What is Agile Sales? Part 1

It has become rare to find a development team that does not employ the Agile methodology. Job postings often list scrums as a cultural advantage and if not, “Are you Agile?” is an inevitable question interviewers hear. This was not always the case as Agile evolved out of necessity to correct the faults of legacy development methodologies, namely the Waterfall Method.

One of the most interesting outcomes of the rise in popularity of Agile development is seeing how it can be applied to other teams within a business. If you examine the specific issues that Agile solves within development teams, you can draw many parallels to modern sales teams.

Before going into too much detail about applying Agile to sales, it’s important we take a step back and cover the differences between the Waterfall and Agile methodologies.

The Waterfall Method

Waterfall takes a methodical and procedural approach to software development. An entire project is broken down into steps and each step must be completed before moving onto the next. Teams employing the Waterfall Method often allocate a great amount of time on gathering requirements during the preliminary stages.This is useful, as it allows for the entire process to be clearly laid out before execution. As a result, developers within the team are prepared for the entire project and things remain relatively predictable.

However, the predictable nature of Waterfall proved to be a double edged sword. This is because the day-to-day of tech companies is anything but predictable. One of the most exciting aspects of working in the tech industry is that the organizations are constantly evolving. From team dynamics, to customer requirements, to the product and deliverables themselves; the best tech companies are ones that can quickly adapt to the ever-changing environment around them.

As a result of unexpected changes over time, the Waterfall Method’s reliance on the initially established requirements often led to turmoil during the development process. Moreover, if there were any inaccuracies in outlining the initial requirements, the rigid nature of the Waterfall Method meant that the final product would ultimately suffer.

The procedural nature of Waterfall can also have a stifling side effect for creative developers. When new ideas are proposed during the development process, Waterfall prevents them from being used unless they were proposed during the initial planning stages.

To summarize, let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of the Waterfall Method:

Pros:

• Predictable and well planned
• Developers do not get blindsided during the development process

Cons:

• Relies too heavily on initial requirements
• Early flaws will affect the end product
• Does not play to developers’ individual strengths

Enter Agile

Agile was developed to address the specific disadvantages of Waterfall. Where Waterfall is procedural, Agile is iterative and stresses the importance of flexibility throughout the project. The fundamental principles of Agile revolve around breaking tasks down into their individual parts and then setting out to complete each task in the form of sprints.

As a result, instead of exclusively gathering requirements at the beginning of the process, Agile allows for multiple planning sessions. Stakeholders and team members remain heavily involved, and collaboration is one of the main aspects in pushing the project to completion.

However, there are still disadvantages with Agile. Since the process is iterative, there is a risk of the project taking much longer to complete than initially planned. A focused product manager can mitigate this by adhering to strict deadlines, and ensuring their team does the same. Another downside is that the end product may turn out much different than what was originally planned for, as a result of pivoting to address issues along the way.

Here’s a summary of pros and cons for the Agile Method:

Pros:

• Allows teams to be adaptive
• Empowers individuals within the team and promotes collaboration

Cons:

• Deadlines can easily be missed
• End product can be grossly different than what you initially planned for

It’s clear to see that although both the Waterfall and Agile methodologies have their upsides and downsides, Agile has proven to be the better process for high growth tech companies. Allowing for ongoing collaboration and development within the project allows for teams to produce the best possible result.

We take a closer look at how these same ideas can be applied to the modern sales team in Part 2.

Questions? Email me at shane@agilesales.ca