To ensure the success of your sales team in competitive sales situations, it is a great idea to provide them with a sales playbook for your product. This is a quick reference, a cheat sheet, or a ready reference that provides them a simple and easy way to refresh their knowledge about your product and its key value drivers, competitive differentiators and positioning statements before they make their sales calls. So, what should a sales playbook contain? How long should it be? And what is the value or benefit of creating such a document?
A sales playbook is a one-stop ready reference for your sales force. Ideally, they should carry a copy of this with them when going on sales calls so that they can quickly review the information to help them showcase the strengths of your products and create a compelling case to the customer as to why he needs to buy it to solve the business problems that he faces.
A good sales playbook should contain a set of themes – across deployment models, business value drivers, vertical market requirements, and key technology features. For each of these themes, it should define particular plays or situations that your sales force may encounter. For example, the vertical market theme can have plays for financial services, healthcare, retail, etc. If your product is geared only for the finance vertical, the vertical plays can be further divided into credit unions, commercial banks, investment banks etc. you get the picture.
For each play, you must detail out the following information to help sales teams get prepared:
· What are the target industries?
· What is the typical client profile? – Is it a SMB or an enterprise? What kind of a situation are they in?
· Who is the target audience? – Is it the CEO, CTO, CIO, business decision maker, or the technology decision maker (realize that there may be different plays for different audiences)
· What are the challenges or pain points? – List out the top few pain points or problems to which your product offers a solution in this play. These points should focus on the problems that the people you are pitching to face because they are not currently using your product. Think about your key differentiators and the problems that you solve and retrace your steps to identify the key challenges that you want to list here
· Discuss your value proposition – what are the business benefits that they will get by adopting your solution. Remember to keep this more business focused rather than focusing on technology differentiators
· Delve into the features – here’s your chance to talk technology. List the key technology elements or features that enable the solution
· Talk about the benefits – list out the top and most impactful benefits that your customers get by adopting your solution. Remember to see that the benefits align with the pain points of the target audience
· Competitive differentiators – here is your chance to attack your competition without listing them. Talk about what makes your solution special. Remember to build in the value that you bring because of the unique things that your product has that competition does not.
· Key questions – Provide your sales team with hints about the questions that they need to ask to engage their customers in a conversation. These questions should nudge the person that they are speaking with to want to know more about your solution. Focus on the problems they face and about life without your product. This can help you design the right questions.
Remember to have the sales playbook professionally designed and formatted. Each theme should be its own section and one play should occupy either one or two sides of a page. Because, should this ever be a printed document, your sales guy should get all his answers from that single sheet. Remember to put in diagrams and illustrations where needed to help elucidate concepts. But also remember, this needs to be succinct and to the point. You are not creating a textbook – you are making a cheat sheet. And cheat sheets are usually just one sheet of paper.
What is the value of creating this document? Well, there are multiple sources of value that you can derive from having this document:
· Your sales force can use this as a ready reference before they go into tricky sales situations
· You can use this as an additional tool to train new sales staff
· Drive efficiencies in the sales process
· Ensure consistency in the way your product is positioned and sold to end customers
· Build in best practices into the way your product is sold and represented
Oh, and yes, please remember that a sales playbook is different from a sales battle card. I will discuss sales battle cards in a separate post. For now, let’s just say that these are two different things.
If you are thinking of creating a sales playbook for your team and have any questions, feel free to leave me your questions. I’ll be glad to answer any questions that you might have.
