The best aspects of human and digital customer contacts are combined in agile B2B sales operational models, which are most likely to remain popular.
The world of 24/7 consumers are increasingly reflected in the B2B purchasing landscape. Customers anticipate both digital and physical touch points, as well as precision and quickness. The COVID-19 epidemic has hastened this process, which has already caused B2B enterprises to reconsider their sales strategy. While both sellers and buyers become acclimated to remote and digital interactions, sales conditions vary dramatically and demand quick customer responsiveness.
Sales organisations have begun taking steps to become nimbler in response to shifting consumer expectations. However, misconceptions about what agile is still exist. The term "agile" refers to more than merely using test-and-learn, iterative working methods. It entails implementing a new operating model that is centred on the customer and is supported by the appropriate governance and processes.
Stable practices that offer the framework for agile teams to work rapidly and successfully underpin and enable the dynamic, quick pace of agile sales teams. This is the distinction between "doing a scrum" or acting agile, and "being agile," which involves having an operating model that offers stability while enabling sales teams to explore expansion prospects.
5 characteristics of agile sales
Being adept at traditional concepts of "sales excellence" does not imply that the sales team is necessarily agile. Think of the software company whose local sales teams were responsible for defining precise, granular goals, while the global business divisions prioritised other market segments and led innovation without consulting the local market. Although the account managers used best practices in sales, they did not collaborate with other departments to develop customer-specific value propositions for complicated agreements. Once a month, sales leaders met to discuss opportunities in the pipeline, but by the time support arrived, the clients had left. Sales managers provided clear top-down guidance but did not devote much time to coaching. There were clearly defined regions, but new clients and business prospects were rarely redistributed, resulting in coverage models that had nothing to do with potential or abilities. Everyone was also advised to "please keep the CRM up-to-date," only to see that the information there was never actually used.
Based on these findings we have discovered that the top B2B sales organisations have five characteristics that define true agility:
The sales organisation's shared goal
A network of digitally equipped and empowered sales teams
Decisions that are made quickly and dynamically
Dynamic personnel enable the development of customer-focused sales abilities
Technology that will enable the future
“Agile sales organisations constantly prioritise deals
and accounts and make swift investment decisions.”
An agile sales operational model is made up of a set of both stable and flexible practices that are shared by all of these trademarks. When the ten dynamic practices are put into place, the seven stable practices keep the business from degenerating into chaos.
For instance, agile sales organisations constantly prioritise deals and accounts and make swift investment decisions. However, this only works if a cross-functional team has created a clear, detailed growth plan and has a shared understanding of how to win each sort of consumer. Similar to how quick decision-making between local sales and global business units requires a solid sales pipeline-management methodology that both of them use (short-cycled pipeline management), so does quick resource reallocation between them.
A network of sales personnel with the authority to act is supported by digital capabilities.
The second trademark—a network of empowered sales teams supported by digital capabilities—will be examined in more detail in this piece to further illustrate the relationship between dynamic and stable practices.
This comprises of two reliable practices: a world-class centre of sales excellence and industry-focused expert marketing teams, both of which are supported by three dynamic practices: key-account management, inside-sales teams, and e-commerce engines.
Dynamic Methods
Key-account customer squads are beginning to take the place of conventional key-account teams in agile businesses. These teams are tasked with serving a certain group of clients. A cross-functional agile team called the squad provides all aspects of customer support, from the first point of contact to the aftersales care. Customer service personnel communicate with each member of the squad directly, and the key-account manager, who is also a member of the squad, works with the other members each day in a quick stand-up meeting to establish the priorities for enhancing customer satisfaction.
Additionally, the team includes committed experts who provide the necessary operational or content expertise—that crucial human interaction required when a B2B customer has consumed all of the information available on digital channels. Gaining a customer's business requires delivering the appropriate expertise at the appropriate point in the process. When arranged in agile teams around collections of significant clients, other operations like legal, quality, and sales support also become genuinely customer centric.
A financial institution radically revamped its strategy to going to market, forming agile teams based on consumer segments. It established cross-functional agile teams with around ten of its largest clients and about two account managers for each team. Co-located team members possessed all the necessary abilities to provide a client service (such as IT networking skills).
In order to particularly call for more cross-functional collaboration and customer-facing skills, the organisation reorganised the roles inside the agile team. Team members were requested to reapply for these new responsibilities since they were so different from the old ones, and management put a lot more focus on working as a team and maximising time with customers. Shared team incentives like net promoter scores (NPS) showed this. The agile teams also implemented agile practises, such as weekly stand-up meetings and quarterly account planning in a one-week sprint. The NPS tripled as a result of this new, customer-centric strategy, which also increased employee engagement and cut staff expenditures.
Inside sales are increasingly being credited with driving growth for medium and small accounts. Inside sales are nothing new in and of themselves, especially in B2C, but the rise in B2B meshes with firms' goals to become more adaptable in pursuing evolving and specific development possibilities. Inside-sales teams spend a lot more time talking to prospective customers than field reps do, who typically lose a lot of time travelling to see old clients.
“The NPS tripled as a result of this new, customer-centric strategy, which
also increased employee engagement and cut staff expenditures.”
