How a sales playbook can help you compete before a prospect even knows your name

This article is from Andrea Lechner-Becker, CMO at LeadMD.

If you’re a large, well-known company like Salesforce, you’re fortunate enough to be in the position of being in every considered purchase sales cycle for a CRM. Yet, new CRMs are still springing up, attempting to grow and compete in the category. This happens all across technology categories and other industries every day.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely trying to break into new markets or grow existing ones. One core, and effective, way to communicate your unique value proposition to your future customers lies with your sales team’s outreach. And one of the best ways to ensure that communication is effective is with a strong, well-understood, sales playbook.

A sales playbook is an invaluable resource that outlines a company’s sales process. It encompasses everything from personas and call scripts to sample emails and real-life customer scenarios. Good sales playbooks aren’t made up of go-to lines your reps should memorize. They’re full of depth and understanding of your customers and your business as a whole. A playbook should outline proven processes and the best ways to execute them.

Research shows that quota attainment is higher with sellers using sales playbooks. Further, the average selling price increases 3.9% when using playbooks because you transition from selling a product to selling a solution. At LeadMD, we have helped dozens of high-growth companies implement our sales playbook methodology over the last three years. We’ve seen similar results, all the way up to a 10% increase in average selling price. Although that may not seem like a big increase, if you think about it at scale it really adds up. So here is our overarching sales playbook methodology.

Who Should Own the Playbook?

Before we get into the how, I want to level-set on the who. Jon Miller, Engagio’s founder and CEO, is talking a lot lately about the shifts in the way marketing and sales departments operate. We’re seeing sales moving closer to the top of the funnel, while marketing expands more into the bottom. There may be no better example of where the two departments need to come together than the sales playbook.

It will require both marketing and sales to be involved in the communication of the company’s unique value proposition, to the right kinds of accounts and the people within them, all with the right timing. It’s the classic: right message, right time, right person.

Strategic Decisions

Before you begin any project, like a playbook, start with the strategic drivers behind the tactic.

What are you looking to achieve as an organization? What kind of content and marketing initiatives will be most compelling in a sales playbook?

Although a sales playbook might seem like a no brainer to achieve a company’s revenue goals, you may be surprised how often marketing initiatives are not connected to the company’s goals. PipelineMarketing.com reports that 50% of marketers state they are either misaligned or somewhat aligned to the broader business’s goals. So figure your overarching goals before truly diving in.

As a quick example, if your sales playbook targets a specific industry, but your goals are created to focus on capturing a different industry entirely, you’ll be doing an awful lot of work erroneously.

After determining your goals, dig into the who. These strategic elements of your ideal customer profile (a company, likely) and the buying committee within that company must be outlined. Hopefully you have buyer personas, but even if you’re too new and running too fast to create these, think about the humans who buy your product or service. Why are they giving you money?

Focus on the pain points they have and your unique value proposition (UVP) for how you solve them. At the very least, you must have this, before moving into the next steps.

Channel and Timing Refinement

Once you have the who, you need to identify which outreach channels you want to leverage. Again, if you have personas with details about where your buyers access information, those would be ideal to take into account here. If you don’t have these outlined, fear not! You’ll want to incorporate at least these basic channels: email, phone calls, and social media/communities.

Depending on your buyer, the third category can vary widely. Most people immediately target LinkedIn or Twitter, which tends to be a good instinct. However, don’t sleep on the platforms most people consider less business-focused, like Facebook and Instagram. I know plenty of people who connect with folks on these platforms and successfully sell to folks based on the information they share there. If you have a technical buyer, communities like Spiceworks can be a hotbed of possibility. You’ll also want to consider specific platform communities, such as Marketo’s community, where marketing automation nerds (like me) share frustrations and wins with like-minded folks.

Messaging Refinement

Hopefully you’ve worked through your messaging. If not, do it. We have some tips here, and Seismic’s Ryan MacDonald has already shared some other ways here in Foreshock to refine and focus messaging for growth.

Then leverage your messaging to outline how you’ll explain your UVP to the people you’ve outlined above in the places you also outlined above. There’s a big difference between a first email that says, “We help medical device marketers like you obtain customer 360,” and, “It’s 5 o’clock. Do you know where your customers are?”

If you don’t see the difference in the effectiveness of those two statements, you are probably the wrong person for this step.

Given the creative and dynamic nature of this exercise, marketing will likely lead this piece. Sales typically comes in handy to poke holes in any of the messaging that isn’t as compelling or straight-forward and simple as it could be. Keep in mind that your messaging should fit your brand, your buyer and the channel. People expect a different tone from social and community posts than a phone call.

Finalizing and Implementing Your Playbook

Finally, you’ll want to tie all your work together in a way that makes it extremely easy (and hard to mess up) for your day-to-day users. If you choose to invest in a sales engagement tool like Salesloft or Outreach, those are good places to store not only the explicit touches, but also book out how often the outreach happens and at what cadence.

Training and Enablement

After putting all this hard work, it’s always a shame when we see projects fail due to a lack of training and ongoing enablement — so don’t forget to enable your team! Once you’ve launched your wonderful new sales playbook, it can be tempting to move on to the next big thing. This happens especially often in hyper growth organizations that are growing at a pace where revisiting something “done” can sometimes feel like going backwards. But resist the urge to keep piling on new things.

Beyond the initial training, be sure that someone owns a regular check-in with folks to understand what’s working and what’s not. A simple format like Wins, Losses, Challenges for the sales folks can often uncover various nuances and frustrations around many things, including your playbooks or outreach.

Conclusion

As a quickly growing organization, there are so many things to get done and likely not enough hands to do them. That’s why you need to be laser focused and prioritizing the right initiatives. In our experience with our dozens of high-growth customers, we’ve seen the immense and quick impact a great sales playbook can have on an organization’s bottom line.

If you end up creating one, we’d love to hear about your results! Connect with us at www.leadmd.com.

Andrea Lechner-Becker is the CMO at LeadMD. Find her on LinkedIn and on Twitter.