Brad Jeavons on Agile Sales: Delivering Customer Journeys of Value and Delight

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Okay. Wonderful, wonderful— congratulations.

Brad wrote one of the most important books in sales and I was fascinated by the thought process that went behind it, and he’ll speak about that in a moment. Brad is an organizational improvement leader whose purpose is creating a better future economically, socially and environmentally for the generations to come. Brad helps organizations directly define and achieve excellence journeys. He works with organizations across many different fields— education, manufacturing, mining, agriculture, supply chain, technology, government and health. Brad is an Agile Scrum-at-Scale Practitioner and Lean Six Sigma Black Belt. He is an associate with SA Partners, the assessors for the Shingo Model, the most prestigious business award for Excellence in the Western world. Brad is the host of the ‘Enterprise Excellence Podcast’ and an award-winning author. His book “Agile Sales – Delivering Customer Journeys of Value and Delight”, outlines how to apply Agile to Sales and Marketing to amplify customer experience and business performance and today’s presentation is based on that book.

Brad, welcome to the PitchLink Sales and Marketing Lit Fest and I can’t wait to have you get into your session and get started. Thank you.

Brad Jeavons    

Thanks so much. Hi everyone, thanks for having me on. It’s great to be able to come and talk a bit about the book “Agile Sales”.

So everyone, the reason I wrote the book “Agile Sales” is because a lot of sales books have been written over time about techniques and selling strategies and elements like that, whereas not much has been written about the systems of a sales team and how to really create great frameworks and approaches and team collaboration and high performance.

And I’ve got a big background in Agile. I’ve got a big background in sales. I used Agile in sales throughout my career to achieve great things. I’m going to talk, and I wrote the book about that, and I do an awful lot in Agile with many different companies nowadays, and it creates amazing performance when you apply these sorts of techniques.

A lot of people out of the world of Agile have used sales teams as that customer contact. And a lot of people in sales have seen Agile as a strange thing. Blending the two is what I’m going to talk about today.

So if we look at it in organizations nowadays, typically there are the goals out there to achieve, results that we’re after— staying in business, staying relevant. We all know that customers are key and that having a point of difference is critical. Otherwise, you know staying in business and trying to sell is really difficult.

The challenges we’ve got is that differentiation, particularly in sales, is very difficult nowadays. Now everything’s being commoditized. It’s hard to build value back into things. Price is becoming really powerful and you can be driven down on price. There’s also the uncertainty of what’s to come. So I think there’s a lot out of Agile and a lot out of the book, out of Agile styles that you can use to help navigate this and put yourself in that stronger position.

Today, I’m going to talk about a few case studies of how people have done that out of the book.

If you look at Agile, typically this is a list of the largest companies in the world at the moment— the bulk of them are using Agile techniques, or at most blends of Lean and Agile to rapidly grow and scale and create innovation and get insane customer outcomes. I guess there’s proven success in what most of these companies have achieved and others can achieve, and a lot of them have gone from being very small to becoming very large over the last 30 years. It’s been amazing.

So with the book Agile Sales, if I start from the right-hand side across, first of all, it talks about how do you really understand your customers deeply and using Agile techniques, how do you build a sales process in a way that you actually execute work that aligns that actually sells to the customer the way they want to be sold to— align to the customer buying journey. I talk a lot about and train on customer journey mapping and how you do that to achieve that.

Then through the middle of the image, Scrum, Motion, and Kanban. That’s all about the techniques of Agile in your teams and how you create really high performance in sales teams using Agile techniques. Leader Standard Work and the whole leadership piece I also wrote about, and there’s a piece on leaders who serve— that is key to Agile and key to creating autonomy and high performance. I’ll talk a little bit about that.

