What Is Agile Sales?

Reviewed by: Madhur Kathuria (CST, CEC, CTC, CSP-D, CSP-SM, CSP-PO, A-CSD, A-CSM, A-CSPO, CAL 1, CSD, CSM, CSPO)

Agile sales is an approach that applies agile principles to the sales environment. With agile sales operations, you can deliver value to customers faster, rapidly adapt strategies amid change, and stay ahead of the competition.

Agile frameworks transformed software development at the turn of the millennium. The success of these approaches has not gone unnoticed, and numerous disciplines have adopted them. Agile isn't just for software teams anymore.

Today, many leading companies strive to practice agile values in multiple areas of their organization, from production to human resources. Sales is proving an area where the approach is making a dramatic difference. 

One reason sales agility matters is the complete transformation in advertising and marketing in the online marketplace. With search engine optimization, social media, and the competitiveness of digital products, the landscape can transform very rapidly, and sales approaches need the flexibility agile offers to respond to these changes. In addition, the new sales environment is even more heavily data-driven than ever, and the empirical basis of agile approaches makes them ideal for leveraging this data productively. 

Adopting an agile sales approach can give your team numerous benefits. It can not only continuously increase sales but also improve collaboration and alignment in your organization, leading to greater innovation and better problem-solving in your team. 

What is agile sales?

Agile sales is the application of agile principles and practices in the sales department and on sales teams. This may include leadership empowering the sales team to solve complex problems and determine how they will deliver the best value to customers and stakeholders. Sales teams may adopt the use of short sprints followed by reflective evaluations that seek to continuously improve their collaboration and processes. 

Agile is an approach based on a set of principles and values. It has many potential benefits, including increased customer satisfaction and supercharged collaboration. 

Many project and product management frameworks emphasize agility. These frameworks differ in a number of ways, but most of them utilize a few key principles. The first we've already mentioned: that small, self-organizing teams are the most effective approach to solving complex problems. 

In addition, agile approaches are empirical and fact-based, and they utilize principles that make empirical decision-making easier and more effective. The scrum framework is also based on the empirical pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Work must be visible to the entire team and stakeholders in order to inform decision-making. People have to see and inspect the work in order to understand its value and alignment with business goals. They can then use the findings of their inspection to decide whether and how to adapt future work and progress toward goals.

Benefits of agile sales

Many organizations have found that an agile sales approach offers numerous benefits for sales teams. Here are some of the key benefits that organizations might see after adopting an agile sales mindset and techniques: 

• Effectiveness: Agile approaches strive to reduce waste by eliminating any work that doesn't add value. Over time, sales teams identify wasteful processes and replace them with more productive ones.
• Adaptability: Agile sales teams are better prepared to pivot when conditions change. Consider if a competitor suddenly releases a very similar product to the one your organization is about to release, or the product development team suddenly must change the user guide for the digital product you've already been selling to customers. Agile teams can adapt and adjust in the face of change.
• Improved sales: Agile teams adapt to a changing sales environment to overcome emerging challenges and exploit new opportunities. This can increase their sales significantly over traditional sales approaches that are slow to adapt to new opportunities. 
• Better profitability: The combination of eliminating wasteful practices and improving sales can increase the profitability of your sales team, and, therefore, your company.
• Employee satisfaction: With greater focus, customer collaboration, the excitement of new challenges, and feedback, people tend to feel more satisfied working in agile teams. 
• Customer satisfaction: Agile sales is an empirical process that centers on customer feedback and interaction. By understanding customers' needs, agile sales teams can give customers solutions to their problems rather than simply selling them a product, which improves customer satisfaction. 

How to adopt agile ways of thinking in sales

It would be nice if there were a magic agile wand you could wave to instantly transform your sales team into an agile team. However, that's not the way it works. Instead, it takes effort, patience, and intention to start the journey. Here are some steps to consider taking to achieve the goal, but, of course, adapt them to the situation in your organization.

Get everyone on board

First, you have to ensure that enough people support the transition to make it work. In particular, you need to convince management to give your sales team the autonomy necessary to solve their own problems and collaborate across teams. 

Next, you need to get the team to buy in. Agile approaches only work if the team is committed to the goal of continuous improvement and is ready to work to achieve it. 

Train people in the strategy

Anything new can be intimidating for people. When people are intimidated, they are more likely to expect it to fail, make it fail, and feel justified in their initial skepticism. 

Adequate training before implementing the strategy transforms people's initial tentative buy-in into true acceptance and excitement about the new approach's possibilities. 

Put the tools in place to support collaboration

Agile approaches are data-driven, and in order to work, your agile team will need to have access to data. That means that your organization needs the tools to collect, report, and analyze sales data. Everyone's sales data needs to be visible. You also need tools to support strategies like A/B testing to allow the evaluation of different approaches. 

For this purpose, many organizations utilize CRM (customer relationship management) software, which gathers a customer's entire lifecycle—from initial sale through onboarding and into loyalty or loss—in one place. 

Professional agile training

Agile is about so much more than implementing a series of steps. It's also a mindset and a way of approaching work that must be adopted from the top down. It's not an easy feat. Experienced agile coaches and/or certification-based training can support your organization's adoption of agile methods.

Common misconceptions about agile sales

In trying to get management and your team to buy into an agile sales process, you might encounter and need to address some of these common misconceptions:

"Agile wastes a lot of time"

A common misconception is that the events in agile frameworks like scrum, including sprint planning and daily scrums, take too much time. However, these timeboxed events take up a small fraction of the overall sprint—an average of less than one hour for every 8-hour day—and they support focus and collaboration, and limit the need for meetings. 

"Agile advocates are very rulebound"

Sometimes, people think of agile frameworks as a very specific way of working and that everyone has to follow the same rules if they adopt one. However, the truth is that agile frameworks are based on the philosophy of giving teams the freedom to find what works and the ability to keep improving. Successful agile teams don't follow a single set of rules; they keep adapting as a team to improve constantly. 

"Agile is chaotic"

People also sometimes say the opposite about agile: that it's a chaotic, leaderless free-for-all that can undermine discipline and dedication. While it's true that agile supports autonomy for teams, these teams still follow guidelines and the right rules to achieve the best results for the team and the company. 

"Agile means making a lot of mistakes"

Agile is often represented as "fail fast," which makes people think that it leads to a lot of failures. However, the hard truth is that there will always be mistakes and failures in any line of complex work.

In a traditional sales configuration, the team might persist in a mistaken process for a full quarter before making an adjustment. In contrast, an agile team might make mistakes but quickly change to find a better way based on what they've learned. 

"Agile transformation delivers instant results"

Another misconception is that changing to an agile process will immediately improve your sales. However, agile is all about iterative improvement in the sales process. You will see small improvements at first, but it may take time for the improvements to become significant. The mindset shift and new practices must be given time to work. 

Agile sales in your organization

Agile sales is not a single set of rules that will instantly deliver amazing results. Instead, agile sales is a different approach that will help your process improve continuously, including giving it the flexibility necessary to deal with a constantly changing sales environment.

Discover how to adopt agile sales, from the experts

If you're ready to unlock new levels of success and increase market share, register now for Agile in Sales. This trainer-led microcredential course from Scrum Alliance will bring you through an exploration of agile sales methods, techniques, team management, and an agile sales model. You'll earn a microcredential to demonstrate your new skills.

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