© 2019 Sandler and Playboox. All rights reserved.
If you want to teach people a new
way of thinking, don’t bother
trying to teach them. Instead, give
them a tool, the use of which will
lead to new ways of thinking.
Buckminster Fuller
American author, inventor & systems theorist
2
Today’s sales leaders face formidable challenges in their quest to achieve increasingly
aggressive growth targets, and there is very little margin for error. The markets you
sell into are saturated with competitors with seemingly identical value propositions.
And your buyers have more power and are more hesitant to budge from their current
state than ever.
The stories of fast-growth companies that fizzle and market leaders that falter are
well documented. To realize sustainable, scalable, and predictable sales success, it’s
not what but how your sales team sells that matters. Enabling that ‘how’ is where a
sales playbook comes in.
In this guide you will learn:
• Why a sales playbook is the key to effective Sales Enablement
•
The mission of a sales playbook
• Why a sales playbook should be your top Sales Enablement priority
•
The six sales playbook types
• Why a sales process playbook is the optimal approach
•
The critical difference between a ‘documented sales process’ and a sales
process playbook
•
The anatomy of a great sales process playbook
•
The role of technology in driving playbook utility and adoption
3
4
1
Sales Playbooks Drive Sales Enablement
5
2
Sales Playbook Purpose
10
3
Why Sales Playbook Top Sales Enablement Priority
16
4
The Six Sales Playbook Types
20
5
Why a Sales Process Playbook is Optimal Approach
28
6
Documented Sales Process vs Sales Process Playbook
34
7
Anatomy of a Great Sales Playbook
41
8
Assembly of a Great Sales Playbook Program
48
9
The Technology-Enabled Sales Playbook
54
1
Sales Playbook is the Sales Enablement Critical Success Factor
70%. That’s the percentage of Sales Enablement programs that did not meet or
exceed all or the majority of expectations (CSO Insights).
This guide is written from the perspective that implementing a Sales Playbook
Program is the single most important initiative Sales Enablement practioners can take
to improve their effectiveness and performance. To buy into this point-of-view and
realize the full potential of a sales playbook program will require a mindset shift
relative to how you think about a sales playbook.
• A sales playbook is not a sales tool. A battle card is a sales tool. An ROI calculator is a sales
tool. A playbook, as we will see later in the guide, is designed to drive best practices throughout
the sales process. Sales tools are point solutions that are typically stage-specific. The playbook
is in essence the Sales Enablement ‘platform’ into which sales tools plug in.
•
Sales-playbook-as-a-service. Because until now PowerPoint has been the primary delivery
format for playbooks, we have had no choice but to think of a playbook as a document instead
of as an ongoing service. A programmatic approach to playbook development, deployment and
maintenance forces you to plan and schedule exactly what you need to do to continually iterate
and reinforce the best practices embedded in the playbook. Leveraging technology further
enables the playbook-as-a-service model.
6
7
Sales playbooks are the foundation of Sales Enablement
The Sales Playbook is the
foundation for all of your other
Sales Enablement initiatives.
Your playbook can be the basis
for the bulk of your
onboarding, training, and
reinforcement content.
What is ‘Sales Enablement’?
To appreciate the critical role playbooks play in Sales Enablement and how to leverage
them to drive effective Sales Enablement, we first need to define what we mean by
‘Sales Enablement’ and consider how this definition has evolved to more precisely
address the needs and challenges of the modern sales organization.
Google ‘Sales Enablement definition’ and you’ll get 172,000 results. Here is the
problem with 171, 999 of these. Whether it’s a Sales Enablement practitioner or
pundit, most think of Sales Enablement as “Salesperson Enablement”. Here's proof.
This definition comes courtesy of Forrester circa 2010 and is still to a very large extent
the conventional wisdom.
8
Sales Force Enablement
Because the role of the frontline sales manager is crucial to the success of any Sales
Enablement program, any definition of ‘Sales Enablement’ needs to take this into
account. Enter the good folks at CSO Insights. In late 2016 they raised the ante for
Sales Enablement professionals by introducing the concept of ‘Sales Force
Enablement’:
They nailed it. They position the function of Sales Enablement as strategic - an
important and necessary distinction. They establish its mission to be driving
measurable impact on sales performance. They emphasize its dual role of serving
salespeople and frontline managers. Like Forrester, they intimate that Sales
Enablement needs to provide guidance and tools to facilitate the buying process.
