The Agoge Pizza Challenge: Official Rules
I'm happy there was so much interest in my post about The Agoge Pizza Challenge last week! I decided to put the rules and script in one place for anyone who wants to add the exercise to their sales onboarding program.
Since Outreach gets the vast majority of our new meetings over the phone, we are extremely careful to not let call reluctance creep into our culture. We start addressing this potential issue immediately when SDRs enter our Agoge program with The Agoge Pizza Challenge. Call reluctance usually comes from an irrational expectation of the pain of rejection. Letting your team accumulate first-hand experience with rejection early on gives them a head start.
The Agoge Pizza Challenge is easy to implement, fun, and effective. You should add it to your onboarding program!
RULES AND SCRIPT
Objective: Overcome call reluctance. Get SDRs used to persisting in the face of rejection.
Prize: $100 gift certificate to Pizza Hut
Time limit: 30 minutes
Scoring: 1 point for each pizza sold. Tiebreaker is whoever is hung up on the most times. Reps must keep track of how many times they are hung up on.
Instructions for reps: Use the call script. Sell to ANY human who answers the phone. For this exercise, the CEO is no more important than the receptionist. For simplicity, you will be selling only pepperoni or cheese pizzas. Persist with each prospect until they either purchase a pizza or hang up on you.
Script: The Agoge Pizza Challenge Call Script
SETUP/LOGISTICS
Generating the list of prospects: Find a list of people who will pick up the phone and are strangers. The title, position, and line of business of the prospect is relatively unimportant. Since this exercise is only 30 minutes, you want lots of connects.
While the type of prospect doesn’t really matter, I have found that salespeople are the most fun.
Brokering the pizza: The cold callers will not need to collect payment information since most national pizza chains will allow you to pay on delivery. You simply need to place the order with the prospect’s local Pizza Hut, have it delivered to the address they give you, and tell them you would like to pay on delivery. I recommend having a dedicated person to call and coordinate the pizza delivery so cold callers are not slowed down during the session.
What to expect: A lot of rejection. While it is very exciting when a pizza is sold, reps will receive the intended benefit of this exercise regardless of how many (if any) are actually sold.
Hall of Fame
In the last 5 months, 3 of our reps have successfully sold pizzas. I want to recognize them here. Congratulations: Anisa Boerger, Keegan Otter, Brennan Vaughn, and Rebecca Donoghue.
If any other company rep successfully sells a pizza under these rules, I will add them to the Hall of Fame above.
Data-Driven Strategist | Unlocking Insights for Business Success
2 å¹´Send me the script!
AVP, Sales @ LambdaTest || Supercharge your software testing with KaneAI + Hyperexecute Cloud ??
2 å¹´This is great. Please send me the script :)
??Home Health Care Revenue Strategy ??Hospitality??Tech is for the People??LLMs|No Code|SAAS|Family Offices??Sales Confidence
2 å¹´I love this so much that I shared and posted about it because I heard about this challenge from an enthusiastic sdranger from India who became a regular in my Clubhouse room and he was so excited about selling that I talked to him about it in Great lengths several times when he came up on stage. He proceeded to send me this very link to check out and this was a few months ago and does the first time I'm actually taking a good look at it and it just so happens that I found myself back in the SAS space so this is just got to be called the clue! I didn't know he was an SDR back then because I didn't even know what that meant lol! This is just wild! Thank you for sharing this and I'd love to know how it went ?? have a great day!
Growth Operations Manager at Hypersolid
4 å¹´Send me the script
Build, optimize, & accelerate XDR & Sales pipeline
5 å¹´Sam Nelson?I'd like to introduce you to the newest winner of the pizza challenge, @Rebecca Donoghue! We all had a blast with this activity - thanks so much for all of the incredible resources you provide!