How to: Implement Sales Playbooks (and why they’re valuable)

How to create a sales playbook

Having touched on the topic of sales playbooks in ‘Why your Key Messaging is vital’, I wanted to explain how sales plays can help make life easier for sales and provide a guide on implementing them.

Why have Sales Plays?

Sales playbooks make life easier for your sales team and allow the onboarding of new salespeople faster while aligning assets across the whole organization. It’s also a great way to check that the collateral sales need is available to them, and if it isn’t, you’re aware this content needs to be created.

Packaging all the sales collateral they need in one place for each of your target markets standardizes your sales process. It ensures that the whole team follows the same processes and best practices, enabling them to operate productively and creating more predictable outcomes.

This standardization means sales can replicate successful strategies across the team. If a sales approach or objection-handling technique works well, it can become a best practice for others. In that regard, standardization forms a significant part of your win strategy.

This increases your success rate and minimizes the ramp-up time when onboarding new salespeople. It also enables you to scale sales far more effectively as new hires have access to a well-organized collection of resources that outline the sales process, from prospecting to closing. It shortens their learning curve and helps them become productive more quickly.

That said, this doesn’t replace the need for sales training but supplements it to make your sales team more productive and effective.

Creating an effective sales play

1. Ensure you understand your customers’ journey and how this maps onto your current sales processes.

Before creating your sales play(s), you need to map the steps of the journey (both from a customer’s and an internal perspective), from lead generation to closing, retention, and future upsell opportunities.

You can do this by interviewing existing customers and salespeople to identify strategies and techniques that lead to success and discover where customers get stuck (see ‘How to accelerate your sales cycle’).

If there is a conflict between what the customer expects to happen and what is happening today, this is a good time to resolve it (for the avoidance of doubt, the customer wins!).

 
2. Work with sales to define the content they need

Sales plays consist of a list of deliverables agreed between sales and marketing and typically might look like (but are not limited to) the following:

Prospecting:

• Your Ideal Customer Profile, including personas

• How to identify and qualify leads

• Sample call scripts and email templates

Discovery:

• A breakdown of the steps your customers go through during the buying process (which is not necessarily the same as your sales funnel)

• Techniques on how to probe and build an understanding of your prospect’s needs and pain points

• Reference customers

• Examples of use cases and their return on investment

• Customer case studies

• Example return on investment arguments

• Why your solution has been ideal for your customers

• When to qualify in and, equally important, when to qualify out

Subsequent discussions:

• Strategies shown to lead to a positive sales conversation

• A short slide deck that outlines the arc of the story they can tell

• An extended set of reference slides divided into logical sections to include:

  o   A reiteration of the relevant pains you can help them solve

o   How you are able to help them resolve these pains

o   Validated return on investment (ROI) numbers

o   Industry analyst reports

o   Press articles

Evaluation:

• Include the hurdles customers might encounter during their buying process and tools sales can use to overcome them

• Features, Advantages, and Benefits of your product (see ‘Why your Key Messaging is vital’)

• How to handle objections

• Differentiated messaging (how and why you are different from the competitors you see most often)

• Any additional technical material their IT/OT team might need to support the decision

• Competitive information (including strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats)

Side note: While the last three points sound similar, the first is about responding to customer concerns/questions, the second is about differentiating yourself from the competition while bringing the argument back from what can quickly become a technical one to one that is benefit-led, and the third is about positioning yourself against the competition.

Closing:

• Proof points that your solution works (such as a QuickStart program)

• Strategies to close the sale effectively

• Best practices for post-sale engagement to ensure customer satisfaction and encourage upselling or referrals

• Pricing models

3. Define any additional content your customers need to support and accelerate their decision-making process

Like your sales plays, this is worth putting together as a buyer’s pack, so when an internal sponsor gets asked questions, they have the answers they need to hand.

4. Measure and benchmark your success against your competition

It's crucial to measure the success of your playbook. Track key performance indicators such as win rates, average deal size, sales cycle length, and customer acquisition costs. Compare these metrics before and after implementing the playbook to gauge its impact.

5. Finally, your playbooks should be seen as living documents

The content should evolve as your market, competitors, and customers’ needs change. Encourage your sales team to contribute to the playbook by sharing their experiences and suggestions for improvement.

Use these insights from your sales team and your benchmarking to continue iteratively improving your playbook, driving better results.

The content you include will ultimately depend on the maturity of your market. Do your customers recognize they have the pains you can help solve (or that they can gain a particular benefit) by choosing your solution; are they comparing you with other vendors in your space?). 

It’s also worth sanitizing sensitive information should it inadvertently end up in a customer’s (or competitor’s) hands.

Conclusions

Sales playbooks are strategic assets that can transform your sales team’s operations. A well-implemented playbook can drive significant sales effectiveness and efficiency improvements by standardizing processes, improving training, enhancing performance and sales predictability, and enabling scalability.

Creating and implementing a sales playbook is not a one-time task. It requires ongoing management and refinement to ensure that it meets the ongoing needs of your sales team. Following the steps outlined in this article, you can develop a sales playbook that boosts your team's performance and positions your organization for long-term success.