30 Mar What Software Developers Can Teach Sales Managers

In 2001, 17 leaders in software development got together and wrote the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, now well known as the Agile Manifesto. Consisting of four values and 12 principles, the manifesto offers an alternative way to manage software development teams and projects, and has a lot of useful information for sales managers.

Agile focuses attention on collaboration and adaptability rather than following a rigid, step-by-step plan to complete projects. Agile principles promote an ability to adapt to change, which is why so many other disciplines have adopted Agile methodologies into their management processes.

It works particularly well in the rapidly changing world of enterprise sales. This is because Agile shows you how to function in fast-moving dynamic environments and gives you the ability to make strategic decisions, quickly.

The sheer volume of information means top-down management styles have become a detriment to the fluidity of work, and a detriment to a company as a whole. Following is some advice to help enterprise sales managers adopt the agile methodologies so familiar to software developers.

Agile Principle: Reduce Information Overload (Don’t Multi-Task)

In its Email Statistics Report, 2015-2019, the American technology market research firm The Radicati Group, Inc. reported, “In 2015, the number of business emails sent and received per user per day totals 122 emails per day.” They forecast that will grow to “average 126 messages sent and received per business user by the end of 2019.”

Let’s also consider that researchers at Loughborough University released the results of a study in 2015 about the cost of email interruption within the workplace showing that, “It took the average employee an average of 1 minute 44 seconds to react to a new email notification by opening up the email application. The majority of emails, 70%, were reacted to within 6 seconds of them arriving and 85% were reacted to within 2 minutes of arriving. The time it takes the average employee to recover from an email interrupt and to return to their work at the same work rate at which they left it, is on average 64 seconds.”

So if the average employee receives an average of 122 emails a day and each email takes approximately 2.5 minutes to deal with that means employees spend an average of 305 minutes on email each day.

To prevent a fair number of those, or emails relating to those, making their way into a manager’s in-box, empowering employees by offering them training and best practices, such as Tips on Managing Email, can allow managers to step back with confidence.

Agile Principle: Empower Teams to Function Optimally

Agile principles push operational decisions down and strategic decisions up. This means that managers do less micro-managing and more removing anything that slows down progress.

Agile teaches that a team must be empowered to make decisions to deliver the product. As long as the sales teams are delivering sales at the right profit margin and exceeding quota, the sales manager should help them focus on their job. The Sales Manager should carefully shield the sales reps from any interference that might take time out of their day. This includes unnecessary meeting requests from other departments.

Any interference with the project team is disruptive and reduces their motivation to deliver. To survive in this new era, managers must choose their people well then trust and empower them with the information and contacts they need to function without management. Employees become most valuable when they are trained and empowered to bring strategic decisions and only the most critical information to their manager when things change.

Agile Principle: Create Continuous Small Wins

Agile teaches its practitioners to find the fastest possible way to get value into the hands of the customer. This means listening to customer needs and delivering exactly what they expect (and more). But it also means breaking large projects down into bite-sized pieces so that customers can show results faster.

This not only provides a better feedback loop, but it also helps the customer justify the entire project over a longer period.

Researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer talked about the progress principle in Harvard Business Review article, “The Power of Small Wins.” This substantiates Agile theory for small wins by noting that people are incentivized by making progress in meaningful work, leading to innovation and continued energy on the project.

This same principle applies to enterprise sales. Taking a very large sale and creating short term wins via pilots or proof on concepts engages specialist help needed early in the process. It keeps everyone motivated and energized to push the sale to conclusion.

Software Developers Get It

By empowering their employees and listening to their customers, sales managers become gatekeepers whose success no longer depends on how many fingers they can stick in the pie, but how many they can leave out.

Software developers have figured this out as the Agile Manifesto demonstrates. And this is why software developers can teach sales managers a thing or two.

They value:

Of course, as the Manifesto points out, they still value the items on the right of this list, but it is those on the left they value most. And so too should it be true for enterprise sales managers.