The 10 Agile Sales Principles

Being an agile organization is a very recent transformation we are seeing in today’s companies.

I am in the same transition with my sales team and it took a while to understand how that works.

After a lot of discussion and feedback from that article, I'd like to write down all these best practices to my own little sales-manifest - presenting my 10 principles for agile sales organizations.

Please comment/give feedback on you experience about that topic as this is still a very exotic to move sales to agile.

So far so good - but let’s go a bit deeper into that buzzwords and discuss the ideas behind it.

1. Accountability

Every sales rep needs to be accountable. That’s sounds very familiar - or? But try to move your focus away from pure numbers - as sales today is only accountable for achieving a certain number - nothing else.

Sales is your market sensor. You need to identify market demand, innovation trends, things customers likes to buy etc. etc. that’s something a good sales rep can do. A sales rep represents himself, the company, the product or service at once. Forget sales people who are just asking for budget and bringing in "other" resources to explain the product – that’s no value - and these people are only accountable for numbers - this might help over the next quarters - but not long term. A healthy organization has to learn and adopt to market trends - sales is the first entry point for the continuous improvement - or continuous innovation process for the team, the product and the whole company.

Step away from the cliché, that sales are just stupid and overpaid people in telling whatever bullshit to the customer. If your sales team is behaving like that - change it immediately or fire them!

A sales rep should always have one question in mind:

'What can I do to help my team/company to do better".

Getting the deal signed is one answer - but there are many more.

2. Adaptive planning

When the new fiscal year begins, we find us as sales being part of customer assessment centers to plan the year. But a year is long. It takes 12 month, more than 50 weeks. In the days of cloud - this is an epoch. 

Implement ways to adopt changes in products, markets, competitors - stay flexible, stay agile!

This doesn’t mean that the numbers - which we still need to meet - are be softened. No - but give sales some flexibility to bring the numbers. When a technology is getting outdated – don’t stay on the plan - move to the next technology and find your value-add there. Increase pressure on old stuff will only make sure that good people will leave early.

3. Collaboration in teams

That’s something I really focus on. In most sales team I was working in my history a sales rep was a lonesome wolf. We had always a good relationship within the teams - but we worked alone - we went out for hunting alone.

But a team is much stronger than an individual - especially when you think about the long run. But companies needs to support to collaborate within sales team. But reality is, that reporting, quota, named-account lists etc. are forcing sales rep's to be alone - because that’s what they are getting paid for - and their variable portion of the salary is typically huge. So it is on their personal interest to increase income to pay their live to act as a lonesome wolf.

There is a way to get rid of that problem - that is a team goal - or a mixed personal + team goal. But this only works together with accountability and transparency.

4. Continuous Integration

This is a typical software-engineering term. But think about Continuous Integration as a Process or Collaboration topic. How to embed the experience/feedback sales is getting from the field into the sales organization. How will get you product manager input from sales? Do you ask sales what is hindering them to be successful? Is it always a bad/buggy product - or is it always price? Often the problem is somewhere else. Communication, misbehavior, wrong expectations, processes, misleading reports or approvals ...

Talk to sales, embed sales into a learning organization.

5. Function

What is sales typically doing? In my point of view it is much more then presenting a PPT or explaining the pricelist to procurement. In today’s sales world you need to have a certain knowledge about your product. It is not necessary to be a "nerd" - but you have to be able to explain your product in context with other technologies, standup on a whiteboard and draw a high level design.

That’s a lot more then sales did in the past. 

For companies this means - you need to invest into sales skills as well as expert-skills to get the right expertise in the field. If this is missing - accountability will not work.

6. Measurement

I talked a lot about team numbers, KPI's quotas. Being agile means to be very transparent and work against measurements. These measurements can be numbers or activities which are supporting sales processes. But we need to have measurements in shorter periods then a fiscal year. Think about a sprint for project teams. That’s typically a 2-week period. 2 weeks – that’s a bit short coming for sales projects - but a month or a quarter is pretty good to plan and track. Break down the BIG Goal to make a deal or to hit a number into smaller goals to that BIG Goal. These measurements will not have compensation impacts - it will help the sales guy and the sales team tu understand what the sales rep is doing and what help/support this sales rep might need to achieve the goal. Remember: a team goal needs to be part of an agile sales team - so everybody from the team has an interest that the whole teams wins. 

