What are strategy sprints and how can they help your business?

Lack of control can make it almost impossible to run a business based on monthly plans. So how can we plan? Simon Severino finds out

If you run a business, 80% of what happens is outside of your control. Monthly Sales? Not in your control. Monthly employee fluctuation? Not in your control. Supply chain efficiency? Not even that is in your control.

In this article, I will summarise my learnings from coaching over 1,600 business owners in 114 countries. You will learn about:

• The only three things you (really) control
• Three growth strategies to implement today
• How to reduce your sales cycle and have people begging to give you money…
• How to increase your team’s output to make you more profit.

The only three things you (really) control

Friends of mine printed a shirt saying ‘Relax, nothing is in control’. And I largely agree. Except one thing IS in our control. It is how we respond to events.

I follow three habits:

• Daily habit
• Weekly habit
• Monthly habit
  

These three habits have kept my business resilient and agile. They work by consistently reflecting on the following questions:

Daily

How did I allocate my time today?
Which of my tasks gave me energy, took energy from me?
What will I delegate tomorrow?
If I lived more freely and intentionally, what would I do tomorrow?

Weekly

What is working right now? What is not working?
Marketing numbers of this week
Sales numbers of this week
Operations numbers of this week
The one bottleneck to solve next week

Monthly

Are we moving in the right direction at the right pace?
Competitive analysis
Next month’s budget: Where to cut costs
Next month’s budget: Where to invest more

Three growth strategies to implement today

To get even more practical, what can I start today that will ensure we scale faster?

Most business owners know exactly what to do. But they get caught up in distractions. To keep business owners distraction-free we implement this prioritisation filter.

Does a project/programme improve one of the following three areas by 25%?

• Sales frequency
• Sales price
• Sales conversion rate

If yes, go for it. If not, goes back to ‘someday/backlog’.

It’s a simple concept, but hard to execute. This approach provides clarity and focus whilst being able to make a quicker decision. 

How to reduce your sales cycle and have people begging to give you money…

Let’s dive into ‘sales frequency’ one of the three levers for growth.

How can we improve sales frequency? One of our coaching clients, a digital marketing agency, reduced sales time from 14 months to just three weeks. It was long because the company’s offer is a $20.000 USD package, which needs a lot of trust to be sold. Its clients needed on average 14-16 experiences with them (lunches, workshops, calls, emails) before they committed to work together.

So, the Sprint Coach and the four people client team (owner, sales, marketing, operations) tested ways to make those 16 experiences happen more swiftly.

They nailed a series of emails and videos that delivered exactly that. And added a role that would call website visitors and invite them to talk to an expert.

With those two interventions, sales time went from 14 months to three weeks.

How to increase your team’s output to make you more profit 

Aligned teams have more impact, this gives them more positive feedback every week, and keeps their motivation high. 

Like when playing a video game, the feedback is real-time. When shooting the bird in Angry Birds, we don’t wait for a month to get back our results. That is how video games leverage the Flow Principles (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: ‘Finding Flow: The Psychology Of Engagement With Everyday Life’) of real-time feedback.

The same principle applies to every business team. Real-time, visual feedback gives information and motivation needed to move forward.

If you think of a team in your sector, that is highly motivated and fast in learning, what makes them stay on track? How often do they meet? How do they divide work?

Of all the +1,600 teams I have coached, the most resilient ones had:

• An exciting vision
• Daily habits
• Weekly progress metrics
• A good cadence of building and learning.

They felt more like friends playing basketball, than like big office tables. Formal enough to respect roles and goals, but swift enough to adapt quickly to market changes.  Having the current bottleneck solved before starting the new project certainly helps. As well as visually having the main numbers in front of them, as a real-time dashboard.

What kills motivation is not having immediate feedback loops. I saw marketing teams losing confidence and energy because for the next 30 days they wouldn’t know if their activities had impact or not. That is the opposite of flow. Imagine playing a video game and not getting immediate feedback. It would not be played.

A team in flow states creates, learns, adapts.
A team disconnected from flow states is low-energy and low-output.
Being in such a team is contagious.

I am sure you have seen team members clocking their minimum hours with low effervescence. But when they go home… Total transformation.

They pull all-nighters playing team video games. Why are they so motivated at night?

What are the small differences that make a big difference?

Looking at it through the Strategy Sprints lens, we see they have:

• A clear vision (The ‘quest’)
• Clear roles (‘defender’, ‘coordinator’, etc)
• Few activities (‘Rescue Person X’, ‘Access city Y’)
• Real-time progress dashboard ‘‘You are 500 meters away’, ‘You added 93 points’)

These principles can be implemented to most business teams and experimenting with them can be fun even before they work. As the journey itself becomes rewarding, the energy to build, track and improve compounds automatically.

Remember to always consider the following questions:

What gives your team energy?
How do ensure your meetings are crisp?

Summary

If you run a business, 80% is outside of your control. The only thing in your control is how you respond to events.
A helpful practice is to establish daily, weekly, monthly habits. The three levers for business growth are:

• Sales frequency
• Sales price
• Sales conversion rate
  

The most resilient and impactful teams have:

• A clear vision
• Clear roles
• Few activities
• A real-time progress dashboard 

In the Strategy Sprints method we combine those elements into a 90 days program that ensures focus, freedom and flow. As the team spends more time in flow states, activities lead to more impact, which leads to higher motivation.