Saturday, October 26, 2013

Scrum Selling - The new way of selling

How many times we have made sales plan and kept at it for months, without knowing where it is going? and often mistakenly calling it as "perseverance" or telling oneself  "Well, it does take time, so let us not change direction". Running a plan for 6 to 12 months and then saying "We have tried everything and it doesn't seem to be working", and ending up blaming the market or the product/service or delivery organization or something else, this isn't the way sales process should be structured.

How about making sales process a little more agile/nimble in nature, how about implementing Scrum agile principles in selling and see how that works, well that is exactly what I have been trying for some time now. I can tell you first hand that it works. Here is the mapping of Scrum Agile to what I call "Scrum Selling"



  1. Form a Scrum team of not more than 5 people, typical combination will be one sales executive, 2 lead generators, 1 or 2 contact collectors. 
  2. List down all your campaigns (a typical campaign includes details like, industry you are targeting, service/product you are planning to sell, target audience (designations), target companies, your differentiator, email pitch and voice-mail pitch) - This becomes your campaign backlog.
  3. Define your sprint cycle time, typically 2 weeks, first day of the sprint you basically do your planning, and everyday the team meets (scrum meeting) to share success/rejection stories, innovative idea for sourcing leads, prospect's reaction to your messages etc. This meeting takes about 20 minutes or so.
  4. At the end of the sprint, do a retrospect, if required tweak your pitch, your preso, get an understanding of the market based on all your conversations with prospects and align your approach accordingly. 
  5. Prioritize your campaign list based on how things are evolving on the sales side, repeat the process.
Sales plans are effective when you infuse the learning from the market (learning from prospects, partners, competitors, subject matter experts) into your outreach campaign and the best way to do is "Scrum Selling", the process is so nimble, that you can accommodate your day to day learning into your execution plan unlike the conventional model.

So wanna try this for few weeks? let me know your thoughts on this.

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