Recently, we introduced the Agile Sales Pipeline – a sales process that adjusts to the non-linear nature of the buyer’s journey. The Agile Sales Pipeline is a core part of the sales team management framework we illustrate in the Introduction to the Sales Accelerator Playbook. The Agile Sales Pipeline seems complex, thanks to the fact that each sales opportunity your team dives into will be equally complex. It doesn’t have to be difficult to get started with building an Agile Sales pipeline. In this post, we give you 3 tips to help you with creating your agile sales pipeline.
Have a Set of Values to Guide You
It is vital to have a set of values to guide you through creating an agile sales pipeline. The Agile Sales Manifesto in our Sales Accelerator Playbook provides a set of values to guide you and your team’s efforts.
The Agile Sales Manifesto
We are guiding others in learning better ways of delivering value to customers. Through our experience, we have come to value:
Relationships and interactions over transactions
Establishing value over focusing on price
Customer collaboration over negotiation
Strategic thinking over reliance on what worked in the past
Experimentation and innovation over reactive work patterns
Responding to change over following a plan
While there is value in the items on the right, we value the left more.
Use the Agile Sales Manifesto as the foundation for the process of aligning your sales pipeline with your buyer’s journey.
Align Your Operational Runway
As the sales organization’s nerve center, a broken or misaligned operational runway is detrimental to your agile sales pipeline. Once you have created your newly aligned agile sales pipeline, you need to ensure that your operational runway supports the new process. Ensure that your CRM and other sales enablement tools can serve your customers and help your team succeed. In doing so, you will create an easily executable and repeatable process to help your sales team.
Adopt an Agile Mindset Culture
The Agile Mindset focuses on building relationships with those we serve as individuals and as a team. Teams with an Agile Mindset culture are open to learn, change, improve, and serve those that look to us to help them solve their problems. The key Agile Mindset elements of respect, openness to learning, relentless improvement, and adaptation to change work together to build a culture of agility. The Agile Mindest culture will help the successful adoption and future iterations of any process.
Having a set of values to guide you, aligning your operational runway, and adopting an Agile Mindset culture are 3 tips to help in creating an agile sales pipeline. It is more important than ever for sales teams to be aligned with customers. They must be able to demonstrate a clear understanding of their customer’s business and be prepared to work with them on solutions instead of simply pitching products.