If we go into the next slide, we’re talking about customers. So some stats that I’m finding here in Australia and that I know have been found elsewhere is that about 70% of buyers nowadays don’t perceive they get value from salespeople, but 71% of buyers actually want salespeople to help them overcome challenges. There’s a gap there. You know, most buyers don’t see salespeople as valuable, but they would love someone to help them. The key to overcoming this and actually making the two worlds meet where buyers actually do want help, but they don’t perceive value in salespeople, and how to connect those two is really that if we can gear organizations so that we really understand who our ideal customers are, understand their attributes, and then the people that we’re going to be dealing with in there, and then we can get our salespeople and organizations to place ourselves in their shoes and really think from that perspective, we can find the way as sales organizations to really connect the two dots that aren’t currently connecting.

The way that you do that, and I write about it in the book, Agile Sales, is just persona mapping and empathy mapping, and really building this deep understanding of your customers. There are some survey techniques, some ways you can actually gain key information to know who your ideal customers are, who your key people are, build persona maps, and start to really sit in that position of the customer and put your salespeople or the whole organization in the shoes of the customer and make decisions on that, as to how do we build frameworks and approaches to really deliver great outcomes for customers and innovate.

The next part that’s critical is our sales process or our sales framework that we use, and looking at how we align what we do in sales to what customers actually want. You know, 71% of customers want salespeople that are going to help them overcome challenges and move towards their goals. The way we’ve got to do that consistently is to build some sort of framework or approach to do that. We need to align it for that journey the customer wants to go on, and do it differently from our competition.

Michael Porter, who’s the legend in competitive advantage, said recently in a podcast is that one of the main competitive advantages you can actually sustain is process, and the other one is culture. And that’s what a lot of agile organizations have done through process or framework and team culture— they can outcompete the competition. The way you do that is through customer journey mapping, taking that research you’ve done on your customer and the personas you’ve got, and that work you’ve done to place yourself in the customer’s shoes. You then map the customer journey that you’re currently giving customers from discovery through research when they actually engage you, through purchase to delivery— and then are you getting customers to devotion. And then you go back and think, well, what would be the ideal way that these customers that we’ve explored would really want us to engage with them and to sell to them and take them through a buying journey. Out of that, you end up with a sales framework or sales process that you can then gear up your capability on, as teams, and get great outcomes for customers and for yourselves.

Here are some examples of that. So Signet is a large packaging company in Australia. Packaging has become commoditized, you talk pallet wrap and tape and things like that. They really dug deep into their customers through persona mapping and empathy mapping and doing surveys and great data gathering. They were then able to do customer journey mapping and build a sales process that really aligns with their customer. So that previous persona I showed you was one of theirs, which is the head of a factory who’s all about that factory surviving and not having downtime of his factory and getting greater performance out of his factory, so he doesn’t get shut down. They built a continuous improvement-style approach to their sales process to really deliver great outcomes, and they do that for personas in a warehouse also. So they target factories and warehouses largely and supply chains, and get great outcomes through continuously improving for them through their sales process. The other case study I’ve got for you there is Kimberly-Clark. They have again a process that they align to the customer buying journey, the journey the customer wants to go on, and they all practice it. It’s again more of an improvement approach. I think you’ll find this if you’re a company where you are selling, especially B2B customers, are looking for that ongoing improvement approach. Typically, they’re after someone that really helps them solve problems. If you’re talking B2C, a lot of it is about ongoing experiential outcomes. You know, it’s got the same connotation, but it’s ‘how can you give us that ongoing experiential and engagement’ approach. But it often ends up being in a loop, a circle, because of delivering great outcomes and delighting the customers. It’s always going to be a circular loop. Once you’ve got a framework through customer journey mapping, and I write about that in the book, you can then build a really unique competitive advantage approach to the way that you sell. And then you can build capability of the way that you onboard people, train people, develop people, and also the resources and tools that you build around this. If you look at both Kimberly-Clark and Signet, you’ll find a lot of great resources that they have online that they use to delight customers but also help provide resources to the sales team.

