Interviewer (3:44)

So I was really interested because Peter was speaking to me about this and he said when you came to him and said you were going to do it in a week, he didn't believe you and was basically just like, yeah, that can't be done, I don't think it will. So I mean Peter, talk me through what your thinking was and then your delight and surprise of how it all worked.

Peter Abraham (3:57)

Yeah, I think there's so many different elements to that, isn't there? There's the team. So making sure that you've got a team that are together and really want to, you know, make sure that they understand what it is they're trying to achieve in the limited time that you've got. I mean, a week is really, is a really short time frame. But I think, you know, having been through a couple of these now, the understanding that Katherine and Claire have around how you, how you kind of organize and run that week is really important. So having a focused objective, having limited scope, so making sure that, you know, you don't try and do something that's completely unwieldy. The rapid deployment piece, particularly with the campaigns, you know, you really have to have some of those elements in place kind of to start with because that's going to kind of take minimum two days to set the campaign up itself. Same with the metrics. You've got to make sure that you're not, you know, you're not trying to measure everything because very keen about what it is that you want as an outcome. I mean we. I think one of the things that we had, which I thought was brilliant was almost like everything on one page. So you can see what is it that the business does, what are you trying to achieve, not just from the sales perspective, the sales team perspective, but right the way across from marketing and sales. And then obviously it's an iterative approach. So once you start, you know that's the first bit, then you've got to wait, get some data and then make some changes. So yeah, I didn't think you could do it in a week, two weeks maybe. So I was quite surprised. Yeah. That you can do it in a week.

Interviewer (5:37)

So brilliant. So I mean, what was it that led you to create this in the first place? Because I think that will kind of give some context to the audience in terms of why this is such a great thing and how they might apply it to different situations.

Catherine Torrance (5:47)

Sure. I think there are sort of three things that led us here. So the first is this is this hard environment. So remarketing has always been difficult, but when there was lots of free money, there was less exposure if things weren't perfect. Now we're in an environment where every penny counts and people are being asked to do more with a lot less. So that was one thing. The other is this notion that not so much that old processes are broken, but they aren't enough anymore for cut through. So if you think about tech and SaaS really they're commoditized products right now because they're not new anymore and features are catching up, there's constant releases. So your marketing really needs to work hard. Buyers are changing, they're demanding a lot more, they're doing a lot more self educating. So addressing that in a positive way and helping teams get to grips with what buyers are thinking was really important. And then, you know, Claire and I go into lots of businesses, so we see campaign chaos, the struggle to get them out the door, how messy they are, tears in the toilet sort of stuff. And we know there's a better way. I don't think it's fair to ask marketing teams to work harder because we know they're working flat out, but for sure we can help them work smarter and more effectively. And so this is kind of a combination of those things. And Claire, I don't know if you had some points you wanted to bring in too, just around the fact that.

Claire Pankhurst (7:08)

You know, we know how messy that they can be. And it's also the business as usual side that typically gets in the way. So, you know, it's not only trying to do something that's very strategic and matters to the business, but that the fact that you've got all of this other stuff going on. So, you know, I don't think it's that teams are lacking in the ideas, it's that they're lacking that space and structure to be able to get the, to actually make that campaign real, get it out the door.

Interviewer (7:37)

So that, that brings me to the next point, which is like, how are they different from just working faster or running internal workshops? Like how does that, what Agile processes do you bring into the whole thing? Because we hear about agile spoken about a lot and I think for our audience, they might be familiar with the idea of Agile. They probably heard it used in development from a kind of technical development point of view, but seeing how it's applied in marketing is a really interesting one and I think that kind of structured approach. So how is it different from just running internal workshops?

Claire Pankhurst (8:03)

I just want to kick off by saying, yeah, it came from the Google Ventures methodology of the five Days Sprint. So it started in product design. From that we've evolved it and taken the marketing fundamentals and built those out. And then Catherine's given it the structure that she does so beautifully around being able to deliver it in such a punchy way. So I think it's very different from just a workshop because it has the structure to support the team. So we work collaboratively throughout the process in a very lean way as well. So we're making sure that we're maximizing the use of time through the people that we've got on our Sprint team, and then also maximizing the time of the people, you know, the stakeholders that we're bringing in for those expert interviews. So we can capture that.

