The Ultimate Guide to Agile Sales

Effective sales management is based on a variety of different strategies, like being able to motivate your teams, setting goals and quotas, motivating reps, and reviewing data and performance.

While all of these strategies can lead you to be successful, there are also frameworks to follow, like agile sales management, that will supplement your process.

In this post, learn about agile sales, how to grow a successful agile sales team, and key processes to follow.

What is agile sales?

Agile sales takes project management strategies from the IT world — such as sprints, daily stand-ups, and constant iteration — and applies them to selling to help teams become more flexible and effectively meet customers at their stages of the customer journey.

Why should you care about agile sales?

There are three changes in the sales world that should make you sit up and pay attention.

First, millennials are making up larger and larger parts of your sales team. Right now, they’re probably SDRs and AEs — with a few ambitious ones holding management or even director roles. But in eight years, millennials may hold half of your leadership positions. In 15? They’ll probably hold all of them.

That means you can’t keep using the same techniques and tactics. These professionals have grown up with constant access to information. As a result, they’re independent, learn quickly, enjoy collaboration, are incredibly tech-savvy, and get bored doing the same things over and over. Agile sales help you adapt your sales org to suit these traits.

Second, your customers are different. Few people have the patience or desire to be forced through a rigid sales process. Now they can self-educate — and they’ll quickly lose interest if your reps make them answer a laundry list of questions about things they could’ve learned online or don’t add any value to the research process.

If you want your salespeople to deliver unique, consultative, high-value experiences to each and every buyer they interact with, the agile sales methodology makes it much easier for reps to respond in real-time and meet client needs.

Finally, we have an unprecedented amount of data. You can learn everything from your lowest-performing rep’s average call-to-demo conversion rate to the average number of deals closed on the last day of the month in a few clicks. The dark side to all this data? If you’re not focused and intentional, you’ll get lost in it. Agile sales involve constantly reviewing and reacting to data — making it an ideal solution.

Agile Sales Explained

We gave a brief summary above, but let’s dive further into how agile sales works.

When using this framework, work is organized into “sprints.” A sprint typically lasts one to two weeks and has a specific objective.

Every sprint starts with a two-to-four-hour planning meeting to decide on the sprint goal (which must be summed up in one sentence) and break down that objective into discrete tasks or milestones. The latter should result in a list of projects, known as the Sprint Backlog.

Each morning, the team gets together for a stand-up. This meeting is meant to be quick — in fact, most companies make everyone stand up for the duration, hence the name. Team members go around and explain:

1. What they accomplished yesterday
2. What they’ll accomplish today
3. Any obstacles they’re facing

This helps everyone stay on the same page and provides accountability.

How To Implement Agile Sales

Implementing an agile sales methodology is centered around seven essential processes: sprints, daily standups, short-term goals, a flexible strategy, leveraging a CRM, data, and review. Let’s discuss each below.

Agile Sales Tactics

1. Sprints

Divide work into sprints of just one to two weeks at most. With these sprints, you can have kickoff meetings where you inform salespeople of the goal of the sprint and what tasks will need to happen to achieve that goal.

2. Daily Standups

Standups are helpful for any group that works collaboratively:

• ABM teams
• Tiger teams targeting a list of prospects
• BDR-AE teams

The idea is simple. Have a quick (5-15 minutes) status update meeting at the beginning of the workday. Each person should share what they did the day before, explain what they’ll work on that day, and ask for help or guidance if necessary.

Standups definitely boost alignment and accountability (plus, they make your team feel like more of a team.)

3. Short-term Goals

Sales objectives can often feel overwhelming and impossible to achieve. For example, maybe you want to go to President’s Club this year, but that would mean performing 30% better than last year — which you don’t think you can pull off no matter how hard you work.

Or you’re a sales manager, and you want to double your team’s average contract value — but that seems like a monumental feat.

To make these goals feel in your reach, borrow the “sprint” concept from agile. Rather than looking at the end goal, break it down into sub-goals. These objectives should be short-term (think monthly, weekly, or even daily).

For example, let’s say to make P Club you need to hit 120% of your annual quota. That translates to $84,000.

In other words, you need to sell $7,000 every month. But you know that some months are better — The first quarter tends to be huge, while June, July, and August are slow. With that in mind, you create this schedule:

January: $8,000

February: $7,500

March: $8,500

April: $6,000

May: $6,000

June: $5,000

July: $5,000

August: $5,000

September: $9,000

October: $7,500

November: $8,000

December: $9,000

(If you do the math, this comes out to $84,500. It’s always good to have a cushion!)

Now that you’ve broken down your major goal into monthly ones, qualifying for P Club seems a lot more feasible.

Sales managers, use this framework to guide your reps’ goal-setting process. First, figure out their “pie in the sky” goal. What do they want to accomplish this year? Then, work with them to create a timeline with milestones.

