You want a sales process your new hire can run without you. One that wins the same way twice.

So you try things. New subject line. New offer page. A new LinkedIn rhythm. A new follow-up script for the team. All in the same month.

Then the month ends. Something moved. Maybe. Nobody can say what, so nobody knows what to keep. Next month you change five more things, and the guessing starts again. By week three the plan already smells stale.

I talked this through with Sarah Boxx on the No Labels, No Limits podcast (July 2024). Listen to the full conversation: Accelerating Success: Mastering Strategy Sprints with Simon Severino

Why "more" stops working

When I ask founders to map everything they do in a week, the list is always long. "The default mindset is frequently the more the better." More activity, more hustle, more campaigns.

It works up to a point. After three or four hours a day of the wrong things, nothing compounds. You're busy, the pipeline is not fuller, and when a deal does land you can't tell which of your ten moves earned it.

That's the real cost. Not the hours. You can't repeat a win you can't explain. You can't hand a process to your new salesperson if you don't know which parts of it work. Meanwhile your new hire copies whatever you did last, right or wrong. And on the call, you're guessing too. Guessing is the opposite of control.

Let the market be the coach

A Strategy Sprint is 90 days, run one week at a time. It borrows one rule from the scientific method: "you change one variable and then you measure." Change three at once and you lose the signal. Most sales teams run on opinions. A sprint runs sales like an experiment.

After one change, one of two things happens. Your assumption holds, so you do more of it. Or it doesn't, and you learned you were on the wrong path, cheaply.

And the verdict doesn't come from you. "Market is the number one coach." If you send an email, the open rate and the click rate tell you if it works. Not if you like the email. 🐬

Here's how that looks on a sales call (an illustrative example, not a client story). Your new salesperson runs ten discovery calls a week. This week you change only one thing: the first question. Everything else stays the same. On Friday you count how many of those calls turned into a second meeting. One change, one number, one clear answer.

That takes a weight off. No more arguing about taste in the Monday meeting. You stop hearing opinions and start hearing your buyers. They vote, and the scorecard shows it in black and white.

Find the one bottleneck first

Every business runs on three parts: marketing starts the conversation with a stranger, sales turns that conversation into a commitment, operations delivers so well that clients stay and bring their friends. Each part has a hundred moving pieces. You can't fix three hundred pieces at once.

So start with the weakest part. Here's the question that finds it: if I add five times more clients than usual next week, which part of my business breaks first?

Answer from the gut, fast. Wherever it breaks, that's this quarter's focus. My rule of thumb: improve the bottleneck by 20% and the output of the whole chain can go up by 80%. Polishing everything a little never does that.

One bottleneck per week

Inside a 90-day sprint, each week solves one bottleneck. Say the goal is emails that actually bring in money, not just entertain. The weeks line up like this:

1. Week 1: the buyer. Define your ideal client and their journey.
2. Week 2: the beliefs. Name the three beliefs a buyer must hold before they buy. Without those three beliefs they will never buy from you, so you shouldn't have them on the phone yet. Three emails per belief, nine emails. That's the week's work.
3. Week 3: the ask. What happens after the email? Fix the call to action.
4. Week 4: the calendar. They booked a call. What are your talking points in the conversation itself?

One change per week, measured before the next one starts. That order is what makes the result repeatable. It's the same weekly rhythm more than 2,400 B2B founders have run in our programs.

Test it cheaply, then let go

The hardest part for most founders isn't adding the new thing. It's letting go of the old one. That part tastes bitter. What if cutting it hurts the business?

Where you can measure, the fear disappears fast. Two versions of a newsletter: we send A to 500 people, we send B to 500 people, tomorrow we know the answer. You drop the one with the lower click rate, and it's easy, because you can see the winner.

Where you can't measure in a day (a rebrand, say), you go in small, ordered decisions instead of one giant leap: positioning, then the slogan, then the angle, then the voice, then the message. Each step builds on the last, so every single decision feels safe. 🐯

The bonus: when you only work on the few things that move win rate, pricing power and speed of the sale, the rest goes on hold for 90 days. A few weeks in, teams usually say it out loud: "oh that wasn't even so important it was just urgent." That's where the 14 hours a week come back.

Make the small wins big

Every sprint week ends with a scorecard: one marketing number, one sales number, one operations number, measured every seven days.

If sales are up 1.2% on last week, that's a small thing that we will make big. Leaderboard, songs, confetti. It sounds playful. It's also how a team learns to notice progress, and after 12 weeks they keep doing it because they'd miss it.

Start this week

If you do only one thing, do step 1 today. It takes two minutes.

1. Ask the 5x question. Five times more clients next week: what breaks first? Write it down.
2. Pick one change. Only one, aimed at that bottleneck.
3. Set your Monday Strategy around it. One number that tells you if it worked.
4. Score it in Friday Learnings. Keep it, or kill it and test the next one.
5. Celebrate the small win. Out loud, with the team.

Picture twelve Fridays from now. Twelve tested changes. A short list of things you know work, written down, so your newest salesperson can run them without you in the room. No more guessing which move closed the deal. You walk into the Monday meeting as the one with the answers. That's Sprintlife: control of the sales conversation, and the time freedom it buys you. 🌴

Listen to the full conversation with Sarah Boxx: Accelerating Success: Mastering Strategy Sprints with Simon Severino

Grab the free tools and run your first sprint alongside other founders in the Sprint Club: https://www.strategysprints.com

Ready to accelerate now? Book a Discovery Call: https://calendly.com/strategysprint/discovery-call

Happy hunting.
Simon & The Sprinters 🐬⚡️🐆