Agile has proven successful for software developers, and it can work wonders for marketing and RevOps teams, too

Marketing methodologies have changed dramatically over the past ten years as priorities have shifted from brand awareness to driving revenue. Where it once made sense to design long-term marketing plans and check in with them periodically, new marketplace demands and technology require B2B marketers to be ready to pivot in an instant. 

Many B2B teams are moving towards agile marketing to address the volatility that seems to be the only constant. But what exactly is agile? Where does it come from, and what are its benefits? Great questions. Read on for the answers.

What is agile marketing?

The concept of agile comes from software development. Until the 1990s, development was an ungainly beast. With so much distance between the people conceptualizing the project and the people realizing it, almost nothing was accomplished on time or particularly well. Agile was conceived as a way for teams to work faster and more productively. Rather than aiming for one big “perfect” rollout, teams work iteratively, breaking the project into small, manageable chunks. The team evaluates everything continuously so that they can address issues and improvements quickly.

Traditionally, agile has components that you may want to consider, like daily stand up meetings and progress trackers, but the one technique you absolutely should adopt is the sprint. A “sprint” is the amount of time given for project completion. It should be enough time to actually achieve some progress on whatever needs to be done, but not so much that teams can stray off task. Two weeks is a fairly standard sprint length. It’s better to repeat a sprint — that is set the same goals for the same length of time — rather than have one longer sprint. The shorter the sprint, the more precise your actions must be.

Agile marketing simply applies that same methodology to its own arena. Rather than viewing the fiscal year or quarter as a single entity, it examines it in manageable chunks or “sprints, which allows teams to make data-driven decisions quickly and flexibly. For example, an agile marketer may realize that a particular sales territory or market segment is underperforming YoY and dedicate a sprint to creating more pipeline for that sales territory or market segment to compensate.

How to do agile marketing?

There are many variations of “agile,” but they all boil down to setting clear, short term goals, working towards those goals, and then examining the results. When combined with a forward-looking pipeline plan, agile marketing can remove the spreadsheet guesswork that leads to ugly surprises in future quarters.

Sprints can be dedicated to specific go-to-market segments, or drill down even further within a segment to target desirable stakeholders. The beauty of agile is that marketers don’t have to commit to a single strategy and hope for the best. Instead, they can examine data on current pipeline, sales, or campaigns, use that information to create a sprint and test their strategy. 

You might want to dedicate a sprint to a nurture campaign directed at a particular buyer persona, for example. A sprint might be created to reflect sales cycles, as well,  to ensure that the marketing team is making smart choices about when to launch a campaign. The length of the sprint and its goals are flexible; what matters is that both the objectives and the endpoint are clearly defined so that the marketing team can objectively evaluate the results of the sprint. 

Why do agile marketing?

Agile is a must for the revenue-focused marketer because it uses revenue goals as the starting point, rather than the endpoint. Marketing teams’ success is typically measured in MQLs, but what really matters is whether or not deals close. In agile, marketers look at the yearlong goals for the company and work backward to determine what pipeline they have, and what they’ll need to reach those goals. They can then work toward achieving those goals over successive sprints. 

More importantly, they should understand the context of the current pipeline status. Overall pipeline may be up, but if deal size or conversion rates are down, achieving future bookings targets may become challenging. Pipeline for segments with a longer sales cycle needs to be balanced with pipeline that will convert faster. Using revenue as the guiding principle tells marketers what they need to do; agile gives them the flexibility to do it.

Remember: Agile is not a magic wand. Adopting it will not immediately solve all your problems or make bad marketers into great marketers. What it will do, however, is give your team the flexibility it needs to identify pain points and find solutions quickly. You can’t find the right answer until you know you’re asking the right questions, and that’s what agile can help you discover.