Catherine Torrance (8:53)

We didn't necessarily set out to be agile, to be honest. We set out to just fix a problem we saw and we were encountering. But it just so happens that, that the kind of, you know, taking in the big picture, focusing down on the critical path, understanding what's most important to do first and then learning as you go and being kind of collaborative, you know, open to a certain point, but then when you cut, you know, when it's time to cut things off, you cut off and move. So we've kind of taken that mindset of moving quickly, but we also wanted to leave space for the deep thinking. And I think this is where it sort of evolves Agile potentially. And it's different from just doing a workshop because a lot of times workshops you do deep thinking, you think great things, but you come out with like lots of stuff on paper, all over walls that never ever sees the light of day or gets used beyond that good feeling. And so it moves agile along, it brings back the marketing fundamentals. But then at the end of them, the process, you've got something that's live in market and teams have a messaging hierarchy, a really well mapped buyer journey, understanding of the customer pain points and what you need to address, and also a really nice deck that we kind of prepare along with them branded up and their brand that they can then share back into the business to stakeholders, whatever. So it's kind of a whole piece in a box ready to go.

Interviewer (10:21)

So what problems are these sprints fixing? Because where do you see these growth marketing campaigns falling over?

Peter Abraham (10:28)

I think a lot of them are very tactical. A lot of the stuff that you see these days is very tactical. There isn't a lot of strategy, which is why I think it's good that these move back to strategy. Even if we're touching it in quite a light way, we're kind of taking it all on board and then again, you know, condensing that into something that's really very focused, like super focused. I think that's the other thing that's different with it, to the degree with agile marketing, is that agile marketing tends to be on stuff that's very well versed in terms of the frameworks that people use or the channels that they use. Whereas we're starting right at the beginning from day one, looking at the strategy and then condensing that right down and focusing on it and driving it from there. So that's the main thing. I think there's far too many tactics across far too many channels. And sometimes just to go back and say, actually, you know, the way that we do things is that are we missing a trick? Are we not doing what we should really be doing and we're just getting stuff out the door.

Claire Pankhurst (11:31)

We've all been there, I'm sure, where you get given a list of like 10 products that you have to sell and you know, this is the laundry list of stuff to do and you know, almost checkbox. Got it. Yeah, got to get something out the door. Hit our KPIs for this, that and the other, and then, and sometimes you just miss the mark of actually sitting down and going, okay, who are we selling to? Why do they even care about this? Like, how can we differentiate this compared to everybody else and that other noise that's out in the market? So What I really love about this is it's almost, it's, it gives you the speed, but it also gives you the direction of travel. Because speed without direction is just chaos. Right. It's, you know, we've all been in those kind of chaotic examples and obviously with, if you're just going into a direction without that speed, then you've also got the risk of missing the opportunity.

Interviewer (12:24)

Yeah, I mean, I feel this every day at the moment in terms of the amount of stuff that's happening with Generative AI and everything else. And we're just, oh, I've got to get this out the door and that out the door. And there's these social media channels and I love this idea of taking a step back, bringing the right people in, going back to basics and go, what are we trying to achieve? Who are we achieving it for?

Claire Pankhurst (12:40)

So it's a five day workshop, but we're working with the team. So we've appointed, you know, a Sprint leader from the organization. We've also bought in somebody who can manage the campaigns so they're responsible for the actual execution of getting this out the door. And just to clarify, when we're talking about campaigns, isn't just a single channel. We're not talking just, you know, an email campaign or a social media campaign. These are multi channel, sort of multi execution. So it needs to have somebody who's got that say so and authority across the business to be able to make decisions in the room. And so they've typically been given that authority by perhaps somebody else, a CMO or another stakeholder within the business. So when we're thinking about, you know, day one, we're looking at how, what's the actual goal that we're trying to achieve here? And typically people sometimes miss that completely and they go straight into, okay, what channel are we going to use, what tactics are we going to use? So if we think, what's the goal of this campaign? Set that then we get alignment across the team to ensure that is the correct goal. Because again, that's something that can get missed. And then in day two, we move into the planning. So this is a real marketing team day where we actually start to look at, okay, who are the audience? As I said, you know, who is this going out to? Looking at the messaging framework and the hierarchy. So what's our lead message here? What's the most important thing that's going to resonate the most with the particular audience? And then we look at channels, budget and forecast and pull that together into a campaign plan. So Everybody knows what we're trying to achieve, who we're sending it to, what we're saying, what channels and how much it's likely to cost. And that's where we typically bring in Peter and Crank to be able to support around. Okay, if we're looking at paid media here, how bringing in the budget and the forecast around that Also day three, we move into the copy and design day. So we're actually working on the hero copy and the visuals. So either they've got an in house team or you know, perhaps a designer that could work with us for that day to be able to pull together the key campaign assets. And again, we're not looking at a whole deck full of stuff here. We're looking at what do we need for a minimum viable campaign. Once we're happy with that, we can move into day four, which is a real collaboration day. And this is like, let's see what we've got, what's in progress, we can share that back to the stakeholders and review and approve. And I, what I didn't mention either was that throughout this we've already had our stakeholder interviews on day one. So we've pulled in the key stakeholders who might be sales, they might be the cmo. You know, these are the inputs that we will use to drive some of the messaging as well to make sure that's really key.

