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.

在这篇文章中,了解敏捷销售,如何发展成功的敏捷销售团队以及遵循的关键流程。

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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.

其次,您的客户与众不同。很少有人有耐心或渴望通过严格的销售过程而被迫。现在,他们可以自学 - 如果您的代表让他们回答有关他们可以在线学习或不会为研究过程增加任何价值的问题的清单,他们将很快失去兴趣。

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.

使用此框架时,工作将组织成“冲刺”。冲刺通常持续一到两周,并具有特定的目标。

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. 他们昨天取得了什么成就
  2. 他们今天要做什么
  3. 他们面临的任何障碍

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

如何实施敏捷销售

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.

敏捷的销售策略以实施敏捷销售

Agile Sales Tactics

1.冲刺

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

站立对任何合作的小组都有帮助:

  • ABM团队
  • 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.

站立绝对可以提高一致性和问责制(此外,它们使您的团队更像是一个团队。)

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.

或者,您是销售经理,您想将团队的平均合同价值加倍 - 但这似乎是一项巨大的壮举。

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.

换句话说,您需要每月出售7,000美元。但是您知道几个月更好 - 第一季度往往很大,而六月,七月和八月很慢。考虑到这一点,您可以创建此时间表:

January:$8,000

February:$ 7,500

March:$ 8,500

April:$6,000

May:$6,000

June:$ 5,000

七月:$ 5,000

August:$ 5,000

September:$9,000

十月:$ 7,500

十一月:$8,000

十二月:$9,000

(如果您进行数学数,这将达到84,500美元。坐垫总是很好!)

既然您已经将自己的主要目标分为每月的目标,那么在P俱乐部的资格似乎更为可行。

销售经理,使用此框架来指导您的代表的目标设定过程。首先,找出他们的“天空中的馅饼”目标。他们今年想完成什么?然后,与他们一起创建具有里程碑的时间表。

4. A Flexible Strategy

灵活性和迭代是敏捷销售的基础。这意味着实时对新数据和信息进行实时反应,并根据需要进行调整。

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.

  • 选项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.
  • 选项2:创建一个battlecard,帮助销售人员职位n 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:

  • 市场/行业变革
  • 新立法
  • Product updates and launches
  • Company-wide strategic shifts
  • 领导的变化

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

没有真理制度,很难让销售人员负责。(如果您是代表,也是如此:如果您不跟踪,如何分析进度?)

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.”

有几种方法可以实施这一点:

  • 如果没有登录CRM,请不要计算活动目标的电子邮件,呼叫或演示
  • 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.数据

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.

不同的指标对不同情况和目标很重要。也许您会审查上一季度,并意识到您的资格和发现电话之间会有巨大的影响。在与您的经理收听一些电话录音后,您确定了两个问题:

  • 你说的太多了
  • 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%)

请注意,您在短时间内专注于这些指标(本质上是冲刺)。您可以轻松管理这些特定指标,并在月底评估您的进度。

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

如果您本月有一个特定的目标 - 例如让销售人员更快地跟进 - 您也将集中在平均寄托响应时间上。

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

7.审查

每次冲刺完成后,举行审查会议,以解决冲刺,目标达到的结果以及无法实现的目标。

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

how 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 practiceaccountability。由于在特定冲刺期间需要满足特定的里程碑,因此所有相关方需要拥有自己的行动来帮助团队实现他们的目标。销售人员应掌握其实践的所有权,无论是积极的成果还是需要改进的结果,并直率地将其归类,并能够在必要时寻求帮助。

Adaptability

敏捷实践总是可以改变,因此团队需要适应能力并在出现时处理更改。因此,尽管您应该拥有一个基线框架,但该框架应该具有灵活性的余地,例如与比其他人更了解的客户或由于数据而旋转策略。

合作

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.

站立对于建立团队之间的合作非常有价值。

透明度

透明度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.

销售计划

销售计划template

最初发布于2021年11月8日下午5:00:00,更新于2021年11月9日

Topics:

Sales Management