Playbook required!

In my last several articles, we’ve been talking about how to scale your business. That is almost impossible without a playbook – also known as a game plan or revenue model. However you define it, you need a clear roadmap of how you will scale your business.

Playbooks create clarity because they help your team members visualize your organization’s path to growth and their role in that process. Scaling a business is all about mobilizing and aligning their efforts toward a common goal. A playbook defines exactly what's expected of them and how to get it done. ?Simply put, it’s your roadmap for growth.

Elements of a marketing playbook

An effective marketing playbook consists of several essential pieces. It starts with a clear and compelling definition of the market opportunity. Here you need to assess the size of the market, the share of it you can reasonably expect to capture and any barriers to entry. Will it be worth the effort to penetrate this market? What are the odds that you will gain a return on your investment?

Once you have the data to support your planned market expansion, the next step is to ensure your product or service is adequately differentiated from competing products - along dimensions that your target audience cares about. How are your products or services unique or different enough to gain their attention? Can you prove that you can make an economic impact that competing products or services can’t equal? In other words, what is their ROI for using your product or service? How will it save them time or money? Make them more productive? Help them win more business?

Most B2B markets are filled with “me-too” products. Features, benefits and specifications are distressingly similar. It’s hard to tell competing products and services apart. To win business, you must define a value proposition that is significantly different and better than the existing options in the marketplace. You need to wow them!

Now it’s time to model your target audience. Businesses that are successful at scaling know the types of customers they’re targeting, how buying decisions are made and what influences each type of buyer. They develop detailed buyer personas that clearly define the needs, challenges and aspirations of each type of person and their role in the buying process. These personas not only help you understand what motivates these individuals but also how they make decisions and where they get their information.

Based on these personas, you can begin to recognize behavioral signals that tell you where prospects might be in their buying process and what role they play in it. Are they a decision-maker or influencer? Ultimately, you’re in the process of building an ideal customer profile (ICP) that will help you make better-informed decisions about list building and messaging for your marketing campaigns.

All this work on your playbook is the foundation for creating an experience design, a well thought out strategy for how you want the market to experience your product or service. It enables you to answer questions like these:

·??????How are you going to generate awareness?

·??????Where does your target audience currently congregate online and offline, so you can start to build a list and create an earned audience?

·??????As they demonstrate interest, how can you nurture them along their process, so when they’re ready to buy, you’re their primary option?

·??????What tools does your sales team need to move those prospects through their pipeline?

This campaign design also needs to include a toolset to measure engagement and impact. Keeping score is critical to validating what’s working and what’s not, so you can iterate and improve your results. Setting KPIs and being able to measure engagement is also required so you can deliver qualified opportunities to your sales team. Marketing automation and other business intelligence tools are plentiful; they can help you collect and interpret the data you need to optimize your campaign experience design.

Just remember: Creating this type of comprehensive customer experience starts with a playbook. It provides the roadmap that defines where you want to go, how you’re going to get there and the metrics to help you measure your progress. Rapidly growing businesses don’t get that way by chance. They are deliberate in their efforts and can mobilize and align the efforts of their teams to reach their aggressive goals.?