Agile Business Development

A nephew of mine recently joined the Air Force and selected bomb demolition as his occupation. One of the trickier munitions he learned to defuse was based on smart weapons technology. These munitions are delivered to the vicinity of a target via a missile or other delivery vehicle, then smaller sub ordinances are released which perform the actual target sighting as well calculating aim points for maximal kill effect. This led me to think about an analogy with selling - how marketing organizations create programs to identify suspects then drop sales people in to engage with these potential customers, much in the same way that the missile gets the smart munitions into the battlefield for engagement with the suspected targets.

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What makes the better choice?

Think about it…the last time you purchased a big ticket item what did you do? If you are like me you check product reviews before making a purchase. Why? Well for me, a lot of products look very similar, at least in the way they are positioned and marketed. So in the shopping process I’m not really looking the buy the superior product, I’m looking to buy a problem free product - the “better” product.

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An agile methodology promotes processes that are structured, adaptive and reiterative, and encourages self-organization, teamwork and accountability. This makes agile methods well suited to use in sales organizations where the ability to adapt to quickly changing customer requirements and dynamic competitive environments is critical to effectively deploying and optimizing human resources to achieve financial targets on a daily basis.

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If you had asked me this question when I started my sales career, I would have answered definitely proactive. Every sales seminar I attended, every book I read, and every training tape I listened to instructed me to take charge of the selling process. All of the closing techniques from the tried and true to the more recent seemed to assume two things: That buyers tended to follow a fairly standard series of buying steps, and that I could impose a process of my own on the buyer to influence the timing and outcome of that process. What I have found in practice is that firstly all buyers do not buy the same way, and secondly buyers resist and detest you hijacking their processes! Additionally, many of the old and true sales techniques break down when there are multiple buyers in the process which is typical in high-value or enterprise purchases. (more…)

In my posts on Making Sales Agile I discussed the concept of how one might optimally map an Agile framework onto a sales process. In agile development, a Release is a set of functionality that is delivered usually in a series of Sprints. In the context of agile sales, I proposed that the Release is the revenue the sales team “delivers” at the end of a series of sales Sprints.

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In a previous blog post I covered a concept of applying agile methodologies to the business development process (http://agilebizdev.com/agile-business-development). In this post I wanted to begin focus down to the tail of the business development process, closing sales, and look at how one might optimally map an agile framework onto this part of the marketing process.  The idea would be to bring the sales team into an agile framework much in the same way as software development teams operate in frameworks such as Scrum. The goal of this would be to gain more control and visibility over the sales organization and process so that is can be better managed to deliver more accurate sales results.

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