4. A Flexible Strategy

Flexibility and iteration are the foundation of agile sales. That means reacting in real-time to new data and information and adapting as needed.

Let’s look at two examples of how you might iterate or pivot. First, imagine you’re the director of your company’s SMB segment. In the past few weeks, your reps have lost ten deals to a new, lower-cost competitor.

• Option 1: Let this play out. You know the competitor’s product is inferior, so in time, customers will figure out the cheaper price isn’t worth it and switch to you.
• Option 2: Create a battlecard that helps salespeople position your product as the higher-quality, more reliable choice, goes over common customer objections and responses, and outlines testimonials from customers who have chosen you over the competitor.

The first option — essentially, stay the course — isn’t agile. The second option is quintessential agile: Being quick to respond and adapt to changing customer needs.

You can also use this mentality to react to:

• Market/industry changes
• New legislation
• Product updates and launches
• Company-wide strategic shifts
• Changes in leadership

And more. Basically, you should constantly be analyzing what’s happening in your world and figuring out how to change your process, objectives, or strategy to keep up.

5. Leveraging a CRM

Without a system of truth, it’s extremely difficult to hold salespeople accountable. (The same goes if you’re a rep: How can you analyze your progress if you’re not tracking it?)

That makes your CRM an essential component of agile sales. At many companies, the rule is “If it’s not in the CRM, it didn’t happen.”

There are a few ways to enforce this:

• Don’t count emails, calls, or demos toward activity goals if they’re not logged in the CRM
• Don’t discuss deals during pipeline review if there’s not a matching opportunity in the rep’s CRM pipeline
• Don’t comp reps on deals that aren’t in the CRM

Of course, getting your salespeople to record everything will be far easier if your sales and marketing tools are synced with your CRM. For example, teams using HubSpot Sales Hub will automatically have their calls, emails, and meetings recorded in the CRM — no manual data entry required.

6. Data

Agile sales’ emphasis on data dovetails perfectly with modern sales management. Whether you’re a rep, a manager, or an executive, data tells you if your strategy is working — and how well.

Different metrics matter for different situations and objectives. Perhaps you review your last quarter and realize there’s huge fallout between your qualification and discovery calls. After listening to a few call recordings with your manager, you identify two issues:

• You talk too much
• You don’t ask enough open-ended questions

Your key metrics for the next month should be:

• Talk-to-listen ratio (aiming for 30:70)
• # of open-ended questions per call (shooting for 6+)
• Qualification-to-discovery conversion rate (target is 30%)

Notice that you’re focusing on these metrics within a short timeframe (essentially, a sprint). You can easily manage these specific metrics and evaluate your progress at the end of the month.

A sales manager, on the other hand, might be focusing on these metrics:

• Average deal velocity, or typical length of sales cycle
• Average deal size
• Average quota attainment

If you have a specific goal for the month — like getting your salespeople to follow up more quickly — you’d also be focused on average lead response time.

The bottom line is: Come up with your short-term goals first, then work backward to determine the best metrics for gauging progress.

7. Review

After each sprint is completed, have a review meeting to go over the outcomes of the sprint, goals met, and what was not able to be achieved.

As a sales manager, you can lead the majority of the meeting, but you can also consider having teams or specific individuals present on progress. This can help reps take accountability for their process and bolster feelings of collaboration and teamwork.

Steps To Build an Agile Sales Team

Building a successful agile sales team is dependent on four critical factors: accountability, adaptability, and collaboration, transparency.

Accountability

Agile sales teams need to practice accountability. As there are specific milestones to meet during specific sprints, all involved parties need to own their actions to help the team meet their goals. Salespeople should take ownership of their practices, both positive outcomes and those that need improvement, and be forthright about them and be able to ask for help when necessary.

Adaptability

Agile practices can always change, so teams need to be adaptable and handle changes when they arise. Thus, while you should have a baseline framework that you follow, the framework should have room for flexibility, like working with customers that are more informed than others or pivoting a strategy as a result of data.

Collaboration

As successful agile sales processes require teams to be able to work together, collaboration is key. Individuals should know who is on their team, what their job duties are, and how their job duties contribute to other teams’ successes. They should be able to approach other team members to ask questions. Departments should also be aligned to achieve the same goals.

Stand-ups are incredibly valuable for establishing collaboration amongst your teams.

Transparency

Transparency is similar to accountability, as reps and all team members understand progress towards meeting goals throughout the entire sprint. As a result, they aren’t surprised by quotas not met at the end of your sprints because the information is available to them throughout the entire process. Essentially, transparency is directly related to teams having context for what is happening in the sales process at all times.

Over To You

Agile sales is a natural evolution for sales teams. It helps you leverage your data, team members, and motivation to get the best results possible.