Scrum and Marketing

Within the waterfall project management style, it’s difficult to know whether the correct product is being built. Little to no user feedback has been sought along the way, so it’s anybody’s guess whether the product will be a big success.

Here’s the catch: Organizations traditionally have a fixed annual marketing plan (much like the annual budgeting process we discuss in Chapter 14). Firms come out with a product with no clear idea whether it’ll be a success, yet marketing is often planned a year in advance.

Additionally, markets change frequently. Given the speed of technological advances today, change is even more frequent now. Even for products that have been vetted and proved to be what the customer wants, companies might need to have their marketing angle changed along the way.

Sometimes, customers don’t even know what they want until they get a product in their hands and use it. Despite the company’s best intentions, a mystery remains about how and what to market.

Also, a firm may be dealing with millions of customers who have varied tastes and desires. Consider how many different styles and models of cars, clothes, and gadgets are sold in any one year. Each year, new models come out. For every buyer, marketers want to appease individual tastes.

Although the future is impossible to predict, prediction is exactly what traditional marketing asks people to do.

Marketing evolution

Like most industries and business functions marketing has evolved. As Anna Kennedy, author of Business Development For Dummies (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.), told us, recent changes in marketing include the following:

Prospects can self-serve information to the extent that two-thirds of the buyer’s journey happens before any formal engagement exists with the company.
Marketing has shifted to being responsible for generating leads. Any chief marketing officer who isn’t will soon be out of a job.
Technology allows marketers to assess where prospects are on the buyer’s journey and nurture them on a one-to-one basis.
Social media provides a forum for conversations among brands and their influencers, prospects, and customers.

Given those trends, how can scrum help marketers embrace the changes and develop agility in responding to this shifting world?

Perhaps customers can research more on their own before engaging with a seller, which may seem to be a challenge from the seller’s point of view. A marketing scrum team that makes its marketing materials trackable, however, can use analytics to inspect and adapt its marketing to fit instantaneous feedback.

In the past few years, marketing has become a primary consumer of Big Data. Being able to consolidate, analyze, and react to market data and moving trends makes scrum an ideal framework to use for marketing.

Access to feedback (potential customers’ actions and interaction with marketing materials) enables a scrum team to respond and pivot more frequently and quickly than before. This feedback doesn’t require a customer to attend a sprint review. A product owner has access to this feedback in real time, thanks to marketing analytics technologies.

Scrum and social media

Marketers are responsible for managing the social media images of their brands. The speed at which posts become viral is astonishing, requiring immediate tactical response. An example of this dynamic played out during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The campaigns used social media to track and respond to trends.

A popular global charity recently faced a social media crisis and was able to respond effectively because of its investment in marketing expertise and rapid deployment strategies. A false public statement was made about the charity. Within hours, the rapidly growing false narrative endangered the charity’s ability to do good in the world it served and negatively affected its donations.

Also, within hours, the charity’s brand managers began producing content to correct the misconceptions. Making a social media response wasn’t enough, though. The brand managers worked with all the organization’s sites and developers to make sure that the charity’s official position was clear and coming from the newly created content. Because the site developers were part of scrum teams, the new content became the highest priority and was deployed across the various platforms within days. If the changes had gone through a waterfall development and testing process, the story might have had an unhappy ending. Instead, the organization’s message of acceptance became clearer, and a negative event was turned into a positive outcome. This story repeats on an almost-daily basis for small businesses and Fortune 500 companies.

THE AGILE ADVANTAGE

In one of its annual “Agile Advantage” surveys, CMG Partners, a strategic marketing consulting firm, interviewed chief marketing officers (CMOs), marketing leaders, and agile experts and found that they overwhelmingly agreed that long-term, highly crafted marketing plans are things of the past. Today, speed and agility are key tools. Marketers need to be able to respond to changing economic landscapes and customers’ shifting desires and needs.

The survey found three key benefits of using the agile framework within marketing campaigns and projects:

Increased business performance: This performance increase took the form of faster speed to market and increased prioritization and productivity.
Increased employee satisfaction: Self-organizing and self-managing teams, working with transparency and empowerment, lead to happier people.
Increased adaptability: A hallmark of agile and scrum, adaptability came to the forefront when marketing teams adopted agile frameworks. Adaptability is sorely lacking in waterfall.