Lastly, they call out the critical role that technology plays in enabling enablement.
Brilliant!
9
2
11
SOURCE: EDUCATION WEEK
Sales Performance Optimization
The number one objective of a sales playbook program is to improve sales
performance.
At a high-level, this means aiming to impact the metrics that executive and sales
leadership care about most: quota achievement and forecast accuracy.
At a more granular level, this can mean focusing on improving win rates of forecasted
deals, increasing average deal size, or compressing sales cycles.
Sales Behavior Optimization
The overarching Sales Enablement goal from a change management perspective is to
shift behavior from everyone doing their own thing to everyone doing the best thing.
Whether a sales organization has 20, 200, or 2000 salespeople, inevitably, there is a
subset of top performers whose behavior you wish you could clone.
The purpose of a playbook program is to capture, codify, and institutionalize the best
practice behaviors of these top performers. Simply put, a sales playbook defines and
illustrates the best way to sell at your company,
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Move the Middle
Your middle-of-the-pack reps are the primary target audience for your playbooks. The
goal is to make it easy for this group to consistently replicate the best practices of
your top performers.
By enabling them to more consistently execute your sales strategy, sales process, and
top performer best practices, you can drive higher win rates, average deal sizes, and
percentage of reps at plan, as well as reduce sales cycles from this group.
Improving the performance of your average reps has a disproportionately positive
effect on driving overall sales organization quota achievement than improving the
performance of your laggards or top performers.
13
Accelerate New-Hire Time-to-Productivity
New-hires are also a core audience and primary beneficiary of a playbook.
Getting immediate access to what your top performers say, ask, do, and use at each
stage of your sales process can compress their time-to-productivity by weeks or
months.
According to CSO insights, in a complex sales environment, close to 50% of companies
reported ramp up times of 10 months or greater. They also noted that new-hire ramp
up has increased over the last decade.
Compressing the length of time it takes a new rep to achieve full productivity can
have a significant impact on current year results, especially if you experience
unexpected turnover.
14
Help the Best Crunch Their Numbers
Your top performers also benefit from playbooks because they gain access to the best
practices of other high achievers. These are strategies and tactics that they might not
have considered and can now add to their arsenal.
Moreover, by having a reference guide, they increase the consistency of application of
their own as well as their colleagues’ best practices.
While they are not the main audience, time and again, high achievers are often the
most open to playbook initiatives because part of what makes them top performers is
their drive to continually get better at their craft.
15
3
17
42%
29%
19%
BEST-IN-CLASS
AVERAGE
LAGGARD
SOURCE: ABERDEEN RESEARCH
Top performing sales organizations use playbooks
Percentage of companies in the performance category that use sales playbooks
Sales Performance Impact
Playbooks move the needle. The best performing sales organizations implement sales
playbooks at a higher rate than their peers. According to Aberdeen, sales
organizations that implement playbooks have:
•
10% shorter sales cycles
•
12% higher number of reps achieving quota
•
7% greater revenue growth
A compelling case for building a playbook to optimize sales organization wide
effectiveness and performance is to consider what might happen if you don't. Here is
a collection of statistics that don't paint a pretty picture of the current state of affairs
for all too many sales organizations.
•
80% of sales conversations are considered a waste of time - Forrester
• Win rates of FORECASTED deals are less than 50% - CSO Insights
•
Only 29% of new reps hit year one performance milestones - Rain Group
•
Only 57% of salespeople achieve their target - CSO Insights
18
Sales Strategy Execution Impact
A quality sales playbook outlines the processes and practices that need to be followed
and the decisions that need to be made to effectively execute your company's sales
and go-to-market strategies.
Great sales playbooks translate the ambitions declared and decided in the boardroom
into specific tactics and direction the sales organization can execute in the field.
Developing a sales playbook is the single most important initiative a head of sales
needs to put in place in order to operationalize the best way to sell and manage at
their organization.
