The Power of Playbooks: Execute Your Sales Vision
Sales executives often lack the ability to execute their vision for the new go-to-market strategy. Sales playbooks enable their vision to become reality.
Many sales organizations fail to develop and train their sales forces on a consistent set of plays. Shorter seller onboarding and training programs contrast with more sophisticated buyers and solutions. Increased complexity and proliferation of roles and channels require more collaboration across a greater number of team members than ever before. The need for guided selling has never been greater. Done right, sales playbooks help sales leaders realize increased productivity from their teams.
Research conducted by Aberdeen Group found that companies that document and distribute their high performer best practices experienced sales cycles that are 10 percent shorter, sellers achieve 4 percent higher quota attainment, and most importantly, overall revenue growth is 7.9 percent better than peer companies.
What Is a Sales Playbook?
Written guidelines of sales plays are essential for creating a smooth onboarding or training process. These manuals document best practices for selling products and services.
Playbook resources should provide easy-to-understand instructions with detailed, accurate information for any scenario. Whether learning a task for the first time or checking specific procedures, personnel should be able to access documents that set standards for engaging with prospects and navigating sales scenarios.
When the same steps are consistently followed, a team can set daily quotas. Clear expectations help everyone work toward a shared vision and overall goal. Consider offering performance recognition to boost employee engagement, motivation and performance.
Sales Playbook Examples
Simultaneously listening, watching a demonstration and taking notes requires considerable effort and skill. Having written documentation already prepared allows employees to underline, highlight or add to the provided notes.
Employees can revisit the information to refresh their memory or gain clarification when needed. Here are some sales plays to cover in your manual:
- Personalized content play: Identify how sales representatives can tailor their interactions and the content they share toward specific leads and prospects throughout the buyer’s journey.
- Lead qualification play: Give detailed descriptions of how to identify highly qualified leads or prospects who are likely to convert into customers.
- Demo play: Provide clear instructions on how your sales team should demonstrate specific products and services to potential buyers.
- Use case play: Describe a success story, evidence or data highlighting how products and services have benefited customers in the past.
- Prospecting play: Offer an overview of how to complete the first stage of the sales cycle for identifying potential buyers via channels such as cold emailing, cold calling and social selling.
- Closing play: Provide instruction on how sales reps should overcome objections, gain commitment and persuade potential customers to finalize a purchase.
- Follow-up play: Identify how sales reps should follow up with a potential customer after interactions to build engagement, develop trust, provide additional information and guide the lead toward a purchase.
Importance of Sales Playbooks
Every business has to discover what works and doesn’t work well for its target audience. Fine-tuning sales techniques takes time and effort.
Imagine you’ve identified exactly what converts potential customers into buyers—wouldn’t you want to document and implement that strategy across your whole team?
Research conducted by Aberdeen Group found that companies that document and distribute their high performer best practices experienced sales cycles that are 10 percent shorter, sellers achieve 4 percent higher quota attainment, and most importantly, overall revenue growth is 7.9 percent better than peer companies.
Having a team implement the best sales plays offers a consistent user experience for your brand. Your business can adjust sales plays and test the success of new strategies as needed. Track the increased lead generation, sales conversions and profits over time.
Types of Sales Playbooks
Sales Playbooks revolve around sales fulfillment, advocacy and innovation. Here are four common forms for you to implement:
- Sales Process Playbooks: Use a sales process playbook to provide specific details on how to access buyers, incorporate marketing collateral, and effectively utilize vignettes, case studies and scripts to offer consistent seller execution.
- Manager Coaching Playbooks: Create a coaching playbook for managers to promote rigor and consistency while addressing all three of the key aspects of the role—people management, region or district development, and business improvement.
- Jump–start Playbooks: Make a playbook to dictate the new sales strategy for a new product launch, sales transformation or merger and identify what the seller needs to stop doing.
- Onboarding Playbooks: Generate an onboarding playbook to accelerate the new hire ramp up process, guide managers and representatives, and reduce the time to benefit so new hires are fully productive faster.
What Are Sales Plays?
Each sales play describes how representatives should approach communication, tasks and strategies. Documentation outlines the steps and practices your team should follow to meet different customer needs.
The information should offer guidance at different points in the sales cycle with details of what to say, show and do during interactions. Each strategy aims to successfully sell a product or service.
3 Steps to Implement a Successful Sales Play
Playbooks should offer helpful information in a concise format. Offering the right amount of detail can facilitate quick training and fact-checking processes. Follow these steps to have your sales reps work toward shared goals:
Step 1: Assemble Your Winning Team
Do you have motivated and hardworking employees? Having a team with the right mindset goes a long way. Look for professionals who demonstrate an ability to work efficiently and adapt when adjustments are made. Aim to assemble a small, diverse group across your sales, marketing and leadership roles.
Step 2: Aim for Continuous Improvement
The marketing world continues to transform with new techniques and technologies—your sales strategies should shift too. Instill a positive mindset for continuous changes. Create a playbook with a basic framework that welcomes modifications. Offer exciting challenges and rewards to keep your team improving as the new practices emerge over time.
Step 3: Turn Plans Into Actionable Results
If you want to succeed, you have to plan. Prepare to plan around four to eight weeks ahead before implementing a new playbook. Conduct trials to ensure the sales team understands the tasks involved. Most importantly, test to ensure the process brings value to your customer. Ask for feedback and make adjustments to keep improving and develop a winning sales process.
Lessons to Learn From Sales Plays
Creating a playbook tailored to your strengths and goals involves trial and error, with many lessons to learn. Ultimately, your playbooks should provide the right value propositions and coaching messages. Getting everyone on the same page is essential to your team’s success.
Aim to make your documentation specific without being too detailed. Your sales team should be able to quickly scan the key stages of a play, identify the most important activities within a stage and follow directions in real time.
Implementing Your Sales Play
Have sales reps integrate the playbook into their daily routine, which can reinforce the right activities and eliminate other habits. Having a focused and productive workspace is essential for implementing new strategies.
Coaching can create a positive work environment and ensure everyone feels confident working on the same page. Managers should assess how sales progress, identify what causes reps to stall and determine when to add more resources.
How Alexander Group Can Help
Interested in learning more about how Alexander Group can help you design, implement and get the most out of sales playbooks within your organization? Contact us today.