It’s clear that using agile and scrum in marketing allowed greater collaboration between the end user and the marketers. The product brand could then evolve with the customer in hand, rather than hoping that at the end a fit existed.

Cost can be reduced because fewer plans fail with the new fine-tuned approach. With this increase in success rates, customer and employee satisfaction also rises.

Scrum in marketing

Before we discuss specific examples of scrum in marketing, we look at some specific ways that it can be adopted. Like the annual budgeting plan discussed in Chapter 14, the annual marketing plan is a guess that is refined throughout the year as the organization learns and adapts.

With scrum, marketing plans can be monthly, weekly, and even daily. After each iteration, inspection and adaptation are applied based on feedback from sprint reviews and retrospectives. Marketing plans can be adjusted, change can be thought of as progress, and customers can be marketed to in a way that speaks to their changing needs.

New marketing strategies can be tested with actual users before they’re released to broader audiences. In the same vein, brands can be tested within sprints, saving huge costs because branding is developed together with customers rather than presented to them at the end.

Scrum in Action for Marketing

Scrum is widely used in marketing today with astounding success. Scrum fits the wild and wooly world of shifting customer needs and technology. In the following sections, we discuss three examples of scrum and marketing.

CafePress

CafePress sells gifts and merchandise that a customer can customize, such as mugs with pictures and/or memes.

A layer of versatility was uncovered in CafePress’s scrum implementation. The legal implications of customizable products meant that marketing needed a close alliance with the legal team to facilitate quick response to legal inquiries and concerns. The marketing team needed to be aware of what it could and couldn’t say to avoid taking on unnecessary legal liability.

The legal department became an integral part of CafePress’s marketing scrum team, making sure that marketing could get any queries answered in 20 minutes.

CafePress’s strategy of bringing legal and marketing together is a great example of the benefits of aligning business with development. Sometimes, the departments’ goals seem to be at odds, but with scrum, they’re directly aligned with making a better product and creating more satisfied customers.

Xerox

Xerox is a household name, usually associated with office photocopying. Over the years, this firm has branched into other products and services, such as IT, document management, and software and support.

The original photocopy process of making paper copies from documents and visual images is called xerography. Electrostatic charges are used on a light-sensitive photoreceptor to transfer powder onto paper, thereby copying the images. Heat then seals the deal, literally. Who invented xerography? A company called Xerox.

Xerox’s global interactive marketing team integrated scrum into its business framework to simplify and prioritize demand from customers and marketing teams throughout the world. The team knew that it had to respond to the changing market and customers’ changing needs, and they needed to respond as fast as smaller competitors that could respond and pivot more quickly. Scrum provided the framework for Xerox to self-organize, iterate, inspect, adapt, and deliver more often.

Similar problems existed in portfolio management (see Chapter 13). Projects weren’t prioritized, so developers were thrashed from project to project, and the loudest stakeholder received his product first. When new initiatives came along, the teams couldn’t pivot quickly enough to take advantage of potential benefits. The teams thrashed employees across multiple projects or stopped projects to reallocate people to new ones.

With scrum, Xerox segmented the type of work to be done into three queues: new development, creative projects (such as artwork), and rapid response (service issues that take eight hours or less to resolve). Short sprint cycles and the inspect-and-adapt process enabled team members to focus each sprint on only one queue rather than all of them.

The Xerox marketing team was thrashing between sprints, but at least it was no longer thrashing within sprints. (Read Chapter 13 for information about why thrashing is undesirable.) The focus during each sprint enabled the team to deliver increments across the three queues and prioritize those that were most important. Speed to market increased because the team didn’t get sidetracked before completing a project. Employee morale also increased, and customer satisfaction improved because customers got what they wanted sooner and better.

Scrum for Sales

Sales isn’t an island, but part of a business development cycle that starts with defining what the market needs and the product and service that fulfills that need. Then the cycle goes through marketing, sales, delivery, and evaluation to leverage the customer for repeat sales and advocacy.

In traditional project management frameworks, sales is the classic, individualistic role. Individual quotas must be met (and ideally exceeded), and each individual’s pay is based on sales-quota results. Salesperson of the Week, Month, and Year are coveted accolades. Competition is fierce, and in every organization, a few stars rise to the top. In sales, the word team typically refers to the staff of the department, not to the department working as a unified team for a common goal as in scrum. To apply scrum to sales, you have to figure out how to get salespeople to work together as a team rather than as individuals in a department.