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4
21
REFERENCE
MESSAGING
COACHING
PROCESS
CAMPAIGN
SPECIALTY
The Reference Playbook
This type of sales playbook includes everything a rep needs to get their job done.
These playbooks include topics like:
•
Introduction to the company and sales organization
•
Sales team roles and responsibilities
• Buyer personas
•
Product and pricing
•
Territory management
•
Time management
• How to use the CRM
•
The commission plan
•
Sales process
•
Key activity metrics and targets
•
Competition
• Objection-handling
22
The Messaging Playbook
These playbooks define how to best prepare and conduct conversations that help
salespeople gain attention, engagement, and traction with target buyers. They
typically include tools like:
•
The ideal customer profile
•
The target buying audience
•
Individual target buyer profiles
• Discovery question guides
•
Initial conversation framework and talk track to uncover and develop buyer
needs and articulate value and differentiation
•
Success stories
•
Competitive strengths and weaknesses
• Objection-handling guides
23
The Coaching Playbook
Earlier, we emphasized the importance of sales manager enablement. A coaching
playbook is central to this objective and is designed to help frontline sales managers
understand and execute critical sales management processes to drive optimal team
performance and engagement.
It typically includes a series of frameworks and tools that form “how-to” guides for
key sales management disciplines based on organizational and/or industry best
practices.
•
Territory management/QBR templates and discussion guides
•
Pipeline and deal review discussion guides
• Account management planning discussion guides
• Deal management discussion guides
•
Forecast management assessment guides
•
Talent assessment and development guides
•
Coaching feedback guides
• Behavioral interviewing guides
24
The Campaign Playbook
A campaign-focused playbook can be used by Inside Sales organizations to drive
execution of prospecting campaigns. By definition, these types of playbooks will have
shorter shelf lives than the others mentioned in this section.
Here's an example: the leader of an SDR team might choose to run a two-week lead
generation campaign focused on a specific buyer persona in a specific vertical at
companies with a specific employee size range. Content could include:
•
Target buyer profile
•
Prospecting templates
•
Cold calling talk track
•
Initial conversation and discovery talk tack
• Objection-handling guide
•
Industry market collateral
25
The Sales Process Playbook
This type of playbook focuses on helping reps and managers consistently apply deal,
conversation, and forecast management best practices and tools at each stage of their
sales process. These types of playbooks include topics like:
•
The buyer journey
•
The sales process overview
•
Stage-specific best practices
•
Stage-specific exit criteria
•
Stage-specific sales tools
•
Stage-specific skills tips
•
Forecast category definitions and criteria
• Discovery talk tracks
• Qualification checklists
26
Specialized Playbooks
You can further specialize any of the playbook types by:
• Role: Inside Sales, Field Sales, and Customer Success
•
Segment: Industry and/or company size
•
Product: Solution category or use case
27
5
Even experts need checklists –
written guides that walk them
through the key steps in any
complex procedure.
Atul Gawande
Surgeon & author Checklist Manifesto
29
So given the variety of sales playbook options, why is a sales process playbook your
best bet and, in our perspective, all you need?
Sales process prowess is the critical success factor. The research is clear: Sales process
execution excellence, the ability to define, execute, reinforce, monitor, and evolve a
repeatable sales process, is the single most important enabler of sustainable,
scalable, and repeatable sales success. As such, driving sales process execution
excellence should be the primary focus of your Sales Enablement program.
Sales process is the ultimate playbook framework. We listed reference, messaging,
coaching, campaign, and specialty playbooks as the playbook options at your disposal.
Done right, a sales process playbook to a very large degree encompasses all of these.
Most of the tools/content mentioned for each of the various playbook types can be
categorized by sales process stage.
Sales process is the ultimate sales coaching framework. When used during deal and
pipeline reviews and forecast calls, the sales process provides the perfect construct to
guide managers to systematically assess and develop their reps’ deals, pipelines,
forecasts, skills, and knowledge.
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Sales Enablement = Sales Process Enablement
If you read between the lines of the definitions of ‘Sales Enablement’, they are all
aiming to drive sales process execution excellence.
