Sales Playbooks that Work

I’m often asked what an effective format for a sales playbook is — something that captures the important aspects of a value proposition as concisely as possible.

Here we will look at the structure of a simple sales playbook for B2B enterprise selling that will help your commercial team achieve success.

The key focus of this playbook to create situational fluency for your sales team so they are not reciting a powerpoint presentation by rote, but engaging in a conversation with the prospect. It also provides an excellent starting point for marketing teams to decide content and campaigns that need developing.

These sales playbooks are not intended to be seen by the prospect — they should be internalised by the sales team and kept as a reference.

This format takes a simple two-page structure to make it fast to create, and easy to digest. It also highlights areas of the value proposition that need more research or definition. So let’s explore each section.

Market Validation

This section is the background to the problem. It contains a few pithy stats, charts and quotes that prove:

1. The existence of the problem
2. The potential cost of the problem (or value of solving the problem)
3. Why the problem is getting worse

These stats should focus on the problem — not the possible solution, so a Magic Quadrant showing your product top-right is not what we’re looking for.

Remember it is critical to note the precise source of the data — nothing kills a good stat like inability to attribute. Respected analyst firms like Forrester, Gartner and IDC are great here, but in early markets, you may need to seek out more specialist analysts, or even commission your own surveys.

The Main Spread

Example Sales Playbook Format

This condenses the prospecting and sales cycle right down, so in many cases will refer to further sales tools, such as campaigns, whitepapers and case studies. The key sections are:

1. Value Proposition Synopsis

This section looks at the basics of the value proposition. I won’t go into value proposition design in this post — but remember a value proposition needs to be specific, and solve a ‘complete problem’ for at least one persona — solving parts of problems for multiple personas just won’t work.

• Who are the key personas being targeted — economic buyers and decision makers as well as influencers and users, depending upon the complexity of the sales cycle.
• Problem description — a short ‘elevator pitch’ style description of the problem — this should be as specific as possible, and include an estimate of the economic impact if known.
• Solution description — how does your product solve that problem — avoiding all tech-speak if at all possible.
• Key messages — what are the 1–3 key messages (in bullet form) that must be conveyed — this is what you want people to remember after each meeting if nothing else.
• Proof points — if you have customers who have implemented the product and quantified their success — detail it here. Be specific and try as far as possible to give a metric or financial value.
• Resources — what resources do you have at hand that can be used to educate, inform and excite prospects — this will usually be some combination of white papers, case studies, analyst reports, ROI/Benefit calculators, datasheets, demos and videos.

You should work on the top three bullets in this list to ensure that you are being as specific, clear and concise as possible.

2. Opportunity Identification

Now — how do you find appropriate opportunities?

There may also be good trigger events to watch for (for example appointment of a new VP, or a partner press release announcing a new customer). Google Alerts are your friend here.

There will be other information sources which will point you towards individuals (for example LinkedIn groups on the topic to watch or partner sales teams with existing relationships and adjacent products).

There will also be leads generated by marketing campaigns — however, especially in the early stages of a product, a good sales person should never rely on marketing for more than 30% of their pipeline as a rough rule-of-thumb.

3. Questions to Ask

When you finally get a target prospect on chat/email/phone — what are good, open, probing questions to ask to ascertain if they have the problem and how painful it is to them. Often the prospect won’t know they have the problem you’re solving, so gathering as much information as possible without the prospect disengaging is vital. The best sequences of questions will trigger the customer to self-validate that they potentially have a problem they may not have even thought about.

4. Solution Roadmap

Now you’re engaged with the prospect, you understand how this problem manifests itself for them, and you understand their motivations, it is time to start helping the prospect understand how the product will be implemented. This section should describe the baby steps the customer needs to take to get to your promised nirvana. I like to keep this to three steps:

• Crawl — what is the minimum implementation of the product that delivers value? This could be positioned as some sort of audit that delivers discrete value in a fixed timeframe.
• Walk — now the product is implemented and delivering basic value — how do you expand the usage to deliver broader value — this is where the buyer starts to look like a superhero — so make sure they know it!
• Run — this is the full expression of the product and the value that it delivers

The point here is to ensure that the customer understands that the product can be implemented with minimal (/known) time and effort — both from your side but also in terms of their own resources, and that the risk is managed.

5. Burning platform

A burning platform is something the makes the prospect want to jump in with your product now — rather than get burnt. Hopefully there will be at least one burning-platform issue that will prevent your product being pushed down down the queue of things to do, even if they are keen. The best burning platform issues have a concrete date attached — so something HAS to be done, guaranteeing a place at the top of the list. This could be a regulatory deadline or an industry event. Thinking carefully about real burning platform issues prevents lazy sales closing tactics such as artificial dates for price rises.

6. Benefit Summary

The final element on the main spread is the benefit summary — this should include an articulation of each cost saved or avoided, each increase in revenue and each decrease in risk. Each benefit must have a metric against it with a typical value — which could expressed in financial terms, headcount terms, or percentage improvement.

The Chalk-and-Talk

Now we get to the most important element of the whole playbook — the chalk-and-talk. This replaces the standard death-by-powerpoint presentation that prospects dread so much, and instead allows the salesperson to have a conversation with the prospect. Essentially, this is a guided whiteboard session describing the specific value proposition, detailing each step of what needs to be drawn, and what needs to be said. In my experience, if the salesperson has done their prospecting properly and they are in front of the right person, the prospect won’t be able to stop themselves from jumping up and joining in.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully this gave you a good overview of a simple-but-effective sales playbook format that can help sales people obtain fluency in a value proposition fast, understand how to engage the prospect better, and deliver an excellent experience of your company to the prospect. It also serves as a useful communication tool between sales and marketing, ensuring that both functions are positioning in the same way.

The best way to ensure your sales team are up-to-speed with the playbook is to test test test. Run dummy sales calls and get them to walk through the chalk-and-talk until they are pitch-perfect.

I’d love to get your thoughts and tweaks to this model in the comments below.