Sales playbooks are not a novel concept anymore. Almost every organization involved in B2B sales is aware of the critical role played by sales playbooks in helping their sales teams close deals faster. However, a lot of them are still not able to get the concept of playbooks quite right. A lot of organizations treat sales playbooks as an asset dump–a place to push ALL the content that marketing has created for sales, and then, leave it to the salespeople to figure out what to use.
A sales playbook should be a systematic organization of all marketing and sales assets that your salespeople need when interacting with their prospects throughout the buyer’s journey. That’s the key term here–throughout the buyer’s journey. A sales playbook helps you map your sales assets to the relevant point in the buyer’s journey and gives sales easy access to all the assets in the playbook.
A key challenge faced by corporate marketing is having to line up content delivery with the sales processes and with the buyer’s position in the sales cycle. These include Prospecting, nurturing, and closing. The content differs greatly at each of these stages. If the content reaches the prospect too early or too late, it loses relevance and is practically worthless. Sales playbooks truly work only when used to line up content delivery to match the buyer’s position in the sales cycle.
For your sales playbook to be effective, it needs to resolve 3 questions for your sales teams–
- What to say to the prospects
- When to say it
- How to say it
When combined with other technologies such as intelligent content recommendations, playbooks can help in pushing the right content to salespeople and partners when they need it, versus having them hunt for it.