Inside sales are now supported by chat and mobile app features, as well as sophisticated analytics programs that aid in locating, sorting, and converting opportunities. In lieu of face-to-face interaction, this satisfies customers' preferences for speed and accuracy. Agile rituals such as daily stand-ups and maintaining a backlog of user-journey enhancement sprints also consistently help boost customer happiness. Also, employee engagement—a basic element of agile—helps firms attract talent to staff these inside-sales units. In contrast, sales assistance and phone agents in dispersed sales offices, where the reps on the street are the local heroes, receive less managerial attention. For instance, a company that sells power equipment combined internal sales and customer support from 17 different sites into a single centre under senior management. This enabled it to achieve 9 percent growth, boost NPS, and more than 10% cost reduction.
Finally, any business that wants to be responsive and customer-focused needs to have an omnichannel strategy that includes a powerful e-commerce engine. For example, on-site installers are no longer content with simply emailing a sales rep with an order; they want to buy via an app and then chat with technical experts online as they work. Over the past three years, B2B customers' desire to talk to a sales rep rather than interact digitally has decreased by half, and more than half of B2B buyers prefer online channels2. Through a dedicated customer site, e-commerce also offers customers more clarity on delivery status, which can prevent tedious back-and-forth phone calls and unpleasant surprises when things come unexpectedly.
Inside sales and e-commerce both have the same dual goals of increasing sales productivity and improving client response and satisfaction. Compared to conventional go-to-market models based on a field sales team visiting customers one by one, both channels can be operated at much lower costs.
Stable Methods
Companies need to ensure that there is a solid foundation that both supports and enables these dynamic ways to drive growth through an agile operational model.
Analytics-based sales growth has been made possible by digital technologies, but this requires specialised expertise stationed in centres of excellence (COEs). COEs, or "sales innovation garages," as they are frequently referred to, play a crucial role in helping local sales teams become more flexible. They accomplish this by keeping a use-case road map and co-creating digital solutions with sales.
When at their finest, COEs offer:
1. Insights. For local sales teams, advanced analytics may provide insightful data in areas like lead scoring, cross-selling, spotting white spots, preventing churn, dynamic pricing, and more. COEs not only produce ground-breaking insights but also the user-friendly digital tools that communicate these findings to the sales staff.
2. Guidance. COEs can challenge the presumptions of sales teams and give them more insight into how they stack up against competitors. They provide an unbiased opinion on potential development areas and whether a quick reallocation of resources is necessary. In a similar vein, the COE is crucial in determining quotas. Advanced market analytics created in a COE, for instance, can indicate that resources need to be transferred from one market to another. Local markets are unlikely to deliver these insights to global sales leaders. Likewise, COE insights can assist in providing global sales leaders with a better handle on price, with transparent information on current pricing behaviour and market potential. The correct balance between centralization and decentralisation can be achieved by utilising COEs to break organisational bottlenecks.
3. Talent. Local sales organisations generally lack the skill set needed for digital and analytics initiatives. By integrating them into a team of like-minded coworkers and providing career opportunities with a company-wide impact, COEs can recruit and develop the right people—again, something local sales teams cannot do.
4. Precise Procedures. By supporting short-cycled pipeline management—another of the five characteristics of really agile enterprises—COEs can significantly increase the agility of complex businesses with global business units and local sales teams in day-to-day operations. When done correctly, pipeline management brings together local and international teams for virtual stand-ups, where everyone shares access to the same dashboards and makes decisions on how to take advantage of the pipeline's upcoming lucrative prospects.
The capacity to tap into sector expertise is the other reliable technique sales organisations require. This benefits sales representatives who may service clients from a variety of industries within their territory and enables them to consult with specialists who have in-depth knowledge of the challenges and most recent advancements in a certain sector. This becomes more crucial as businesses switch from selling products to selling solutions.
These "vertical" experts, as they are also known, are frequently new positions with competencies that the organisation does not currently have. If the workload justifies it, they can be a member of the key-account squads already described, but more often than not, they serve as the leader of industry-segment tribes and provide support to numerous teams, even those handling smaller accounts. They also include tools for solution setup, customer-value calculators, and off-the-shelf value propositions for the specific market sector in the strong foundation they offer. Of course, they also link to the client as and when needed.
A multinational semiconductor manufacturer became aware of the growing commoditization in the markets for its components. Customers of the company, as well as sales managers, had a
difficult time comprehending how the technical performance of each component individually and collectively could result in various advantages in particular system applications. The business formed centralised application-segment teams to assist these sales managers in adapting their strategy to certain application domains. Technical application system engineers and segment marketers made up these teams. Together, they developed integrated systems for particular application fields, described the value proposition in terms of application advantages for end users, and made sure product road maps were evaluated against segment trends.
Sales representatives were able to convey an entirely new tale whether speaking with makers of automotive lighting, e-bikes, phone adaptors, or server power systems while still selling from the same pool of components thanks to the technique, which made them considerably more dynamic in their sales approach. While this was going on, the application-segment experts made sure that sales representatives were informed of the most recent trends and advancements so they could quickly update customer offerings as needed. Sales representatives may now use customised, application-specific value propositions and customer-value calculators to tap into underserved markets, which is accelerating the company's expansion.
Traditional sales excellence might not be enough anymore, especially when sales leaders deal with the effects of COVID-19. It's time to update our sales strategies and build agile go-to-market strategies that satisfy and even exceed the demands of B2B customers whose needs are always changing.
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