Why sales reps should play Angry Birds instead of chess

Paralysis by potential analysis.

I hear this challenge with sales teams all around the world. There are so many moving parts and influences on the sales process, and so many data points to draw meaning from, that it all becomes a bunch of gibberish.

How do you narrow your focus to the areas of your sales process that you should be working on?

The problem is that sales reps are trying to think six moves ahead rather than taking a lean approach to process improvement. With the lean approach you test, iterate and move onto the next thing. It’s agile, which is something that is essential in today’s rapidly evolving sales landscape.

You can’t afford to plan out your entire go-to-market sales strategy and be six moves ahead like you would in a game of chess. To be successful in the modern sales environment you need more of an “Angry Birds” approach to sales. It validates your go-to-market strategy multiple times before it’s too late.

It’s like ready, fire, aim, and repeat. Because if you spend too long measuring up the perfect slingshot the target will move. You just need to get started, then you can adjust.

Get started and then adjust

Early on in my sales career, I wasn’t very analytical. I would regularly come up with new ideas for ways to approach things, but they were essentially guesses - based on my intuition.

Even though I was having success, I didn’t really know why. Was it because of these new ideas, or did it come down to my personality and good old-fashioned hard work?

I very quickly found out that this way of selling wasn’t going to scale. It wasn’t even going to guarantee me consistent and long-term results because it was too heavily reliant on my will and passion to hit the pavement, instead of a replicable process.

After having this revelation I started testing things. Different customers to sell to, varied types of messaging, new channels, changing my proposals, and even trying out alternate ROI calculations. I would test, fail fast, and then move onto the next thing.

This was me playing sales “Angry Birds”. It’s a bit like agile software development, or growth hacking in marketing. You are making deliberate decisions on how you will pursue your goals with a systematic approach to testing. Never losing sight of the metrics that matter but always looking to increase the volume of tests and shortening the feedback loop.

So how can you use this lean approach to sales improvement?

Here are six steps you can follow to implement your sales and testing strategy like an “Angry Birds” veteran.

Are you ready to Rock Your Revenue? Join us in Sydney on the 10th of April to learn how to build the ultimate sales playbook for your business from the real-life experience of sales leaders.

Step 1 - Baseline your performance metrics

Before you try to improve, you need to understand what you're trying to improve and exactly where those key moments are. So the first thing you need to do is to baseline your performance metrics.

After working with over 200 customers over the last 5 years, my colleague, Jacco Van Der Kooij from Winning by Design, has identified that there are seven key moments where you can influence the buying decision of a prospect.

To find out more about the key moments and metrics you should baseline in your sales process, check out this post.

Step 2 - Brainstorm your tests

Once you have a baseline of performance metrics for the key moments in your sales process, you then need to identify the tests you can run to influence these moments.

For example, if you’re looking at the prospecting end of the funnel you may choose to test a new customer segment or a new market. It may even be a different target person within the same account profile. Instead of speaking with the CEO, you might be engaging the mid-level manager who has a little bit more time and is willing to talk about their challenges.

As you move down the funnel your tests change and adapt to the sales process. A typical middle-of-the-funnel test would be to try out different discovery questions, or you could test out the type of content you share with prospects before a meeting.

Get in a room with members of your team and start to brainstorm some tests you can run at key points of the sales process.

Step 3 - Prioritise based on ease and impact

After your team brainstorming session, you will probably have a big laundry list of potential tests you could run. Now you need to prioritize the tests you are going to execute.

Consider two primary factors when deciding which tests to prioritize:

• Ease. How easy will it be to test this element? Do you need new technology or additional stakeholders to help with the process?
• Impact. What is going to deliver the biggest impact?

Weight and prioritise all of your potential tests based on ease and impact.

Step 4 - Set success criteria and a timeframe

Before you start the testing process you need to define your success criteria. What outcome are you looking to achieve? Which metrics will tell you that this has been a successful test?

You will also want to set a timeframe for running the test so that you have a very clear understanding of how long you are willing to give it to see if it works.

Step 5 - Execute

I spoke about this being a game of “Angry Birds”, not chess. You need to get out there and start executing. The big thing about “Angry Birds” is that it’s short and sharp. You get really tight feedback loops and it all happens quickly.

Most growth marketing teams run multiple tests in a week, and some agile software teams are testing daily. It’s all about quick testing, iteration, and improvement. For sales, I recommend testing on a fortnightly basis. This will enable you to go into enough depth and capture a large enough sample of date to really validate a concept.

Step 6 - Commit to review

It’s important that you have a process for reporting and reviewing your findings to validate whether or not this process is working and the tests are being successful. Let the data lead your decisions.

Wrapping up

When you actually go and apply systematic testing of new sales approaches it’s never going to be easy. It will be uncomfortable trying something new and ultimately there will be failure. You need to overcome the discomfort by practicing these new tactics in a safe team environment before taking them out to the field.

Embrace failure as a learning opportunity instead of letting it hurt you. Because if you have a process in place to track the right data points then failure will give you valuable information to learn and grow from. In the end, you will be able to make more educated decisions and move closer to your goals.

Are you ready to adopt an “Angry Birds” approach to selling?

Are you ready to Rock Your Revenue? Join us in Sydney on the 10th of April to learn how to build the ultimate sales playbook for your business from the real-life experience of sales leaders.