How to Optimize the Sales Process Using Seller Agility

Sales Process Optimization Through Agility

In November 2013, the Harvard Business Review released an article titled "Dismantling the Sales Machine," challenging the traditional approach to customer engagement. The article argued that rigid sales processes were no longer effective. Instead, it proposed a sales process optimization where sellers prioritize offering flexibility, insights, and results to buyers without being confined by traditional constraints.

Over the past decade, buyers have gained unprecedented access to information about potential solutions, making them more informed and empowered. Additionally, the number of individuals involved in organizational purchase decisions has increased. According to Gartner, B2B buying groups now consist of six to ten decision-makers on average. These shifts in buyer behavior demand sales professionals to be highly adaptable and insightful to earn buyer trust and secure business deals.

However, completely abandoning sales processes in favor of unlimited flexibility is not practical. Without established standards for customer engagement, sales managers lack benchmarks for coaching and development. Moreover, allocating resources for sales support, solution definition, and legal, financial, and administrative reviews becomes challenging without clear guidelines on when and how to apply them in sales opportunities. The absence of a mechanism to assess the current state of an opportunity, which a sales process provides, makes forecasting future revenues difficult, if not impossible. Even the most skilled sales teams do not maintain consistent abilities across the entire organization. Without a repeatable framework for selling success, new and developing sellers struggle to keep up with increasingly demanding buyers.

This poses a dilemma for company leaders. How can they address the conflicting demands of buyers for highly flexible and insightful sellers, while also providing sales managers with defined standards for evaluating pipelines, opportunities, and seller performance? How can they reconcile the need for sales process discipline with the realities of modern buyer behavior?

Before approaching a sales process optimization plan, sales leaders must first understand the problems with the traditional sales process.

The Problems with Traditional Sales Process

Traditional sales processes typically outline the steps sellers take to engage buyers throughout their evaluation and purchasing journey. However, many organizations focus only on sales strategies proven to win deals, neglecting the fact that modern buyers often initiate contact with a clear idea of what they need. Buyers now conduct their research, forming their initial solution vision before even talking to sellers.

A well-designed sales process should consider the early stages of buyer evaluation. It should guide sellers in connecting with and piquing the interest of potential buyers still exploring options. Such a process should also identify specific buyer behaviors that indicate alignment between buyers and sellers at each stage of the decision-making process. The idea is that sellers and managers can measure their progress based on these observable outcomes as they guide buyers toward a solution selection. However, this traditional model assumes a linear progression, with clear milestones between each step, leading to a final decision. In reality, this approach is flawed due to several reasons:

• The complexity of sales has increased because more people are now involved in purchase evaluations. Various roles within the buying organization engage and disengage at different times during the evaluation process. Consequently, a sales opportunity may be in multiple stages simultaneously, depending on the number of stakeholders involved.

• Sales processes are not linear; they are iterative. Different stakeholders engage at different phases of the buying process, and new information emerges as the buying team interacts with solution providers. This iterative nature can result in repeated reviews and analysis, often leaving opportunities stuck in a loop, especially for complex solutions.

• Modern sales processes are shrouded in obscurity. Procurement departments are now involved earlier in the evaluation process, limiting access to people and information from solution providers. This lack of transparency is designed to minimize risks and strengthen the buyer's negotiating position, making it difficult for sellers to gauge the progress of their opportunities.

• Sales processes are not uniform. Different solutions require varying degrees of evaluation based on their importance and strategic value. Smaller, low-risk solutions may be purchased more swiftly, while significant initiatives demand a more thorough review involving a larger group of stakeholders. Most traditional sales processes fail to consider this scalability, leading to either over-engineering or under-engineering their processes, causing misalignment with buyer requirements and resulting in a poor customer experience.

• A poorly planned sales process that doesn't match how buyers behave and what they prefer has serious consequences. First, it makes it hard to see the potential sales opportunities clearly, which messes up predictions about future sales. Second, it complicates how sales resources are distributed, leading to higher sales expenses. Third, it often leads to a bad experience for buyers, putting the company at a big disadvantage compared to competitors. Most crucially, when a sales process isn't in sync with what buyers want, it increases the chances of losing deals to competitors, having the money used elsewhere, or the buyer not making any decision at all.

Developing an Agile Sales Process

How do you optimize a sales process to balance both flexibility and discipline? How do sales professionals adapt to the complexity of selling today, while still adhering to agreed-upon standards of selling excellence for their organization? Sales process optimization begins with the concept of seller agility: the ability to understand buyer status accurately and execute actions that help buyers progress toward a decision. An agile seller recognizes the iterative nature of buyer journeys and guides buyers in a way that is flexible to the needs in each opportunity. Sales agility enables sellers to focus on understanding each buyer’s critical issues, aligning with each stakeholder, co-developing a clear vision of a solution, providing value in every interaction, and guiding buyers to agreement on an optimal solution. Rather than focusing on completing recommended sales motions by stage in a defined sales process, an agile sales process blends flexibility and discipline in a unified model. The key components of the agile sales process definition include:

