Simon Severino With Strategy Sprints GmbH

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for high velocity radio.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:14] Lee Kantor here, another episode of High Velocity Radio. And this is going to be a good one. Today on the show, we have Simon Severino with Strategy Sprints. Welcome, Simon.

Simon Severino: [00:00:26] Hey, everybody. Happy to talk. High velocity and sprints goes well together.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:30] There you go. Well, before we get too far into things, tell us about strategy sprints. How are you serving folks?

Simon Severino: [00:00:37] We coach people to have better sales and marketing and to run their business in a way that is more conducive to a good life rather than just a great business. So basically we want to have them feel great now while they are scaling their business versus feel great. If insert your if here, if I sell, if this happens, if that happens because it never happens. But what really happens is right now the process of exploring, of building and of scaling, and we are the coaches who help do that with more fun, with more grace.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:17] Now, do you have a niche that you serve? I mean, being an entrepreneur or a small business person that covers a lot of ground, do you work in certain areas?

Simon Severino: [00:01:26] We work only with B2B businesses, mainly agencies, consultancies and B2B software.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:34] And then what’s your back story? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Simon Severino: [00:01:39] So I started 21 years ago in a global consultancy where I would do this work for the big brands across the globe. On Monday I was in New York. On Thursday I was in Paris and on on Saturday I was in Shanghai doing it for different teams. The question was always the same question How do we enter a market? How do we crush it in the market and how do we stay in the market? How do we stay competitive? How do we stay relevant? And those questions are still around here. If you run a business right now, whatever the business is, you are asking yourself, what’s the right thing to do For me to stay in the market, to crush it in the market, to stay relevant, to stay competitive? What do I need to change? What do I need to keep? Or just being doing more? What do I need to do less? These are the questions that we get asked every day.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:38] Now, when a client comes to you, are they typically experiencing a certain type of frustration or are they at a plateau or are they losing business or are they just kind of getting burnt out? What is kind of the reason that they reach out to you?

Simon Severino: [00:02:53] Typical reason is they feel like they have hit a plateau. If they just do more, it doesn’t bring more results. It would just burn them out. So their current situation is. Every project starts from scratch like every client. They cannot reuse current modules. They are restarting every client project from from scratch, which means there is a lot of manual activities. It’s a ton of input from their side and the business is dependent on them. So they feel like if they go for a four weeks vacation, they would have guilt feelings and sneak sneak away from the beach to have a phone call. That’s usually the situation when they come to us.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:45] Now, when they’re working with you, is there a typical process you go through for every client? Do you kind of walk through? They have to do some pre homework before they start working with you or do you just start listening to them and then just kind of coming up with a plan to help them solve whatever problem they have and help them reach whatever outcome they desire?

Simon Severino: [00:04:11] Yes, we just start listening. There is no pre work. The only pre requisite is that you want to scale the business because our goal will be to double revenue in 90 days. And so this will be the most intense project for your next 90 days. In the first month we will work on simplifying your offer, packaging the offer better, having it convert more. So it will be an offer as simple as VW revenue in 90 days. If you can say it that quickly, that simply then it’s highly referable. People can get out and refer to you, People can become your affiliate partners. And so the first part is to simplify it in a way that it actually gets across. The second part. Is to increase by 25% the sales time. So to shorten the time from awareness to closing by 25%. Many people take six months, eight months, ten months to close a deal, to close a new client. And so we will reduce that to 2 to 3 weeks using our templates and swipe copies. The second part is we will reduce the increase the conversion rate by 25%. Conversion rate is you are talking to ten people per week, you are closing five, then you have a 50% conversion rate. Now we will increase that rate because it’s usually below 50 and we want to have it around 50%. So we will increase that by 25%. And the third thing is increasing the price for the offer that you are currently selling by 25%, by de-risking the decision for the client and by improving the positioning and what it is compared to with compared to. And so when you increase those three things by 25%, which is what the strategy is Prince method is all about, then you have increased revenue by 99%.