Catherine Torrance (15:44)

One of the really kind of potent points is when you're bringing these people on, it could, you know, there's all this information that's locked within the business and a lot of times marketing doesn't have access to it. There are all these people, you know, customer success or flow front line with customers all the time and they know the language, they know the jargon people are using and that really can infuse marketing with so much meaning and be so much more impactful when it lands. So that first day of getting the stakeholders, we were in a sprint. And on day one, the cmo, the sales lead and the director who was kind of driving the project all had different visions of the goal, they have different visions of which product we'd be promoted and they were more or less aligned on the audience, but they had, there was only a very top line view of who the ICP was and who the Personas within the ICP were. And then nobody was really clear on the buyer journey. So in day one it was like, okay, then we've turned to the point that bringing all these people together in a brief but purposeful session is really worthwhile. And we discovered that within the first hour of the sprint, luckily, because you don't want to discover that in day five, but nobody.

Claire Pankhurst (16:56)

It could happen. You know, we know I've been seeing it where you've built out that campaign and then you're sharing it back to the business, all excited and buzzing and then it's like, oh, no, actually we needed it for that.

Peter Abraham (17:07)

We're not always bringing these people in, you know, full time. Like you might work for a war room if you were doing something specific. You know, we have that initial, like Catherine said, you have that initial period where you bring everybody together and then it might separate and then you might pull in other people as you go through the process. And I think that's really key because everybody's time is poor. You do need stakeholders that are, you know, driving it. They need to be full on for a week. But yeah, beyond that, it's kind of here and there. You're pulling in the specialists when you need them, that specialist knowledge.

Interviewer (17:41)

And then when they've kind of got through to the end of this sprint, what's the, what are the deliverables they're going to kind of walk away with by the end of this?

Catherine Torrance (17:47)

So we've got what we call the minimum viable campaign. So that's the critical path set of assets. And it could be anywhere within the funnel. So what we do kind of up front is identify where's the blockage in the funnel. So you might have a campaign that's full funnel, you know, from awareness all the way down to decision purchase. But it could be that you've got real blocker moving people from awareness into consideration, for example. And you might see that in your marketing funnel and your sales pipeline. And so we'll look to identify that blocker and unblock it. And so that could look like link LinkedIn ads to a landing page, that could look like press releases, that could look like thought leadership piece. The kind of critical criteria for the minimum viable campaign is something that can be achieved within the team that you have access to. So, you know, in house designer or designer that we bring in copywriting, which, you know, which we can do in and amongst ourselves. And it's important to not kind of bite off more than a team can chew in terms of might not do full, you know, microsite, but we might do a landing page. We might use assets that are already created, but top and tail them differently. So you get that. So you have a customer journey map. We've got the messaging hierarchy, a campaign hierarchy with the channels, a Forecast associated with that crank's media plan and that either can be one channel. We can look at a number of channels. Obviously, the more we add on, that takes a little bit more time. But, you know, if it knocks over into a little bit after the sprint, usually that's not an issue. So, so what' the media strategy and then the forecast for that and the budgeting associated with it. And then like I was saying, you get the kind of the full package. So all of that. So the Miro board, because when we're not face to face, we do this on a mirror board. So they get the mirror board and then they get the individual component parts and then everything wrapped up into a nice deck.

Interviewer (19:39)

Right. And so from that, how do you make sure that stuff is good, not just fast? So because the risk is you kind of, you bring the right people together, you get the buy in, you go through the process, you go, we're going to solve this pain point. We build a campaign quickly. How do you make sure that's actually going to be effective, not just done quickly?

