Developing an Agile Sales Approach

This article was co-authored with my good friend and former colleague, Nick Bennett.

Virtually all businesses recognise that the pace of change, driven by the digital economy is affecting the entire commercial ecosystem. However, many have failed to adapt their organisational structures or processes sufficiently well to stay competitive. Sales is an area ripe for a more flexible and human-centred approach. Traditionally, sales teams have been tightly managed, rewarded individually and incentivised through fear (either directly or indirectly). This leads to a breakdown of the conditions required for collective learning and improvement, despite the fact that a formalised collaborative approach has been shown to positively impact on commercial goal attainment.

Sales is normally characterised by a high fail rate, and so a fail-fast approach can help teams to focus their limited resources more effectively, and to respond to new information effectively. At the same time, by breaking the sales process down into sprints it is possible to adapt it iteratively over time, to continually evolve best-practice. Successful teams spend a disproportionate amount of time discussing mutual goals and are well skilled at evaluating and feeding back on their collective performance. This is the key to highly effective decision-making. By defining the purpose of that team true alignment and a sense of meaning and significance for its members can be achieved.

This foundation, in turn, supports all the other positive team characteristics including clarity of roles and responsibilities, processes, shared values and accountability towards results. The following is our attempt at designing an approach to help teams define their own purpose and to self-organise around shared goals. It aims to enable a transparent, reflective process and to support decentralised decision making. We will expand on the theory that underpins the model and share some of the insights we gathered when testing it. We will also share our thoughts on how it might be iterated, based on this experience.

In order to help the team define and act upon more targeted activities, we created several clusters of sub-teams. These clusters were formed around shared goals that targeted specific customer behaviours they were trying to influence. The customer behaviours we sought to affect were always downstream from the end revenue, focussing instead on the actions that were within the direct control of the team to influence. This allowed us to form as one unit with a shared purpose when necessary but harness the power of small teams to be more productive.

We then focussed on designing a rhythm that would allow the team to collectively share both failures and successes. The rhythm needed to be flexible enough to allow the team to pivot toward activities that had the biggest impact. This ability to pivot required both structural flexibility, in terms of the underlying sales process, but more importantly, the capability for the team to be truly reflective. This, in turn, needed the sense of psychological safety within the group to be nurtured and maintained, and for them to remain connected to the ambitious commercial goals they needed to achieve.

Rather than rigidly define the process upfront, we built on the foundations of purpose and culture workshops and slowly allowed the group to develop other concepts such as feedback, goal setting and the team rhythm. We certainly provided some structure and left a few signposts along the way, to help guide the team forward, but ultimately we sought to tightly define the desired outcome, rather than the means to achieve it. The biggest inputs we provided were context, theory, enthusiasm and lots of emotional support to the team, as they challenged their sense of individual and collective identity.

Creating new habits and making them stick is one of the greatest challenges we face. The initial excitement that came with the self-definition of team purpose gradually faded. At this stage getting behaviours to stick seemed like the real challenge. We discovered that slowing the pace of change and bedding-in consistency, before seeking to improve and iterate further, was the key to maintaining buy-in and momentum. This combined with ownership of different parts the process being spread across the team, really helped us move forward and realise the progress we’d aspired to make.

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