Scrum in Sales

Daily Stand-up: Because sales people are often on the road or are remotely located, many teams struggle to find a time for everyone to meet. It is the job of the Scrum Master to coordinate the team using whatever tools necessary and convey to the Team that meeting everyday and discussing Impediments can increase Team performance. By communicating with the other sales people, the Team can leverage the Team’s entire knowledge base for every lead. This can have a major impact on the number of leads that turn in to sales.

Refinement: During each Sprint, a cold lead can turn warm or even into a sale. It is important that the Product Owner stays in touch with the Team during the Sprint so she can up-date the Backlog accordingly. This will make Sprint Planning easier.

Sprint Retrospective: In Scrum, the Retrospective is the fundamental ritual that allows the Team to inspect and adapt. In sales the Retrospective is particularly powerful. Implementing Scrum is a challenge. Once the Team has accepted the cultural change and has started to build some experience with the Scrum framework, it is important for the Scrum Master to convey that Scrum is more than just a way to organize, it’s a philosophy of Continuous Improvement. Every Retrospective needs to produce a Kaizen or top improvement for the next Sprint. Over time, the Kaizens should build and have a positive impact on the Team’s Velocity, or how quickly a lead moves from cold to closed.

As the slide above shows, leads are usually listed vertically down the board in order of priority, and rather than one work in process (WIP) column, on sales boards there are multiple columns across the horizontal axis for each step in the sales process. Leads are moved to the far right “done” column only when a sale has been closed or the lead has proven fruitless.

The transparency created by posting all sales leads and their status helps the team to see what leads are struggling to move toward the done column. This allows the Team swarm on sales when they start to wither. As a sales team gets more experienced working the Scrum Board, patterns usually start to emerge. In the case study attached bellow, the team was able to figure out how many cold calls it would take to move a lead from cold to warm. In turn, they then were able to see what sales activities would move a warm lead to a hot lead or a sale. By tracking leads on a Scrum board and discussing what worked and what didn’t every week, the sales process became transparent. The Team was then was able to discern patterns in sales activities and apply metrics, allowing them to better predict the outcome of any lead. For the Team in the case study, this lead to a 50% jump in sales.

A Team might want to set up an acceptance test like, “any lead that doesn’t move at least 3 steps through the sales process by mid-Sprint should be abandoned.” This allows Teams to spend more time on leads that have a higher probability of closing. This is how the Team improves sales as entire unit. Improving individual performance is a fool’s errand, improving the Team is a much easier prospect.

Scrum in Sales seeks to leverage the collective knowledge of the Team to the benefit of the organization. For this reason, compensation needs to be based on Team wide incentives. This is a huge cultural shift for sales people who believe they have an intrinsic gift for getting customers excited about a product. But once the sales process is made transparent, it becomes obvious that by sharing contacts, leads and techniques both the organization and the individual Team members will benefit financially from an overall increase in sales. Whatever incentive program management decides on needs to be designed to raise all boats.

Implementing Scrum outside of its traditional role is relatively new. Organizations are just now pioneering new ways to use Scrum. However, since Scrum is based on Continuous Improvement and adaptation, it is well suited for most applications. The important thing to remember is that when first adapting Scrum, Teams need to be rigorous in their practices. First-time Teams tend to cherry-pick the Scrum process to fit their old way of doing things. This leads to what is called Cowboy Scrum and doesn’t produce the same results.

Be rigorous, inspect and adapt and strive for Continuous Improvement. That is the power of Scrum.