Agile Sales! Is that a Thing?
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The document outlines a transformation within a geographically distributed sales and marketing team utilizing lean and scrum methodologies to improve workflow and responsiveness. It details the challenges faced, such as prioritization issues and communication inefficiencies, and introduces a new process with tiered backlogs, enabling better collaboration and customer involvement. The benefits include improved understanding of priorities, reduced reporting overhead, and enhanced agility in responding to market changes.
Agile Sales! Is that a Thing?
- 1. thi ng? at a ltant s th Consu s! I Sale Managing Agile e – Sr. rt a 12 Kurt Sol th May 20 d say 30 W edne
- 2. Agenda 1 Description of the team and environment 2 Description of principles and process 3 Benefits achieved & view of the dashboards 4 Questions 2 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 3. The Team Pre-sales or Sales Support Staff •Responsibilities: • Assist with sales opportunities as they arise • Assist with creation of Marketing Materials • Assist with client issues as they arise •Geographically distributed across 9 countries Management •Responsibilities • Set priorities for accounts and additional work • Monitor team’s ‘doneness’ • Report to upper management on time and status •Located in US & Europe 3 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 4. The Customers Marketing •Who in marketing?: • World Wide Marketing Organisation for the brand • Local country or geo marketing groups • Industry or sector marketing leads •Geographically distributed in over 60 countries Sales •Who in sales? • World Wide Sales Executives • Local Sales Executives • Local sales and pre-sales teams •Sales presence in over 130 countries 4 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 5. The Original Environment / Issues • Team was ‘slave to many masters’ • Inability to properly understand priority or scope • ‘Biggest Fish’ prioritisation the largest account or opportunity always won • Inability to change priorities fast enough • Management spent too many hours attempting to get ‘status’ • Attempting to call/email status across time zones • Attempting to manage dependencies across the team & time zones • Inability to efficiently plan and manage different types of work • Forecasted long range work like marketing materials (ie blogs & articles) • Immediate reactive work like client issues and sales opportunities 5 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 6. Agenda 1 Description of team and environment 2 Description of principles and process 3 Benefits achieved & view of the dashboards 4 Questions 6 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 7. The Basis for a New Way Forward Lean / Kanban Principles •Move to Pull Method of working •Limit work-in-progress •Use a unified taskboard/dashboard Scrum Principles •Work in timeboxed fashion (sprints) •Use a unified taskboard/dashboard •Retrospectives 7 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 8. The New Process The Backlogs •Three tiers of backlogs are kept: • The ‘Team backlog’ functions similar to a product backlog • The ‘Quarterly backlog’ functions similar to a release backlog • The ‘Monthly backlog’ functions as the sprint backlog •Managing the backlogs: • Planned & Prioritised using virtual planning meetings across global team • Worked using Scrum of Scrums across distributed teams Work on the backlogs •Epics &Stories used for ‘Visioned’ work: • Epics used for Market Themes • Stories used for enablement actions (blog posts, articles, whitepapers, etc) •Sales Opps & Tasks used for ‘Reactive’ work(similar to defects): • Sales Opps used for special sales opportunities that arise and need work • Tasks are used to decompose a Sales Opps across team members 8 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 9. Agenda 1 Description of team and environment 2 Description of principles and process 3 Benefits achieved & view of the dashboards 4 Questions 9 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 10. End-User Customer Benefits Giving a Method to the Madness •Customers become part of the planning: • Instead of just logging a request and waiting to see what happens. • Forces customers to see the impact of their request on the greater team. •All ‘Customers’ understand rank and progress : • Helps foster understanding of why/when work gets done. • Keeps politicing and ‘horse-trading’ out in the open, obvious to everyone. Ability to ‘BE’ agile •Ability to change and respond to market: • Seeing what is WIP, allows customers to more ‘logically’ change their mind. • Looking over backlogs and completed items helps identify market trends. •Ability to see understand change impacts in real-time: • Highlights the impacts between marketing changes and sales requests. • Instant understanding of impact a reactive item has on planned items. 10 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 11. Team Member Benefits Giving a Method to the Madness •True understanding of priority: • No matter how urgent or how important one customer makes it sound….. • Offers cover to team when politics enter the mix. •The Ability to work and organise across a global team: • Streamlines collaboration and teaming across shared tasks. • Allows grouping and trending of tasks, world wide. Reduction of Reporting Overhead •Better view of Doneness: • Ability to link and create dependencies on related tasks. • A more complete view of all related tasks, and their completeness. •Running off of real-time live data: • Complete removal of data collection activities (took over 24 hrs across time zones). • Complete removal of report creation, validation, and emailing. 11 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 12. Taskboard View 12 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 13. Planning View 13 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 14. Dashboards 14 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 15. Individual Active Status Report 15 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 16. Monthly Operational Reports (MOR) 16 © 2012 IBM Corporation
- 17. 17 © 2012 IBM Corporation
Editor's Notes
- #3: 5 mins: Intro and description of the team and environment. 5 mins: Description of process and principles, including how they were adopted by the sales team. 5 mins: How dashboards, reports, and prioritisation are managed & Outlay of the benefits achieved and how they were measured (and reported to management). 5 mins: Questions
- #6: Team is very reactive to the loudest screamers Always sucked into Large Sales opps, neglecting marketing and enablement
- #9: Reactive: Presales Request Large opps Forcasting: Iteration monthly based on MORs (Monthly Operational Reports) Release Quarterly Epic/Stories on Market enablement (blog posts, enblement material, aticles, trainings) Backlogs: Team Monthly Quarterly
- #11: Scrum of Scrums, distributed Tags used to reports from granular to highlevel - replaced Powerpoint Actual running live data,
- #12: Scrum of Scrums, distributed Tags used to reports from granular to highlevel - replaced Powerpoint Actual running live data,