It is that time of the year again. The annual Q4 dash.
Sales organizations are under enormous pressure to deliver and finish the year on a high note. With so much to do in so little time, sales people tend to select the quickest route to close. In order to get something – anything – over the line, conversations quickly turn to pricing and discounts.
Let’s take another approach this year.
While it may seem counter-intuitive, this is actually a good time to pause and reflect. Start by reviewing your pipeline and decide which opportunities your sales people should prioritize and focus on bringing to a close. While many may look good on paper, a little probing will help you zero in on the ones that can realistically be won before the end of the year.
However, prioritizing is just the first step. For each individual opportunity selected, you need to decide on a strategy that will most likely produce the desired outcome. In short, you need a sales playbook.
What are sales playbooks?
Playbooks have become an increasingly popular way to improve sales enablement – defined by IDC as ” “Getting the right information into the hands of the right sellers at the right time, place and format, to move a sales opportunity forward” and, by extension, sales execution.
While there are numerous definitions available, Sales Benchmark Index puts it succinctly:
”A sales playbook is the marrying of your sales process and content/tools”.
With playbooks, sales people are continuously guided towards the next step and provided with everything they need – process, content and tools – to execute with precision.
However, before you can create a playbook you need a documented sales process that is aligned with the customer’s buying decision process. Creating a bad sales process is easy. Creating a good sales process is harder. Creating an effective sales process that encompasses your sales-focused intellectual property, is easy to understand, repeat and use in the field seems to be incredibly difficult, since less than 10% of companies have managed to achieve it.
Which begs the question: why do sales process implementations continue to fail? There are many reasons. For starters: in order for a sales process to work in practice, it needs to go beyond a generic checklist of roughly what to do approximately when. In addition, it needs to be complemented with the right tools to ensure execution – which is what sales playbooks are all about.
The devil is in the details!
In order to be effective, each step in each phase of your process needs to be able to answer the additional questions of why, how and with whom. Let’s take needs analysis as an example. A basic sales process would list the “what” and the “when” – in this scenario, needs analysis might simply be the third step in the first phase. A good sales process will explain why a needs analysis has to be conducted at this particular time before moving further. It will also explain how one goes about conducting it – including which tools that are to be utilized (whether questions/templates or other systems) and which best practices that need to be followed. It would also confirm which customer contacts and internal resources the sales person needs to involve in the process. The devil is in the details!
If we look at sports, playbooks and plays are long established concepts. Depending on a number of in-game parameters and circumstances, coaches select the play that is believed to have the highest chance of producing a desired outcome.
Going back to your list of prioritized opportunities for Q4: each of them may very well have different in-game scenarios. While your established sales process may be applicable to the majority of deals, certain situations require a different play – a customized deal level strategy. In order for your sales people to execute the play, it needs to be designed to ensure they know what to do when, how and with whom.
In other words – your playbook provides a way to standardize slight deviations; the best practices for different types of deal scenarios. Think of your sales process as the standard operating procedure for opportunity management. Playbooks act as a complement to the process; the relevant play is applied to specific deal level scenarios by either removing or adding steps to the already established sales process.
Certain opportunities may involve a complex combination of products and services. In this scenario, a project manager may need to be involved earlier in the process than normal. If you are facing a particular competitor in a particular vertical, you may have very specific advice for how your sales people should communicate around the value your solutions will add.
Whenever an opportunity meets the criteria established for an identified deal scenario, the relevant play should be applied. Playbooks are meant to provide your sales people with the steps, tools, content and resources needed to proceed and execute – regardless of the opportunity circumstances. To take it one step further and automate this workflow, technology needs to be leveraged.
To make sure you finish the year strong, prioritize the opportunities and design the plays that produce the highest chance of reaching your desired outcome. Coach your sales people on how to execute the deal level strategies devised.
Start building your playbooks today –let’s end Q4 better and build the sales structure to blow next year’s targets out of the water!