How to set up sales sprints to focus and scale your business
How do you set up sales sprints and focus your business? A business has a thousand things to cover at the same time and the danger is that you’re trying to do too many things at once. The impact of this is few closed deals but days spent on trying to reach people. We have seen this over and over again. In this short blog post we’ll cover the basics of bringing back focus to your sales and lead generation and we’ll explain with examples how to do so. The video and slides of Michael Humblet will deepen your knowledge of the tried-and-true process.
Why do you need a sales sprint?
Too many sales and marketeers are trying to shoot at every market or buying persona at once. This will not work as you never will be relevant enough for them to pay attention. If marketing is dealing in attention then Sales is dealing in Trust. We need to cover both in a process that focus our sales and marketing team.
What is a sales sprint?
Sales Sprints are a methodology that focuses your sales and marketing team on 1 target audience (can be horizontal: a persona, ex HR manager,… or a vertical: an industry, like non-food retail). Every sales sprints takes 6 weeks, so you can do two in a Quarter. The reason for 6 weeks is that it takes an average of 5 attempts to reach somebody you don’t know and it will take around 6 weeks to be able to reach your list of prospects.
In the below video you see Michael Humblet explaining in detail with several examples how a sales sprint is set up and how you execute it.
To summarize how you set-up a sales sprint
- You build a list of target persona (think function/title/industry)
- This list should be small at first (grow it over time)
- You define 3 major problems of this persona
- You create BAIT based on the above problems
- You go fishing with this Bait. Since these prospects recognize the problem there is a higher change of them consuming your valuable content.
- Implement a Value ladder (this always has 2 steps for a sales sprint – something downloadable (to collect the email) and a live element (a webinar, an event, a Q&A, a Roadshow) a few weeks later so prospects can ask you questions
- Automate and scale after you tested with a smaller batch
- Put your KPI’s first on the steps to get to the prospect and not yet on result (this comes later). First learn, fail, learn again and then scale