•
Forrester: “... at each stage of the customer problem-solving lifecycle…”
•
CSO Insights: “... along the entire customer's journey…”
These definitions emphasize the importance of enabling stage-specific excellence.
Each sales process stage requires a unique set of skills, knowledge, activities, tools,
and milestones whose use and mastery enable progression to the next stage.
Therefore it follows that your chief role as a Sales Enablement leader is to equip your
reps and managers with the tools and training they need to successfully navigate each
stage of your sales process.
31
Current State: Sales Process Suboptimization
Suboptimization is defined as a situation where a process, procedure, or system yields less than the
best possible outcome of output, caused by lack of best possible coordination between different
components, elements, parts, etc.
(Business Dictionary)
Sadly, sales process suboptimization is the reality for the vast majority of sales
organizations.
For over 20 years, CSO Insights has conducted an annual Sales Performance
Optimization study in which they research and analyze study participants’ sales
process maturity.
Year in and year out, they find that something like 85% of sales organizations self-
report (admit) that they do a poor job of documenting and implementing a sales
process.
A well-constructed and managed sales process playbook can help fix this.
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Sales Process Prowess Pays Off
The more disciplined a sales organization is in the formalization and execution of its
sales process, the bigger the impact on meaningful metrics like percentage of reps at
plan, quota achievement, win rates for forecasted deals, forecast accuracy, average
deal size, and sales cycle duration.
Where Are You Now? Sales Process Maturity
CSO Insights defines four levels of sales process maturity,
•
Level 1 Random Process: Company lacks a single sales process. Essentially, everyone does their
own thing.
•
Level 2: - Informal Process: A company has a documented sales process, but its use is not
monitored or reinforced.
•
Level 3: Formal Process: A company regularly reinforces a documented sales process, monitors
its effectiveness, and evolves it as necessary.
•
Level 4: Dynamic Process: A company dynamically monitors and continuously provides feedback
on the use of its sales process and iterates it when necessary.
The Verdict
Unless you are one of the rare Level 4 sales organizations, your primary Sales
Enablement objective and focus should be developing and delivering a sales process
playbook to drive sales process execution excellence.
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6
A Documented Sales Process Is Not Enough
Huh? Didn’t you just make the case that a documented sales process is the key
enabler of sales process execution excellence? Let me explain.
Ask any sales leader, “Do you have a documented sales process?” and unless they’re
in charge of one of those wild and wooly Level One sales organizations where
everyone does their own thing, they’ll respond, “You betcha!”
Here’s the problem.
Dig a little deeper and what you’ll find is that the documentation of their sales
process consists of a PowerPoint slide that outlines stages and exit criteria. Useful,
but not sufficient.
35
Qualification is Not a Sales Process
Another common response to “Do you have a documented sales process?” is
something along the lines that they use MEDDIC or some variation of it and out
comes the one-pager describing the definition of each letter.
Let’s be clear. MEDDIC is not a sales process. MEDDIC, BANT, BANTA, CHAMP or
whatever acronym you use is a QUALFICATION process.
Having a common framework for qualification is essential and should be used early
and often during a sales cycle. It’s an essential part of any sales process, but, in and of
itself, is not a sales process.
36
The Opportunity Stages Picklist is Not a Sales Process
Another example of a “documented” sales process is the opportunity stages picklist in
your CRM.
The danger in using the opportunity picklist as the primary means of defining your
sales process is that you can get too granular.
The sample below is the default opportunity stage picklist in Salesforce.com. It
represents an example of an overly granular approach.
37
Command & Control Limitation
A ‘process-on-a-page’, ‘qualification = sales process’, or ‘CRM opportunity stage
picklist’ process documentation approach diminishes the utility of your sales process.
When stage exit milestones, qualification criteria or picklist items are the primary
articulation of your sales process, by definition, your sales process is designed to do
one thing: help sales management command and control process compliance.
While we buy into the notion that you need to ‘inspect what you expect’, this process
design mindset limits the ability of your sales process to impact performance because
it lacks a key ingredient: guidance on how to sell more effectively.
Enter the Sales Process Playbook.
38
Sales Process Playbook = Guided Selling & Coaching
Technically, a Sales Process Playbook is another form of documenting sales process.
