What are your biggest frustrations with creating insightful sales playbooks that get used?

There's a lot of reasons sales playbooks might not get used. When that happens, you need to figure out that reason. Some common reasons are: It's too detailed or prescriptive: Sales requires a certain degree of improvisation based on customer discovery and what's needed to establish trust with a given customer. When playbooks are too detailed or prescriptive, it gets in the way of reps' ability to customize their approach to meet the needs of the customer. The story is wrong: Sometimes we delive ...Read More

Here are some of the problems I often see with sales playbooks:1. Too much information/time demand up front – If you're asking reps for 5 hours of study time upfront, you're likely going to see poor adoption. Instead, provide guidance to help them size their opportunity based on data, and then provide just the critical next steps for them to move the opportunity forward. We need to be cognizant of sales teams' bandwidth and not flood them with info about every facet of the problem space.2. No da ...Read More

If the playbooks are insightful and get used... I'm not frustrated! ;)  Creating sales playbooks is frustrating when we're in a loop of perfection over progress. Oftentimes we forget how powerful a small amount of clear, digestible insight can be over an incredibly robust, in-depth asset. I picked up a mantra from a consultant that I love: "consumable over comprehensive." Adding depth over time is both more sustainable for you as a PMM and more digestible and actionable for your stakeholders. Ge ...Read More

Some tips for creating useful sales plays Be clear on what success looks like - Have you made it clear why we want them to use a certain playbook ? Is it to drive more pipeline ? Improve win rates ? Get to the decision maker ? Improve ASPs ? Defining, and sharing, that success metric is the first step to getting their attention. If reps don't know what you are doing, why would they care ? Get support from sales leadership - You will have to find a way to get the blessings of sales leadership bef ...Read More

Great answers from Gregg.  From enterprise B2B marketing experience, I would say types of content you create example sales playbooks - also depends on where you are in the lifecycle journey. If its still in the product-market fit or even when you are building / scaling, you may not know the story well enough for each segment of the market you are addressing. You are still learning as an organization. Unless product marketing is also in a few sales calls and visits customers, you may or may not k ...Read More