Kanban Can Help Take the Stress Out of Sales

Before founding Pipedrive, I often battled the stress that comes with disorganization.

At the time, I was a trainer and handled my own sales. I had to work on so many different tasks each day that it was hard to prioritize them. Handling meetings, calls and emails was difficult, often stressful. I had a pile of business cards, random sticky notes and an overflowing inbox. It could be a challenge to stay calm enough to enjoy the work and simultaneously be productive. I tried to feel better by telling myself that stress just comes with the job.

At the time, I organized tasks by aligning business cards in three or four columns on my desk. Each column contained cards with similar tasks; for example, the cards on the right reminded me about prospects waiting for written proposals. I worked through these business cards, accepting new ones, and delegating the ones that had to be delegated. After a while, I needed to include more columns than my desk could hold, so I used sticky notes on my wall. I didn't know it then that I was using a kanban system.

Kanban is an organizational system that's part of the Japanese just-in-time framework. It was developed by Toyota in the 1940s to help the company move manufacturing inventory quickly. Back in the '40s, teams of employees would deliver kanban cards (“kanban” loosely means “card” in Japanese) to one another, to signal that one team had a surplus of inventory and was ready to push it out to the employees on the factory floor, who were putting a car together.

Kanban has since been adapted beyond factory work. It functions somewhat differently as a project management framework, although cards are still used. Take Trello, for example, or my own product, Pipedrive, a sales kanban tool. Both are digital kanban tools intended to manage multistep processes. Both, like my desk, use columns of digital cards to show a project's progress.

They work this way: A project enters a pipeline, is assigned a card and moves through stages. The number of workflow stages differ depending on the project. The simplest kanban board might have three stages:

• To Be Completed


• In Progress


• Done.

On Pipedrive, a sales team might have several workflow stages:

1. First Contact


2. Meeting


3. Estimate


4. Proposal Presented

Because the board is available to a team, everyone can quickly see what stage a project is in.

Kanban helps salespeople concentrate on the task at hand because the system focuses only on the work that's in progress.

I can't claim that we consciously based Pipedrive on kanban - we discovered kanban as a method about a year later after we had launched - but the principles are the same. When we were building Pipedrive, we felt that salespeople needed a tool that would help them prioritize work while rewarding them with a feeling that things are under control.

Sale reps are able to enjoy their work when they're focused, but for a salesperson to stay focused, he must be organized. To be organized, he must have a system. Being focused means that the salesperson is doing the most important thing he can at each given moment while not being worried about other things on a to-do list.

We can have a human tendency to waste a lot of energy by dwelling on things that are not happening right now. At Pipedrive, we believe that being focused on just one thing at a time is not only more productive, but also is way more enjoyable than multitasking.

The post Kanban Can Help Take the Stress Out of Sales appeared first on AllBusiness.com

The post Kanban Can Help Take the Stress Out of Sales appeared first on AllBusiness.com.