The key difference is the focus and depth of the documentation.
The focus of the previous versions of the documented sales process was to help
managers inspect. The focus of a Sales Process Playbook is to guide reps to sell more
effectively and managers to coach more effectively.
To accomplish this requires a detailed description of your sales organization’s proven
best practices at each stage of the sales process.
Here is our definition of a Sales Process Playbook.
Checkers or chess? That’s the distinction between a documented sales process and a
sales process playbook. Unless your sales are highly transactional, you’re playing
chess.
39
A Sales Process Playbook captures and codifies
what your top performers say, ask, do, and use
at each stage of the sales process to guide salespeople on how to most effectively
initiate, assess, advance, close, and grow sales opportunities, and enable sales managers
to systematically coach their reps to do so
Success Factor: Sales Process 2.0 Mindset
The term “process” can induce shivers down the spines of your reps and managers, so
how you think about the concept of sales process will have a significant impact on the
adoption, execution, and impact of your sales process. As such, it’s time to evolve
your sales process mindset.
•
Sales Process 1.0 focus is defining and enforcing a set of rules and exit criteria for each stage to
track deal progress. The process is drawn up and governed by management for compliance.
Reps get little value from this management-centric approach.
•
Sales Process 2.0 focus is capturing and codifying top performer best practices at each stage of
the sales process. This makes all the difference because now the process outlines the proven
steps to successfully initiate, advance and close a sale. Instead of reps feeling they have to
follow the sales process, reps want to follow it because doing so will give them the best shot at
winning more often.
The Sales Process Playbook is the operating system for Sales Process 2.0.
40
7
Playbook Design Considerations
We have established the purpose of a Sales Process Playbook: To enable guided
application of selling and coaching best practices at each stage of the sales process.
Let’s now consider from a playbook design perspective, the best way to accomplish
this.
42
GUIDED
SELLING
GUIDED
COACHING
+
Design Goal: Cover All the Bases
Your playbook should be organized and consist of content that will provide guidance in three critical
areas: 1) who to sell, 2) what to do, and 3) what to say.
• Who to Sell content would include a description of the business and buyer characteristics that define your ‘Ideal
Prospect” as well as profiles of your target buyers.
• What to Do content includes a detailed description of your sales process and the best practice activities that
your reps should carry out before, during, and after a call at each stage of your sales process along with the
requisite stage-specific sales tools and exit criteria. It can also include Qualification, Deal Review & Forecasting
Guides.
• What to Say content includes messaging tools like Elevator Pitch, Discovery Talk Tracks, Positioning Guides,
Objection Handling Responses & Prospecting Templates.
43
Design Goal: Process + Conversation Excellence Enablement
Best-in-class sales playbooks provide step-by-step guidance on how to achieve sales process
execution excellence AND sales conversation preparation and execution excellence.
44
Design Goal: Critical Conversation Enablement
Your playbook should provide frameworks and instruction on how to conduct the three most critical
conversations in sales.
45
Between
throughout
Between
during
Between
during
Design Goal: Process & Methodology Enablement
A great playbook provides guidance on how to best carry out the left-to-right motion of your sales
process as well as your in-depth pain discovery and value messaging methodology.
46
Design Goal: Comprehensive, Concise & Contextual
A great playbook is comprehensive providing concise guidance and relevant tools contextualized to
your sales process to enable reps and managers to effectively carry out their day-to-day
responsibilities.
47
8
The Playbook Program Development & Deployment Process
Now that we have figured out the best way to structure a playbook and what to put in
it, let’s discuss the best way to develop and deploy it for optimal impact. What follows
is a 5-step process to build a world-class sales process playbook program.
49
1. Team
2. Target metrics
3. Target
competencies
4. Templates
• Process
• Stages
• Messaging
• Tools
5.
Project plan &
timeline
1. Content collection,
assessment &
categorization
2. Top performer &
SME interviews
• Say?
• Ask?
• Do?
• Use?
3. Customers or
proxies
• Why us?
• Process?
