How to Implement Agile Sales in 5 Steps
In my previous two blog posts, we covered the differences between the Waterfall and Agile Development Models and then why applying Agile to Sales teams makes just as much sense as applying Agile to Engineering teams.
In this post, we will walk through the necessary steps to implement Agile Sales. It may sound like a big undertaking but fortunately, sales teams can employ Agile Sales in 5 simple steps:
- Understand your prospects
- Reach out at scale with customized sales sprints
- Collect and interpret data
- Adapt for continuous improvement
- Generate attainable quotas
Let’s go through each step in more detail:
1. Understand your prospects
Create a detailed profile of those who benefit most from your offering
The Greatest Sales Tool of All Time
The first step for incorporating Agile Sales is the most important whether you’re planning on going Agile or not. Narrowing in on product-market fit is essential for any tech company.
Unbeknownst to many sales teams, the greatest tool available to salespeople is not a killer deck, spiffy outfit or bottomless corporate card. The greatest sales tool of all time is having a product that a particular industry can get significant value from at a reasonable price. Sales in the tech world is much less about forcing a product into an industry where it doesn’t fit; so much as it’s finding your niche market, and playing to it. By focusing on the product’s natural fit, we’re able to play to those strengths and take action to facilitate sales into those verticals.
Determining your product-market fit relates to what the client’s Return on Investment (ROI) will be. Figure out how your prospects can justify purchasing what you’re selling. Even better, can the prospect actually profit by adopting your product? If so, how many days into the purchase and by how much? This step should not only be a qualitative exercise but a quantitative one, the more details and concrete numbers, the better.
Toronto startup, Kiree, has the right idea. They allow prospects to calculate cost savings right on their website. While this transparency is often rare, it is certainly worthwhile highlighting its value to the customers.
How Well Do You Know Your Prospects?
This step includes spending time figuring out details about your prospects and stakeholders and it’s a necessary step for any sales team.
It is easy to pinpoint the type of people who would respond best to what you are selling but the more details you collect, the better. Details like the job title of your ideal prospect, or how many employees work at their company are important, but you need to go deeper. What do you think your prospects do in their spare time? Do they have a family?
The best way to capture enough information on your prospects is to build out a detailed profile on each stakeholder. This process can be compared to user profiles built out by UX/UI designers and Hubspot has great templates to get started.
Famous Last Words: “Lead Gen”
After you have a grasp on your product market fit and prospect profiles, all that’s left to do is gather the largest list of leads that you can possibly get your hands on. The downside, of course, being that the concept of “Lead Gen” eliciting negative reactions from sales reps.
The good news is that there are so many ways to get creative with Lead Gen. There’s an efficient way of automating this process for virtually any type of industry and their set of prospects.
Google Chrome extensions can be a salesperson’s best friend. For example, if your main source of leads is LinkedIn, ContactOut is a great tool
Has someone already done the work for you and listed all your leads on a webpage? If this is the case, try your hand at web scraping with Data Miner.
Lastly, UpWork is a great way to hire talent from around the world who are seasoned Lead Gen veterans.
Keep in mind, these are all great options if you’re on a budget. If you have some money to spend, Salesforce’s Data.com and Hoovers are lifesavers.
2. Reach out at scale with customized “Sales Sprints”
Employ tailored messaging within a customized cadence that will resonate with prospects.
Employing Sales Sprints
Now that you have pinpointed a large group of prospects who would benefit most from your offering, it is time to reach out to them in the form of Sprints. The whole idea is to reach out to a large number of the exact same prospect profile. This allows you to reach out with tailored messaging even at scale.
It’s important to carefully track the results when employing a new cadence and messaging for each group. The more your sprint, the more you can start using data to help inform changes in your messaging and cadence going forward.
There are all-encompassing sales productivity apps, like SalesLoft, that can help support Sales Sprints. Otherwise, making a Sales Sprint tracking sheet in Excel can be very effective. Whatever you do, make sure to use automated email software and applicable dialing tools to ensure a high level of activity. Yesware and Mixmax are great options for email sequences.
Choosing the Right CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a requirement for any sales team looking to build out a database of leads. CRM software is also vital for maintaining a healthy sales pipeline.
Salesforce is the gold standard for sales organizations because of their endless list of available integrations and customization. Setting up Salesforce can be costly, however, as consultants or even a full time Salesforce administrator are often required for proper implementation.
Fortunately, there are tons of options for easy-to-use CRMs for companies on a budget. Pipedrive is one of the best I’ve come across and the nifty BCC email integration works great with automated email software.
3. Collect and Interpret Data
Understand how leads are responding to your messaging as you go
After each sprint is completed, the resulting data will inform you on how the prospects responded to the sequence. Since each sprint contains prospects from the same profile, the data can let you know whether the messaging you chose will work for similar prospects going forward.
If you decide to purchase software to execute sales sprints, it’s important to make sure that they also provide a sufficient amount of reporting and analytics.
If you are using Excel as a tracking sheet for your sprints, you can consolidate the key data into a larger spreadsheet.
4. Adapt for Continuous Improvement
Make informed decisions to help grow revenue exponentially
While you are tracking your sprints as they are in progress, you’ll be able to develop a better idea of which stages of your sequence are performing best. Furthermore, once you have completed a couple of sprints, you’ll have a set of data to reinforce your ideas around the best and worst parts of your messaging.
From here, it is extremely important to reflect upon why some sprints perform better than others. Why did this happen? Was it because of the messaging or because the leads you reached out to are who your product is best suited for?
Pay close attention to what parts of the sequence are performing the best and the worst. The most important part of this whole process is to use the data you collect to make decisions that will improve your positive response rate (demos/meetings booked) and close rate.
From there, allocate your resources towards targeting the prospects that are responding positively. At the same time, keep tweaking your messaging to ensure that your metrics continue trending in the right direction.
5. Generate Attainable Quotas
Establish a predictable revenue model with accurate forecasts
Further applying the logic from the previous step, you can calculate your overall demo book rate and close rates for all sales activity across the company. This allows you to start understanding how much of the revenue being brought in is directly correlated to sales activity and individual sales reps.
It also allows you to use the Sprint Data in forecasts. Sprint Data can easily and reliably be used to calculate how much more revenue you can bring in over the next 12–24 months, depending on a number of different factors (i.e. after hiring ‘x’ amount of reps, increasing sales activity towards certain verticals over another).
The data generated by sprints helps you make informed decisions and creates an extremely accurate forecast. Instead of building forecasts based on arbitrary growth numbers, you can create ones that are informed by every single cold email, cold call and inbound lead that you made since starting with Agile Sales. As described above, to produce reliable and well-informed data you must commit to each step of the process. Something as obvious as understanding your prospects, when done correctly, can help set your entire sales team up for success.
Questions? Email me at shane@agilesales.ca