That’s the next part I want to talk to you about is then out of Agile. Agile has mastered how to achieve the highest performance teams in the world, creating autonomy at the frontline and great cultures of focus, calm, motivation, performance. Now, with Agile, there have been some revolutionary things. You know, it’s creating this focused autonomous team, but it’s also about looking at teams differently. In Agile, you form a team, typically small, five to eight people based on the customer, not based on the silos of your company. This could mean that you end up with a team that involves a technical person, someone who’s a sales specialist, marketer. It could be quite a cross-functional team that you end up with. And then it’s all about that team having that clear vision and executing through visual performance towards that. I’m going to show you some examples of that in a moment.

The first element I want to show you is that Agile, when you’ve got that team, you’ve got this autonomous focused, potentially cross-functional small team, Agile is then about that team having an aligned vision and challenging goal. And when I say aligned vision, it needs to be aligned to the organization’s vision, where the organization is going, but also who they serve, their internal customers, the next people in the process in the company, but also of course, external customers. So an Agile team has a really compelling vision that is aligned to the people they serve but also the organization, and they’ve got some aspirational goals for that. That’s a really strong starting point.

The next part of a high-performance Agile team is working in Sprint sequences. These are time-boxed sequences where you’re looking to achieve a short-term vision and goal that moves you towards your aspirational vision and goals, and these are iterative sprints that you do. Typically, teams start off with a monthly Sprint and they look to create a backlog of work to help them get there, execute it. That backlog in sales could be target opportunities, target lead generation you’re looking to get indoors. It could be improving backlog items you’re looking to do to create new resources or do different things to delight customers or astound customers, and you execute that throughout the month and look to get to that next short-term goal towards your aspirational goal. That’s basically what it’s all about in a very simple way. There is training you can get on, that gives you the full-blown agile sales type of background, and you can go to the Enterprise Excellence Academy if you want to look into that.

When you come to some case examples of Agile, you often see teams with visual performance boards that show their vision, show their aspirational goals and their short-term goals, and also the backlog of work they’re working on to get there over that monthly Sprint. The teams meet at these boards typically for five to ten minutes every day or twice a week. It’s about constantly reviewing how we’re tracking and adapting if we have to. That’s what brings out agility, from the word agile, and why the word agile came about, but it is a very structured way that we do things. It’s not just the freedom— that’s an important thing to know. The system creates agility, and I write about that in the book Agile Sales.

It can also be a physical board. This is Tom, the head of the internal sales at Signet. It is a junior internal sales team. They’re all together in the one office. They use a physical board and execute using Agile as a team towards their aspirational vision and goals and move towards that. It’s a really cool system.

So, that’s the end of my presentation on Agile Sales. If you want to learn more, I’ve covered a few topics on it there, but there’s a lot more to it. When it comes down to it, you can go to the Enterprise Excellence Academy website and check out the information there. On Agile, you can also reach out to me through LinkedIn. There’s only one Brad Jeavons, so look me up on LinkedIn and reach out, and I’d love to help out further. That’s great. Any questions, please let me know.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

That was a great session. It was very well encapsulated. I think there are a lot of thinking points that people would have to carry back, and thanks for those nice examples, Brad. I really saw a lot of times when you’re talking about concepts, it’s difficult to connect with your own day-to-day activity, right? So listening to this, one might think, “Oh, this is too complex. And how do we execute something like this?” But I think that last example was a great one to show that if you are wanting to do it, a simple Kanban kind of board, a physical board can work wonders for people, right?

Brad Jeavons  

Or electronic, whatever works, yeah.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Of course, absolutely. So this is the book. If you click that button, it’ll take you to wherever it is available, yeah. So let’s have the questions. I think we are getting some, okay, the first one there.

