How to create a sales playbook that yields results.

Its no secret as The Sales Enablement Company we implement frameworks and concepts from Hilmon Sorey and Cory Bray for one simple reason, they work and our client's growth in revenue agrees.

The blueprint we use when creating our target trashing sales playbook is from the their best selling book https://www.amazon.com/dp/1798257297/

We will be sharing one chapter a week from the book.

Introduction

A well-designed, relevant, and highly utilized sales playbook creates teams that engage with more prospects, produce more pipeline, and close more deals. A playbook creates more consistent top performers, more quickly. It will also close the gap between your top performers and everyone else.

Playbooks are living tools that must continue to be developed, revised, and curated over time. Growing companies are constantly hiring new people, promoting internally, entering into new markets, and facing direct or unforeseen competition. In order to drive success, an understanding of how the business operates, what has worked in the past, what is presently working, and what is anticipated to work in the future is required.

We wrote this book for CEOs and sales VPs who are anxious about their sales team’s ability to scale and produce consistent results. If you’re not a CEO or VP of sales, this book will still benefit you in the following roles:

• Frontline Sales Manager: Equip the team with the tools they need to be effective during selling conversations and create a collaborative ecosystem where top performers can share their tips with everyone else.
• Sales Enablement Leader: Build your team’s first playbook or increase the effectiveness of your existing playbook by using this book as a reference guide.
• Customer Success Leader: Identify and cultivate upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
• Salesperson: Identify opportunities to improve performance in your current role, and position yourself for career growth.
• Marketing Leader: Improve the adoption of marketing assets by the sales team and gain greater insight into those that will have a positive impact on the sales process.
• Other Executive: Align finance, operations, and other functions with a more formalized infrastructure to drive repeatable growth.
• Sales Consultant: Improve the quality and repeatability of your work product for clients.

Let’s be honest. Building a sales playbook is not hard. Building an effective sales playbook is hard. Creating a culture to utilize and maintain one is even harder. We wrote this book to break down the development of a sales playbook into elements that any organization can build. If you stick with us to the end, you will be equipped with the know-how to build a comprehensive action-oriented playbook that will become a living application; not an event, a static file on your company’s drive or wiki, or worse—the one-inch binder monitor stand.

What Is a Sales Playbook?

At the highest level, an individual’s success in sales is a direct result of three pillars; mindset, action, and skills (fig. 1.1).

An effective sales playbook is the salesperson’s tool for strategically planning and tactically executing the many conversations and activities required in a sales process.

The sales playbook is a collection of actions and contexts that define an individual and an organization’s engagement with buyers. Think of the playbook as the sales team’s collective brain, where information is stored and then accessed when sales activities occur.

Figure 1.1: The three pillars of success

The playbook is composed of elements, which are represented by the chapters in this book. Each element can stand alone and serves a specific function. When all the elements are combined, you have a single source of truth. This structure eliminates the need to search across different documents, folders, and databases for critical information. It’s all in your playbook!

A sales playbook is not an operations manual. There are countless operational elements that are important to your business but are outside the scope of a playbook, including CRM implementation, sales technology workflow, handoffs between teams, compensation and goal alignment, team structure, company history, and so on. A sales playbook is the fuel that makes the operational engine run.

A sales playbook is also not a training manual. While strong sales playbooks augment the onboarding process and reduce the time needed to ramp up new hires, static information regarding “how to sell,” how to use products in your tech stack, or even, core sales methodology that a salesperson must know in your organization are not part of a playbook. These should exist in a learning management system (LMS) or training handbook. Static documents weigh down a playbook with too much content, create a perception of being relevant only to new salespeople, and discourage daily utilization and engagement.

When to Build a Sales Playbook?

Is now the right time for your company to build a sales playbook or to refresh the one you already have? Take the ten-question quiz in figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2: Do you agree or disagree with these statements?

If you checked “agree” in every column, please reach out to us on LinkedIn, and we’ll give you your money back for this book. You’re doing great!

If you are like most people, and there is an opportunity to increase revenue, win more of the right deals, shorten sales cycles, create greater consistency, and improve individual rep performance—then you’ve found the right resource.

We have worked with small teams that have had go-to-market breakthroughs. We’ve expedited initial customer acquisition and helped identify opportunities to scale as a result of building a playbook. Larger teams who engage us do so because there is inconsistent performance across their sales team, they are often drowning in useless information overload, and they are worried about poor execution or missed opportunities.

Playbooks allow you to run sales experiments. An experiment cannot be run without a control. Standardizing operations across many playbook elements acts as that control and allows companies to run quick, impactful experiments, instead of random actions in hope of success. If you think you are in a more mature market, have figured it out, and no longer need to experiment—ask Kodak how that plan works out.

Bottom line: If you are selling or plan to sell something business-to-business, you need a playbook, and it’s never too early to develop one. Wait until you’ve “figured it out” at your own peril.

Impact on Onboarding and Retention

According to research:

• 80% of selling conversations do not meet the expectations of executives (Forrester);
• 90% of marketing materials don’t get used by sales personnel (American Marketing Association);
• 90% of sales training has no lasting impact after 120 days (ES Research Group).

According to Salesforce.com’s 2015 State of Sales Report, top companies are spending more than $1,000/person/year on sales training. Yet, the 2019 State of Sales Report shows that a full 69 percent of reps are still stuck in the “frozen middle” of moderate performance.

