I’m ANTHONY COPPEDGE

Certified Agile Coach, Agile Leader & Agile Sales & Marketing Trainer | Keynote & Conference Speaker | Podcaster & Author

Transforming Sales & Marketing with Agility

Agile Sales & Agile Marketing?

Agile for Sales & Marketing is a model for team-focused deliverables, faster speed to market, and higher quality work done in short spans of time. 

Agile Marketing is a lot like Google Maps for planning the customer journey and marketing workflow. You know where you want to end up, but how you get there is updated frequently through real-time data and helpful points for course corrections.

Stop following the pre-planned marketing deliverables route where you hope there are no detours, no major accidents, and no changes to the route. Start iterating with marketing agility to determine the best available course guided by helpful data, short iterations, and faster-to-market consistency. That’s the power of Agile Marketing.

Is Agile for all Sales & Marketing Teams?

Agile Marketing is for organizations of all sizes. It works best when there is agreement that what used to work isn’t working as well and that changing from business-as-usual to agility-at-scale is not only needed but supported from the top-down and bottom-up. 

Can Agile for Sales & Marketing be a grass-roots-led effort? Yes. And No. Give yourself and your team permission to suck less, starting now. The results of better successful outcomes, faster, is hard for company leaders to ignore. But with all transformations, key leadership sponsorship is often the difference between limited success and all-out success.

Agile Marketing is already in place at enterprise-class businesses, legacy companies, non-for-profit organizations, and small-to-medium (SMB) businesses serving B2B and B2C audiences. My friends at AgileSherpas have created a list of case studies I recommend reading.

Agile Marketing & Agile Sales
is so legit, they even have

their own Manifestos

When I was invited to attend and speak on a panel during SprintOne – only the second gathering of all of the world’s top Agile Marketing experts – at Mozilla’s headquarters in San Francisco, CA, in 2017, I heard the stories of how Agile Marketing was turning around marketing organizations and creating amazingly productive and thoroughly happy marketing teams. This group of Agile Marketing leaders have applied principles from the Lean production model of Toyota and the work of Agile in software development to the realities of today’s modern marketing.

1. What used to work isn't working anymore.

More of the same marketing mix won’t win because increasing the quantity of your marketing content cannot increase the value of audience engagement.

In the new marketing reality, you must create value, faster. And the speed of change requires agility.

Big bets on marketing campaigns risk too much and take too long to measure ROI.

2. Organizations waiting to change will become increasingly irrelevant.

Marketers stuck in the cycle of content marketing continue to lose traction.

  • 63% of marketing professionals surveyed are using ‘traditional’ or ‘ad hoc’ or even ‘no processes at all’ in their work.
  • On average, 55% of marketers say their boss places priority on the quantity of work.
  • Only 36% of the surveyed marketer’s week is spent doing their primary job duties. The majority of their time is spent in meetings, emails, and ‘other work.’
  • Marketers said 87% of the problem is inefficiency.

Agile marketers surveyed paint a different picture from their non-Agile marketing peers.

 

  • 81% of Agile marketing teams are satisfied with how their teams manage work, compared to a mere 27% of ‘ad hoc’ teams and only 44% of ‘traditional’ teams.
  • 68% of Agile marketing teams place their priority on quality work.
  • 58% of Agile marketers say they are either ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with how their marketing department manages their workload compared to 32% of ‘ad hoc’ marketing teams.
3. Marketing can't wait to improve, so marketers want help now.

The speed of change happening to marketers will not afford organizations the luxury of gradual adjustments. How your organization addresses the elephant in the room will determine how you survive or thrive in today’s digital climate. To address this needed change and dive into Agile Marketing requires a shift away from business as usual towards new systems, processes, and training.

Agile Marketers ranked the following as being most valuable in their adoption of the Agile framework for marketing:

  • 45% voted ‘consistent practices and processes across teams’
  • 32% voted ‘implementing an Agile project management tool’
  • 24% voted ‘external classes or workshops’
  • 20% voted ‘company-provided training programs
4. Accountability? High. Communication? Required.

