Introduction
The agile sales team – including sales team leads, SDRs, BDRs, account executives, account managers, sales operations team members, and sales engineers – is the engine of your organization’s sales efforts. The agile sales team takes on repetitive, planned tasks daily – lead generation campaigns, sales calls, follow-ups, and demos – that can be organized, measured, and prioritized to achieve optimum high performance and sales acceleration. This post will define agile sales team management, discuss why it is essential, and review several tips for bringing agile to sales team management in your company.
What is Agile Sales Team Management?
Agile sales team management is the incorporation of agile methods to improve the traditional management model of a team. Agile sales management provides a flexible, collaborative framework for solving problems and meeting goals.
Why is Agile Sales Team Management Important?
In a previous post, we’ve discussed how adopting agile for sales can profoundly benefit your team by providing them a framework to respond quickly to today’s dynamic customer needs.
When you apply agile to team management, the same positive benefits happen. High amounts of attention are on the activities that drive the sale instead of only focusing on the larger goal. Additionally, more time is spent with frontline staff to help uncover and remove obstacles and provide coaching and training. Studies show that agile projects have a 60% greater chance of success than non-agile projects.
Tools for Agile Sales Team Management
While you can apply many agile tools to sales team management, we will focus on three for this article; Scrum, Team Backlog, and Buyer’s Journey Alignment with the Sales Pipeline.
Agile Sales Team Management with Scrum
Scrum is an agile system for organizing the work of an agile team. The activities of a sales team get divided into time-boxed intervals called Sprints. Before getting started, planning for each sprint occurs with the highest value items in the Program Backlog assigned to the team first. Each day, a 15-minute stand-up meeting called the Daily Scrum occurs, where each team member reports on their progress and keeps other team members accountable. The Daily Scrum is critical to quickly uncover issues hindering the sales process so you can resolve them.
Agile Sales Team Backlog
Team Backlog is a smaller section of the Program Backlog. It is a system used within each sales team to organize, prioritize, and track progress on work assigned to the sales team for each Campaign and Improvement Sprint. At the end of every sprint, evaluate your process or outcome, and make optimizations quickly. It is imperative to capitalize rapidly on things that work well and move on from things that do not work out. It also promotes continuous measurement and analysis, a core part of Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). Additionally, it provides better visibility and transparency for sales and the entire organization.
Buyer’s Journey Alignment with the Agile Sales Team
Aligning the Sales Pipeline with the Buyer’s Journey is a core component of sales acceleration. You should align the same steps your customers take during their purchasing journey with activities within the sales pipeline. This coordination between customers and the sales team empowers your sales team to be flexible and quickly iterate to meet a customer’s needs throughout the sales cycle. Misalignment in the sales pipeline significantly slows down lead-to-close times.
Closing
People, processes, and tools do not function in a void. They all impact and influence one another throughout an organization. Agile sales management provides you with a collaborative framework, values, and culture to create your sales team’s long-term success.