With all the information and technology available to businesses today, it's no wonder that sales professionals are often overwhelmed. In this blog post, we'll explore three key components of a successful sales play: strategy, tools and content.
Sales plays are a sales manager's secret weapon to increasing new business revenue and overall conversion rates.
A playbook is your complete and concise set of instructions, enabling tools, content and resource links that will be used by the sales team to understand and execute the Play.
The three components of a playbook are strategic selling with Account-Based Everything, effective sales tools for reps on the go, and providing qualified leads from your marketing automation platform. We'll explore all three of these components in detail below!
What is a sales play?
A Playbook is a comprehensive and succinct set of instructions, enabling tools, information, and resource connections that the sales team will utilise to comprehend and execute the Play.
Use a standardised methodology to determine which Plays should be produced and supported in order to promote and enable the company's go-to-market, sales, and/or retention strategy.
Define each Play until you have a clear understanding of the "what, why, who, and how" of a certain sales goal.
When everyone understands the difference between a Playbook and a Play – and what a Play is – the company is ready to construct and execute a focused set of Plays throughout the year.
Samples
Within a sales process design, there are defined steps that represent certain sales.
A prospecting stage, for example, a discovery or qualifying stage, a demo stage, a design, propose, negotiate stage, and a sold/customer stage are all part of the sales process.
Sales playbooks, targets, desired behaviours, and leading indicators of success are all detailed actions in the prospecting stage:
Tools for Selling
Script for a personalised video introduction, a LinkedIn connection request template, and a script for scheduling an appointment
The following are the main goals: Schedule a 30-minute discovery call to discuss your needs and receive an invitation to an upcoming webinar.
What to Pay Attention to: Buyer's key signals indicating a pressing necessity
Include details such as the demo date, relevant contacts, and early needs and requirements in the CRM.
Weekly and Monthly Behaviors: Desired Behaviors and Benchmarks
Prospecting necessitates devoting 4-6 hours per week (10-15%) on lead generation outreach.
Any call that is lead generated and initiated by the Account Executive qualifies as a prospecting call.
A total of 40 outbound attempts should be made in the allotted time (approximately 5-8 calls per hour)
Contacts for prospecting: 60 per week / 240 per month
10-14 leads each week / 32-48 leads per month
Ask for 3-5 referrals per week (12-15 per month)
2 hours of research and social outreach
Benchmarks
Conferencing (15-20 per week)
Weekly Meetings/Development Calls: 5-7 times a week (20-28 per month)
Three to four demos per week are scheduled (12-16 per month)
1-2 scoping calls per week (3-8 per month)
3-5 proposals every week (12-15 per month)
Metrics\sProspect
Every month, I make at least 50 new LinkedIn contacts.
25+ Targeted InMails
100+ Connecting Invitations
Demos / Appointments
30 new qualified demos every month with an average of 80% attendance at booked demos and 24 demos completed per month
Possibilities created
Every month, there are 18 new opportunities.
30 percent of chances should be closed
The average sales cycle is less than 180 days.
Revenue & Sale
Close four deals each month.
The average contract value is $15,000 or more.
$60,000+ in monthly revenue
Complex vs. Transactional Sales
Between transactional sales processes and playbooks and complicated sales processes and playbooks, there are crucial distinctions to be recognised.
There are numerous aspects to consider. The prospecting stage may, for example, result in the scheduling of a discovery meeting with a product demo for a simple or transactional sale.
In a complex transaction, the prospecting call should result in an initial discovery encounter with a capabilities review rather than a demo.
Customer onboarding for sophisticated purchases may be substantially longer and more involved, but assistance for a transactional sale may be as simple as an online community or FAQ.
To maximise deal velocity and sales conversions, sales focus sellers on a set of tasks, enablement, and coaching assistance during a prioritised time period.
Sales games assist salespeople in allocating their time and efforts to the areas that are most likely to pay off.
This is accomplished by incorporating these three elements into a successful play:
Managers and executives have made open-ended and ambiguous recommendations for all reps to be more solution-oriented in their approach or to spend more time on a promising vertical.
Let's face it:
These requests are easy to dismiss because they don't have a deadline, and we all know that salespeople have plenty of other things to do. A good playbook should have a timeline of 60 to 90 days.
