Sales teams often face execution challenges, including:
– Poor sales process adoption
– Selling to accounts outside the target market or ideal customer profile
– Inconsistent proactive sales activities
– Lack of confidence in conducting deeper discovery conversations
– Low win rates
Collectively, these challenges contribute to underperforming sales teams.
Sales playbooks play a prominent role in addressing sales execution challenges.
Why Sales Playbooks?
Sales playbooks are essential for modern sales, marketing, and product teams that desire to perform at their full potential. They contain the best practices, messaging, strategies, tactics, knowledge, and tools that the sales team needs to execute the go-to-market strategy.
Sales playbooks also accelerate the onboarding of new hires and provide a framework for sales managers to accelerate pipeline quality and advance deals to closure through coaching. They can empower salespeople to engage customers at every touchpoint and ensure wins aren’t random and that losses can be traced back to when things went wrong.
Alas, two things are never “finished” in sales – account plans and playbooks. Both represent a snapshot in time of what we know and want to accomplish, both of which will change and require adjustments to respond to a competitive position, solution changes, and company objectives.
To that end, a perfect, comprehensive sales playbook is not attainable.
What’s In A Sales Playbook?
By prioritizing the sales playbook content elements based on the organization’s needs, you can develop versions of the playbooks that provide immediate and incremental impact on their path toward completion, roll-out, and optimization.
For example, a sales playbook for an established core solution within your firm known in the marketplace will contain different content than a new product just entering the market.
Depending on which solution you select for your first playbook will determine what content elements are needed to enable the sales team to meet the sales playbook objectives.
Sales playbook components vary by organization and involve a unique assortment and order, including:
– Key Insights
– Ideal Customer Profile
– Solution Value Proposition
– Buyer Personas
– Qualification Criteria
– Customer Journey Map
– Buying and Sales Process
– Competitive Battle Cards
– Content & Sales Resources
– Opportunity Advancement Plays
– Expected Metrics
A clear vision of a comprehensive sales playbook is essential, but you shouldn’t let the concept get in the way of active, agile, and practical progress on each component. Perhaps you don’t have Personas or Competitive Battle cards developed – don’t let that stop you from getting version one out the door without those elements.
You don’t need a perfect playbook to drive improved sales results, and creating sales playbooks does require investments of resources, time, and money. However, sales playbooks are one of the most effective ways to increase revenue and sales productivity.
What Are The Benefits of a Sales Playbook?
A good sales playbook allows organizations to put plans into action by aligning reps, marketing, and product teams around what we are selling, who we are selling it to, and how we will sell it.
When appropriately deployed, sales playbooks enable the organization to optimize sales results by:
– Training sales reps effectively
– Reducing onboarding times
– Winning more deals, and
– Maintaining a consistent go-to-market execution across the organization