How a Sales Playbook Helps You Build a Scalable Revenue Engine
Sales is more complex than ever, so everyone needs a little guidance. Andy Champion from Highspot shows us how to develop an effective sales playbook. Let’s find out more.
In March 2022, we finally got to stage our first in-person Sales Confidence event of the year. It was brilliant to see so many revenue leaders sharing knowledge, networking and enjoying themselves again at the stunning Andaz Hotel.
We’ve put together some articles based on the events’ talks, so even if you couldn’t be there, you can still get inspired.
Andy Champion
Andy is GM for EMEA at Highspot – improving sales teams' performance everywhere.
Andy has led SaaS sales teams for almost twenty years, including at Oracle and Docusign. Since the pandemic, Andy has identified some significant changes. During his 7-minute talk, he showed us how a robust sales playbook helps you navigate your way through.
‘We had to figure out how to sell over Zoom or Teams or whatever. We had to figure out how to coach in a virtual environment. But now, the pandemic has finished – and we have to reinvent ourselves all over again.’
A sales playbook
Right now, there is a battle for sales talent. 44% of employees are looking for a job or thinking about it. Your playbook is the tool that can keep that talent and extend that excellence across your organisation. It can also reduce your ramp time for new team members by 25% and increase the number of reps that hit their targets by 20%
A playbook models the behaviours of your best reps, putting it into a recipe that the whole team can follow. When you do this, you can unlock the potential of your ‘frozen middle’ – those reps who are smart enough but haven’t quite reached top performance yet.
Here are the critical components of your sales play.
1. What to know
Your reps need to have the right content when in front of a buyer (or a buying persona). This comes down to understanding what that person cares about and what keeps them awake at night. When you have this knowledge, you can build a report, talk confidently, and generally act like someone who knows what they’re doing.
A rep can take up to three years to achieve, but a sales play can help you get there much faster.
2. What to say
Call recording software is essential to understand how top performers talk to customers – and how customers respond in the current climate.
3. What to show
Use your systems to track what content resonates with your customers and how they engage with it. Then, look at what drives revenue and work to evolve that content into something useful.
Right now, reps don’t use 90% of the content their marketers create. Getting that figure down makes everyone more effective.
4. What to do
Finally, reps need to know the actions to take, such as how to follow up with a prospect after sending them a piece of content.
When you have everything down and available in one place, you can achieve the stats we talked about earlier – and you succeed in the new world of sales.
Over to you
I hope Andy’s tips help you create a sales playbook that works in your organisation. Now, we want to know what you think.
What’s in your playbook that you think makes you unique? How do you translate the behaviour of your top performers to the rest of the team? Let the Sales Confidence community know with a comment below.