The Power of Sales Playbooks
A Powerful Tool for Growth and Successful Sales Transformations
Sales Playbooks are pivotal tools for companies looking for growth and to achieve consistent, clear, and targeted execution of their strategy. They are also a central tool for companies planning a sales transformation and raising the overall performance of their sales team.
The problem:
A significant number of sales organisations neglect to train and develop their sales teams on a consistent set of tactics. This mindset grew from small businesses, thinking autonomous management is best for salespeople. These fractured approaches create underperformance issues and high operational costs and can lead to enormous lost opportunities, lost market share and lower profits.
With larger sales teams, increased competition and more sophisticated buyers, the need for consistent, clear and targeted strategy execution has never been more pressing. Companies can no longer afford slow ramp-up time on new hires and opportunities being missed in the market.
There is a stark contrast to the typical company onboarding and short training programmes from time to time.
Instead, successful companies provide a comprehensive and detailed guide, ensuring all team members are successful through the consistent and ongoing reinforcement of the company’s strategy execution tactics and sales practices.
Importantly, sales playbooks are designed to step your team up a level and not just document what already exists in your business. Their purpose is to assist sales leaders in achieving increased productivity from their teams when implemented correctly
What is a sales playbook?
A playbook is, in some ways, a collective of everything related to sales. They establish written guidelines for representing the company, the terminology to be used, knowing the competitors, the market and ideal customer profiles and where efforts should be focused. They provide the how-to information for customer acquisition and retention, sales processes and tactics, and battle cards, which are imperative to compete in your market. They are a competitive advantage for the business and the team.
They are a secure, living web-based portal accessible by the team 24/7, ensuring your intellectual property is always protected.
In this eBook, we will outline the content of the successful playbooks we have used to deliver results in hundreds of sales turnarounds. It will guide you on how to put your company in a winning position with your sales team and deliver your sales goals year on year.
The sales playbook purpose:
Take your business to the next level.
Sales leaders have a central tool to manage the team and outline the expectations of the sales team’s performance, focus, and delivery of results. They allow managers to focus on the top 50% of management (coaching and driving growth) instead of repeating the base 50% of learning and functional tasks.
They are instrumental in:
1. Facilitating a seamless onboarding process, reducing the ramp-up time for new hires. New hires can be effective sellers in up to 50% less time.
2. Formalising the sales process to be aligned with buyers, ensuring opportunities are exploited to their fullest potential. The best actions for plays when engaging with prospects and traversing sales scenarios, whether learning a task for the first time or verifying specific procedures. Increases closing ratios and deal size.
3. Providing the structure and clarity of strategy execution ensures timely implementation of all actions. Delivers the right customer mix for the future.
4. Competitor knowledge and battle cards. Reduces pricing pressure.
5. Sales tools and marketing collateral with guidelines for use.
6. Product information, including resources for pricing and other trading requirements.
7. Tech-stack training and reporting. Efficiency in CRM use.
8. The measures and other management tools for consistently delivering sales goals. Supports accurate reporting and forecasting.
Sales organisations excel only where there is consistent performance and operate according to a successful methodology.
Developing playbooks is about raising the team’s performance and not just documenting current practices.
For Sales Transformations
The sales playbook has been a cornerstone of Sales Focus Advisory sales transformations, providing companies and teams with the focus and guidelines necessary to evolve the team to the next level. The playbook assists in removing many barriers in cultural change initiatives, making a smoother transition to new ways of operating.
Sales Focus Advisory’s Potential Contribution
Building a sales playbook requires deep understanding of sales strategy, sales methodologies, sales plays, and functional requirements of sales enablement. A good sales playbook is a major asset to any company.
With 35 years of experience and 200+ assignments in building high-performance teams and sales transformations, Sales Focus Advisory can assist you in the development, execution, and optimisation of sales playbooks within your organisation.