Focusing on Opportunity State, Not Just Stage

As mentioned before, depending on the complexity of the solution and the number of buyer stakeholders involved, different people can be in different stages at the same time in an opportunity. Therefore, an opportunity’s actual state is the condition of the stakeholder with the most significant influence and authority (i.e., “power”) in the buying decision. Often, sellers make the mistake of engaging with lower-level contacts within a buying organization and assume that their interactions represent the entire opportunity. They are then surprised when they find out that they have to repeat the process with higher-ups or wait for their initial contacts to convince the actual decision-makers. To speed up this evaluation process, sellers can analyze how the buyer's critical problems affect other stakeholders, understand how these problems are connected within the organization, and proactively engage with relevant decision-makers. This means sellers need to secure access to influential stakeholders early in the sales process. While it's essential to track individual progress within the organization as they move through different stages of evaluation, it's equally vital to keep an eye on the preferences of each person involved in the purchasing decision. Completing assigned tasks is a positive sign of progress toward a decision, but it's not the only factor determining whether someone will choose the seller's solution. Sellers need to consider a spectrum of low to high preferences for their solution among the involved individuals.

Focusing on Agility, Not Checklists

In an agile sales process model, the next best action for a seller is not a pre-defined sales motion within a stage, but one driven by assessment of objectively observable buyer behaviors. Establishing a set of clear criteria for assessing opportunity quality enables agile sellers to organize their work in opportunities into focused sprints of activity designed to advance the buyer’s journey forward. This helps sellers not only to move the opportunity forward in the buying journey but also to elevate the state of each individual in the buying team.

One example of such criteria is Opportunity Vitals, which provide scoring scales based on observable buyer behaviors in five dimensions:

1. Pain – the buyer’s critical business issue and motivation for buying

2. Power – the roles of buyer stakeholders and their relative influence and authority

3. Vision – the extent the buyer understands the most relevant differentiators of the seller’s solution

4. Value – how well the buyer understands the business impact of a potential solution

5. Consensus – the degree to which the buyer stakeholders have mitigated the financial, operational, and transitional risk, making it easy to make a decision to buy

Opportunity Vitals enable sellers to determine the quality of an opportunity quickly and accurately and organize their next sprint to make progress on one or more of these dimensions. This enables sellers to be highly flexible and responsive to buyers, raising the state of each person in the buying team to more favorable positions by providing an optimal customer experience.

Focusing on Sprints, Not Gates

As mentioned previously, seller actions in an agile sales process are organized into sprints designed to make progress on one or more Opportunity Vitals. While verifiable outcomes are still useful to determining alignment between sellers and buyers, they are not the only determinant of the state of an opportunity. An agile sales process definition overlays the sales stage with opportunity quality and recognizes that the buyer’s journey may iterate on certain stages as they bring different stakeholders to a consensus on a solution. In an agile sales process, verifiable outcomes are not one-way stage gates, but an indicator of seller alignment and opportunity quality.

Focusing on Scalability, Not Compliance

Because it focuses on organizing seller actions into buyer-focused sprints, an agile sales process is inherently scalable to different types and sizes of opportunities. For simple solutions involving few stakeholders, sellers and buyers can progress quickly through incremental states towards a decision with fewer sprints. For solutions with higher strategic value, and more stakeholders, sellers can organize sprints to reflect the higher complexity and mitigate the more challenging risks in the buying decision.

This inherent flexibility is possible because both sellers and managers can be confident of their understanding of the true state of an opportunity, based on the objective assessment using Opportunity Vitals. They do not have to lean on prescriptive sales motions in a standard sales process definition alone, but instead can “right-size” the degree of effort needed to help buyers buy with an optimal customer experience.

An agile selling process does not abandon the structure of a traditional sales process model completely. By defining the stages of a sales process as buyer-aligned states, and overlaying the criteria for assessing opportunity quality, an agile sales process provides a more flexible and scalable architecture for aligning with how modern buyers buy.

Learn more about Richardson’s agile sales training program, Sprint Selling

Value of Agility in Sales Process Optimization

In addition to being more responsive to different types of sales opportunities, and enabling sellers to engage with buyers more flexibly, an agile sales process also provides several key benefits:

• By using objective criteria for assessing opportunity quality, sellers can also disengage from low-probability opportunities earlier. This raises win rates, especially by avoiding opportunities that would have otherwise been lost to buyer inaction. The winner of any game of poker may be the one with the best hand, or the last player remaining, but the player who folds earliest comes in second, as they invested the least amount of resources and time in a bad hand. So it goes with selling as well, and an agile sales process enables sellers to qualify with confidence they are making the right decision, enabling them to spend more time in higher value business.

• By using focused sprints to make progress on buyer-centric criteria, sales teams can engage support resources effectively based on the next best actions in progressing the buyer journey. This reduces the cost of sales and improves operating margins.

• By understanding the true state of an opportunity and knowing the quality of that opportunity based on quality assessment criteria, managers can forecast future revenues with more confidence and accuracy.

• By retaining the recommended states aligned with buyer journeys, an agile sales process definition provides a consistent map for selling success. This is highly useful for accelerating the performance of new hires and provides managers with a common language and standards of excellence for coaching and sales team skill development.

By optimizing the sales process model to embrace agile principles, sales leaders can now synthesize a scalable approach for engaging with buyers in a manner they prefer, while still providing realistic and practical standards for sales performance excellence.

Contact us to learn how we can equip your sales team and sales managers to develop the agility needed to engage today’s buyer and the structure needed to assess pipelines, opportunities, and seller performance.