Once you have established your company’s baseline, (The 3 Key Steps in Applying Agile to Sales) you can now develop an agile sales plan. Depending on your company’s size and it’s propensity for change, you may want to start this process as a “pilot.” The key components to the plan are:

Agile Sales Plan

• Revenue Targets (forecast revenue mo/qty/yy, product and geography revenue segmentation)
• Iteration Scheduling (benchmarks, cycles, timestamps)
• Sales Team Model (staffing, area/geography, management, empowerment, accountability)
• Sales Process (stage, cycle, weighting, targets, pipeline, forecasting)
• Lead Generation (activity, event, campaign, virtual, indirect)
• Visibility Management (metrics, key performance indicators (KPI), reporting, dashboard)
• Decision Management (criteria, qualifying, performance, thresholds, and alarms)
• Tools and Systems

Develop Agile Teams

• Teams – personnel, geography, industry vertical, products
• Sizing Teams – revenue, product complexity, sales cycle length, product development stage
• Iteration Management – empowerment, cross functionality, accountability, sponsorship

Sales Process Planning

• Iteration Management – scheduling, benchmarks
• Lead Generation – activity, event, virtual, indirect
• Sales Cycle – stage, weighting, pipeline, forecast
• Visibility Management
• Decision Management

In my next Blog, I will go into detail on the structure of the agile teams.

AgileSALES empowers sales teams to quickly measure and improve sales performance while improving forecasting accuracy. We accomplish this by:

• Transforming traditional sales and marketing silos to highly informed and collectively accountable customer teams, by applying proven and tested AgileSALES Principles.
• Manage sales activities tighter, by applying iteration scheduling and management, into a dynamic sales process. The team works together to establish plans and goals for each iteration, which is aimed at 1) increasing Sales, 2) compressing the Sales Cycle, and 3) improving Forecast Accuracy.
• Provide sales information to the team that allows for improvement and impact on the results. You accomplished this by collecting the metrics of sales activities and key performance indicators (KPI). The team can now focus on those associated metrics most important to impacting the results. The key here is to assemble this information into one centralized place, correlated in an intuitive format, which can be monitored in “real-time”.

Becoming Agile

First conduct an assessment to develop a baseline. From this assessment an agile sales plan can be developed to establish agile teams, processes, and tools. The baseline will also produce your starting benchmarks to measure from.

Where to Start!

To maximize the benefits of sales agility, a company must take a holistic view of its overall sales process. Assess your current sales plans, processes, lead generation activities and capabilities of your sales systems and tools. The following is an “at-a glance” view of areas to assess.

Sales and Marketing Plans

• Review for completeness and best practices
• Identify areas that are working well and what is needed for improvement and/or development.

Activity Effectiveness

• Review lead development and virtual marketing, and establish ROI’s for baseline
• Review sales forecast, sales cycle length, customer lifetime value, conversion ratios and customer satisfaction
• Review key company specific performance benchmarks

Systems Capabilities

• Review and define existing system and tool function capability
• Produce a Systems and Tools Gap Analysis

Now you’re ready to start developing an agile sales plan. I will address this in my next Blog.

Bigger or more complicated is not always better. This is especial true in today’s market where “time” is the deciding factor and there is NO special sauce. To help understand the “dynamics” of the agile process, I first need to discuss the fallacies of the traditional mindset of the “Pipeline Funnel”, as it pertains to today’s market of empowered buyers. This is especial true for B2B sales and with many B2C sales types, too.

We are all familiar with the traditional sales funnels (top down) concept. This was an excellent approach when potential customers where “in the dark”, and your primary means of reaching them was “Push” type marketing. This top down concept was very successful when the majority of interested buyers were in fact, unfamiliar with your products and needed your help in accessing information and being “sold”. This type of systematic sales approach was a given back then. Those Suspects were in fact, easily identified, qualified, and labeled with somewhat great predictability. Those days have passed. Today the empowered buyer can and does enter your sales process anywhere. They may know more about your product than some of your own personnel. Your website, the internet and social networking has made this knowledge readily available and is a driving factor in why adopting agility is so important to compete in today’s market.

Today’s “sales funnel” is flattened. A potential customer can enter anywhere along your sales cycle. If “time” is a deciding factor, you risk losing that customer by delaying their access to specific resources in your organization, because of sales cycle formality. Remember, today’s empowered buyer not only knows about your product, but also knows about your competitors product and you can be sure that most them have an alternative in mind, even before they contact you.

So how do you manage the flattened sales funnel? With two incredibly powerful resources you already have. Modify your existing sales process to a dynamic one, and build cross functional sales teams. A dynamic sales process will provide the needed awareness for proactive management and the cross functional sales teams will provide the instantaneous response to a customer’s needs, regardless of where they are in the sales cycle.