Sales management presupposes dedicating oneself to a series of activities to guide, lead and monitor sales production, the productivity of sales teams; forwarding sales actions and strategies, and evaluating the results obtained.

What we call Agile Sales Management is using an approach similar to agile software development and project management methodologies to turn sales management into an iterative job.

When we talk about B2B selling, this set of activities can become tedious, cumbersome. Take up a lot of salesperson and pre-sales time filling systems, forms, spreadsheets, CRM fields.

And that is why having sales management is crucial to organize everything in your company and don’t waste more money anymore.

In this article, you will see how you can implement Agile methodologies in sales management in a company. It will give you some glimpses to think about new alternatives for increasing profits due to organizational sales management through agile methods. And GitScrum helps you with the best features for you to increase productivity in your sales team and then show off profitable results. 

How to structure sales management in companies?

Investing in the sales management of your business is essential to organize processes and, consequently, to scale sales and grow. Of course, growth will make your business more complex. Therefore, it is a necessary organization at this time.

With this in mind, we have separated 3 steps for you to sales management:

Plan yourself

Before starting to sell, it is necessary to plan. More than that, training and more training for the entire sales team.

It helps have a sales playbook so that the speech can be standard and assertive. So you can align with what the company is, believes in, and sells. It is good to have a feature like GitScrum’s Documents to document everything before you go deep and put it all into practice. 

Establish, in addition to collective goals, individual goals and make them very clear to everyone involved in the commercial operation.

Identify and choose a leader

It is critical to choose someone competent to lead the sales team. If it can be someone who is already inside the company, so much the better.

After all, of course, it will probably already be aligned with the organization’s values ​​and objectives. Then, with proper training, he/she can be a sales leader.

Prepare yourself

Having software to help manage your company’s sales is essential. With the right tool, the productivity of the sales team is increased and, consequently, costs in the sector are reduced. But that’s a topic for a little while.

4 Reasons for Adopting Agile Sales Management

When the sales cycle is over

Agile Sales makes sense for longer sales cycles whose process’s the division into several stages and requires a certain cadence

When it comes to selling solution

Solution selling, consultative selling, demands an iteration process. Agile Sales ensures that the sales PDCA is part of the sales management process.

When the company needs more process without impacting sales operations

It is sometimes difficult to bring managers and salespeople together in a room; beat pipeline, fill in CRM, spreadsheets, forms. An Agile Selling approach allows you to prioritize, focus and avoid wasting time on activities that could be left for a second moment, a next sprint.

When the sales manager has difficulty keeping up with sales productivity or the most important opportunities for the company

Looking at a sales Kanban, in an Agile approach, is enough for top management and sales managers to understand the status of the Customer Management, Opportunity Management, and Sales Forecast sprints. And together: priorities, TO DO, DOING, DONE, and impediments. Information is more shared and action is more collaborative.

How to implement Agile Methodology in sales?

Sales management based on Agile Methodology gives the sector the agility and flexibility necessary to face the complexity of the market. Among the main gains provided by the Agile Methodology in the sales area are:

Greater sales governance
Cost reduction
Sales cycle reduction
Productivity increase
Improved internal communication
Continuous improvement in processes

Here is you will find five steps to implement agile in sales management:

Define teams and assignments

Within Scrum, one of the most important steps is the definition of teams. In a company, traditionally, we find employees separated by departments: marketing, finance, technology, and so on. The teams proposed in Agile change this structure, betting on multidisciplinarity.

By covering all stages and information of a project, Scrum teams are empowered to make internal decisions, without the need to escalate or bureaucratize problem-solving. Use GitScrum’s Boards to organize all sales team members’ tasks and get to know what to do next.

In addition, it is important to choose the Scrum team who will be the professionals responsible for planning tasks and for conducting the Agile process.

These roles are called Product Owner and Scrum Master, respectively, and are performed by the customer and the project leader. In sales, both roles can be played by team managers.

Define the work cycle

In classic sales management approaches, it is common for the final objective to be placed as a single monthly or annual billing goal. From this perspective, the intermediate tasks necessary to reach the final goal are often neglected.

The Agile Methodology proposes to establish shorter work cycles and break the final objective into smaller deliverables, to complete within this cycle.

You can, for example, establish one-week GitScrum Sprints to determine how many new leads should be generated, how many effective contacts should be reached, and how many meetings should be held.

This strategy also helps to motivate the team, as the professionals will have faster goals to reach and, thus, will be able to see the results of their work more often.

Define the tasks performance in the work cycle

With the work cycle and the team defined, the next step is to establish the tasks that should be delivered throughout the Sprint.

In Scrum, this task list is called the Backlog. There is the Sprint Backlog, which is the list of tasks to be completed throughout the Sprint, and the Product Backlog, which are the tasks that must be delivered at the end of the project.

Hold daily follow-up meetings

The daily monitoring of tasks by the entire team is one of the premises of the Agile Methodology and the Scrum model.

The team involved in the project must meet daily. It doesn’t have to be long meetings. On the contrary, the idea is that the daily meeting is quick.

It can be at the beginning of the end of the day. The idea is for each member of the team to report what they did, what they will do next, and if they have a problem or difficulty in performing a task.

In these meetings, goals, and deadlines can be adjusted according to actual progress. Remember: flexibility is one of the key points of this methodology.

Hold meetings at the end of each Sprint to evaluate the cycle

In addition to the daily meetings, the team must also meet at the end of each Sprint, that is, each work cycle.

In this meeting, longer than the daily meetings, the objective is to evaluate the main problems. What flowed more easily, and how the process can be optimized in the future.

In Agile Methodology, there is a constant search for process optimization, so feedback and evaluation of results are of great importance.

Make your sales team more agile

Making the onboarding of new salespeople more agile is a strategy for the company’s results to come with greater speed and constancy, including avoiding falls during periods of team renewal.

Therefore, betting on the Agile Methodology in sales with this objective can be extremely advantageous for the business.

Agile onboarding needs to perform with collaboration, frequent analysis, and involvement of leaders from different areas.

GitScrum supports your team to better results and effective deliveries!

Set your workflow and board to guide your Agile team, assign Tasks, Subtasks and keep in charge of the whole process evolvements. Allow your Agile team to collaborate.