Creating a Sales Playbook

Four Reasons to Create a Sales Playbook:

1. Establish a consistent sales approach for repeatable success.
2. Define sales best practices to ensure efficient selling.
3. Align sales process with other customer-facing functions to strengthen customer relationships and long term value.
4. Alter sales approach to support a changing business landscape.

It’s More Than Just a Sales Playbook
Driving sales innovation is not just collateral or sales tools. Driving sales innovation requires a process of facilitating organizational and behavioral change.

Get started interviewing successful sales people and collecting examples of what works. Leverage sales experience, expertise and existing tools. BUT … don’t assume that what has worked in the past will work in today’s changing business environment. Listen to the frustrations of skilled and less successful sales people to break out of traditional boxes.

Put the Playbook into action delivery, roll out and training. Yes, training. Actively put the playbook tools into the hands of the sales team. Sales management is vital to promoting and sponsoring the playbook, without their support new tools will not be used.

Keep the momentum going with recognition, rewards, sales compensation changes, sales contests, tracking, performance measurement, CRM changes, and others.

This three step approach will avoid the key reasons why many sales force development initiatives fail to produce compelling results.

• Lack of organizational alignment to support changes.
• Skepticism and resistance to change by experienced salespeople.
• Being told what to do, but not specifically how to do it.
• Inadequate management reinforcement of new behaviors.

 

Infinite Sales Playbook Possibilities

There are an unlimited number of ways to layout an Inside Sales Playbook. Here are two possible approaches.

 

 Personal Formula

KickStart recommends that every Playbook include an individual formula; making the Playbook “personal” to promote ownership. The personal formula may include:

• Personal goals
• Business goals (territory assignment, quota assignment, compensation plan
• Continuous learning (company training resources and reading suggestions)
• Coaching by Sales manager for development opportunities

Sales Playbook Experts.

You can build a Sales Playbook internally or leverage the experience and expertise of KickStart Alliance in developing sales processes and sales playbooks. Our experience is based on twelve years consulting with B2B companies of various sizes and in a variety of industries, along with prior corporate experience where we owned responsibility.

You will find numerous thought leadership articles on our website (www.kickstartall.com). Here are links to three of them:

 Sales Methodology, Sales Process, Sales Guide or Sales Playbook?

https://www.kickstartall.com/resources/archives/salesmethodprocessguideplaybook_sep2010/

How Polycom and VMWare are Implementing Sales Playbooks

https://www.kickstartall.com/how-polycom-and-vmware-are-implementing-sales-playbooks/

Sales Playbooks Help Shorten the Sales Cycle

https://www.kickstartall.com/resources/archives/salesplaybook_may2010/

KickStart Alliance principals have been directly managing or consulting with sales teams for over 25 years. The sales teams we work with typically have assigned territories by geography, vertical market, product/services offering or assigned accounts. We guide teams on working effectively with varied time zones, buying patterns, win rates and decision makers.