Proposal · Impact Sprints
Five out of five on Situation.
One out of five on Impact.
A plan to close the gap you already found.
View as slides
A plan to close the gap you already found.
View as slidesIn two and a half months you put in a sales process with real entry and exit criteria, rolled out SPICED, and stood up a forecasting and QBR cadence. You have set the expectation of two call reviews per rep per month. None of that existed before you arrived.
What you asked for is a second voice to reinforce it, and a way to know whether it is landing. That is what this proposal is.
| SPICED | What you told us |
|---|---|
| Situation | A $120M ARR business with about 35 sellers across SMB, mid-market, an account-management motion on the installed base, and a small K-12 team. Primarily inbound, round-robin, no territories. Deeply technical: you estimate 80 percent of your reps could step in and work as a sysadmin. |
| Pain | Reps quote, hear a no, and move to the next one. MEDDIC existed on paper and was used by one or two reps on roughly 20 percent of deals. Your words: there is a ton of money left on the table. |
| Impact | Roughly $1M of quota per rep and around 120 deals a year each, at an $8,000 ACV. Attainment sits between 80 and 130 percent and the team lands at 95 to 98 percent of plan. The gap is conversion on volume you already touch. |
| Critical Event | You want this in August, framed as opportunity cost rather than a deadline. Your board is asking why new-logo growth is slowing year over year. |
| Decision | You asked for a full version and a slimmed-down version so you can choose. All three below start in August and are delivered remotely. |
You graded the team without being asked. We have not changed a number.
A team that scores 5 on Situation and 1 on Impact is not undertrained on your product. They know the sysadmin's world better than most of their buyers. What they have never been taught is how to turn that knowledge into a number the customer says out loud.
That is a single, teachable skill. It is also the one that stops a rep from quoting and moving on.
Not a curriculum. One skill, taught once, then coached on real recorded calls until it shows up consistently. You told us the environment has scar tissue from changes people wait out. A sprint is built to be too short and too specific to wait out.
We agree the KPI, build the scorecard and rubric against your process, and confirm with you and your frontline leaders that this is the priority.
One skill. Remote, cohort-based, built on your deals and your buyer.
Live call review against the rubric. Cohorts stay near 20 so three to four calls get reviewed live in every session and most of the room is reviewed across the sprint. Reps self-score first, their manager scores second, we score third.
Same rubric, same reps, before and after. You get the movement, not an opinion.
The sprint is powered by your existing recordings. We build the scoring system and the prompts against your stack, so there is nothing new to buy and nothing new for a rep to log into.
That build is yours to keep. When the sprint ends, the rubric, the scorecard, and the prompts stay in place: your managers keep scoring with them, and every new hire gets run through the same standard from their first week. The engagement is three months. The system it leaves behind is not.
A recent Impact Sprint on a comparable team. Fifteen learners, three frontline managers, three coaching sessions, 47 calls reviewed against the rubric.
The starting point on that team looked like yours: roughly half could run a solid opening and dig into pain, and fewer than one in five consistently moved from Pain into Impact. By week three that second number had roughly doubled and the opening was at about 80 percent.
Figure 1. Source: Winning by Design Impact Sprint report, enablement readout, July 2024. Client anonymized. Deepening pain dipped 14 percent in the same window, which is the expected cost of a team consciously changing where a conversation goes; it recovers as the new move becomes automatic.
Figure 2. Percentage increase in ARR by level of methodology adherence. Source: Winning by Design study of 58,000 sales opportunities across a large global SaaS company.
Your team already clears the first bar. They identify Situation and Pain reliably, which is the 11 percent step. The move from there to diagnosing Impact is where the curve turns, and it is precisely the step you scored a 1 on. Months one and two of this proposal buy the two steepest segments of that curve.
Priced per cohort. Your 35 sellers split into two cohorts of roughly 18, which keeps live call review possible for nearly everyone. The first cohort of any skill is $25,000 and the second is $15,000, because the design, rubric, and scorecard are built once.
| Option 2, itemized | Investment | |
|---|---|---|
| Impact sprint | Cohort A $25,000 · Cohort B $15,000 | $40,000 |
| Critical Event sprint | Cohort A $25,000 · Cohort B $15,000 | $40,000 |
| Third sprint, topic chosen from the data | Cohort A $25,000 · Cohort B $15,000 | $40,000 |
| Managing for Impact, open course | Three frontline leaders at $2,500 per seat | $7,500 |
| Total | $127,500 |
We recommend two cohorts rather than one. In a room of 35 people, reps blend into the background and the impact drops. At roughly 18 each, everyone gets individual time and their own call reviewed. Travel does not apply; all delivery is remote.
Choosing it now would be guessing. After two sprints you will have two re-scores against the same rubric on the same reps, and that tells us which skill is actually costing you deals rather than which one sounds right in July.
You already set the expectation of two call reviews per rep per month. That cadence is the single highest-leverage thing in your rollout, and it is the thing most likely to quietly lapse.
Option 2 puts your three frontline leaders through Managing for Impact, our open course, alongside leaders from other companies. They learn to run the same rubric you will be scoring against, so their two reviews a month become the reinforcement engine rather than an admin task. Running it open rather than private also means they hear how other leaders handle the same problem, which lands differently than hearing it from us.
You are hiring against a $120M business with an inbound engine, so there will always be someone who joined after the last cohort. They go to AI for GTM, our open course, which teaches reps to run discovery, research, and proposals with AI, with every output grounded in SPICED and ready for the CRM.
It runs on a published schedule across global time zones, which matters for your people in Slovenia, Switzerland, and Italy. A new rep can be brought up to the same standard as the rest of the team without you waiting to assemble another cohort, and without pulling your managers off their coaching cadence to run onboarding.
The scoring runs on your Fathom recordings, in your Salesforce, on your Claude tokens. We supply the rubric, the scorecard, and the coaching model, and your team extends them after we go. There is no annual license and no platform to keep paying for.
You mentioned you are building your own scoring and coaching skill in Claude. We would like to look at it before this starts. If it is good, we build the sprint rubric to feed it rather than duplicating it.
If Option 2 is the direction, the first working session is a 60-minute design call with you and your three frontline leaders to lock the KPI and approve the scorecard. Baseline scoring runs off recordings you already have, so nothing waits on your team.
This page is deliberately a single document. Drop it into Claude and ask it to pressure-test the recommendation against your own call data before you decide.
View as slidesGrowth in the Age of AI, our research on why AI-native companies are achieving breakout growth while SaaS-natives stall, and how compound growth loops surface the go-to-market capacity a business already has. It picks up roughly where your Revenue Architecture certification left off, and it speaks directly to the question your board is asking about new-logo growth.