Agile Sales Method in Solar Business
Agile Sales: What Does It Mean?
Effective sales management requires a variety of skills, including the ability to encourage your team, create objectives and targets, motivate salespeople, and assess data and performance. While many of these approaches can help you succeed, there are other frameworks to follow, such as agile sales management, that can help you along the way.
Agile sales bring project management practices from the IT sector to sales, such as sprints, daily stand-ups, and constant iteration, to assist teams to become more adaptable and effective at meeting clients at their various stages of the customer journey.
Work is divided into "sprints" when using this approach. A sprint is a one- to the two-week event with a defined goal. Every sprint begins with a two- to a four-hour planning meeting to determine the sprint goal (which must be summarised in one sentence) and divide that goal down into individual tasks or milestones. The Sprint Backlog is a collection of projects that should result from the latter.
Every morning, the team assembles for a stand-up meeting. This meeting is intended to be brief – in fact, most corporations require everyone to remain standing for the duration of the meeting, hence the name. Members of the team walk around explaining:
- What they accomplished the day before yesterday
- What they'll achieve today and
- Any challenges they'll face
This ensures that everyone is on the same page and that accountability is maintained.
Agile's rapid adoption is a logical response to sales teams' increasing responsibilities and frequent market changes. An agile strategy for managers implies letting go of centralized decision-making and giving sales teams the freedom and flexibility to make judgments based on new customer information.
How effective is it?
The agile strategy, at its most basic level, enables teams to work more rapidly, reduce waste, and offer better, faster outcomes. This involves focusing on smaller, more immediate goals, responding to feedback and concerns in real-time, and adapting to changing needs for a sales team. This agile approach of ongoing iteration analyses and improves sales-team operations using real-time, empirical data. As a result, salespeople can employ targeted and customized sales methods to react to changing market conditions and stay competitive.
Eventually, the numbers speak for themselves: agile projects are 2X more likely to succeed than those handled using waterfall approaches.
In the previous few years, sales have changed significantly. Today's salespeople, like their clients, grew up with continual access to information and the internet. Reps may change their strategy to meet customers at the right moment of their new purchase journey with agile sales.
Furthermore, customer relationship management (CRM) software has provided sales teams with a huge chance to address problems and accomplish goals faster and more efficiently. CRMs are used to meticulously record every customer encounter (good or bad) to speed up learning and discovery, allowing for the rapid delivery of data-driven enhancements.
Agile sales are rapidly becoming a reasonable alternative to obsolete traditional sales approaches in a growing number of organizations. In fact, according to a recent agile survey of more than 2,000 professionals, roughly a quarter of those who use the agile methodology come from fields other than IT, such as sales and marketing. In addition, 87 percent of survey respondents believed that agile methodology improves their teams' quality of life at work.
What are the challenges faced by the solar sales team?
Limited Eligibility:
One of the reasons solar marketing and sales might be particularly difficult, starting at the top, is that the amount of eligible leads and customers is fixed. It's a little circle that doesn't seem to get any bigger.
The logic behind this is simple enough to understand. To be a solar customer, you must meet many requirements: you must be a homeowner with good credit, and your home must not have any shade on the roof. Your roof, too, must meet specific requirements—it can't be flat, it can't have dormers, it must be built of the appropriate material, and so on.
A Diverse and Widespread Market:
Not only does the size of the niche market present challenges for solar sales, but so do the variations within your audience. You'll run into different dialects, personality types, and beliefs as you try to sell to this small audience state by state. For instance, If you’re making a call to New Delhi, you might not get away with a soft opening of “How’s your day going? "How's your weekend going?" Instead, you might need to be a little more direct.
However, the outbound sales team will need to account for more than just dialect and decorum. When attempting to sell solar across multiple market segments, your team must also account for ever-changing circumstances on the ground as well as ever-changing rules and regulations affecting our industry.
Each day of the week appears to have its own set of rules and items when it comes to solar sales. There's also various finance data to consider, as well as a separate set of criteria for each utility provider. When you add in the various, complex restrictions in play—you've got "no-rebuttal" states, "purchase-only" states, "two-party consent" states, and more—you've got more than your contact center agents can realistically remember to stay in compliance and build meaningful relationships with your leads.
Geography, Proximity, and Load Balancing:
Beyond connecting with these potentially overburdened leads in a localized, compliant, and effective manner, you must also avoid overburdening your sales force. That's because, given the realities of selling solar panels, you can't simply convert over the phone. There's no getting around it: you have to physically drive to that person's house if you want to address that home's specific needs and close a sale.
Due to the importance of geography and in-person evaluations in the solar buyer's journey, load balancing your scheduling queue becomes a challenge. That is, you have a limited number of salespeople who can drive to prospects' homes. As a result, your data and calling strategy must be balanced against that reality as well as your company's specific sales resources and locations.
How Can Agile Sales Help the Solar Business?
The Agile Sales Method, with its emphasis on flexibility, can be defined as the ability to:
- Adapt to individual customer needs
Small businesses, for starters, have the advantage of being able to add a personal touch to their solar proposals, as well as the flexibility to adapt as needed to meet and exceed customer expectations. The key to success here is to stay as flexible as possible while taking into account all of the unique variables that each customer's potential solar energy system may have.
Small businesses that deal directly with customers should try to gather as much unique data as possible. Solar proposals should always be tailored to the size of the homeowner's roof as well as the property's specific sunlight conditions, in addition to the customer's monthly electricity usage and energy load profile. Showing an actual model of the customer's home, taking into account any special circumstances, will immediately demonstrate the value of your proposal.
- Make changes in real-time
Second, the Agile Sales Method is built around the ability to make real-time changes. While many salespeople are accustomed to calling engineers for design changes, The ARKA 360 software is designed for ease of use, homeowner friendliness, agility, and customization allowing salespeople to make simple, real-time changes to solar proposals and close deals on the spot.
Let's say you understand during a meeting with a homeowner that they plan to purchase an electric vehicle or air conditioning system, which will likely result in a significant increase in their future electricity bills. An agile solar company should be able to make changes quickly by adding panels to the design and monitoring the impact on bill savings in real time.
- Show multiple options to close the deal
Finally, one of the most effective ways to close a sale on a solar energy system is to present multiple options visually and understandably. Solar companies can present multiple options for various financing methods and cash prices to incentivize a sale after working with the customer to meet their personal preferences.
The software's user interface allows you to quickly switch between financing options for customers, allowing you to compare monthly payments, payback periods, and other factors.
While we all wish we could close every sales opportunity on our calendar right away, it doesn't take long in the solar industry to realize this is simply impossible.