1. Define/refine sales
process
2. Buyer profiles
3. Discovery Guide
• Use case
• Persona
4. Buyer journey
stories
5. Why Change/ Now /
Us messaging
6. Objections & FAQ
Guide
7. Conversation
framework / pitch
deck
1. Confirm process &
playbook
2. Edit then publish
3. Develop and deliver
process and
playbook training
4. Develop & schedule
reinforcement plan
& process
5. Technology enable
1. Develop an iteration
cadence & process
2. Iterate process and
tools
3. Specialize playbook
by sales roles or
market segments
4. Measure & test
adoption
5. Leverage content for
Sales University
1
2
3
4
5
Define
•
Form a playbook project committee
• Determine what metrics you want to improve
• Determine what rep competencies you want to improve
•
Schedule and publish playbook development phases and timeline
Capture
•
Collect, assess, and categorize content by sales process stage and whether the
content is seller or buyer focused
•
Interview top performing reps, sales engineers, and other relevant SME’s to
determine what they say, ask, do, and use at each stage of the sales process
• Assess recent win and loss factors to determine common success indicators and
lessons learned
•
Interview customers or customer success reps to identify the factors that led the
customer to select you over the competition
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Codify
• Define or refine your sales process
• Develop discovery conversation guides by use case or buyer persona
• Develop “customer buying journey" stories that illustrate how and why a
customer decided to implement your solution and the impact you've had on their
business
• Develop target audience and buyer profiles describing buyer role specific goals,
challenges, metrics, and current state gaps and risks
• Develop use-case-centric discovery guides to help reps explore, expose, and
expand the gaps and risks of the buyer's current state that point to your unique
set of capabilities as the best approach to resolve these
• Develop a Positioning Guide that highlights how your capabilities are the optimal,
fastest, and easiest approach to resolving the buyer’s critical issues
• Develop objection prevention and handling guides
• Develop competitive Battle Cards that describe key competitors’ strengths and
weaknesses and how to set traps against them and how to defend against traps
set by them
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Confirm
•
Review playbook structure, content, and tools with playbook committee
•
Edit process, playbook, and tools as necessary
Enable
•
Publish playbook
• Develop and deliver a training workshop or series of workshops with learning
activities focused on teaching stage-specific best practices
• Make playbook accessible via your CRM
• Develop a coaching plan and cadence to help sales leadership and management
reinforce sales process and best practices
Evolve
•
Conduct a monthly, bi-monthly or quarterly sales playbook update workshop with
sales leadership and top performers to iterate the sales process, best practices
and tools, as necessary
•
Specialize playbook by roles or markets
53
9
CRM-Integrated Sales Playbook Benefits
55
Limitations of Document-Based Playbooks
The traditional approach to building a sales playbook is to use Word or PowerPoint or
Google Docs to develop a hard copy playbook. The document can be printed or stored
online.
Whether it's printed or stored online, document-based playbooks, inevitably, end up
gathering real or virtual dust. There are obvious limitations with this approach.
Document-based playbooks:
•
Become obsolete shortly after publication
• Are difficult to maintain and update
• Are expensive to print and reprint
• Make it cumbersome to build add-on playbooks
• Are not practical to use on a day-to-day basis
•
Provide a poor user functional experience because difficult to navigate
•
Provide a poor user aesthetic experience because text heavy
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Technology-Enabled Sales Playbook Advantages
By ‘technology-enabled sales playbook’ we mean a sales process playbook application
that is integrated into your CRM. Here are some advantages of a CRM-integrated sales
process playbook app.
•
Enables Agile Playbook Development. By leveraging the playbook authoring
module and built-in playbook template, your time-to-playbook can drop from
months to days.
•
Enables Iterative Playbook Development. The secret to good writing is editing.
The sooner you publish, the sooner you can iterate. A technology-enabled
playbook enables playbooks to be continually improved and up-to-date.
•
Enables Multiple Playbook Development. Having the ability to with just a few
clicks clone and customize additional playbooks enables you to easily build
multiple market-segment-specific playbooks.
•
Enables Crowdsourced Playbook Development. Having the ability to update your
playbook or playbooks in real time allows you to leverage user input and update
your playbook to reflect the latest field-tested best practices.