Brad Jeavons    

So what defines culture? I’m writing a book on that. So on leading excellence, it’s basically two things. It’s the systems of a company, the way that processes work and the way we measure people and the way we onboard people and the way we train people. The way we run Agile or not, the way we run our meetings, the way we do our processes. So all those systems. And the other thing is largely leadership behavior, so the behavior of leaders, but also informal leaders. So when I say informal leaders, it could be that people in your team have a very powerful voice because we as humans are so influenced by social influence, we are crazily influenced by the people around us. So it’s leadership behavior of our direct leader, of course, because they have some form of power over us, even though we don’t, maybe not consciously, think that. And then powerful influences within our teams, they’re what largely drive culture as well as the processes and systems of an organization. Yeah, so it’s only two things you gotta work on the culture, but Agile’s mastered how you do that.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Yeah.This is great. I mean, obviously whenever you talk of culture, you are thinking of Peter Drucker, but I’m not gonna repeat that quote. I’ll spare that.

Subhanjan Sarkar

Yeah. So culture, it’s strategy for breakfast anyway. Yeah, you’ve got a second one, Brad.

Brad Jeavons    

Yeah, so with customizing products or services, I think I just recommend Google— like Google is one of the best examples of agile in the world. They are adapting their products and services all the time, but it doesn’t rock the consumer’s world. You still see that white Google screen with the box there. So it’s how do you continuously innovate and adapt in a way that you’re not rocking the customer’s world with totally changing everything, but you’re continuously improving in small steps. And they don’t even know, like Google, you don’t even know that they’re evolving so much. But you know they are, and they’re retaining you as a customer because of what they do. And that’s what we need to do from a sales point of view too, not come out with dramatic big changes all the time. It’s that rapid, iterative, small improvement that just keeps ahead of the game. Spotify is a great example. There are so many out there that are great examples of this iterative small improvement, not big changes that just rock everyone’s world. That’s not what agile’s about unless you’re gonna really game change things.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

That’s a great answer.

Brad Jeavons    

Yeah, so the size has been studied like crazy. As soon as you clock over eight people in a team, you start to lose performance. It starts to flatline. You hit 10 to 12, you’re actually going backward in performance. It’s just because of human connectedness. We can’t connect as humans in a big team. But human connectedness in a team is critical to getting team performance. Of course, multiple brains will always outperform one brain. That’s why I think in sales, we often look at sales as an individual game. But I’ve seen it time and time again across the companies I work with that a small team that works together as a unit will outperform anything— “Lone wolves”— I don’t know if you want to use that term. The composition of a team is really easy. Who does the customer need in the team to deliver rapid great outcomes every day? If it’s just a salesperson, fine. But if they need technical capability, marketing, different elements, well that’s what we do in Agile. We build our teams based on what the customer needs, not just ourselves, our own divisions.

How can we add the concepts of Agile? So most CRMs nowadays have a Kanban system like HubSpot does, Salesforce does, Microsoft CRM does. You know, you can basically integrate Agile and use it in any CRM. And basically gear up everything you need out of the CRM to run Agile Scrum and execute and perform programs. Like HubSpot, also integrates customer journey mapping modules. And it’s all becoming interconnected nowadays. And I work with a lot of those, you know, different clients use different CRMs that I work with and that’s how that plays out. So yeah, you don’t need to, you can basically all work out of your CRM.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Ok. I think that was a great, great one. I think we had a good interaction and great answers, Brad. Thank you so much and I hope you go back to a happy conclusion to the cricket match that you left.

Brad Jeavons    

Yeah, I think it’s good. I mean, England— that we are 90 runs ahead and we haven’t lost anyone yet, so it’s looking good. Australia, the Australian opener, it’s going well.

Subhanjan Sarkar    

Wonderful, wonderful. Enjoy your cricket match and thank you again for joining us and I’ll see you again soon. I’ll talk to you about the new book.

Brad Jeavons  

Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, it should be good. Thanks everyone. Catch you later.

Subhanjan Sarkar  

Guys, we’ll be back with TN Hari in a few minutes, okay?

show less