Written by Agile Sales™, a ground-breaking approach to sales and marketing that empowers teams to quickly measure and improve performance.

Are your sales and marketing efforts strong enough to weather the economic storm? Do you know how you are going to achieve more revenue, while at the same time cutting expenses? Do you have enough visibility into your Sales Velocity™ to accurately predict results?

If you are like most, the answer to these questions is “no” or “I don’t know.” Here's what we DO know. Everything about today's business environment has changed:

• The Economic downturn.
• Web 2.0 and all of its complexities.
• Buyers are becoming more and more difficult to reach through
  traditional means.

And, you probably know by now that you will not be able to respond to today’s market conditions with the traditional approach to sales and marketing. It’s going to take significant changes to thrive and survive in today’s Web 2.0 environment! It is going to take agility. It is going to take these three fundamental changes:

1. Restructuring and developing ONE team.
   To truly be agile, you must change the Org Chart! It isn't going to be easy, but to be agile, you must break down the barriers preventing sales and marketing from truly working together by restructuring the org chart to represent an empowered, cross-functional Customer Service Team.
   
   
2. Managing activities in tighter iterations.
   To make sure you are able to identify problems and respond to them...BEFORE it's too late, you must look at progress, or lack thereof, in shorter iterations—two weeks, monthly, and quarterly.
   
   
3. Evaluating the metrics that are most important to Sales Velocity™.
   Sales Velocity is a real-time measurement of the movement speed (positive, negative, or neutral) of your sales cycle. This is determined by sales stage volume (number), length of sales cycle (time), and revenue quantity (dollars). Sales Velocity takes these three variables and sums into a single numeric number that reflects sales acceleration, deceleration, or standing still.

Change is not an easy thing to embrace, and these three changes are not easy ones to make…we understand that. But change is happening in the market. Change is happening with our buyers. Change is happening with our available tools. And our only way to survive this change is to evolve your sales and marketing organization.

Visit the Agile Sales™ website to download complete white paper and learn more about sales agility. We also recommend you check out The Agile Sales Workshop.