Strategy! Alignment! Positioning! Messaging! Methodology! Training! Enablement! Productivity! If we all had a nickel (remember those?) for every bright idea to improve our selling efforts we would have, well, a shitload of nickels!
Talking to many smaller, high growth companies and investors this year a common theme has emerged around the performance of sales teams. There are many factors that drive consistent revenue generation across the customer lifecycle, and many good diagnostic / assessment tools to identify root causes of performance challenges. It is interesting that one simple, powerful tool seems to surface consistently as part of the action plan: Sales Playbooks. Well-designed playbooks can be a catalyst for Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams to work together and provide salespeople with a high impact tool designed with a single purpose in mind: win more deals.
Adoption of systems, training, methodology and tools has historically been pretty poor in most sales organizations, with millions of nickels spent for a questionable return. What I have found over the course of multiple playbook projects is that doing this work is easily within reach for most companies, and it is one of the few things sellers actually find helpful. Speeding up a sales cycle, having the right conversations with the right people, closing just one more deal to get over quota or into president’s club, increasing deal size, putting a few more bucks in the bank…what sales person doesn’t like that?
One of the biggest benefits to building out playbooks is that it not only delivers value to the sales team, but it also gets internal teams mobilized around a collaborative project without a lot of handwringing and finger pointing around alignment (or lack thereof). It is a wonderful way to organize and tighten up marketing content and assets, align customer success stories and programs, and clarify the differentiators for your products, services, and solutions. Creating, compiling, and updating the content and detail required for a great playbook helps break down silos and is a win/win for everyone involved. Marketers want to help drive revenue, CS teams want to position clients for success from day one, and Sales wants to set a foundation for expansion as customers grow over time. Developing the sales playbook helps everyone involved hit their targets and establishes a foundation for ongoing collaboration to drive revenue.
There is a lot of confusion around the term playbooks, and I find it helpful to distinguish between playbooks and selling guides as a design principle. Sales Playbooks focus on your strategy and tactics to win in a given buying scenario…who are the people you sell to, what do they care about, how do they make decisions? In clear, simple language, how do you help them solve problems and succeed? Why are they buying, why from you, why now? Who else is after their business, and how do you position against them? How do you anticipate and overcome objections, and what proof points do you have to support your value claims? What do you have for assets and resources to leverage at each sales stage? In short, how do you play to win?
Selling guides or operating manuals should be separated from the playbooks, and can be equally important to sales productivity. These tools include things like sales stage definitions, CRM and SFA system usage guidelines, pipeline and forecast policies and processes, legal and financial deal support, and insight into what metrics are tracked and why. These are all significant for the organization and leadership, but may be seen by sellers as more of a necessary evil than tools they need to win more deals. Isolating playbooks from these operational tools helps tremendously with the perception of value and adoption for the sales plays themselves. Great sales people think constantly about how they will win, and anything that helps them in that mission is much more likely to be embraced.
If you are like most teams you don’t have a bottomless bag of nickels to spend. As you plan your program investments for the new year consider the impact you can have building a library of plays crafted to address your most common buying scenarios. Creating this template and a framework to build additional plays is something you can leverage in every launch plan for new releases, acquired solutions, and partner plays as your strategy evolves. It will also help you improve a number of KPI’s around funnel quality & velocity, forecast accuracy and revenue growth.
Best wishes to all for a strong close to 2019 and a prosperous start to the roaring twenties!