Does your team need a Sales Playbook?

There are several levers to pull in bringing a sales team to perform at the highest levels.  One of the most compelling is to provide each sales exec with a “Playbook” which details a road-map for managing each sales opportunity.  In a perfect world, the Sales Playbook would be deployed both on-line and as a document to facilitate different use cases.  Here’s the table of contents and description of one built by a management team I served on.

1. Message Summary by vertical market:  These summaries include your company’s high level message supported by three proof point descriptions that are the core of your discussions with any prospect.  These proof point descriptions should start with a series of “What if you could…” questions and then a brief high level description of how your solution addresses the issue.   This content will reappear throughout the sales process in the form of phone scripts, written communications/proposals, presentations etc.  It is important to employ your best minds and winning sales processes to develop these “meta-messages”.  Management opportunity:  Coach sales team to fully absorb these messages and be able to deliver them in a compelling fashion.
2. Ideal Prospect Company Profile:  Take at look at your best “wins” over the past 18 months.  What types of companies were they?  What industry?  What was the business problem solved?  Who in the prospect company was worried about it?  What were the most impactful parts of your sales strategy and tactics.  Map it all out in detail.  Your sales team now has a profile to match their prospects against, or to seek new prospects who are closely aligned.  Management opportunity:  inspect and compare prospect targets in each territory plan against ideal prospect.
3. Ideal prospect (person) within the company:  This should be easy given the work you did on #2.  What titles and responsibilities engaged themselves in the buying process, and which ones were the most enthusiastic and engaged?  It’s a good idea to identify the actual buyers here too.  In these times that almost always a C-Level person who may not have engaged in the buying process until nearer the end, but it is important to identify them and seek them out as early as possible in future opportunities.  Management opportunity:  Inspect each account plan and ensure the “ideal prospect(s) are identified.
4. Sales Process Script:  Visually map out your sales process with descriptions and qualifiers for each stage.  Define what completed actions are required to promote a prospect to the next stage.
5. Qualifying, Probing, and Follow-up Questions:  Using real-life examples, capture the best and most impactful  ”questions” in each category.  This section is “fluid” and should be updated regularly with new entries.  Management opportunity:  Ensure your team is facile with these questions.  Reinforce with role plays and inspect for them on sales calls.
6. Competitive Analysis:  Gather your senior sales executives and management team and capture your best practices for dealing with competitive pressures.  Review both wins and losses and document your strengths and weaknesses against each competitor who is active in your target market.  This section should be “fluid” too.  Management opportunity:  Role play competitive scenarios in sales meetings and one-on-ones.  Ensure your team members can deliver a credible response.
7. Demonstration Outline:  Define the best practices for successful demonstrations.  Key areas to focus on are messaging (the big picture), customization for the prospect, focus on specific relevant areas (avoid the feature dump!), customer stories for proof, wrap-up with restatement of key relevant messages or restatement of positive feedback received during the demonstration, and finally, “what did you think?”   Management opportunity:Role play the demonstrations in sales meetings, brainstorm new ideas as a team, and inspect for use in pre-call plans and live situations.
8. Winning Objection Handling:  Capture your most common objections with particular emphasis on the ones you like hearing the least.  Brainstorm the best responses and document for each.  Management opportunity:  Role plays and demonstrate use during live sales meetings.
9. Presentation Storyboard:  Capture your best talking points for your standard presentation(s).  If your Playbook is on-line, have a video of senior executives giving the presentation.  Management opportunity:  Practice as a team with brainstorming to keep the talking points and customer stories fresh.  As the manager, give the presentation in live sales meetings and gather feedback from your team afterword.

As you can see, properly done, this project requires a significant up-front investment in time and resources.  Many of the tasks can be divided and then reviewed in brainstorming sessions.  Once complete, you’ve built an extremely valuable sales tool and corporate asset. 

Additional Note:

Make sure your technical and finance resources have some input into the security of the content.  Disgruntled employees with access to this type of material can create damage.