The SALES INNOVATION SPRINT

Reinvent the sales experience to increase trust and revenue

Who It’s For

The Sales Innovation Sprint is great for sales, account, partnership, customer success, and customer experience teams who need to:

• Increase revenue and grow pipeline sales
• Create a differentiated, magical customer experience for top customers
• Shift from a push model to a consultative sales model
• Build deeper empathy with customer decision making
• Evolve outdated relationship management practices
• Repair neglected relationships with top customers

How It Works

Weeks 1: On-boarding, Design Brief, and Research Plan

Our teams become one team with an immersion into goals, desired outcomes, and business results. We co-create a Strategy Brief that will guide the project.

• Immersion into existing documentation (asynchronous)
• 1x 90m Visioning Session with the team leader to prioritize the metrics and outcomes we must achieve in this effort (virtual)
• 1x 3-hour Kickoff + Problem Framing Workshop (in person/virtual)
• 1x 3-hour Research Mapping + Hypotheses Creation workshop (in person/virtual)
• Coordinating interviews with key customers and internal stakeholders

Week 3: Quantitative and Qualitative Stakeholder and Client Research

We lead in-depth interviews with your customers and leadership to understand what’s working, what’s not, and where opportunities exist for better co-creation and impact in the sales relationship.

• 8x 1-hour interviews with a hand selected set of customers (virtual)
• Up to 6x 1-hour interviews with internal stakeholders, including leadership, account teams, and front line sales associates (virtual)
• Desk research to explore trends and inspiration in your industry and beyond (asynchronous)

Weeks 4-6: Insights + Experience Design

We’ll synthesize the needs of your business and your customers in order to prioritize the opportunities for increasing value for both parties. Then we’ll design a new sales experience to meet those needs and leave your customers feeling better heard and more confident and your sales pipeline looking stronger.

• Heads down time to synthesize the research and distill insights
• 1x 3-hour insights presentation to share opportunities and gather ideas
• Design time to create the new sales experience
• 3x 1-hour feedback sessions with the core team

Weeks 7-8: In-Market Workshops with 2x Top Customers

Our team will facilitate the new sales experience 2x separate times with a blended group of folks from your organization and your customer’s organization. The sessions will create a great experience for your customers and generate fruitful ideas for growing together, but also provide immediate learning for how to refine the experience for broader scale.

• Facilitation of the new Sales Workshop Experience with 2x of your top customers, each consisting of 2-3x ½ day experiences (in person/virtual)
• 2x 60m retrospectives with the core team to gather learnings (virtual)

Weeks 9-10: Experience Playbook Development

We take the best of the collaborative workshop solutions and codify them into an operating playbook that enables your teams to implement the new sales tactics, run experiments, and track their metrics in a shared dashboard.

• Heads down time refining the experience and designing the artifacts and playbook
• 2x 1-hour feedback sessions with the core team (virtual)

Weeks 11-12: Team Training and Experiment Planning

We join your team back in-person for 2x days to on-board and train folks on how to lead their own sales co-creation experiences, how to experiment, and how to continue to advance this way of working long after the sprint is complete.

• 1x 2-day “Facilitator Training” to upskill your team members on how to effectively lead the new sales experience (in person/virtual)
• Development of final deliverables
• 1x 60m team retrospective to debrief the process and collaboration (virtual)
• Optional: 1x 90m workshop to co-create a narrative to cascade through the team (virtual)

Sprint Deliverables

• Strategy Brief
• Research Plan
• Empathy Interview Videos
• Insights + Opportunity Space Presentation
• A custom designed Sales Innovation Workshop experience and everything needed to execute it (i.e. agenda, slides, tools and worksheets, Facilitator Playbook, etc.)
• Design and Delivery of 2x Customer Innovation Workshops and Strategic Roadmaps for each of the customers who participated

EXAMPLES OF PAST INNOVATION SPRINTS

Fortune 50 Tech Company

Created a 2-day ‘Innovation Hack’ experience that was eventually scaled globally and executed with their 30+ top customers resulting in increased pipeline revenue 28%.

Sponsor: Director of Sales Learning

Fortune 100 Tech Company

Developed a 6-hour Design Thinking workshop that was brought to 20+ top customers and used to validate investments in a 3-year product pipeline

Sponsor: Head of Product

Global Food & Beverage Brand

Developed an ‘Everyday Insights Field Guide’ and trained the frontline sales organization on practices for building customer empathy and insights in their field interactions. Insights were used to fuel the new product development process.

Sponsor: Innovation Team