Scrum takes the traditional approach to sales and turns it on its head in several ways:

Scrum by its nature focuses on team success. You might think of a sales team as being a group of salespeople pounding the pavement and making the same pitch. A sales team with scrum is much more. Like a cross-functional product development team consisting of designers, engineers, and testers, a sales team needs subject-matter experts and people from marketing, sales enablement, sales engineering, contracts, legal, and finance. The entire sales team has goals. If the team fails to reach its goals, the members can work together to find solutions.
Rewards are team-based. A traditional sales team (all salespeople) is driven by competition, with everyone working in silos. A team structure means all team members swarm around a lead to get to done (close the sale).
Scrum is all about results over the process to achieve those results. It’s focused on reality-based inspect and adapt. You have to inspect the process and adapt for each client.
Results count. Burndown and burnup charts (which we discuss in Chapter 5) can be used in sales. Rather than tracking how much has been done, sales tracks how much is left to do in that sprint (burndown). Tracking cumulative sales (burnup) shows real-time progress toward the sprint sales goal.
Standing daily scrums work well because nobody wants long meetings. If impediments are discovered outside the team, an outside person can be invited to the daily scrum and partake in an after-party removal of the impediment (see Chapter 6).

The scrum solution

The sales process of converting leads to closed sales is also known as the sales pipeline or funnel. Figure 15-1 outlines a basic sales funnel.

FIGURE 15-1: A classic sales funnel depicting the sales process from beginning to end.

A sales manager at an agile-based organization implemented a backlog item task board. Columns included the stages of the sales funnel, such as Leads, Sales Call, and Follow-Up. The sales team and management had an immediate picture of where the team was in the project. Sales estimates were inspected and adapted based on reality. Figure 15-2 shows an example of the sales funnel as a task board.

FIGURE 15-2: A sales task board with columns representing the sales funnel stages.

A visible funnel in the form of a task board is quite valuable. The sales funnel in Figure 15-1 becomes the task board shown in Figure 15-2, as follows:

Leads: Each row (swim lane) represents one lead. Leads arrive from a variety of sources through a variety of methods, but they all land here and get discussed, vetted, and prioritized before the sales call is initiated. Taking somewhat-qualified leads and turning them into sales-qualified leads that are ready to buy is becoming a marketing function. Scrum can help bridge the traditional divide between marketing and sales through visibility and coordination of the sales team.
Sales call: An initial sales call is made to further qualify the lead (that is, define the prospect’s need and position the offering as the solution). This stage involves various tasks, which were outlined during sprint planning in the Leads column.
Follow-Up: The lead has responded and expressed interest in the proposed solution to his need. The team coordinates, times, and executes a series of tasks.
Conversion: Obstacles and impediments to closing the sales are identified, and the team swarms to overcome them.
Close: The contract is won. The team clearly documents how the contract was won.

All of this is done effectively as a team. Look at the skills required to make a sale, including marketing, sales enablement, sales engineering, subject-matter expertise, contracts, legal, and finance.

Ideally, you want cross-functional team members who can do everything. But having one person who can do everything well is unusual. Having a team of people who can do everything well is even less likely. But a cross-functional team of members who can self-organize, devise plans, and swarm around a prospect, event, or contract produces better results than one person who tries to do everything alone.

Because scrum focuses on continuous communication among all parties, a scrum sales team has a clearer understanding of what prospective clients need and want. As a result, the team can present its sales ideas in a way that directly affects those prospects.

The scrum sales process

Successful salespeople are exceptional listeners and have keen observation skills. One goal is to discover prospects’ problems and then show how the product or service solves those problems. To make this connection, a salesperson needs to establish a relationship based on trust. People buy things from people they know and trust.

Scrum selling is about gaining trust through teamwork. The supporting players may include presales, business development, account executives, field engineers, installers, inside sales and support, and service people. Any combination of these people can make up a scrum team and swarm to synchronize communication, supporting the effort to get the client to sign a deal. Swarming activities might revolve around the following:

Preparing for a trade show
Following up with trade-show leads
Developing time-bound proposals to potential solutions for a sales pitch to out-class the competition
Saving an at-risk sale by brainstorming and prioritizing action items

Sales cycles are more successful when a potential consumer or business is pulled toward a product or solution as opposed to responding to a pure outbound “cold call” approach. Pull strategies involve content marketing, webinars, trade shows, and social media marketing. Push versus pull models are discussed in Chapter 5.

