Why Sales Playbooks are Essential for Sales Effectiveness
Sales messaging is often missing
Organizations produce messages on different levels. There’s a corporate strategy which influences strategies for growth. There’s marketing strategy that turns into brand messaging, determining how to position your organization in the marketplace.
Below that level is “sales messaging.” This level of message is often missing. It’s different from brand messaging (which often receives the most resources) because “sales messaging” is focused on the tactical customer conversations level. Salespeople need bite-sized practical resources in order to have effective buyer conversations. This type of content focuses solely on enabling more productive conversations with prospective buyers – questions to ask in a meeting to demonstrate insight, customer stories, whiteboard models to draw during a meeting…
While sales messaging requires a different focus, it shouldn’t be disconnected from the corporate strategy and marketing strategy. There should be consistency between strategy and what salespeople actually say during customer conversations.
You need salespeople to deliver the right message
Sales reps will say something in a sales conversation, and it can be either the right message to differentiate your company or an off-book message. Research shows that salespeople end up creating their own presentations. The “State of the Sales Rep” study by Brainshark shows salespeople report that they end up creating 51% of the content they use on their own. Without being equipped with the right messaging, sales will take ownership of generating the message.
How do you build, package, and deploy content and tools in a way that sales will actually use it? Playbooks provide a repeatable structure for delivering content on the “sales messaging” level.
What to put in a sales playbook
Sales playbooks consist of content and strategies focused on preparing sales reps to be successful in their calls, meetings, and presentations. Playbooks can cover a wide variety of sales plays—from guidance on a comprehensive enterprise story to a narrowly focused play like a specific persona, vertical, solution, or partner.
DSG and Highspot surveyed 144 sales, marketing, and enablement professionals across 74 organizations about the contents and creation of their sales playbooks. Here is how those organizations are using sales playbooks:
Sales Playbooks Contain:
Instructions on how to sell products or solutions
Provides coaching for sellers
Describes our sales methodology
Instructions on how to differentiate from competition
Instructions on how to sell to different personas
Instructions on how to engage specific industries
Contains best practices of top performers
Top reasons for creating sales playbooks
Sales and marketing leadership creates a plan for future sales growth. Having a sales playbook helps to implement that strategic direction across the entire sales team, connecting strategy to the sales conversation. The top two reasons for creating are shifting to solution selling and implementing a new message, according to the survey. A sales playbook is especially crucial for supporting a new sales strategy that requires behavior change from sales reps.
