Michael J. Scherm - Scrum for Sales: A B2B Guide to Agility in Organization, Performance, and Management

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The call came unexpectedly: Our sales approach needs to become agile , the client told the Scrum Master, can you help us? Intuitively, the Scrum Master asked a few questions. The clients answers were enthusiastic and detailed. He mentioned new products, which were to be sold in new markets. He described growth potential waiting to be tapped into. He envisioned a new, faster-paced way of selling followed by ever-more, ever-grander ideas, packed in clouds of confidence and optimism. Embracing agility would change virtually everything for the better.

But what would it change? The Scrum Master probed further. As it turned out, a new sales approach was not what the client needed. At least not initially. What the client really needed were salespeople who are not shy of talking to new contacts, product developers who involve the companys salespeople in the design of new solutions, and corporate controllers who allow account managers to make budget decisions. What the company really needed was courage , cooperation , and trust not just in sales, but across the whole organization. More agility would be the consequence of fixing these issues, but it would not be the remedy. Now that these points had been clarified, it made sense to discuss how Scrum could help to generate benefits.

Agility is often a rather diffused idea. Corporate executives have witnessed young, agile companies such as Netflix , Spotify , Reddit , Basecamp , Robinhood , and Fitbit pop up and take the market by storm. Naturally, they want their own companies to become equally agile. As a leading agile framework, Scrum is one of the first things that comes to mind when they think about how to implement agility. But Scrum must make sense. There must be a reason for it. There must be a clear idea of what is to be changed with it. There must be a clear understanding of what issues Scrum can solve and what it cannot. Early protagonists of the Scrum community, such as Jeff Sutherland , Rini van Solingen , and Denny deWaard , soon started thinking about how Scrum could be used to change the way sales organizations work. However, with the exception of some initial conceptual thoughts, there is no major documentation that explains how exactly Scrum can work in sales and what specific issues it can solve in a sales context.

Scrum for Sales intends to close this gap. Chapter is devoted to sales management in Scrum.

This book is intended for salespeople and sales managers who want to better serve their customers with Scrum but do not yet know how Scrum works. It is also a book for people who are already familiar with Scrum but want to understand how it can be applied specifically to sales. Therefore, it is as much a book about sales as it is about Scrum: The User Stories included in it provide a detailed account of how modern customer acquisition, opportunity management, and pipeline management can be implemented from a customers point of view, to increase customer satisfaction, and to maximize long-term value for both customer and vendor. It provides sales managers with nuggets of advice based on philosophical, historical, and scientific thinking that does not usually make it into books about sales. The book is also methodology-agnostic : it is not devoted to a specific sales methodology, nor to a particular set of management tools . Rather, it draws on a variety of these, with Scrum providing the framework for them to take effect.

Scrum for Sales does not try to convince people that Scrum is effective. The benefits of Scrum and its impact on productivity have been well researched in software and product development. There are some initial, comparatively small, studies as well as strong anecdotal evidence that suggest Scrum can substantially benefit sales organizations. At this point, however, they would not withstand scientific scrutiny. Hence, the aim of the following 200-something pages is to show how Scrum works in a sales context and what issues it can solve. No more, no less.

While the book does indeed reference a significant amount of scientific evidence, which proves the validity of the underlying concepts and theories, Scrum for Sales takes an outspokenly pragmatic approach. The aim is to equip the reader with practical tools to start working with Scrum right away. The User Stories provide examples which teams may use directly to kick-start the Product Backlogs for their sales projects. Readers may skip them if they do not find them valuable or applicable to their own situation. The same goes for the many examples that illustrate how cognitive biases affect decision-making generally and specifically in sales organizations. Some readers will find them useful and stimulating; others may have already read about them and prefer to skip these paragraphs. There are multiple exercises and checklists throughout Chaps. , which support the practical work of sales Scrum teams and sales management. They boil down practical experience from the work with sales organizations and Scrum teams, best practice from the literature, and findings from a diverse range of research in psychology and social sciences to a practical, manageable, format.