Simon Severino: [00:06:24] Now you have almost doubled revenue and you have more cash flow, which means that the team is more relaxed and you are now more in grace and in in in a calm, productive state which will now be felt by your clients as being much more fun to work with. So you will lose less clients and they will refer much more to you. But this is what we do in the first month. Simplifying things, just finding what’s currently working for you, doing doing that more and doing less of everything else. So the team will have much less activities because they have now only one main offer and we are improving each part of that offer every week. And then the second part is increasing those three key strategies, 25% more conversion rate, 25% faster, saves time and 25% more dollars for the same offer, which increases cash flow. And then the third month is writing all that down in form of processes so that it’s less people dependent. Now it’s a machine that’s working. And when we write down the processes, which we call SOP, standard operating procedures, now you can hire people, you can change people, people can get six or go go on vacation. But the whole system is still resilient, is adaptive, is capable of having self correction and self-healing properties, which you want to have, especially in these times, in this very volatile times, you have a system that can cope, self-heal, self-correct, self decide, and now it’s less dependent on on people.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:26] Now is that your consultancy? So it’s a 90 day sprint. That’s what people are buying from you. Or is it something that okay, once we’ve tackled one line of business, now we do it again for a different one and we just keep it going from there? Or is that kind of the end of your time with them that all it takes is 90 days to kind of solve their problem and get them on the right track?

Simon Severino: [00:08:51] Yeah, most clients just book one sprint for 90 days and that optimizes one main offer for them and they don’t need more. Then they have a more simple business which is converting more. They have now more life. They have systems that work that’s fine for them and and some then pick a second sprint. So they say, All right, I have now one offer that’s working like a machine. Now, can I stack a second offer on top of that? And so of course, when you have optimized one, you could now start a second one. This is how you create multiple revenue streams stacked upon each other. And so, yes, some do a second sprint, but you actually don’t need many. It’s enough. If you do one, you have one systemized business and then you can enjoy your life because that business is enough to create, you know, to feed multiple families. And so for most people, that’s enough.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:56] Can you share a story? You don’t have to name in the name of the client, but just talk us through the challenge that they had and how you were able to inject your system into their world and get them to a new level.

Simon Severino: [00:10:08] Sure. So Sonny Abdul-Jabbar in Los Angeles, he’s printed and he’s a consultant. He runs an attack consultancy. So everything that you need, he is the guy that you would call if you are in Los Angeles and say, Sonny, I need developers. I have this tech problem. Can you solve this tech problem? And he’s the most networked guy and he would find it. Now, the problem was that he was offering many different things. Like most service businesses, they start offering they they get asked for multiple things and they say yes. And then quite quickly, you have 17 different offers in 17 different projects. So what happens is that your profitability goes down and you are working a lot for. Not much more net profit. So he felt that just doing more of that will not be conducive to growth. And so he sprinted. And his goal was to to simplify and to systemize the business. So all of those different things that he was offering, we asked him if you could only pick one Sunny, which is the most profitable of all these offers. He picked one. It was. Just consulting on blockchain related topics. So of all the possible technological challenges, he picked blockchain technology and then we said, Alright, who is of all your last 50 clients? Which one is the ideal client? And he picked one.

Simon Severino: [00:12:00] And then we designed the flow of his things to be around that main offer for exactly that kind of people that he wanted to serve. And we simplified everything else. He started a weekly lengthy newsletter, which was called The Three Things Blockchain You Need to Know this Week. Very simple, but very coherent. And so the whole brand was now very simple, very coherent, very easy to tell what they stand for. They are the blockchain guys. You have any technical blockchain question, Those are your people. And so sales went through the roof. He wrote us then a wonderful client testimonial, which is on our website, and it says, In this strategy, Sprint, my sales went through the roof. And it was just in the first month just simplifying and then in the second and third month systematizing and scaling. That was basically the work for him. And that’s a very typical sprint, a typical situation for agencies, consultancies that they. They’re doing too much and they’re offering too much.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:13] Now, it seems to me at the heart of this is being clear on your offer and what is going to be the offer that resonates with that ideal client as part of your system. Are you doing any interviewing of their ideal client to really understand what it is that they need and what it is they’re getting from this your client like? How important is that understanding of the real motivations of the of the client’s client in order to come up with that simplified offer that resonates.