Agile Marketing works when it’s bought into by leadership (who wants higher productivity anyway) and marketing team members dedicated to working collaboratively instead of in silos.

Agile marketers believe they will achieve goals when they plan in small increments, quickly execute and validate results, and pivot based on data to adjust course — and then do it all again and again with consistency. There’s no hiding on an Agile Marketing team because everyone sees everyone else’s work progress.

Because Agile is team-based and requires multiple communication touch-points, the result yields less ‘dropped balls’, better collaboration, and prioritizes data-driven insights to make decisions together. The team wins together in Agile Marketing.

5. Agile Marketing has proven to deliver better results, faster.

In order to respond quickly to change, marketing teams are choosing agility to deliver projects faster, shift away from rigid planning to adaptive campaigns, and quickly test, measure, and validate outcomes.

Agile Marketing is replacing traditional and ad hoc marketing with companies like CA Technologies, Dell, General Mills, IBM, Mozilla, and Santander Bank. You’ll also find Agile Marketing at smaller startups and businesses, too. My friend Andrea Fryrear of Agile Sherpas published the 2nd Annual Agile Marketing Report which surveyed over 400 Agile marketers from businesses, with 50% of respondents working at a company with 100 or less employees.

 

 

Agile Sales Manifesto

In 2019, I implemented Agile Sales at IBM for 26 teams first across North America. During the 13 month pilot program, we learned a ton about both what worked best and what didn’t add value. From the incredible feedback at scale, I learned and applied the essence into the first Agile Sales Manifesto

In 2022, I was tasked with taking the successes and learnings from North America and launch Agile for all of Worldwide Digital Sales.  Today, I’ve expanded to fully employ an OKR management system and a team-led Agile Sales model.

1. We value better business outcomes over more outputs.

When the focus is on the outputs, it’s entirely possible for Sales and Marketing teams to push things out that ‘check the boxes’ but fail to deliver value to the prospects and clients.

We do pay attention to the prioritization of effort and the quality of outputs, but the focus is always, always, always on the outcomes of those efforts.

2. We value ways to understand continuous improvement over high levels of activity measurement.

Doing more of the wrong stuff ever more efficiently or faster should never be the goal. And yet, many Sales & Marketing organizations focus almost exclusively on measuring the outputs via activity-based metrics.

As Goodhart’s Law states: “When a measure becomes a target, it cases to be a good measure.”

3. What used to work isn't working anymore.

More of the same marketing mix won’t win because increasing the quantity of your marketing content cannot increase the value of audience engagement.

In the new marketing reality, you must create value, faster. And the speed of change requires agility.

Big bets on marketing campaigns risk too much and take too long to measure ROI.

4. We value collaboration for client-centricity over silos of individual work.

The speed of change happening to marketers will not afford organizations the luxury of gradual adjustments. How your organization addresses the elephant in the room will determine how you survive or thrive in today’s digital climate. To address this needed change and dive into Agile Marketing requires a shift away from business as usual towards new systems, processes, and training.

Agile Marketers ranked the following as being most valuable in their adoption of the Agile framework for marketing:

  • 45% voted ‘consistent practices and processes across teams’
  • 32% voted ‘implementing an Agile project management tool’
  • 24% voted ‘external classes or workshops’
  • 20% voted ‘company-provided training programs
5. We value quantitative and qualitative data-driven insight over pure opinions.

Agile Marketing works when it’s bought into by leadership (who wants higher productivity anyway) and marketing team members dedicated to working collaboratively instead of in silos.

Agile marketers believe they will achieve goals when they plan in small increments, quickly execute and validate results, and pivot based on data to adjust course — and then do it all again and again with consistency. There’s no hiding on an Agile Marketing team because everyone sees everyone else’s work progress.

