The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

Before we get into the how to use a Sales Playbook, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page when it comes to answering what is a Sales Playbook.

In its simplest terms, a Sales Playbook is a key piece to a winning sales enablement strategy that outlines your sales process and aligns it with the buyer’s journey. It provides salespeople with a collection of resources like best practices, insights into their buyers, how to approach specific sales scenarios, talk tracks, email templates, ways to handle objections, competitive intel, and more.

More than 60% of organizations today are using sales enablement, meaning — if you’re not on board, there’s a strong chance your competitors are. If you’re competing against organizations with sales enablement tools, you’re already at a disadvantage.

Despite the proven benefits, many sales departments haven’t deployed sales enablement resources. They expect to do business the same way it’s always been done. The results are a slowed sales process and repeatedly missing quota. What’s holding them back from implementing a sales enablement strategy?

The Pareto Principle suggests that 80% of sales come from 20% of clients. Alternatively, 20% of what you do represents 80% of that activity’s outcome.

Most of us know this rule, and we’re familiar with the labels – Key Accounts, Target Accounts, and Secondary Accounts – what we often fail to realize is the impact of what it’s like to lose a Key Account.

Understanding that most of your sales come from a relatively small number of clients, and having an Account List Management Strategy (ALMS) in place, realigns your organization's priorities, leading to an increase in revenue and sales performance.

The realities of COVID-19, coupled with legacy sales issues, are making it more difficult for sellers to set appointments with new business prospects. Problems inhibiting a seller’s access to decision makers — like a lack of trust — have been compounded by the uncertainties of the current business climate. The bottom line, already a tough job, is now even more difficult.

Simply put, helping sellers develop expertise in the Identify and Connect steps of the sales process is needed and will provide a high ROI on training time. Specifically, improving skills related to finding prospects and setting appointments will increase the number of prospects in the sales funnel and lead to cash!

Whether you call it cold calling, prospecting, or new business development, lead generation is critical piece for the sales success formula. In many current sales structures, the salesperson in charge of lead generation also oversees setting appointments, finding needs, selling solutions, and ensuring contracts are fulfilled.

Sales managers are great at tracking pending business and placing accountability on the average number of new accounts. While these are important metrics to track, they’re also narrowly focused on the middle and end of the sales process. What if we placed greater accountability at the beginning of the sales process as well? Imagine placing more focus on lead generation efforts, whether through a specialist role or an inbound marketing agency, where qualified leads are regularly handed off to Account Executives.

Sales structures look different for all organizations depending on the industry, size of the team, product, and the sales process. As your company and people evolve or as things change in your business sector, your sales structure should change as well in order to maintain a competitive advantage.

Companies that identify the need to change sales structure continue to grow, while those who ignore it find themselves struggling to meet sales goals and stay competitive. According to the recent Media Sales report, 60% of sales managers don’t feel they have the right number of salespeople on their team. This leads to a couple important questions:

• Is it the number of people on your team that needs adjustment?
• Or is it the sales structure and expectations aren’t in line with sellers’ true talents?

Last week, we discussed why the sales industry needed a Henry Ford assembly line. We determined that while the technology that we use has changed over time, our sales structure’s foundation has not.

Before Ford's assembly line, auto manufacturers built cars one-at-a-time. They hired a skilled artisan who would build the vehicle from the ground up, which meant that Ford had to hire people who knew every aspect of the vehicle.  From connecting an engine to a frame, steering to the chassis, installing seats, builders had to know how to do it all.

It’s what we expect salespeople to do with radio and television stations. Don't we still expect salespeople to also do it all? 

History is fascinating! You can learn so much from the past. The History channel offers some amazing documentaries that can enlightening for those of us that want to learn from the past to improve our future. One of the most popular series on History is the "The Men Who Built America".  These epic documentaries tell the story of how great men and women shaped our country through their entrepreneurial spirits and built companies and brands that built America.

The latest series, "The Cars that Built America," obviously highlight stories of American auto manufacturers. And, you can’t talk about automobile history without telling Henry Ford's story. As a visionary, Ford was an entrepreneur that developed many of the best practices that companies still use today. The most famous of his designs was the assembly line.

How do you know if you have a sales structure problem? Too often, sales organizations are evaluated single-handily by their results. If your company isn’t hitting targets and sale goals aren’t being achieved, the blame falls on not having the right salespeople. But, is the source of lost revenue really a “people” problem?

Underperformance is easily blamed on salespeople because data often helps support the claims. However, while we always seek to improve the performance of sales teams, there are a few indicators that show you may have more than a people problem.

To establish the foundation for sustainable business growth, a solid sales structure must be built layer by layer. People, resources, and processes must align and work together to produce the best results for your organization.

In an earlier post, we identified the top challenges media sales departments face and a solution that addresses them all — changing your sales structure. Restructuring is easier said than done, but if you’re going to manage a successful team, the need for change eventually hits home. When thinking about restructuring, below are four important things to know about the modern-day sales structure.