Setup Agile Sales Management

Everybody is talking about lean and agile companies. But to adopt agile methods to sales is quite hard. Sales is a real old-school setup usually. Sales-People are not talking/helping each other - everybody is hunting for own quota, everybody is hiding assets, contacts, customers or best practises - and reporting is a pure waterfall approach. Sales have to give numbers weekly to Sales management - they have to sum up numbers to directors board. Is that agile?

The setup of an agile sales team is quite complicated - because these behaviours are really hard to change. I am trying that in my team, using elements from agile methods, transfering them into sales words and methods. Found a BLOG here with a very nice description how to deal with that:
https://lnkd.in/eCBdCTs
and I adopted some of these wordings:

• TeamMember  = Sales Person = Closing Deals - BUT: Instead of individual quote – contribute to the team
• ScrumMaster   = Team Lead / Sales Operations / Coach / Share sales and orga experise
• Product Owner = Sales manager / Steakholder taking care about team performance

As an experience I can tell you: to have a retrospective within sales and talking about emotions, feelings and behaviours is a quite interesting experience. It took a while until first sales people started to really talk open about those issues, learning or even emotions - but it is now an important part of our team-culture.

When you like to have your sales to act a an (agile) team, then you need to re-think about quota and compensation. A 100% individual quota will kill team play - because thats what the quota is forcing the sales person to do.

A team quote provides the possibility for weak members to hide. And now it becomes important to keep sales teams small and highly communicative. Everyone from the team has to contribute to the team - when this becomes transparent to everyone - then nobody can hide anymore. My experience is a good mixture of individual targets and team targets - but in a way the individual target is not destroying the team approach.

Sales candence to share and report numbers is now something we use only 30min a week - thats is a result of trust and transparency. Cadence itself is not helping sales to sell, or being more competitive - it is just a need for the organisation to control the numbers. But a healthy company is more than numbers - it is an organization which helps each other, which understands tho overall mission/target. We call that "outward mindset"

Some more agile methods we translated to the sales-world:
•Sales Sprint is a quarter
•StandUp and Review are happening in our Quarterly Business Reviews
•Retrospectics bi-weekly to improve and learn (no cadence, no escalation)
•Burndown-Charts are CRM Numbers
I can encourage you to adopt agile methods to sales - people are now behaving as intelligent individuals - not as sales-bots. But take your time! :-)
#sales #agile