The scrum sales process is high-touch and commonsense. It mirrors the roadmap to value as follows:

Vision

Example: Grow gross sales in Dallas by 20 percent this fiscal year by increasing the company’s social media presence and analytics. Follow up with a personal phone call or email to everyone who provides contact information.

(The vision model we present in Chapter 2 is for product development. For sales and other nonproduct development projects, it’s appropriate to tweak that model based on reality.)
Product roadmap (high-level) and product backlog (broken down)

Example: High-level and low-level lists of changes are needed to make the vision a reality, such as
- Sales strategy development
- Acquisition of tools
- Development of collateral
- Sales process development and fine-tuning
- Execution needed for specific deals in the process
- Assigning key (detailed) social media sites to a team member
- Finding a tool for tracking sales funnels that the team will use
- Defining such reporting processes as analytics workflows
Release planning

Example: Prioritize backlog items by month and/or quarter.
Sprint planning

Example: As a team, create tasks and assignments for the backlog items.
Sprint

Example: Hold daily stand-up meetings to coordinate swarming tasks for the day and identify impediments.
Sprint review

Example: Demonstrate to the stakeholders (such as the vice president of sales) that the sprint is complete (the Facebook page is operational, for example, or mailing lists of past customers are compiled).
Sprint retrospective

Example: Review what worked well and facilitate knowledge transfer. Service/installation people are learning how new customers are being acquired, for example, which helps them continue the company messaging that leads to the sale.

iSense PROWARENESS

iSense Prowareness is an information and computer technology consulting company (ICT) based in the Netherlands that adopted scrum throughout it sales processes. The problems that the company had been experiencing were diverse and based on a huge lack of transparency:

The system tracked individual progress, but only the manager looked at this. The number and size of each deal were all the data that was shared, and each rep’s progress was measured by these metrics alone. Every week, each individual estimated his numbers for that week, and at the end of the week, reported what he had actually achieved.
The company had no way of knowing how individual efforts were impacting the overall team sales.
No process indicators existed. The only measurement was the amount sold. The number of phone calls could be tracked; however, the closing rate based on these was unknown. Management had limited ways to help their sales team as they didn’t know what and where the individual impediments were. The only input was to work harder, as they had no way of determining what “working smarter” meant.
The sales reps worked hard on improving their numbers, but no structured time was spent on reflecting or on the establishment of a system to improve.

Given this quite typical sales background, iSense began implementing scrum. It hired outside consultants to help with the transition and began with

Weekly sprints from Monday through Friday.
Quarterly sales targets, which included 13 sprints to each “release.”
Each week, salespeople adapted what they learned from the daily scrums and sprint reviews and retrospectives.
A scrum task board was created with a burndown chart and orders taken.
Standing daily scrums were held in front of the task board.

After the completion of the scrum integration, revenue doubled, half of which sales managers attributed directly to scrum — an excellent return on investment for the transition to scrum.

Interestingly, important lessons learned included the ability to assess which sales tactics were working and which weren’t delivering total value. Scrum’s transparency made abundantly clear that there is no value to an organization being unable to fulfill a closed sale. When the sales team increased their hit rate as a result of this team-based approach, their pool of service providers had not increased to fill demand. The sales managers recognized a way that they could help recruiters fill the demand through temporary contracts, which bought them more time to permanently fill those positions.

The team just presented would cold-call to gather attendees for events highlighting the products. At the event, attendees would be turned from cold leads into warm ones, and then follow-up contact would result in some of these turning into hot leads and eventual sales. Through analyzing the process and results, the team found that they were only converting 10 percent into actual sales. This allowed the team to discuss and identify gaps in the sales process, refine the sequence, and increase sales. Before long, they doubled that conversion rate.

Through the integration of scrum, the iSense sales team made another important discovery: Making the sale was just the beginning. To truly complete the cycle, the company had to deliver on the product. Sounds simple, but through the process of sprint reviews and retrospectives, where employees from different parts of the company shared information, this gap, too, began to narrow, and the customer benefited.

The sales teams realized that instead of their primary focus being on creating new business, they had more to win with existing contacts and customers. The customers they had already done successful projects with could be used as a starting point for more business. They could become promoters of projects to other companies.