Simon Severino: [00:13:52] Great question. Yes, it’s very important. And yes, there are also interviews. So we have 274 blueprints and templates ready for our clients. And some of them are interviews. We have even three types of interviews and we have the whole slab copy is exactly what they ask, how long the interview goes, how many people they need to interview, and there are many variations of doing it yourself. And then there are delegated versions where your team interviews them, and then there are even fully automated versions where just emails ask them these questions. And yes, these are three of our 274 blueprints. Plug and play ready are very important because you really need to use their words. So we then use the words that we collect in these interviews on the website, on the email subject line. So this is the masterclass of marketing when you use the exact words that your clients use. Because, you know, you can you can use your technical words, but that’s not how they think. You have to use the words that they use. That will increase your or your Google ranking, that will increase the resonance and the they will feel understood when you use their words, literally their words. Then they will say, Oh, yeah, that’s me. He gets me. Oh, yeah. Click.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:29] So is that a mistake you see firms making is they’re not really empathizing enough with their client. They’re kind of just talking in the language that they understand about their service and product and not through the lens of how the buyer buys, but rather how they’re selling.

Simon Severino: [00:15:52] Totally. Yes. And we are all doing this in different degrees. But if you go to your website right now, whoever you are listening to this, think of your current website. What are the first words? What are the first 10 seconds that I experience? Are you talking my language? Are you talking the language of the user who is there for the first time? Are you talking to them like you would talk to a stranger visiting your place for the first time? Or are you talking from your perspective? And so most of our websites, if we are honest, we are talking from our perspective, Hey, this is who we are. This is what we can do for you. We don’t start with, Hey, this is who you are. I see you. I know how it feels. I know that you have this problem, this problem, and that this feels hard. You know what? Those three people also have this problem. Look what we did with them. Can we do it with you? Find out. That would be a good flow for for a website. For example, if this happens in the first 10 seconds, that’s a good website and you can check our strategies please dot com. We always try to have that flow optimized and it’s converting quite well. But most, most websites are just talking features. They are talking from their perspective. We are engineers. We have built great features. Okay. But I don’t know how you’re talking to me or to something else. Is this built for small businesses or for big businesses? We are not connected yet, so I’m not interested in your features. Do you see me? That’s what I want to know in the beginning. And are you talking to me now?

Lee Kantor: [00:17:40] Especially for your professional services clients. Is it something that you need to have? Like you have a book. You have a lot of thought leadership on your website. Are those kind of must haves? In today’s day and age, when it comes to selling this type of knowledge? Or is that a nice to have?

Simon Severino: [00:18:02] That’s a good question. And it’s different for everybody listening right now. I don’t think anybody needs anything. I think you can run a great business without a website, actually. Probably the core component are an email list. Good operations, meaning that you actually deliver value around to vitals. You either help them decrease costs or you help them save time, or you help them increase sales. Time and money are two vital things. If you have some operations, some core core delivery, that really helps them with either time or money. I think that’s a must. And the second is that you really care about that, that you really want to go deeper, understand them, make them win, because they will feel it. These two, I think, are a must. And then that you really show up, that you really consistently show up for them, are there for them, and are interested in evolving and are interested in their feedback because you will implement that feedback. So this is the must. Something else is a nice to have.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:26] What? What do you need more? How can we help you? Do you need more entrepreneurs to go through the system? Do you need more business coaches to get certified in your system? What? What are the things we could be doing to help you?

Simon Severino: [00:19:42] I need as many people as possible to grab the book because they they can navigate the next months much better if they have our proven processes and they are in the book. The book is strategist Prince Dotcom and they can grab it on Amazon.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:01] So the book is the first step in kind of connecting with you and your team. If you go through the book, you learn, implement some of that stuff. It’ll improve your business and it might make you ready to invest in a more substantive relationship with your team and or maybe join and partner with you.

Simon Severino: [00:20:22] Yeah, most people cannot afford a 1 to 1 sprint coach, but the book is a great starting point and many checklists, many blueprints are in there and they can go very far just by implementing what’s what’s in the book. And it’s step by step. Every chapter is exactly very practical. So most people will get most value just by doing what’s in the book strategy sprints. And then some of them might say, All right, I came so far and I want to go even farther, and they will call us. They will then go to strategy sprints dot com and have a call with us.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:59] And are those 274 templates in the book or some of them?

Simon Severino: [00:21:04] Yes, like 35 of them are in there.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:07] Okay. So it gives you a good feel for your methodology.

Simon Severino: [00:21:11] Totally. Yes. And it can probably help them save a ton of time because they can now focus on what they are best at and and don’t have to think about the process of how to do marketing, how to do sales, how to do client onboarding, because that’s in the book and they just focus on what they are great at.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:34] Well, Simon, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Simon Severino: [00:21:42] Thank you. Keep rolling, everybody.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:44] All right. And that’s strategy sprints with an ESPN.com. All right, This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on high velocity radio.