Peter Abraham (19:55)

So definitely using the paid, because paid media is the fast that gives you the fastest return in terms of identifying the right audiences, the right messages, the right creative, whatever creative you're using. So, you know, typically we might start with B2B LinkedIn, because that will give you the depth, because you can obviously focus on people's interests and skills, not just their kind of job titles within different industry sectors. Some of that will also give us a sense of how kind of large that audience is, particularly if you're working with ABM and the ICP type approach and then obviously the Google which, the Google side of things, Google Ads, which gives you the breadth and intent. So those two things together very quickly, you know, give you some indicators. You'll get an indicator within kind of 24 hours. But then there are kind of all sorts of factors in this. But you might have to wait. I usually we say wait kind of a week before you get a really decent amount of data and four weeks, if you wait four weeks, that gives you a month's worth of data, then you can allow for all sorts of other things because you've got to allow for seasonality and those kind of things. But if you take, if you take that foundation and you pick that up, then you can start to deploy that across some of the other channels. So you're already starting on that momentum of you've already identified the audience, you know, kind of what the messages are, you know what the success metrics that you're looking for are you have a budget, you know how long that budget is going to last. That's the other thing. You know, we haven't all got deep pockets. We can't just run forever.

Interviewer (21:26)

So does AI come into this at all in terms of how using AI technology in the Sprints?

Peter Abraham (21:32)

Yeah, it does. We've got a couple of tools ourselves with a crank that we use. But I think more and more as what we, I think what we've learned is as we run these, there are certain things that we can lean on to bring the, the AI kind of agency. And I wouldn't necessarily say that AI is a big thing, but it helps give you the speed. Providing you know what you're doing, then it definitely can give you speed. So I mean a really a simple example, writing copy headlines, it can take a long time. We can do that in 30 seconds.

Interviewer (22:05)

Yeah, I think it's interesting because if you take this kind of agile approach and then you bake AI into it as well, you're just going to enable some of those things that were just taken too long before as well. So what are the common challenges then that teams are facing when they're kind of transitioning to this new way of working and how do you kind of work through that?

Claire Pankhurst (22:21)

It's definitely a mindset shift for a lot of people because they're so used to doing how, you know, working, how they work. And so I think open mindedness is a key sort of value that we bring in and we identify when we're speaking to people initially that they've got that right mindset to be able to leave their ego at the door almost because we're all in this together. There's no, we're not sort of dictating or commanding that it has to be done this way. So there's no rigid process, but it's just a case of we will hold that structure and space and asking the right questions at the right time to be able to get the best outcome. So I think for the actual team itself, it's just important to have that right mindset from the outset.

Peter Abraham (23:07)

I also think from a kind of CMO or head of marketing perspective, sometimes they might be thinking, how come we're so slow? Why is this stuff taking so long? Why can't I see results fast? And taking this approach, even if you kind of just run it once, it will start to open your eyes to understand. Actually I could be more agile in certain approaches. You're not going to run everything like this, but it will definitely Open your eyes to different ways of working at speed and then, yeah, what have we learned? What can we take back? What would we change? Those kind of things, I think are important.

Catherine Torrance (23:43)

I think there are two fundamental challenges to add. One is that disbelief that technology and tools equals great marketing. And so I can just go straight to tactics and channels and kind of, you know, take some wording from the website and off I go. And so I think that mindset that you can move fast, but you can also be rigorous is important. And I think that there's a belief that somehow strategy is time consuming. And it is. I mean, it's not to say that you can be brilliant in 10 seconds or less, but the business has that intelligence. So if you take the time to hoover it up and infuse it into the marketing, that'll make things better. And I think that is a big strategic shift as opposed to just like, you know, run to the channels, run to the tactics, and off you go, because that does miss the mark.

Peter Abraham (24:30)

I think the other important thing to mention is that it's not like we're taking control of anything. All we're doing is using a methodology to kind of get some results quickly and then hand it over. It's a terrible kind of analogy, that it's a bit like getting the SAS to start a campaign off and then you get the troops to follow it up. It's a similar kind of thing. So either your marketing team will pick it up and continue with it. Yeah. Or their agency will.

Interviewer (24:59)

And from that point of view, then. So how are you measuring success at the Sprint?

Claire Pankhurst (25:04)

Sure.

Catherine Torrance (25:04)

We have three things that we measure. So the first one, and really importantly, because the Sprint is about getting to market quickly, but it's also about coaching and learning and development. So client feedback, was a process effective? Would they try it on their own? Did they learn something? Were they exposed to something that they hadn't been exposed to before? So that's number one. And then we look at the leading indicators, like Peter was saying, from the minimum viable campaign or mvc, and then we look at did it achieve its goal? So this part is a little bit harder for us to control because like Peter was saying, we hand it back to the team, we co create, we guide, we use our experience to kind of set people in direction, but then it's down to them to carry on and do what they're really good at. And so it's sort of. It's a catalyst for this success and we're hopeful that they carry it forward. So did we Meet the goals that we set out to meet on day one.

