5 Things to Avoid when Creating a Sales Playbook

When I first heard of the term “Sales Playbooks” my first reaction was great, another sports analogy for selling that will be incessantly repeated on sales forecast calls across America.  I guess in my experiences selling I had heard too many quotes from Vince Lombardi such as “Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.” Thanks for the motivation, but how does that help me close a large opportunity with a Medical Device company facing compliance challenges?  Or analogies that I needed to perform more like Tom Brady and “quarterback the deal”.  As you’ll see throughout this blog I like analogies, but only when they actually help me better understand a situation.  Sales Playbooks aren’t just another motivational quote or sports analogy.  When successful they can definitely impact revenue, however when implemented poorly they are just another costly tool from corporate that sellers don’t adopt.

Sirius Decisions says that Playbooks “Take on an often over-whelming amount of marketing created information and distills it into a series of “plays” that can be applied to facilitate specific stages of the buying process for specific audiences within target market.” A Playbook can be assembled for a myriad of topics such as Solution, Industry, Sales Stage, Campaign, Region, or a combination of these. I just spoke last week with the leader of an inside sales team a billion dollar software company who’s plays were very different than their Account Executives.  They changed every quarter based on opportunities to grow revenue.  The play could be for only the Federal team to grow business with existing clients by cross selling a new product for example.  Regardless of how you define your “plays”, there are things to avoid in the creation of Playbooks.  The top 5 pitfalls that come to mind in my experiences are:

1) Calling the Play without stepping foot on the field

The “if you build it they will come” mentality is one of the biggest reasons for failure.  You need to go down into the trenches discover what play your Salesforce really needs, and truly understand the sales / buying cycle.  One way to start is by talking to a seller that closed a larger deal that was executed well on last quarter.  The key is to document anatomy of a deal that represents the Play you are trying to enable with questions like:

• Why did it close?
• What did the buying cycle look like?
• What were the meetings involved and who did we speak to?
• Who in our organization was leveraged?
• What content and information were used throughout the buying cycle?
• What were the key activities throughout?
• What were the things that slowed down the deal on either side?

2) Not inviting all the coaches to the drawing board

Only representing one group, such as Marketing to create the Playbook is a huge reason for failure.  Get all the sources of genius in one room as a steering committee.  This is typically some cross section of Marketing, Product, Training, Sales (Executives/Sellers/Operations/Support), etc.  Take the blueprint of the deal and determine how and if this changes per industry, audience, solution, region, etc. Take stock of what sellers had as resources and when they used them, but also discuss what was missing.  Make sure you meet regularly, and that every constituent can easily contribute to the Playbook framework.

3) Thinking a Playbook is a document, or just a series of documents

I have seen some rather large documents and binders created from these exercises that honestly scare the hell out of me.  They can sometimes be beneficial for that steering committee, but actually goes against Sirius Decision’s definition of Playbooks by overwhelming sellers even more.  Don’t go on a content creation (or in many times recreation) excursions.  Take stock of what you have, and align it to the Play.  Many times you will find that the marketing documents the sellers used were not what won the deal.  It was the knowledge of competitors, best practices, objection handling, success stories, or a highly customized proposal, which can be harvested.  It may have even been the right person brought in for technical expertise.  A Playbook needs a dynamic just in time delivery tool that can include:

• Why people buy a solution and the profile of an ideal prospect
• Sales cycle stages, activities, deliverables, and tactics.
• Discovery questions and solution prompters
• Players and their roles and responsibilities (internal and external)
• Supporting collateral and resources (internal and external)
• Competitive positioning, objection handling, and FAQs

4) Forgetting that sellers need to call their own audible and Plays need to evolve

Many times I’ve found that an extremely intelligent consultant or technical person has been the mastermind behind a Playbook, but they’ve never once sold a thing in their life.  They go off on a science experiment and create a very rigid Playbook with gates and workflows.  What’s even scarier is when the Playbook is wrong because it was not easily adapted to the latest economic changes for example.  Selling is part science, and part art. (See SalesCraft or John Aiello’s Blog “Game On” in Sales Enablement”).  Playbooks need to be flexible to the nuances of selling as it’s impossible to create a Playbook that maps to every selling situation.  There should be a mechanism for closed loop feedback on the play, the ability to easily evolve the play to that feedback, and easy creation of new plays as an opportunity arises.  This all needs to be executed on by a decentralized group of business stakeholders, and not IT.

5) Thinking that Playbooks alone will enable your sellers

Playbooks are one tool in a broader Sales Enablement solution. When integrated with CRM they can drive even higher value by selecting the right play based on opportunity data (See Enabled versus Mandated CRM), however this alone is not enough. Not many companies would replace their Sales Portal, CMS system, Proposal Solution, Blog, and Partner Portal tomorrow for a Playbook initiative.  If we are quite honest with ourselves, not everyone will adopt these Playbooks anyways.  Many sellers prefer to walk down the hall or call a colleague for their version of the Play.  More experienced sellers already know what to do and when to use this information, however still need access to this information the way they think about it.  Also, if you’re starting with Playbooks, make sure you can scale to keep adding value.

I’m sure there are other best practices you have all experience and pitfalls to avoid, and would love to hear your feedback on how to create more impactful Playbooks.