Because Agile is team-based and requires multiple communication touch-points, the result yields less ‘dropped balls’, better collaboration, and prioritizes data-driven insights to make decisions together. The team wins together in Agile Marketing.

6. We value building a sustainable work culture over prioritizing last-minute requests.

In order to respond quickly to change, marketing teams are choosing agility to deliver projects faster, shift away from rigid planning to adaptive campaigns, and quickly test, measure, and validate outcomes.

Agile Marketing is replacing traditional and ad hoc marketing with companies like CA Technologies, Dell, General Mills, IBM, Mozilla, and Santander Bank. You’ll also find Agile Marketing at smaller startups and businesses, too. My friend Andrea Fryrear of Agile Sherpas published the 2nd Annual Agile Marketing Report which surveyed over 400 Agile marketers from businesses, with 50% of respondents working at a company with 100 or less employees.

7. We value co-creating value with clients over extracting value from clients.

In order to respond quickly to change, marketing teams are choosing agility to deliver projects faster, shift away from rigid planning to adaptive campaigns, and quickly test, measure, and validate outcomes.

Agile Marketing is replacing traditional and ad hoc marketing with companies like CA Technologies, Dell, General Mills, IBM, Mozilla, and Santander Bank. You’ll also find Agile Marketing at smaller startups and businesses, too. My friend Andrea Fryrear of Agile Sherpas published the 2nd Annual Agile Marketing Report which surveyed over 400 Agile marketers from businesses, with 50% of respondents working at a company with 100 or less employees.

 

 

Testimonials

Active_Network_logo"As the Product Manager for a SaaS-based software company, I found Anthony’s insight into current technical trends invaluable. His thoughts and his approach focused on market needs; not just where markets were currently positioned but where they were headed. His discourse is founded on a comprehensive understanding of the big picture, his points of view are logically sound, and his passion is contagious."

Scott Lowrie

Division VP, Product & Innovation, Active Network

BB&T_logo"Anthony has many strengths, one of the greatest is the ability to rally individuals to common goals. The key to his success is the talent to clearly communicate technical challenges and solutions with stakeholders and technical leads. Anthony developed a communication strategy for the multiple programs that elevated goals, clarity, and focus. This allowed business units to align technology roadmaps to strategic goals."

Craig Rodgers

Head of Enterprise Architecture, BB&T

ECi Software Solutions

"Getting more of the right things done; that’s exciting! I worked for Anthony and his excitement and passion for Agile Marketing showed daily. Anthony recommended a framework for how our team could better plan and deliver, and he worked with us to tailor it to meet the needs of our team. Through his help, we implemented this new way of working, and it was amazing! We planned our work better and got more of the right work done! If that’s not worth getting excited about, I don’t know what is! I highly recommend Anthony Coppedge as an Agile Marketing coach and leader."

Daniell Ybarra

Field Marketing Manager, ECi Software Solutions

Fidelity_Investments_logo"In my role as Program Manager, I communicated with Anthony on a regular basis as he led the overall coordination/integration. He was always a pleasure to work with and was driven to improve process and communications across all tracks to provide complete transparency into the program. His background in communications and marketing helped to drive many informative communications for the benefit of the Fidelity community."

Scott Ross

Program Manager, PaaS, Fidelity Investments

Script16_logo"Anthony has been instrumental in my professional and personal development over the past year. As a result of time spent with him, our 40-year old organization is entering a new year with a digital communications strategy for the first time!"

Kelon Moore

Executive Producer, Script 16

Center for Creative Media_logo"It is a genuine pleasure and honor for me to recommend Anthony Coppedge. He came to the Center for Creative Media to specifically develop several new websites and consolidate our online presence for us and to increase our visibility and relationships with our customers and B2B relationships using social media. He’s very goal-oriented, a team player, and clearly dedicated to the overall strategy and each of the defined goals."

Doug Rittenhouse

Executive Director, Center for Creative Media