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What Is a Sales
Playbook?
Like a playbook in sports that plans for the most frequent and most important
in-game situations, a sales playbook is a unique collection of sales
scenarios, strategies, plans, tactics, and tools to help a sales team
consistently win when the stakes are high.
And because every sales team has a unique
sales strategy, culture, solution, and definition of winning, the best sales
playbooks are unique to each organization and target buyer persona.
Three Prerequisites
to Creating a Better Sales Playbook
While in sales you may need to create a basic or interim playbook to keep the
sales wheels spinning, a head coach would never create a game plan without
knowing the sport that they were playing and their opponent; unfortunately,
too many sales enablement functions create sales playbooks without getting
the context right first.
Before you can define your key sales plays
based upon key buyer personas, goals, problems, and needs, three foundational
sales areas must be addressed.
Sales Strategy
First, your sales strategy must be clear, believable, and implementable enough to set
the true north for your sales plays. Our organizational alignment research found that sales strategy accounts for 31% of the
difference between high and low performing sales teams.
Do not make the mistake of investing heavily
in sales enablement tools until you have alignment around and commitment to
your target clients, value proposition, success metrics, and go-to-market sales strategies.
Sales Culture
Next, your sales culture must be healthy, high performing, and aligned enough with
your sales strategy for it to accelerate - not hinder - your sales force.
Sales culture, the way sales work gets done across the entire organization,
accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing sales
teams. Your sales strategy must go through your sales culture.
Do not underestimate the need for the right
sales culture to meet your targets. Otherwise your desire for a better
sales playbook to drive better sales results will falter.
Sales Talent
Lastly, you must assess the key sales skills required to execute your sales strategy and
know how your current sales force stacks up against those sales skills and
behaviors. Then, based upon your gap analysis, you can create a practical
plan to fill the key sales skill gaps that matter most for your sales plays
to be successful.
Make sure that any corresponding solution selling training is highly customized to your unique needs and reinforced by
frequent sales coaching. It is not very practical to create sales plays if your
sales force does not have the knowledge, skills, and business savvy to run
the plays well.
Elements of a Great
Sales Playbook
Once your sales strategy and sales culture are aligned and your plan to close
key sales skill gaps is clear, you have the context required to design the
right business sales training and build a better sales playbook
with the right sales scenarios, sales plays, and sales support tools.
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