Is your sales team running the same plays as it did ten years ago? Even five years ago? If so, there’s a good chance you need to update your sales playbook.

The way businesses buy and sell has forever changed—and to stay competitive, you need to change too. Yes, certain things are still essential such as:

• Finding needs and pain points
• Presenting solutions
• Getting results

But how you interact with prospects and clients is different.

How to Determine if You Need Sales Enablement Tools 

Grab a pen and a paper, think about some prospects you or your salespeople are currently calling and answer the questions below. If you find yourself answering ‘No’ or ‘I don’t know’ to most of the questions, you could use a new sales playbook powered by sales enablement tools and a CRM. 

Email

• Do you know how many emails you have sent to individual prospects in the last 90 days?
• Do you know how many have been read? Responded to? Clicked on?
• Do you know how many have been focused on helping them with their customer journey?
• Do you know how many lead with an insight?
• Do you know how many were mostly about “checking in?”
• Do you know which email templates are most effective?

Sales Content

• Do you have specific content /resources /emails that salespeople can use during certain stages of the buyer’s journey and sales process?
• Do you have specific content / resources / emails that salespeople can use to overcome specific objections they hear?
• Do you know which efforts are driving the best sales results?

Phone Calls/Meetings

• Do you know how many phone calls happened with individual prospects in the past 90 days?
• Do you know how many meetings happened in the last 90 days?
• Do you know how many attempted calls were made to engage?
• Do you know how many of the voicemail messages left have been returned?
• Do you know what prospects are doing on your website after or before you have a call or meeting? 

Sales Cycle 

• Do you know what the time interval is between client touches, and are you losing business due to the time between contacts?     
• Do you know how much time you are spending as a salesperson on certain activities? And which are paying off the best?  
• Do you know what the length of your sales cycle is (from lead gen to close)?
• Do you know what the average length of time between each step in the sales/buying process is?
• Do you know which steps are most important to the buyer?
• Do you know when a deal is stalled in a particular step? Are you notified?

Prospecting and Leads 

• Do you know which prospects you should focus your efforts on / prioritize?  
• Do you know what the percentage of leads that are qualified is?
• Do you know where your best leads, that produce revenue, are coming from and how they’re finding your business?
• Do you know how many prospects convert into appointments?
• Do you know how many appointments convert into proposals?
• Do you know which types of leads are converting and which are not, by AE and team?

Salesperson Success

• Do you know where some of the salespeople excel, and where are others needing improvement in the sales process?
• Do you know which salespeople on your team have the highest activity? Highest conversion rates? Highest revenue performance?
• Do you know why you won or lost certain business, and are there trends related to that?
• Do you know how your salespeople compare to each other in regards to activity and different conversions?

Proposals

• Do you know how many proposals have been created and presented in the past 12 months?
• Do you know how many you have won? Lost? And why?
• Do you know the average amount of time it takes from the time you present to the time you get a yes or no?
• Do you know how often prospects buy, and if they buy almost exactly what you presented?
• Do you know how long they view the proposal and which pages they spend the most time on?

Drive Revenue and Results with a Sales Playbook

To guide your team through the diverse sales scenarios they encounter day in and day out, a sales playbook is a key piece to winning sales enablement.

A sales playbook helps align your salespeople's activities with the buyer’s journey. Inside the book, one of the key components are the sales plays that guide salespeople through the exact recommended steps they should be taking in different sales scenarios.

All of these questions will help you better understand whether it’s time to focus on generating more leads, or if it's time to improve your sales strategy… or both!

Editor's Note: This post was originally published on Nov 30, 2016 and has been updated.