The trickiest question in sales and marketing would be, how do you simplify your sales and marketing process?
Hmm! Simple answer is to go on a hunt for marketing automation solution, CRM, analytics, sales training software, call tracking solution etc. and knit it to your process. It’s like hiring cave men to sell houses in downtown Seattle. We can’t expect them to communicate telepathically, same is the case with all these independent systems. Thus, sales playbook was made to simplify communication between various lead-gen, marketing and sales enablement systems.
Sales playbook sounds like it’s a highly technical software.
Right! It’s a bit technical but it isn’t a rocket science. Sales playbook is a system of interconnected parts such as a content management system, analytics, sales intelligence and work flow management system etc. I understand it sounds too tough to grasp the first time. But let’s look at sales playbook part by part and see how each part adds value to sales process and simplifies it.
Let’s find answers to some frequently asked questions on a sales playbook.
What are the components of a sales play book?
- Potential/prospect analysis toolkit
- Customer buying journey mapper
- Competitor analysis toolkit
- Marketing and sales collateral room
- Analytics and intelligence dashboards
- Work flow maps
Why do you need a sales playbook?
A playbook is a sales streamlining software, where different systems such as Marketing Automation, CRM and Sales Enablement etc. are synced. This provides a unified content and intelligence center for sales reps for their varying needs at various steps of the sales funnel.
A robust sales playbook needs to have an intelligence layer to know which action at what time could produce maximum impact in customer’s buying decision.
What factors influence the content displayed in sales playbook?
The sales and marketing collateral displayed inside a sales play book depends on:
- Specific tactical actions to be executed based on a individuals level in customer buying journey.
- Sales and marketing intelligence about a buyer.
When can sales playbook be a useful addition to sales team’s arsenal?
A sales team can use a sales playbook in various scenarios such as :
- Defining Sales Process: Sales playbook can help you chalk out a structured sales process based on your customer’s buying journey
- Adding a fresh sales initiatives : You can easily add inside sales as new channel for a particular geography using a playbook
- New Product launch: A play book can help organizations set up new sales or marketing process for fresh to market products. This includes mapping specific journeys of target audiences to position sales and marketing messages. Thus optimizing these messages for maximum reach based on micro targeting traits.
- New Sales Practice: All gears to run a new sales process or practice could be calibrated using a playbook. Such as setting up content library, performance analytics, basic sales gamification and other enabling technologies to increase sales and marketing performance.
- Inducting new hires: A sales playbook’s custom views and dashboards can shorten a fresh hires learning curve. Fast paced learning of message building process, lead gen follow up communication etc. Specific customization gives the new sales reps a trap door entry to sales collateral, training programs and practices followed by a company.
When can a sales playbook be a useful addition to marketing team’s arsenal?
- Content Discovery: A sales playbook is like a compass which helps marketing to dig for fresh and relevant content. Accounts specific user intelligence collected throughout the sales process enables sales and marketing to handcraft messaging based on the multiple preferences an account exhibits.
- Scenario based Customization: These customizations allow you to pick up relevant content pieces like industry specific cases, relevant email messaging or CTA posters. This allows sales and marketing to differentiate each message by finding sweet spots of creative content customization to position your story based on potential customer’s preferences.
- Custom content delivery: Various potentials buyer and their organization prefer to see certain genus of content more like videos, whitepapers etc. Predictive dashboards in a playbook solution empowers you to deliver apt content for a specific persona. A smart sales playbook will deliver campaign content based on buyer’s persona parameters such as geography, industry, company size or even the stage in a buying cycle.
- One stop Content Center: A playbook can be one stop content source center which connects sale and marketing teams. Team members can collaborate to deliver freshest content in a meeting. If an inside sales rep feels like content does reflect new information about an offering or its needs repositioning then a sales rep could request the owner or creator of the content such as a sales presentations to make necessary changes.
- Marketing and Sales Sync: A sales playbook enables a marketing team to make fast updates on the run, without friction with sales team. Thus, a sales team would be able to use best-in-class updated content for every interaction or engagement.
Why to buy a Sales play book?
As a Startup or a Small to Medium sized business, it’s paramount for your team to get most bang for each buck spend on sales and marketing. Every percentage improvement to your lead-gen, marketing or sales process adds win–win deal for your organization.
Automation that stress up on the de-cluttering and simplification of your customer acquisition journey will bring windfall benefits such as
- Improved collaborative ethos in the company
- Sales and marketing teams get easy access to information and intelligence. Because content is tagged to particular milestones in a potential customer’s journey. Such content on potentials customers, qualified leads and others make sales reps work easy.
- One shot direct request from sales teams to content creators to update or edits collateral to make this content up to date. This makes possible the delivery of such content just in time for the sales interactions.
- Employees performance monitoring via real time leader boards based on various inside sales KPIs
- Enables fast communication and adoption of sales process rejigs
How does a Sales playbook help in lead conversion?
Figure 1 is an excerpt from an Aberdeen Group Survey on 322 end user organizations to understand their sales effectiveness practices. The above graph illustrates the effects of a sales playbook technology in improvement of lead conversation ratios. Sales playbook solutions have very deep effects on the sales process simplification. The data from survey suggest that:
- Sales playbook users collaborate on an average 4% more for defining parameters of selecting a qualified lead than non-users.
- Sales playbook optimally deploys efforts of cold callers to generate, qualify and nurture leads. Business development effectiveness increases up to 7 percent when such best in class organizations use playbook technology.
- Playbook technology helps marketing teams to enable sales to contribute to own content 24% effectively than teams who don’t use sales playbooks.
- Sales playbooks enable sales and marketing to drive hyper customization of content based on potential customer preferences. Playbook adoption has led to 9% increased delivery of custom marketing content compared to organization without this technology.
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Having read the article , you may be wondering ,
- What are the perquisites to a Play book?
- How to build a playbook for your product/ service?
- How do I streamline a sales play book with my CRM?
Please feel free to find out more on sales playbook using the above research resources.
