How sports tactics can transform your team’s performance

What do sports and company growth have in common? Jennifer Montague, VP of Growth at Onomondo, shares her insights, drawing from her experience with national field hockey teams and FIFA. Jennifer reveals how the strategies that build winning sports teams can be directly applied to business for creating cohesive and high-performing teams. Let’s dive in!

How to apply a sport team playbook to business: 

Sports teams and business teams share many parallels. Think of your team as a sports squad, where every player has a crucial role to play in achieving success:

• Forwards = sales – Out front, scoring goals, and driving results. They’re your go-getters, pushing the agenda and closing deals.
• Midfielders = growth. Positioned in the middle, they support both offense and defense, ensuring smooth transitions and sustained momentum.
• Defenders = support team. There to keep the ball from entering your territory, managing challenges, and backing up the forwards when needed.
• Goalkeepers = product team. They’re the last line of defense or the first line of offense, ready to catch and deflect any threats or seize opportunities.

Much like in sports, not everyone on your team will always score goals. In the business realm, this translates to a focus on broader contributions rather than just individual achievements. Imagine being judged solely on the number of goals scored if you’re a midfielder – how would that impact your morale and productivity? It’s about time we look at the bigger picture and understand the collective effort. 

Jennifer shares her perspective: 

“As a goalkeeper, if my performance were measured by my ability to score goals rather than stopping them, I’d feel unmotivated and misaligned with my role. This would not only hurt my morale but also prevent me from developing the skills essential to my position, ultimately diminishing my value to the team.”

Introducing OKR-ish: A goal-setting framework for team alignment

In fast-paced startups, the need for a more personalized and agile approach to goal-setting is crucial. Traditional OKRs, while occasionally effective, often miss the mark when it comes to aligning a team with diverse roles and objectives.

Traditional OKRs looks something like this

Jennifer introduces us to the OKR-ish framework, a modern approach to goal setting that combines OKRs with NCT (narratives, commitments, tasks) and impact mapping to bring a more holistic approach to OKRs. This framework is designed to create goals that resonate with your team and drive shared success. Here’s a quick breakdown:

• Objectives: Define what you want to achieve by setting a SMART goal.
• Blockers: Identify the obstacles preventing you from reaching these objectives with your current approach.
• Tactics: Determine the strategies that will effectively remove these blockers and enable you to achieve your goals.
• ICE Score: Assess the impact, confidence and ease of tactics to help with prioritization
• Taskforce: Assemble a collaborative taskforce dedicated to executing these tactics efficiently.
• Sponsor: Secure a C-level sponsor to support the taskforce, helping to eliminate obstacles and ensure alignment with organizational priorities.
• Key results: Establish metrics to track progress towards achieving your objectives.
• Narratives: Create a compelling story around your goals to motivate your team.
• Commitments: Outline what each team member will deliver.
• Tasks: Identify actionable steps to reach your goals.
• Impact mapping: Understand how your goals contribute to broader organizational success.

Jennifer emphasizes the importance of addressing blockers with this approach: 

“If your teams aren’t meeting company objectives, it’s not because they’re bad or lazy. By asking them to identify blockers, you provide them with an opportunity to contextualize their work and find practical solutions, with support from their colleagues.”

Here’s an example of how the OKR-ish framework was applied at Onomondo:

Objective: Increase net new MRR in the smaller segment by 10%.

Blocker: Most prospects want to “try before they buy”

Tactic: Offer a free trial

ICE Score: 

• Impact (what impact will this tactic have on the blocker?): 8
• Confidence (how confident are we this will have a positive impact?): 7
• Ease (how easy will this be to implement?): 3
• Total ICE score: 6 

Taskforce: A taskforce was created with one representative from Growth, Sales, Product, CS, Engineering, and RevOps – with the CTO as a sponsor – to help develop and execute a free trial. 

The free trial was launched just 5 weeks after this taskforce was established.

When Onomondo put this strategy into action, the results spoke for themselves:

Objective: Increase net new MRR in the smaller segment by 10%.

Tactic: Implemented a free trial offer.

Results after two quarters: 

• Touchpoints: Reduced by 8%
• Lead to Close Rate: Increased by 25%
• SQL to Close Rate: 51%
• Revenue Growth: Achieved a 7.3% increase

This free trial tactic was one of three strategies implemented, leading to an overall increase of 23% in net new MRR by year’s end. The key to their success? A collaborative approach. By breaking down a revenue-based target into actionable steps and engaging every department, they maximized impact and drove impressive results.

Here are three key takeaways:

1. Position-specific roles: Measure success by setting realistic, achievable goals for each team member, especially if they’re not directly connected to revenue. This ensures motivation and prevents the frustration of chasing unreachable targets.
2. Create goals in context: Engage your team in the goal-setting process with a framework that provides context. By consulting them, you gain their buy-in and align everyone with shared objectives.
3. Teamwork from end-to-end: Like a sports team, form cross-functional task forces to achieve goals together. Empower ownership by trusting team members to leverage their expertise, leading to greater enthusiasm and collaboration.

Jennifer notes,

“In many organizations, everyone is expected to ‘score’—not just Sales and Marketing, but even some CS and Product teams have revenue targets. If we were a sports team and my performance was depending solely on my ability to score, would I pass you the ball? No!”

Just like in sports, every team member plays a crucial role in reaching shared goals. By adopting strategies from the field and embracing frameworks like OKR-ish, you can build a team that’s not only more cohesive and motivated but also primed for success.