A sales playbook reduces onboarding time by giving a new hire much of the information he or she will need to be successful in a well-structured format. When hiring experienced salespeople, a playbook allows them to leverage their expertise and ramp up since they are familiar with all the components of the playbook in the context of the companies they have worked at before but need to be brought up to speed on the specifics for their new company faster. For example:

• They know how to leverage customer stories, but need to know your customer stories and which stories to use in which situations.
• They know how to ask discovery questions, but need to know which ones to use in various scenarios to uncover pain from prospects for your product or service.
• They know how to manage Resistance, but need to know what objections they are likely to hear and what responses are likely to work.

For experienced sales hires, combining their sales skills with the knowledge contained in your playbook gets them sales-ready, fast.

While playbooks are a critical component of new-hire onboarding, they are primarily meant to be used by ramped up salespeople on an ongoing basis. Unfortunately, many organizations equip salespeople with too little information, too late, much of which is overwhelming and poorly presented, or simply out of context. Often the focus is on product knowledge as if just educating a buyer will result in deals closing. Salespeople need business, selling, process, and conversational tools to succeed.

Impact on Channel Partners

Companies selling their products or services through channel partners face a grueling series of challenges from partner enablement, to increasing sell-through, pipeline velocity, alignment with their goals, and quality control of the sales process.

An effective sales playbook quickly gets channel partners up to speed while providing ongoing resources on demand and quality assurance. The playbook delivered to the channel team can be the complete sales playbook, or an abbreviated version that only showcases the most relevant elements.

Triangle Selling?

We wrote the book Triangle Selling to underlie methodologies like Miller Heiman, MEDDIC, Challenger, and Sandler with the most comprehensive frameworks published to date. Many readers of the book choose to implement Triangle Selling as a stand-alone methodology. For those who have adopted Triangle Selling in whole or in part, we highlight the elements that correlate to these frameworks in this toolkit. However, you need NOT be a Triangle Selling organization to use the elements in this book.

Triangle Selling frameworks referenced in this book include the following:

• Structuring Meetings (P.L.A.N.)
• Sharing demos and customer stories (S.H.A.R.E.)
• Growing trials, pilots, and initial deals into larger engagements (G.R.O.W.)
• Helping to create urgency between meetings (H.E.L.P.)
• Measuring rapport (S.C.A.L.E.)
• Generating referrals on a systematic basis (D.O.T.S.)

Triangle Selling takes a robust view across the three critical aspects of discovery as well:

• Reason: Why will the prospect buy?
• Resources: Understand the prospect’s willingness and ability to invest across seven types of Resources: emotional, intellectual, human, technical, financial, political, and energy.
• Resistance: In lieu of having a twenty-page “objection handling document,” understand the psychology behind Resistance and how salespeople can manage it across the three types of Resistance: reactance, skepticism, and inertia.

We encourage you to tightly integrate your existing sales methodology into your playbook. However, feel free to plug in a component of Triangle Selling wherever you see fit.

How to Use This Book

This book is a builder’s toolkit, not a textbook. The goal is to coach the reader along the set of actionable steps that ClozeLoop follows with each client in order to make an effective sales playbook come to life.

We wrote this book for an advanced audience. If you are new to sales, are unfamiliar with the concept of sales playbooks, or don’t have thorough insight into the inner workings of each department of your organization, you will feel challenged at times. That’s OK! Push yourself, engage with colleagues, and work together to build the best playbook that you can for your company.

Each chapter covers an element of the playbook. For each element, we will explore the following at the beginning of the chapter:

Goal: What is the desired outcome from employees having access to this element of the playbook?

How It’s Used: Who will use this element as part of their jobs, and how? Adjust our suggestions to the structure of your organization.

Difficulty: An estimate of how difficult it will be to build out the element to the point that it can be deployed. Difficulty is defined as follows:

• Easy: A competent individual who understands how the sales team operates can do it by himself or herself.
• Medium: Collaboration within the sales team is required and might possibly involve several stakeholders.
• Hard: Stakeholders from multiple departments must come to agreement to complete the element.

People + Resources Required: The departments that will contribute to the creation of the element.

Note : We do not specifically call out “sales enablement,” because we assume that if a company has a sales enablement team, they are involved in every aspect of the playbook.

Next, we will introduce the element, steps, and relevant frameworks. We provide guidance on how to build out each framework, respecting the fact that every organization and business is different. As we introduce frameworks, we will use some example data here to demonstrate the concepts.

Most of our frameworks are built out as tables, since we find them to be the universal way to order, connect, and display information. Decide which method of displaying information works best for you.

Do not launch your playbook in a word-processing document or in slides. It will fail. These formats are not dynamic, make collaboration and navigation difficult, discourage a feedback loop, forestall iteration, and will be useless in ninety days .

Throughout this book, we will reference TradeShowMe, a fictional company that rates trade shows by attendees, reach, value, content, and prestige. Example data inside of frameworks will guide you in applying these tools to your company.

An in-depth example playbook is available at TriangleSellingPlaybook.com.

At the end of each chapter, you’ll find three sections:

• Take Action: Your checklist of specific next steps to make the element come to life.
• Traps to Avoid: Common mistakes we’ve observed over 10 years and how they can be avoided.
• Keep It Fresh: Guidelines on incorporating feedback and keeping your content up to date.

Throughout the book, if there are words, phrases, or acronyms that do not look familiar, check out the glossary in appendix A for a definition. Additionally, we have included a few pages at the back of the book for you to take notes along the way.

Let’s build your playbook!

Want to check out the rest of the book? You can wait for next week's chapter, or?buy it now on Amazon.

We are also offering a free 30-minute review of existing sales playbooks. If you want us to take a look at what you have and give some advice, book time at?https://calendly.com/theenablement