Playbooks and the automation of deal level strategies

Sales playbooks have become increasingly popular as a way to improve sales enablement and, by extension, sales execution. Before we delve into the details, let’s take a page from Vince Lombardi and start with the fundamental question: What is a sales playbook?

There are numerous definitions available, however for the purposes of this post, Sales Benchmark Index puts it succinctly: ”A sales playbook is the marrying of your sales process and content/tools”.
In other words, playbooks constitute a system that help you combine the right tools and processes needed to enable your sales force and execute your sales strategy.

As research has pointed to time and time again; successful sales organizations don’t wing it. They have a structure in place, a system that allows them to achieve consistent results in complex sales. Before you can create a playbook, you need a documented sales process that is aligned with the customer’s buying decision making process. Creating a bad sales process is easy. Creating a good sales process is harder. Creating an effective sales process that is easy to understand, repeat and use in the field seems to be incredibly difficult, since only about 10% of companies have managed to achieve it.

Why do sales process implementations continue to fail? There are many reasons. For starters: in order for a sales process to work in practice, it needs to go beyond a generic checklist of roughly what to do approximately when. In addition, it needs to be complemented with the right tools to ensure execution - which is what sales playbooks are all about.

IDC defines sales enablement as ” “Getting the right information into the hands of the right sellers at the right time, place and format, to move a sales opportunity forward.” To enable, each step in each phase of your process needs to be able to answer the additional questions of why, how and with whom. Let’s take needs analysis as an example. A basic sales process would list the what and then when – in this scenario, needs analysis might simply be the third step in the first phase. A good sales process will explain why a needs analysis has to be conducted at this particular time before moving further. It will also explain how one goes about conducting it – including which tools that are to be utilized (whether questions/templates or other systems) and which best practices that need to be followed. It would also confirm which customer contacts and internal resources the sales person needs to involve in the process. The devil is in the details.

If your company is part of the vast majority, the road to playbooks starts with creating your sales process. 

We see many clients struggling with this, which is why we have designed a tool to help you get started – just click here to download. For more actionable advice, we highly recommend reading what Dave Kurlan has to say on the topic. He knows more about it than most - here is a great starting point.

While we don’t have a Membrain book club with recommended reading (yet!), here are two that do a fabulous job of outlining the importance of a systems approach: “The Checklist Manifesto” by Atul Gawande and “Work the System” by Sam Carpenter.

Books brings us to content, which is the next crucial part of playbooks. If your sales people are unable to provide relevant content at the important milestones of your sales process, momentum will be lost. While some say that there are lies, damned lies and statistics, we should be worried that 90% of the content marketing produces is not used by sales.

(Yes. 90%).

Whether it’s early, mid or late funnel content that is required, make sure it gets produced and that it is relevant for your target audience. The main reason sales people do not use the collateral available is that it is not perceived as useful for the opportunity they are pursuing. Second reason? They can’t find the piece of content they need by the time they need it. But that’s a whole different article.

The point is this: involve your sales people in the process of prioritizing the content needed. We have created a quick guide to improve sales and marketing alignment in general, and relevant content production in particular. Just click here and it should pop right up.

Okay, so a sales playbook is comprised of the sales process, content and tools. Together, they provide a system for both sales enablement and sales execution.

However, what if we took a slightly different approach and focused on plays within the playbook. With a little imagination, the term well established in sports could be translated into sales as customized deal level strategies. Together with tools, playbooks could be used to automatically apply the right play to the right deal scenario.

That sounds complex – let’s see if we can simplify.

Imagine you have your sales process in place. You might even have two, one for new sales and one for upselling / account planning. However, for certain types of deals you may need to do deviate from the standard process. An opportunity with an RFP may require numerous additional steps and deadlines, which we don’t need to consider in other opportunities. You may offer only products, or add on delivery service bundles; in the latter, a project manager may need to be involved earlier in the process. If you are facing a particular competitor in a particular vertical, you may have very specific advice for how your sales people should communicate around the value your solutions will add. What if you could standardize these deviations? In this scenario, every time a sales person confirms that an RFP is involved, non-essential steps are removed from the sales process and replaced with the relevant steps, including content, tools and best practices.

At Membrain, we work diligently to create a software platform that not only integrates and visualizes the sales process, but also embeds the relevant content and tools at every step, in order to support both sales enablement and sales execution. We fully support the playbook functionality described above – if you’d like to learn more about it, please send us a note on sales@membrain.com or click here get in touch.