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?

Google search data shows that in 2019 searches for “sales enablement” increased by 61.1% year over year, up from 51.2% in 2018.

What’s the reason behind the steady increase in interest around sales enablement? When implemented correctly, sales enablement moves the sales process faster and more efficently. It's the long-term solution that addresses each of the key priorities for sales productivity — to shorten the sales cycle, decrease onboarding time, and streamline the opportunity management process. Simply put, sales enablement provides a big impact on the bottom line. 

Still, there are several questions sales managers and salespeople want answered before investing in sales enablement. Let us help answer some of those questions.

From being quarantined in our homes to keeping six feet apart and avoiding handshakes, the way we interact with other humans has drastically changed. In the business environment, the normal behaviors and tactics that salespeople have relied on to drive their success are no longer available. We can no longer drop by to see a client, meet a prospect for lunch, or fly to another city for a face-to-face meeting. More and more selling is now being conducted over the phone and via email.

And this isn’t a short-term trend. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that “a new normal has developed for businesses of all sizes across nearly all industries, with changes likely to endure even after COVID-19 is a thing of the past.” We may have lost a few tools from our sales toolbox, but we’re going to replace them with new ones that we can use to build relationships and advance the sale.

Sales enablement. Is it a buzzword or just a misunderstood word?

DEFINITION OF SALES ENABLEMENT: Sales Enablement encompasses the technology, strategy, processes, and content that empower sales teams to sell smarter and faster. It’s about providing salespeople with what they need in order to successfully and strategically engage the buyer throughout the buying process. Why wouldn't you want it?

Why is sales enablement important? Because buyers are more informed, and selling is more challenging than ever before. Our 2019 Media Sales Report found that some of the major challenges in sales today are that sales reps’ time is not actually spent selling and salespeople are simply not equipped with relevant materials.

Sales enablement is a strategy that aligns marketing, sales, and operations while lowering costs, increasing revenue, ensuring brand integrity, and ultimately closing more deals. Even the most talented sales reps can benefit from the right support, structure, and technology.

So, why did nearly 1 out of 4 sales managers feel that they don’t have the right sales collateral pieces to help their sellers in all stages of the sales process?

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.

Sales enablement is a broad and powerful term that covers a lot of sales functions under one large umbrella. We define sales enablement as the strategy, content, technology, and training that empowers sales teams to sell smarter and faster. 

Sales enablement tools put the right resources and content in the salesperson's hands right when they need it. Businesses that are properly utilizing sales enablement tools quickly:

• Improve sales productivity
• Drive revenue
• Increase customer alignment

Providing sales teams with the proper tools, knowledge, and processes to maximize every sales opportunity is invaluable. Effective sales enablement tools can significantly benefit your company – here’s how.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published on the LeadG2 blog.

Most managers and sellers have experienced this:

• A seller is moving a new business prospect through the sales process.
• All signs are positive.
• The prospect goes silent, and will not respond to email, phone calls, letters, or stop-ins.
• The seller goes to his/her manager and asks for advice.
• The manager spends time listening to the seller, conducting diagnostic work, and providing advice to the seller (what to do to restart the stalled sale).

On the surface, this sounds like a good system, but in reality, it is not. Here’s why:

• Managers work with multiple sellers—doing this for many sellers takes up a great deal of time and is often redundant (same problem… same solution).
• Sellers might not have easy or timely access to their managers—this delays the sales process and allows the sale to get further off track.

As a proud partner of HubSpot, we at The Center for Sales Strategy, as well as our sister company that focuses on lead generation and sales enablement, LeadG2, naturally have experience with the HubSpot CRM, and it might be easy to think that we’re biased about this tool because of our relationship with them. However, it’s important to know a bit more of the context to better understand why we’re not biased and how that shows up in what we do and recommend.