How do you create a sales playbook that gets used by sales?

Answer

6 Answers

Sales Content Sales Adoption

Michael Olson

Splunk Sr. Director, Product Marketing - Observability • 2y

Speaking as someone who has created a lot of bad sales playbooks that have collected dust during my career :-), this is a topic that I'm passionate about. Here are the main ingredients that I've found make for a sales playbook that will actually get used by sales teams. Market Primer: Particularly for sales reps who are new to your company or space, I've found it useful to 1) define the market in which we play, 2) the market context/dynamics that are impacting our buyers, 3) the market problems ...Read More

8,347 Views
Mary Margaret

Grafana Head of Solutions Marketing | Formerly HubSpot • 5y

1. Take the time to understand their needs and paint points

2. Work with Sales leadership on a plan for rep adoption: align on the resourcing, rollout, measurement, and expectations

3. Partner closely with reps and the sales enablement team (if there is a focused one) to define and refine the content and content types

4. Get feedback and continuously experiment and optimize

2,807 Views
Jeff Beckham

Gem VP of Marketing & Partnerships | Formerly Mixpanel, Slack, BlueJeans, Cisco • 6y

A good question to ask before starting a sales playbook is, “what’s in it for them?” Good sales reps welcome support from anyone who can truly help them, and product marketers are well-positioned to provide that type of assistance. But I’ve made the mistake many times of taking the “build it and they will come” mindset, because it was the path of least resistance. The playbooks I’ve seen actually make a difference were created with in-depth sales feedback from the get-go.Sometimes it seems obvio ...Read More

1,905 Views
Nikhil Balaraman

Pomerium Head of Marketing | Formerly Roofstock, Instacart, Uber, Algolia, Google • 5y

By understanding how deals work from beginning to end. Get to know the SDRs. What research do they do before starting a sequence? How does a meeting get set? Sit in on first calls. Is a first call all discovery or all demo? What follow ups get sent? And so on and so forth including understanding how a customer implements/on-boards. Once you see enough of these, you will likely start to see a pattern emerge. Within this pattern is where the plays can emerge. Ok, so for this vertical, this is typi ...Read More

1,109 Views
Axel Kirstetter

Guidewire Software VP Product Marketing | Formerly EIS Group, Datasite, Software AG, Microstrategy • 5y

Should Sales not create the Sales Playbook?! This seems to be a case where PMM is doing Sales Ops' job. I understand with smaller companies responsibilities stretch across departments. In this case I would have thought the right answer is to work with Sales on the playbook. If they co-authored it or had major input, they are more likely to use it.

882 Views
Jessica Scrimale

Oracle Senior Director of Product Management • 4y

Sales is most likely to use an asset that product marketing creates if they influence the asset as it comes together. I like to create a working team with a cross-section of sellers to provide input and feedback on the playbook. Make sure your playbook is aligned to the sales methodology that your team is using, and keep it structured, with clear expected outcomes and milestones identified for each component. It also helps if the playbook can highlight little success stories or verbatims from se ...Read More

1,075 Views