This now comes back to accountability and collaboration. Create a please that sales can talk to each other. A sales cadence call is the wrong place for that - as this is just collecting numbers.

Think about Retrospectives to talk about internal problems or QBR-session (Quarterly-Business-Reviews) to talk about external challenges and experiences.

The measurements are not between the sales manager and the sales rep. They are between the sales rep and the sales team.

Again: What can I as a sales team do to let the whole team win?

7. Organization

Most organizations are starting projects to become more and more agile - but this will take time - and the way to implement agility is always different. To become agile also brings in some side-effects which are hard to carry for a lot of classic managers.

-We bring responsibility to the point where it belongs. That sounds nice in the beginning - but it's also assigned with some loss of control which only works if accountability, collaboration and transparency is healthy.

-We allow fail's - this is a BIG mantra for many people. I do see that a bit different.  I'd like to say: we do not allow failures  but we accept that they happen. And they are ok as long as I understand why they happened and that we as a team/company a learning from that failure. Continuous improvement is key in this point - this will make us better, more competitive, faster and more successful at the end.

But I'd like to avoid the situation that mistakes are ok. We still need to avoid them - but when we make mistakes because of wrong or incomplete facts ... this happens. When you like to be innovative - then you never have all facts ... you need to try out different ways - and some of them will fail. That’s ok when you stand up immediately, learn, change and try again.

This behaviors must be made transparent and communicated in the collaboration-sessions within the team - then the failure becomes valuable - because it turns now into a learning/improvement.

But again - mistakes we can avoid - has to be avoided! I do not like the behaviors that mistakes are no problem - whey cost us time, resources, money and nerve.

8. Predictability

When you sum up accountability and measurements - then this will automatically lead to predictability. Why this needs to be added here then?

Because this is a central KPI for good sales teams because most companies needs to report goals and numbers to the stock market - and analyst are hating surprises - no matter it its good or bad.

Predictability comes from numbers / CRM system where the team needs to give the right risk-assessment and transparency what they will achieve and what not.

9. Recognition

Recognition is a bilaterally thing. Sales is already recognized by achieving quote or accelerators on top. That’s why they are going up every morning ...

But you can do more. Show the team what, why and how an individual achieved. Show this with internal newsletters to the company - make people visible and what they did. But sales is not winning alone - make the technical people, Backoffice etc. visible as well. Recognize teams!

Motivate sales as well to recognize the team contribution - because they also work hard and their contribution is crucial for successful customer situations.

10. Transparency

That’s my last point to my 10 principles of agile sales - and it is the most important one.

When we give more responsibility and accountability into sales and empower them to work self-organized in the market - this will not work without 100% transparency. But transparency will only come with trust and team culture.

Do you now any sales rep who enters the complete truth of his opportunities into a sales CRM?

They either blow up opportunities to say: Hey - my pipe is fine - please let me work and do not disturb - or they hide deals because pipeline / funnel is full enough and they like to avoid the get their quota increased.

No matter which one - it is unhealthy for the team and the company.

To come to a transparent sales organization - the management has to change first. You need to setup a foundation of trust. Deals can fail - we don’t like that - but its real. And as long as we fully understand what happens in the market, we can manage it. Think about accountability, measurements, collaboration and adaptive planning.

A good way to implement that transparency is to have a team quota and a regular standup/QBR where every sales individual needs to show his contribution to teams success. 

For sales rep without full pipeline - this transparency also helps to get new ideas, contacts etc. to start activities to create pipeline. But everyone needs to be 100% open and transparent with it. That sometimes hurt - especially when pipeline is bad. But hiding is not making it better. Team-Collaboration helps here.

Another critical aspect of transparency is the daily work, the sales processes and interfaces to team/company. In engineering-projects we are having bi-weekly retrospectives to mirror success and failures, to learn from them, to communicate, to recognize or even to create and making people accountable for change.

The retrospective was the starting point for my sales team to get on the "next level" for transparency.

What do you think? Please give me feedback on this – either here or on LinkedIn.