Ever try using Scrum in Sales Teams? We have.

Evaluating Scrum

I was recently approached by one of our Sales VPs who was looking to improve operations within his sales teams. He had seen me talk about Transformation using Agile ideas and had done some research himself to learn more. He was ready to try something new.

I was excited at the opportunity to explore this idea of sales using Scrum more deeply. I’ve seen examples of many different kinds of teams doing Scrum and of course have learned that if there is a fully allocated and geographically co-located team as well as a list of work to do, that Scrum can be amazing for moving through the work. The idea of moving this from theory to reality intrigued me and I couldn’t wait to get started.

I met with my colleague and we discussed what he was looking to do. His key reasons for considering these ideas were the following. 

• Quarterly increment - Too long to discover and react to problems
• Revenue - A challenge during the pandemic so we should focus on building pipeline
• Transparency - Create coaching opportunities for the Sales Managers
• Culture shift - Create accountability, competition and challenges for the teams
• Learning - More team time gives visibility and learning opportunities from each other

I knew Scrum could help with all of these.

We brought together all of his Sales Managers and introduced the ideas to them. Most of them jumped right on board. I described the process and he started brainstorming with his Managers how to apply these ideas specifically to the teams within the Scrum framework. I was there to help as they came up with different ideas.

I introduced the concept of 3-5-3 Scrum to the group. This concept represents 3 roles, 5 events and 3 artifacts. These are all elements that are required to be defined and present when executing a good basic Scrum process. After discussing with the larger group, here was how we laid it out initially.

3 Roles

• Product Owner - Our VP will be helping everyone to prioritize their accounts.
• Scrum Master - The Sales Managers will help us with the process, making work visible and removing impediments.
• Team - Each of the teams in the geographic region will serve as their own team.

5 Events

• Refinement - The team comes together to discuss the work, understand prioritization and get any clarification or context they need to have. 
• Planning - The team comes together and locks in what they are going to do in the next iteration (Sprint). 
• Daily Scrum - The team comes together for fifteen minutes or less and discusses what has been done in the last day towards the Sprint commitment, what they will do in the next day towards that commitment and brings up any impediments they are having. The hope would be that the team could help one another with any problems, but if not, the Manager should try and step in to help with the problem. Instead of looking together at a burndown they have available real-time reports with metrics of pipeline, new customer calls and account plans completed to see if they are on track to deliver on the Sprint commitment. They could look at this together in the Daily Scrum meeting. 
• Sprint Review - The team comes together to look at the output of the Sprint. Was it successful?
• Retrospective - The team comes together to talk about the process. They look for ways to improve. They decided to do this every other Sprint.

3 Artifacts

• Product Backlog - Each salesperson has their own account list. This is their backlog. 
• Sprint Backlog - Taken from the Salesperson’s Product Backlog, this is their plan of which new customer calls and account plans they are going to complete within this iteration. 
• Product Increment - Completed work from the Sprint.

They (Sales) deserve a ton of credit for what they have done and for the desire to do so.

Results

The concepts were shared with each of the teams and a date was decided to get started. The teams went through the first iteration and then the second. After the first two Sprints had been completed, I met with the VP of Sales again and asked him what top 5 things that have been more successful because of these changes as well as the top 5 opportunities for improvement that had been discovered. Here is what he told me. 

Top 5 Improvements

• Accountability - With Managers empowering their people to solve their own problems and each Salesperson being able to see the work of the others on their team there was a level-up in accountability in the calls and account plans that were being created. 
• Daily Scrum - The Teams enjoyed the daily connection. This allowed them to learn from and help one another as well as pitch ideas and suggestions in a group setting. 
• Research - In order to speed up on what is being delivered in an iteration, it becomes critical to leverage the research tools that are available effectively. The teams have gotten better and better at this with each iteration.
• Planning - In order to make an effective commitment it is important to be able to plan realistically. The teams have started getting more realistic about what they intend to deliver in order to meet their promises. 
• Scaling Value - With the increased transparency each Salesperson is seeing what the others are selling and this leads to people selling more holistically and then learning from each other so everyone is doing the same. This means larger deals when they close.

Top 5 Opportunities to Improve

• Time Management - While the planning was getting more realistic it was becoming more obvious that time management was a challenge for some of the teams. Work can be done here to make them better at this skill. 
• More Team Time - The teams like spending more time together and they’d like to have even more of that time. This could also be a byproduct of the pandemic and everyone being at home full-time. 
• Prioritization - With the tightening of the timeframe from three months to two weeks, it became a challenge to work on some of the larger deals that can sometimes take years to develop. How to reserve time for these as well as move in some of the smaller deals to meet commitments takes some prioritization. There is an opportunity for improvement in this.
• Data Integrity - Bad data slows Salespeople down if they have no confidence in it. This is an area of improvement for sure. The better and cleaner data they have the faster they can move. 
• Transparency - The increased transparency has revealed coaching opportunities for the Managers as they have more visibility into the action of their people. This has led to a number of opportunities of improvement for our Salespeople as individuals.

Summary

As I write this, the Sales teams have been doing Scrum for more than three months. They continue to iterate and improve and even with the pandemic still going on, the pipeline is increasing and we have done a lot to minimize the impact on the targets we had set for the year. They deserve a ton of credit for what they have done and for the desire to do so.

We used to find problems slowly with a quarterly increment, now we are making commitments for each two week increment. That is six cycles for each one we had before! With this increase in focused execution, Managers are seeing more opportunities for coaching their talent to be even more effective. The culture is shifting and Salespeople are owning their commitments more than ever and using research, data and even one another to help accomplish their goals. 

The Managers now see their teams feeling motivated and excited to do their work. Individuals are feeling empowered to help one another and being open about successes and problems. Scrum has proven successful for the Salespeople, the Managers and their teams as well as the Organization overall.