The Proposition
What a finished proposition has in it, and what each part has to survive.
The template is the shape of the thing you walk out with. It is short, it is written in the buyer's language rather than yours, and every part of it has to hold up when a customer pushes back on it.
Teams look for a template because they want to skip the argument and go straight to the wording. The wording is the easy part. The template is useful once you have decided the things it asks you to state.
The buyer. Named specifically enough that your sales team could list ten companies that match and ten that do not. "Enterprise technology firms" is a category. "Technology firms selling into UK financial services with a sales team of twenty or more" is a buyer.
The problem. In the buyer's words, taken from a real conversation with one of them, not from a positioning session.
What you do about it. Plainly, without the internal vocabulary.
What changes for them. The outcome they can describe to their own boss.
Why you rather than the alternatives. Including the alternative of carrying on as they are, which is the one that wins most often.
The proof. Something checkable. A named result, a reference customer, a piece of evidence a sceptic could verify.
Fill it in once per buyer type. Companies that try to write one version covering every customer end up with something so general that nobody recognises themselves in it.
Then read it out loud to somebody who buys from you. If they hesitate at any line, that line is the one to fix.
You can, and what you will get is a description of what your leadership team believes. That belief is usually the thing the exercise exists to correct.
Short enough that a salesperson can say it under pressure without reading it.
One per buyer type, which is often the same thing and sometimes is not.
Tell me what you sell and who you are trying to reach, and I will tell you whether this would help.