 18 months in salary, opportunity cost, and foregone mid-market pipeline.
How to read this dossier. Every number carries its sample size and a confidence interval. Where the evidence is thin, it says so. The section not to skip is “The case against” in the Decision record — the strongest argument that this recommendation is wrong.
Decision charter
Agreed before analysis
Signed off by the decision owner at kickoff, before any data was touched. It fixes what is being decided — and what is not.
The decision
Whether to concentrate 2026 sales capacity on mid-market accounts, or continue pursuing enterprise and mid-market with equal weight.
Why now
Board has asked for a 2026 headcount plan by month-end; two enterprise AE hires are pending sign-off.
Decision deadline
28 days · decided by the CEO
Value at risk
~€400K over 18 months (hiring + opportunity cost)
Reversibility
Costly to reverse once AEs are hired and territories assigned
What success looks like
By Q3 2026: blended win rate up from ~25%, CAC payback trending down, and no loss of total pipeline value — measured against today's baseline, agreed now.
Pricing model redesign · product roadmap · new-market entry
What the evidence shows
939 deals · 8 interviews
Drawn from two years of pipeline data and eight structured interviews with won, lost, and no-decision buyers. Findings are ordered by how much weight they can bear.
Win rate by deal size
Bars show the point estimate; brackets show the 95% confidence interval. Dashed line = 19% market average.
<€10k
23%
€10–50k
28%
€50–100k
23%
€100k+
14%
Large deals convert at half the rate of mid-market E3 · triangulated
Deals over €100k win 14% of the time (95% CI 8–24%, n=73) against 28% for the €10–50k band (CI 23–34%, n=253). The intervals do not overlap — a real difference, not noise.
Interpretation: the enterprise motion is structurally underperforming, not just unlucky.
Most losses are to no-decision, not to competitors E3 · triangulated
52% of categorised losses were “no decision / status quo,” against 18% lost to a named competitor — consistent with the 40–60% no-decision benchmark (Jolt Effect, HBR).
Interpretation: the enemy is buyer inertia and weak internal urgency, which a bigger enterprise team does not fix.
Win rate has declined steadily over two years E3 · trend test
33% in early 2024 to 15% by late 2025 across eight quarters (Cochran-Armitage trend test, p=0.020). A genuine deterioration, not quarterly variation.
Interpretation: whatever is wrong is getting worse, and predates any market softening.
Four of the eight interviewed buyers raised implementation risk unprompted; three of those were lost enterprise deals. Directional only — too small a sample to weight heavily.
Interpretation: a hypothesis worth testing, not a finding to act on alone.
What we could not establishLoss reasons were recorded on only 61% of lost deals, so the no-decision share is indicative rather than precise. Two requested enterprise interviews did not respond. These gaps are why the recommendation carries moderate, not high, confidence.
Hypothesis tournament
Tested against the evidence
Every plausible explanation was written down first — including the CEO's — then tested. What survived contact with the evidence became the diagnosis.
CEO
“The market has gone soft — everyone is seeing it.”
Rejected
The decline predates any market softening and is concentrated in large deals, not spread evenly. If it were the market, mid-market would have fallen too. It didn't.
Consultant
“We're structurally not equipped to win enterprise, and are starving mid-market to chase it.”
Supported
Large-deal win rate is half mid-market's with non-overlapping intervals; no-decision dominates enterprise losses; the trend worsens as enterprise pursuit intensified through 2024–25.
VP Sales
“It's a pricing problem — we're too expensive on the big deals.”
Partly
Price surfaced in interviews, but laddering showed it standing in for unclear ROI and onboarding risk. Real for some deals; not the binding constraint.
Data
“It's a rep-performance problem — some AEs are underperforming.”
Rejected
Rep-to-rep win-rate variation sits inside its confidence intervals. The problem is structural, not individual — it is not the reps.
Disconfirming
“Enterprise is a long game; the low win rate is just early-stage learning that will improve.”
Rejected
The deliberate counter-hypothesis. If it were true, the trend would improve as the team learned. It declined instead. Evidence points the other way.
The options
A trade-off, not a score
Four real options, including doing nothing. No single weighted score — the trade-off between growth ambition and evidence is exactly the call leadership is paid to make.
A · Status quo
B · Concentrate mid-market ✓
C · Double down enterprise
D · Split the team
What it means
Keep equal weight, hire the 2 AEs
Re-point capacity to mid-market; enterprise selective
Hire enterprise specialists + SE
Formally separate the two motions
Expected effect
Decline continues
Blended win rate up, payback down
Possible but unproven and slow
Dilutes a small team further
Evidence
Against
Strong
Weak
Partial
Cost
€260K hires
Low — reallocation
€400K+
Moderate
Time to signal
—
1 quarter
3–4 quarters
2 quarters
Reversibility
Low once hired
High
Low
Moderate
Main risk
Funds a losing motion
Caps logo-size growth near-term
Doubles the failing bet
Too small to split
Option B is reversible, cheap, and gives a read within one quarter. Its real cost is honest: it slows the pursuit of marquee logos the board likes. That trade — near-term evidence-backed efficiency versus prestige growth — was the decision put to the room.
Decision record
Made in the room · dissent recorded
Concentrate 2026 capacity on mid-market. Enterprise continues as a selective, champion-led motion only. The two enterprise AE hires are paused.
Decided by
CEO, in the decision council of 22 June
Supported by
VP Marketing, RevOps lead
Dissent
VP Sales agreed the diagnosis but argued for keeping one enterprise AE hire. Recorded and respected; revisit trigger set.
Rests on
Assumption that mid-market demand can absorb reallocated capacity — validated in the first 30 days.
Revisit if
Mid-market win rate does not hold above 25% by end of Q3, or two named enterprise opportunities reach late stage organically.
The case against this decisionThe interview sample is small (n=8) and enterprise-loss reasons are incompletely recorded. It is possible the enterprise motion was close to a breakthrough that reallocation will now forfeit. The revisit trigger exists precisely to catch that: if two enterprise deals mature organically, the decision reopens. This is the strongest honest argument that the recommendation is wrong — and why confidence is moderate, not high.
90-day execution contract
Signed by the owner
Three interventions, one priority. Baselines measured today so the day-90 review can tell whether it worked — including if the answer is “it didn't.”
Priority
Reallocate 60% of enterprise-facing capacity to mid-market
Owner
VP Sales
Baseline win rate
25%
Leading indicator
Mid-market pipeline
Min meaningful change
+4 pts by Q3
Guardrail
Pipeline value flat+
Wk 2
Territories reassigned
Wk 6
First reallocated cohort
Day 90
Win-rate read vs baseline
Add an onboarding-risk section to the mid-market sales narrative
Owner
VP Marketing
Addresses
No-decision losses
Leading indicator
Stage 2→3 conversion
Test
A/B in outbound
Define an enterprise qualification bar — champion + budget + <120-day path
Owner
RevOps
Effect
Stops the time-sink
Measure
Enterprise deals started
Day-90 verification — bookedOutcome will be classified as supported · partially supported · unsupported · invalidated · unresolved · or not-implemented. A null or negative result is a legitimate outcome and will be recorded as such. An uninstrumented result is not.
Your decision
This is the format. The content would be yours.
If you have one commercial decision worth getting right — which segment to back, why the large deals slip, what has to change to sell upmarket — a sprint like this settles it in four to six weeks. Half an hour to start, nothing to prepare.