This week we’re taking an introductory approach in analyzing the sales playbook. If you haven’t heard of a sales playbook or aren’t using one yet, this blog will certainly be of interest to you.
Defining a Sales Playbook
The sales playbook is becoming a necessary tool for sales and marketing teams. According to studies by Aberdeen Research, “best-in-class companies reported a 42% current adoption rate of sales playbooks” (Source: Aberdeen Group, 2015).
Sales playbooks can best be described as “technology-enabled tools and processes that provide ‘guided selling’ assistance to various selling job roles such as inside, field and/or channel partners” (Source: Aberdeen Group, 2015). Basically, they are pre-determined groups of appropriate digital content assets to use for each stage of the decision journey for a contextually relevant sales interaction, every time.
Using playbooks as a part of your sales enablement strategy is beneficial for both the sales and marketing team.
Playbooks for Marketers
Playbooks allow marketing to better organize and create content for specific target audiences, in turn making content management an easier task for sales reps. Marketing can then maintain consistency around your company’s brand and messaging much easier (Source: Aberdeen Group, 2015).
Playbooks for Sales Reps
Playbooks offer sales reps the ability to customize and configure presentations and other marketing collateral for a more tailored sales call approach (Source: Aberdeen Group, 2015). Playbooks may also be organized for buyer personas by the marketing team, further streamlining the sales process.
Sales playbooks are one excellent way to enhance a sales enablement strategy, CLICK HERE to see our top picks for building a stronger sales enablement strategy in 2016.
How to Use a Sales Playbook
According to reports, “72% of the best-in-class indicated that sales playbooks help sellers develop and customize content most appropriate to their individual accounts or territories” (Source: Aberdeen Group, 2015). Playbooks are meant to deliver a coordinated set of actions through any device (Source: Profitable Channels, 2015). Through sales enablement software, playbooks help to bridge the gap between your digital content library and your sales process (Source: Sales Benchmark Index, 2014).
Content creation that aligns with buyer personas is essential for an effective sales playbook. In a previous post we explain how to tailor digital content to purchase decision stages, CLICK HERE to read more.
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Importance of Defining a Strategy
A documented sales playbook strategy should become a part of your overall sales methodology, used to provide communication guidelines and instructions for various decision journey stages (Source: Nimble, 2013). A defined strategy will help you benchmark progress and stay on track for accomplishing the goals you set out. More specifically, your playbook strategy should:
- Define your sales process;
- Outline how you are going to package your sales and marketing content;
- Define how you are going to use your content to help your buyer through their decision journey; and
- Define the sales tools you are planning to use to help guide your sales team through the sales process (Source: Sales Benchmark Index, 2014).
Developing a sales playbook and strategy can be quite time-consuming but pays off in the long run. One of the biggest benefits of creating a sales playbook is that it gives you a better understanding of customer pain points and preferences, improves your sales effectiveness, and can actually expose and correct any weaknesses you may be experiencing when it comes to the way that you operate (Source: Nimble, 2013).
Finding yourself struggling when it comes to planning your digital content? We’ve outlined 5 easy steps in our post, “5- Steps for Digital Content Communications Planning”.
Sales & Marketing Alignment
Sales playbooks influence alignment between your sales and marketing teams. When you think about it, playbooks are just a combination of the processes and tools you’re going to be using to engage with your buyer at every stage in their decision journey (Source: Lattice-Engines, 2014). It’s important for marketing to work with sales to determine what content will be most useful for certain prospects and each stage of their decision journey. Working with the sales team will also make it easier for marketing to align their buyer persona strategy with the sales process, further enhancing the quality of marketing generated leads.
The most common mistake in using this tactic is having marketing-alone define a playbook strategy without insight or assistance from sales (Source: Lattice- Engines, 2014). Sellers have an acute awareness of buying influences, especially at the end of the decision journey. Without that insight, marketers are working with anecdotal evidence at best, and cannot effectively create a foundation for repeatable sales success (Source: Lattice- Engines, 2014).
Interested in learning more about the benefits of sales and marketing alignment? May I suggest you read our post, “Why use Sales and Marketing Alignment, and 5 Best Practices”.
ROI of Sales Books
Getting your brand communications to stand out amongst the sea of information that your competitors are putting out isn’t easy. Today, the need to for B2B sellers to stand out from their competition has become a necessity, not a luxury (Source: Aberdeen Group, 2015). The complex buyer’s decision journey means that the one-size-fits-all sales script is no longer relevant (Source: Aberdeen Group, 2015).
Playbooks provide the answer to many common problems that sales and marketing teams face, including (Source: Revegy, 2015):
- Shortening onboarding time for new sales reps;
- Reducing product-centric selling and encouraging value selling; and
- Making presentation material easier and faster to find.
Playbooks are also an easy way of customizing and packaging materials for specific types of buyers. The use of multiple playbooks allows for any number of unique buyers to be targeted (Source: Sales Benchmark Index, 2015). Best-in-class performers are more than twice as likely to have personalized front line communications using playbooks to help provide “content in context” (Source: Aberdeen Group, 2015).
Studies show that users of playbooks have stronger year-over-year growth in several areas when compared to non-users (Source: Aberdeen Group, 2015):
- CRM: Users have “3.9% better customer relationship management (CRM) adoption, compared with 2.9%”;
- Larger deals: Users experienced “3.9% larger average deal size or contract value, compared with 2.8%”;
- Higher Acceptance: Users saw a “1.9% higher lead acceptance rate, compared with 0.9%”; and
- Shorter Sales Cycle: Users experienced a “0.9% shorter average sales cycle, compared with 0.5% longer cycle”.
Getting customers engaged and maintaining engagement isn’t an easy task. Follow THIS LINK to learn how you can apply Netflix-inspired digital content management strategies to your content marketing and sales enablement strategy.
Sales playbooks are not only an excellent way to organize your content, they also help align your sales and marketing teams and enhance your overall sales process. If you’re interested in learning how to create an effective sales playbook, be sure to check back to our blog later this week. I’ll link it here as well.
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