Many companies want to make their sales agile. Some of them have tried to set up agile sales organizations, but such top-down approaches and big-bang rollouts seldom seem to work. This book shows how the elements of the leading agile framework Scrum should be applied to install agility in the salesforce, improve sales performance, and resolve typical performance issues in sales organizations. It contains concrete guidelines, real-world examples, and useful tools to create the necessary change step by step and built to last.

Applies Scrum, usually known from software development, to make sales agile Provides detailed guidelines and comprehensive use cases from an organizational view Connects the underlying psychological and behavioral mechanisms to the issues of sales organization

Autorentext

Michael Scherm is a historian by training, a manager and consultant by profession, and an avid observer of sales leadership behavior in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific. Michael encourages and assists sales organizations and their leaders to change fundamentally in order to survive digitalization and the associated changes in customer behavior. Working with IT companies across the world for more than 15 years, he experienced the benefits of Scrum, the leading agile framework. Extending his idea to adopt Scrum for sales organizations, Michael founded the Sales Scrum Club in 2018 as a platform for exchange and expertise. Scrum has meanwhile become his main profession: Having returned to Germany after professional engagements in Washington D.C., London and Singapore, Michael is now a Scrum Master at ODAV AG, a provider of software solutions for the public sector in Germany. He is a certified Scrum Master and holds a PhD summa cum laude in early modern economic history from Regensburg University.

Inhalt

1. Agility Is More Than a Buzzword. Why B2B Sales Organizations Must Become Even More Adaptive.- 2. From Agony to Agility: The Emergence of Scrum as a Leading Agile Framework.- 3. Customer Acquisition: Team Dynamics and the Soft Beat of the Drum.- 4. Opportunity Management: Managing Complexity and Ambiguity.- 5. Pipeline Management: Overcoming Our Reptile Brain.- 6. Managing the Agile Salesforce in Scrum.- Epilogue: Agile Is DeadLong Live Agile.