If you give reps less than 60 days, you risk not giving them enough time to complete all of the actions you want them to. More than 90 days can dilute the energy and attention needed to build enthusiasm and results from a solid playbook.
The goal of playbook is to get a specific result.
A quantifiable goal is required for successful sales. For example, a sales move could result in 25 meetings with CFOs, each with a rep leading a whiteboard discussion.
A precise outcome is important to a play's success because it gives salespeople direction and eliminates any doubt about how to prioritise their daily tasks.
Managers and leaders benefit from a clear, defined outcome because it gives their coaching and assessment activities structure.
A whole toolkit is included with each play. A full bundle of the material, tools, and best practises that salespeople need to go out and execute is the last element in any strong playbook.
If you've already put in the effort to create a modern playbook, you'll probably have everything you need to run a successful play: email and phone scripts to get a meeting; persona insights and industry information to prepare for the meeting; and actual talk tracks to lead the meeting and handle any objections.
Too often, sales managers and enablement executives assume that strong sales reps intuitively know how to secure, prepare for, and handle a meeting.
That may be true for individual salespeople, but being prescriptive ensures uniformity across the board. That isn't to imply that the goal of a sales play is to build a squad of faceless robots.
Every individual in charge of a play will use the tools and resources supplied in their own unique way to support the play. This is a good thing.
Plays on sales
There are four different types of sales plays.
1. First-meeting plays with a lot of value
Because sales has a limited number of accounts, they need first-meeting plays that allow them to:
arouse enough curiosity to lead to a meeting
Provide enough value to entice the prospect to study more.
Many companies now encourage prospects to schedule a demonstration, but most customers aren't ready or willing to devote the time.
Create high-value plays that are more likely to evoke buyer participation and engagement as an alternative. Offer something of value, such as a personalised report presentation with insights specific to that account or their peers.
Many firms that execute high-value, first-meeting plays credit these plays to considerable improvements in their metrics, according to our research.
In two years, 49 percent of target accounts were penetrated, with a 26 percent increase in touch pattern/sales qualified lead conversion rate.
The conversion rate of first meetings to bigger stakeholder meetings is 21%.
2. Plays custom content
Description: Based on research, custom material was created exclusively for the target account.
Example: SDRs for a SaaS firm focused on F2000 e-commerce and retail organisations investigate and prepare a bespoke research report utilising a template created by marketing.
During the outreach phase, the study report is given away, and the call to action (CTA) is a meeting to discuss the report's results.
Analysis: The report is unique in terms of prospecting value, and the CTA is 100 percent valuable to the prospect. Within two years, the organisation was able to achieve over 50% penetration in the F2000 target accounts using this customised methodology.
3. The role of vertical content
Description: Content that is unique and relevant to a specific vertical or portion of the target market.
For example, a pharma analytics firm switched from SDRs calling out to schedule a demo to a high-value report that includes research on specific medicine brands for that segment, giving their target accounts valuable, unique information.
All advertising (e.g., targeted ads, email) refers to the study, and the SDR CTA is to schedule a meeting with an internal expert who will present the report findings, answer questions, and provide insights as part of their outreach.
Analysis: Vertical marketing allows businesses to reach out to several audiences rather than just one. The campaign was able to go one step further in this situation and give research about the target account, making the CTA offer much more appealing.
4. Use role-playing scenarios
A use case that goes beyond the product's functionality to present an engaging storey that often contains a rich, strategic storyline that incorporates change management, methodology, process, strategic initiatives, and more.
Example: The top 50 marketers were the target of a company focusing on the extremely competitive advertising technology sector.
It took advantage of a very compelling use case involving a whole new technique to measure and optimise AdTech investment.
All of the company's marketing and sales efforts were focused on exposing target clients to the use case in order to tell the storey.
Sales quickly found that they could use the use case in two or three meetings with these key prospects after the initial presentation, as the initial presentation sparked a follow-up meeting with the larger stakeholder group.
Analysis: Using use case plays to tell a captivating business storey from a unique point of view is a scalable strategy to get people to participate in the first place.
The content of the use case must be relevant to the target account in order for the play to be successful. Other top advertisers, like the example given above, want to know what their competitors are doing.