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CRM-Integrated Playbooks Drive Sales Process Execution
The common thrust in the Sales Enablement definitions is that the central role of
Sales Enablement is to equip salespeople with the means (tools, training, technology)
to apply best practices throughout the sales process, and for sales managers to
systematically coach them to do so.
That's the purpose of a CRM-integrated sales process playbook.
Which is why the Corporate Executive Board (CEB) has declared that the highest level
of Sales Process maturity requires you to have your sales playbook integrated into
your CRM.
58
59
SOURCE: CORPORATE EXECUTIIVE BOARD
Sales Excellence Enablement. On-Demand.
The emphasis is deal execution excellence.
Deal execution excellence results in higher win rates, better forecast accuracy, shorter
sales cycles, larger average deal sizes, and decreased deal slippage.
More won deals leads to more reps hitting their numbers. More reps hitting their
numbers leads to a higher likelihood of overall growth target achievement.
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Technology-Enable Sales & Coaching Effectiveness
The ultimate benefit of a CRM-integrated sales process playbook is that it makes all of
the best practices and sales tools referenced in your playbook easily accessible
thereby significantly improving your sales strategy and sales process execution.
Additional advantages of a CRM-integrated sales playbook include:
• Makes Your Playbooks Actionable. Enabling your reps to select and apply
playbooks to specific leads and deals makes your playbooks actionable and
increases their utility by an order of magnitude.
•
Enables Guided Selling. A CRM-embedded sales process playbook will guide your
salespeople to consistently apply best practices and tools at each stage of your
sales process to specific leads and deals.
•
Enables Guided Coaching. A CRM-embedded sales process playbook provides the
ideal framework to guide your managers to help reps assess and advance deals.
•
Enables Guided Deal Forecasting. By including a deal health assessment tool in
the playbook that shows deal-specific stage and forecast category exit criteria
progress, reps and managers can get on the same page about a deal’s forecast
status.
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Sales Enablement Technology Maturity Model
When considering an investment in a Sales Enablement application, the ultimate
decision factor needs to be the extent to which the solution will help the sales
organization win more often. More wins, especially of forecasted deals, means a
higher likelihood of overall quota attainment and greater forecast accuracy
The SALES ENABLEMENT TECHNOLOGY MATURITY MODEL helps assess the potential
impact on deal winnability performance of a given Sales Enablement application.
Think of this as a requirements checklist for evaluating sales enablement technology
solutions.
62
Level
Factor
Detail
1
CONTENT
Enables easy access to sales tool and training content
2
CONTEXT
Enables easy access to sales tool and training content in the context of your sales
process
3
COLLABORATION
Enables rep, manager, and any other interested parties to collaborate on assessing
risks and strategizing how to advance specific deals
4
CONVERSATION
Enables reps to consistently prepare and conduct high quality conversations at each
stage in the sales process
5
COACHING
Enables managers to hone in on key deals and provide situational coaching to help
reps advance and close these deals
6
CUSTOMIZATION
Enables customization of playbooks to drive consistent application of vertical-market​
or product​-specific deal and conversation best practices
Sales Enablement Technology Maturity Model
63
Level 2
CONTEXT
Level 1
CONTENT
Level 3
COLLABORATION
Level 5
COACHING
Level 4
CONVERSATION
Level 6
CUSTOMIZATION
Learning Enablement Platform
From a purely training perspective, it’s useful to think of Sales Enablement technology
in the context of learning enablement.
There are two critical technology components required to drive learning absorption,
adoption, and application: a learning management system and a CRM-integrated
sales process playbook.
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Playbook Authoring Made Easy
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Deal-Specific Guided Selling
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Deal-Specific Guided Coaching
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Deal-Specific Guided Learning
How to Build
to Crush Your Number
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SANDLER PLAYMAKER
Playboox is a Sales Enablement
consultancy specialized in
developing and delivering
customized sales process playbooks
and sales training powered by
technology.
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Daniel Zamudio
• Founder & CEO, Playboox
• Thought leader on the
convergence of process and
technology to drive sales
productivity and effectiveness
• Sales leadership background:
Symantec, Gartner, Xerox
• UC Berkeley Haas School of
Business MBA
• Management philosophy: Have a
process in place and fun in the
process
• Playboox is the developer of
Sandler Playmaker