How to Make Your Sales Team More Agile

Agile methodology  offers a specific set of foundational principles and values that aims at focusing your team’s efforts on value-added tasks. Organizations looking to nurture efficiency in their sales teams can take inspiration from the agile methodology popularized by the giant car manufacturer Toyota. How can agile practices help sales teams stay competitive in a customer-centric landscape? Adopting agile practices allows sales teams the autonomy to make decisions that will contribute to increasing the company’s revenue and growth.

Five Steps to Creating a More Agile Structure for Your Sales Team and How ShowroomHQ Can Help

1. Invest in technology

Companies that invest in sales technologies, such as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, can help their reps hit their sales targets and greatly improve the sales team’s performance and efficiency. A cloud-based CRM gives your team the flexibility to work anywhere, anytime. Leads and buyer’s accounts can be kept current and moved thru the appropriate sales funnel with records of each engagement kept on file and accessible when needed.

Finding the right technologies for your needs takes time. You’ll most likely want to see if you can do a free trials before committing. Avoid wasting time onboarding onto generic software that’s not the best fit. Instead, finding one that is built specific to your industry is the best place to start.

2. Schedule daily stand-up meetings

A daily stand-up is a daily status meeting among all team members which typically lasts about 15 minutes. Every member has to answer three important questions:

• What did you accomplish yesterday?

• What will you accomplish today?

• What is getting in your way or preventing you from doing your job?

Tip: In order to help keep the meeting brief, members are encourage to stand instead of sit.

With sales teams on the road every season, it can be hard to schedule the team’s daily stand-up so having a dashboard in your CRM is a great way for the team to keep up-to-date with past and future activities. Activities can be filtered by user or activity, everyone will be kept in the loop if there are buyer appointments and users can assign tasks to others ensuring nothing gets lost in the shuffle.

3. Embrace sprints for better decision-making

Refine and reiterate your sales process with an agile framework that evolves your team’s ability to remain flexible to changing trends and customers’ needs. When teams break sales goals into shorter segments, known as “sprints” in agile methodology, it gives them more manageable sales targets to focus on.

You can break up quarterly goals by month and then further narrow this to by bi-weekly timeframes. By working with a short time frame, teams are required to focus on what they aim to achieve, relative to their current sales targets. Realistic goal-setting techniques makes it more likely for sales reps to reach these mini-milestones which can be a great confidence booster.

4. Adapt to changing buyer behavior

It used to be that sales reps were the front line representative for sharing product information with retailers however more and more these days, buyers are flocking to online resources to discover products and to place their orders. That does not mean reps are obsolete but instead, it’s a sign that they should be utilizing other methods of showcasing their offering to their customer base. With ShowroomHQ’s online ordering module, sales agencies are able to upload the collections from multiple lines. Your buyers will be able to preview the collection anytime as well as follow up with you thru one central portal.

5. Shine a light on data

To focus on the right goals, sales team should be utilizing their CRM’s capability to gather mass data for reports and analysis. By collecting data from your customers such as their order history, you’ll be able to better predict their future buying habits. Having all that information in one central location makes it accessible and easy to shift thru the massive mountain of data  to make the best business decisions that will propel your sales team’s growth.

Why Choose ShowroomHQ

Teams that do not adopt the agile methodology are missing out on the potential benefits for their sales organization. With careful planning and commitment, teams can shift to agile sales practices to improve efficiency in their sales operation. Take the step forward and bring agility to your team by reaching out to the ShowroomHQ team to set up a demo of our fashion wholesale CRM platform.