Are you thinking about creating a sales playbook? Collecting all your collateral and getting ready to put it into a playbook? Wait a second.
That’s the last step, not the first.
The goal of a sales playbook is to enable sales to sell better. Giving them a big box of possible collateral isn’t going to enable anyone to sell anything better. It’s just going to waste their time. The sales playbook is a guide to how to sell in each situation and during each phase of the sales funnel.
Creating a sales playbook is a project that entails conducting a critical analysis of your entire sales process. This involves a reflective and detailed evaluation , but it is necessary if you want to enable sales using the playbook concept.
So what is involved? The first step to creating an amazing playbook is to define your sales process clearly. You need to define your target audience. What are all the personas that you focus on? If you want to help your salespeople sell, you need to provide them a clear picture of your customers—your key buyer personas. Who are your ideal buyers? What are their core challenges or pain points? What kind of questions do your buyers typically ask at each stage of the sales cycle? In order to answer these questions successfully, you need to have a complete, 360-degree view of your prospects that allows you to study their actions over a period of time. This helps you identify buyer behavioral patterns.
Also, you will need to identify the buying stages that your prospects typically pass through before making a purchase, the various triggers that you use to define those stages, and the many ways in which you keep your prospect engaged at each of those stages. Also, you need to identify if these stages differ depending on the specific buyer persona. This will be important in building the most effective playbooks.
