Create a Sales Playbook
Posted December 18th, 2007 by ybo
When it comes to bolstering results from your sales force, try developing a good sales playbook. The idea is to offer specific strategies and tactics that can steer your sales staff in the right direction—and require less handholding. “The primary goal of a successful sales playbook is to align a salesperson’s understanding of his or her products and services with the needs and requirements of the market,” says Michael Krigsman, co-founder, president and CEO of Cambridge Publications, a documentation and training services company.
So what exactly should you put in your playbook? “Imagine packaging the specific traits that make your most experienced salespeople especially good,” Krigsman says. Also be sure to provide detailed information rather than broad theories. “The more the playbook strays into broad theory, the less useful it becomes.”
As you build your playbook, include these essential elements:
- The basics: Provide any key information on your company that your sales team might need, such as terminology, pricing and contact information.
- Value proposition: Explain the purpose of your company in depth and illustrate how your products and services connect to customers’ business needs and “pain points.”
- Customer analysis: This section should help take the guesswork out of figuring out who to pursue and who not to pursue. Be sure to clearly identify market segments and key buyers. Include customer profiles that detail, among other things, customers’ motivation, preferences and buying processes.
- Competitive analysis: Pinpoint where your competitors stand in the market. Describe their selling processes and explain how they differ from yours. Also, include tips for countering their strategies.
- Sales methodology: Describe the steps needed to make a sale in detail. In addition, it’s a good idea to explain how to collect the right information, handle objections and assess opportunities given at each stage of the customer buying process.
- Best practices: Devote this section to tried-and-true techniques as well as info on when such practices work best. Include strategies that haven’t worked in the past so others can avoid making the same mistakes.
- Readable format: The contents of the sales playbook should be easy to understand. Use bullet points to break up long blocks of text into manageable, reader-friendly sections. And illustrate your text with plenty of visual aids—graphs, charts and diagrams do the trick.
Once you’ve created your playbook, Krigsman recommends updating it regularly—particularly as your sales strategies change over time—so everyone on the team remains on the same page.
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