A low-budget advertising or a charity organisation might not find this use case as attractive. Use case plays, unlike other high-value bets, are often developed and created on a regular basis, making them a more feasible possibility.
1. High-value, semi-custom content
To develop unique content assets, Sales incorporates insights gathered during discovery into a marketing-generated framework.
Example: CIOs were needed to approve IT stakeholders to examine a software business providing client/server solutions to local and state governments.
CIOs, on the other hand, were frequently uninterested in this type of solution. The corporation established a "Readiness Assessment" to address this (shown below).
Sales was able to tweak the template in five minutes after asking four or five exploration questions, and develop material that established credibility and urgency among stakeholders.
This strategy is a simple method to develop content without disturbing sales operations.
The play was effective, and it worked in a similar way to some of the previous high-value plays in that it sparked additional dialogues with stakeholders who might not have signed up to hear a pitch or demonstration otherwise.
2. Workshops on-site
On-site workshops are interactive discussions with multiple stakeholders on a topic that is relevant to the account.
For example, IT security companies have been deploying free security audits performed in on-site workshops for years with great success.
Another scenario: a customer experience provider hosts a half-day session in which several stakeholders are asked to map their current experience process and identify gaps interactively.
Analysis: This play is a fantastic method to reach out to important stakeholders early on and establish trusted connections. Sellers can use the workshops to fill in any gaps in their research.
These seminars have the potential to become the most valuable play in an organization's sales process if correctly done.
3. Public relations initiatives
After sales has ran discovery and found critical account insights, a set of campaign touches is supplied.
For example, sales will uncover account and stakeholder insights in discovery for a firm pursuing complicated accounts with several stakeholders.
Marketing, SDRs, and sales will use this information to develop a multitouch campaign centred on the account's current difficulties or initiatives. For example, during discovery, sales learns that the target account's key goal for the following two quarters is to drive EMEA expansion. With this crucial information in hand, a campaign is launched:
Executives reach out to key decision makers to discuss EMEA expansion plans.
White paper on EMEA expansion promoted by a digital campaign.
SDR outreach centred on the message of EMEA expansion.
Analysis: The knowledge that a smart sales representative obtains directly from a prospect is priceless. Sales can engage with decision makers and other stakeholders more efficiently by combining this with mid-sales process campaigns.
Sales plays that are tailored to your needs
A solid practise for some of the most successful B2B sales professionals is to customise every prospect engagement. Unfortunately, regardless of the buyer, many salespeople utilise the same templates or strategy.
In an account-based model, the sales representative must maximise each engagement. It is vital to provide personalised, valuable experiences. The three plays listed below are standard in most B2B sales processes and can be tailored to the buyer's needs.
1. One-on-one presentations
The corporate introduction template, which highlights the seller's firm and products, is the most typical presentation.
Instead, these presentations should be individualised to show what the sales agent knows about the account, followed by a message that explains why their organisation and solution are the best partner to help.
The 80 percent template, 20% customised rule, for example, can be used to scale presentation personalisation.
Marketing generates the deck and the core material, but sales reps use the slide templates to define the account's current difficulties and initiatives, as well as to make an early case for why they can solve them.
Analysis: The templates must be set up to allow salespeople to personalise presentations while also preventing them from providing off-brand content or wasting too much time on deck creation.
These templates can also assist in ensuring that correct discovery is carried out.
2. Personalized demonstrations
Many demonstrations have evolved into one-way feature presentations. Instead, they should be considered as an opportunity to demonstrate how a solution may be used to solve a buyer's problem.
TOPO did some buyer research in the ERP sector a few years ago, for example. When asked what content influenced their decision the most, several people said "the demonstration."
The buyers were specifically referring to highly tailored demonstrations that contained the prospect's real data, business processes, and even minor details such as their logo.
Analysis: A company's ERP demonstration that is highly customised translates to closed business at a rate of 50%.
3. Champion content Description:
Champion content is tailored to the account's internal champion — the person who is interested in your solution but must navigate his or her own company in order to close the deal.
Example: Based on the account and disposition of their stakeholders, an e-learning company generated 25 customisable PDFs for its sales people.
The build vs. buy debate, requirements, a comparative guide, and ROI were all covered in this champion content pack. Sales reps select relevant information, mildly personalise it for the prospect, and then package and send it.