Peter Abraham (25:56)

Yeah, one stage I think I said to Catherine it was it feels a bit like you've got a mentor and a coach in the same room at the same time.

Interviewer (26:05)

Yeah, no, I love that. I love that approach. So you've got some big brands might follow up with you after this and come through to. But if somebody can't do a sprint with you, they can't afford it. What could they take away from this and how could they apply that today?

Catherine Torrance (26:17)

I think there are kind of two techniques that they could try on their own. And this is, you know, it's about carving out the time to do it and which is hard to do and not letting BAU get in the way. But I think mapping the journey from the buyer's point of view is critically important. And if you use that as your North Star, what experience are they having? What questions are they asking? And put yourself in their mindset and use I need to do this. I'm struggling with that. As opposed to, you know, our buyers are encountering these challenges during the course of their workday. Really get into their mind, their lingo and the way they talk. I think that would be number one. And then when you're thinking about your most valuable use cases that meet their pain points, again, describe it in their words. It's not about what you want to say to them, it's about what they need to hear from you. So if you can do those two things sort of in your everyday practice when you're creating your marketing materials, I think it can go a long way.

Peter Abraham (27:13)

We've also written this. We've also written a short guide. So which, yeah, everybody can probably download from the site.

Interviewer (27:19)

Exactly. So we'll put the link in the show notes. So targetinternet.com forward/podcast and you'll better download.

Host (27:23)

That kind of step by step guide.

Interviewer (27:25)

And get some kind of pointers from that as well. So we've talked about what people can apply from this. I mean, what do you think people should not be doing? What if there was one thing marketers should stop doing, what would it be? That's kind of getting in the way of all of this.

Claire Pankhurst (27:37)

I think the one thing is definitely just to when you get talk when someone approaches you about this, to not just jump straight into those tactics and tools and to actually put yourself in the prospect's shoes and think about, okay, so what is it that they want? Who have we sold to that's in a similar either products and looking back Perhaps through your CRM data or your win loss data, and also just looping in people that can give you some really key insights so that you can use those insights to build out a quality campaign. And then think about the messaging. Because quite often that's what Lands Flat is. You know, it's not how it's been pumped out or your distribution or anything like that. It's that the messaging didn't resonate. It didn't feel. You didn't feel it in your chest when you read that, you know, and that person, that company understands who I am.

Peter Abraham (28:30)

I'd also say it's also not what should they stop doing, but what should they start doing. So I think I've said it a couple of times, but the constraints, constraints are really good. If you ask any creative person, they'll tell you if you give everybody loads of room to maneuver, it makes it really hard. And I think a lot of the time that's half of the problem is that we don't constrain stuff enough to be able to go, okay, now we know what the customer's experience, we know what the problem is, we know what the message is, we know, you know, those kind of things. So, yeah, that's probably the big thing for me, that's part of the agility is it's small things quicker, it's not big things faster.

Interviewer (29:09)

Yeah, I love this approach of bringing the right stakeholders in, constraining the period of time that you're going to do it, focus on one particular problem, go through, truly understand what's going to resonate with the target audience, and then build that into a structured process. Now, and I like the fact that there's an output that then they're going to take away and run with, because too many design thinking workshops and innovation workshops I've done end up with loads of stuff on paper, exactly as Catherine said. And you walk away and go, that was fun. That were brilliant ideas. And then six months later, oh, we haven't done anything with that.

Peter Abraham (29:36)

This is it. After a week, you get a campaign. I mean, the campaign's live, so you can see, you can see users. Yeah, you can see the data.

Interviewer (29:43)

So I love it. And I think that the overwhelm that all marketers are feeling at the moment and trying to do all things, you end up doing nothing. So where can people learn more? Where should they go to find out a bit more about this stuff?

Catherine Torrance (29:56)

Sure, they can go to superchargemarketingsprints.com and they're welcome to connect with Claire with myself, Catherine Torrance, Peter, I'm going to volunteer you for connection as well. So Claire Pankhurst, Katherine Torrance and Peter Abraham. And we'd be happy to share knowledge and help how we can.

Interviewer (30:13)

Brilliant stuff. We'll put all of those links for the LinkedIn profiles and the website and everything else into the show notes as well. And other than that, thank you, Claire, Catherine and Peter for joining us today. For more episodes resources to leave a.

Host (30:26)

Review or to get in contact act, go to targetinternet.com forward/podcast.