How To Create A Sales Playbook 💰

Hey you… 👋🏻
YES YOU! 🫵🏻

Want more customers? Wondering how to empower anyone on your staff, not just the marketing team, to respond to and nurture prospective customers? 

Well today, you’re in the correct place! If you follow these steps to create a sales playbook, it should put your entire company on the same page so they can help grow the business.

Align Internal Stakeholders 👨🏻‍💼

The first critical step is to bring together key stakeholders such as sales, marketing, service delivery, and executive leadership for a workshop. The primary goals of this session are to:

• Get everyone aligned on your ideal target audience. Who can you serve better than anyone else? Narrow down firmographic criteria like industry, company size, and location, as well as psychographic and behavioral attributes.

• Agree on the core business goals and objectives your sales playbook will support. What are the quantitative and qualitative outcomes you want to achieve in the market?  

• Surface areas of market misalignment and open questions that require further research and validation.

Gather External Buyer Insights 🤑

Armed with initial hypotheses about your ideal audience and value proposition from the internal workshop, the next step is to test those assumptions with real buyer insights. There are two key types of buyers to engage through interviews, whose feedback is invaluable:

• Current and past customers who know and love your business. Seek to understand why they chose you, what specific outcomes they achieved through the partnership, and how they view your unique strengths. 

• Prospects you lost to competitors or no decision. Uncover why they didn't select your business, what they were looking for that you didn't provide, and what they ultimately bought instead. If you can't get direct interviews, reviewing loss reports from the sales team can provide useful data points.

In addition to interviews, analyze quantitative data from your CRM and marketing automation systems to identify commonalities in your most successful customer accounts and leads that didn't convert.

This external research aims to validate or refine your target audience hypotheses, surface new pain points and objectives, and collect proof points demonstrating your unique value. Look for patterns and language you can incorporate directly into the playbook.

Assess The Competitive Landscape 👀

Now, analyze how your top competitors are positioning themselves in the market. Review their websites, content marketing assets, and any publicly available case studies. Talk to your sales team about which competitors come up most often and how they succeed.

The goal is to understand the general narrative in the market so you can differentiate your approach through how you package and communicate your positioning, the unique perspective you bring, and the vertical or use case specialization you highlight.

Capture the key themes, proof points, and language competitors use so you can thoughtfully choose where to align and where to stand apart in your messaging.

Prioritize And Build Consensus 💪🏻

By this point, you should have a robust fact base from internal and external sources to guide decisions about your sales playbook strategy. It's time to narrow that down to the most essential elements through a structured prioritization exercise.

Bring the internal stakeholder group back together to review what you've learned and test the initial target audience and positioning hypotheses. Facilitate an objective discussion of the pros and cons of different opportunity areas and push the group to prioritize the most compelling two or three to execute first. For each area, build the business case for why it warrants investment and the specific use cases you'll focus the playbook on supporting.

Socializing these recommendations across the organization and building consensus is key to a successful rollout. Develop a crisp presentation highlighting the market feedback, data, and rationale behind each recommendation. Meet with your internal stakeholders and influential voices individually to get their input and buy-in, then roll your playbook out to everyone in your business.

Q&A

• So, are you ready to harness the power of using this sales playbook for your business?

• Do you have any pain points I can help you with smoothing out?

• What do you think is the most important in developing a sales pipeline and why it impacts your business?

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Book a {10 MINUTE} Business Power Call with me, to arrange working together to make your social media videos stand out online as I tweak your approach, and analyse how to improve your current video, business strategy or marketing.

2. Don’t have time to create great videos yourself? Focus on your business, whilst we focus on creating the videos that you’ve always dreamed of. Get in touch to find out more.

Until next Friday, love to you all!

My Partner Services
Sky Adsmart  | Cheekymonkey Marketing  |