The New Sales Playbook
The New Sales Playbook
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The New Sales Playbook
Table of Contents 4. Foreward 6. The Internet Changes Everything 9. ABC Sales is Gone 10. What is Inbound Marketing? 12. Buyer Personas and the Buyer’s Journey 16. What’s in the Sales Playbook? 20. Revise Your Sales Playbook Continuously 21. Certify Your Sales Team 22. It’s All About Building Relationships
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“Outbound sales is dying and the days of cold calling are coming to an end. The new sales playbook will consist of a personalized approach to the buyer, and like we’ve seen proven on the marketing side, the use of great content and insights that helps solve the buyer’s unique problems.” – Brian Halligan, Co-Founder/CEO HubSpot
The New Sales Playbook
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Outbound sales is dying. Cold calling, while not dead, is moving to warm calling—driven by connections and events that synchronize with the potential buyer’s journey. The new approaches are inbound sales and content marketing, along with initiating and building ongoing supportive relationships with each and every customer. That should be good news for the sales staff, but it can also be threatening when you’re changing the old for the new. That’s where The New Sales Playbook comes into play. It spells out every aspect of the new approach to sales, why it’s changing, and what you can expect as a result. This time in history is not unlike the transition in golf from hickory shafts and persimmon woods to graphite shafts and titanium woods. It also boils down to the question:
Would you like to hit 150 yard drives into the woods or 300 yard drives onto the fairway? If your answer is “yes” to making a dramatic improvement, read on.
The Internet Changes Everything So what’s making the big difference? Why can’t we launch a massive television advertising campaign coupled with doorto-door sales calls? Or better yet, why can’t we just send more email blasts or ramp up our outbound phone calls? Those were fine options in the 1960s and the 1990s, respectively. But they don’t work in the twenty-first century. To start with, as buyers our instinctive reflex whenever we encounter any personal or business need is to conduct a search. Or we ask Siri, who conducts the search for us. Search is king of finding, buying, and, as a result, selling in today’s world. This means the power has shifted to buyers. They can search, post reviews, and quickly find other options. There’s no longer any need to rely on a salesman to provide the information needed to make an informed purchase. Given that, the real leaders in sales are fast becoming experts in getting found on the Internet. And that takes a full range of talent from search engine
The New Sales Playbook
optimization (SEO) to building content that people want and need, as well as moving anonymous viewers down the path to becoming delighted customers. If we take a quick glance at our golf metaphor, we’re moving from hiring a caddy to carry our bag and possibly guide our round to relying on a GPS system that can actually give us far more information including precise accuracy, and do it all on our own, without the help of a caddy.
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The New Sales Playbook
ABC Sales is Gone— ”Always Be Closing” The high pressure “always be closing” approach to sales is really a thing of the past, best left for viewing in old movies like Death of a Salesman. And, dead it is, no longer effective in our sales and marketing saturated world. Instead, modern selling is all about researching how your product or service can meet the challenges of your potential customers. Then it’s about providing information that helps build connections with those sales prospects followed by moving them into satisfied and delighted customers. Modern selling is also about truly balancing the efficiency and effectiveness of your effort. Efficiency is all about numbers and maximizing your efforts to bring in potential new clients. On the other hand, effectiveness is about building long term relationships that bring sustainable sales to your organization. The Willie Lomans of the sales world were always driven to bring in more customers. It’s clear that this approach needs to be balanced by finding the right customers and growing that business through providing the right products and services.
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What is Inbound Marketing?
ATTRACT
We love the Hubspot definition of inbound marketing:
“Inbound marketing is about using marketing to bring potential customers to you, rather than having your marketing efforts fight for their attention. Sharing is caring and inbound marketing is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more.”
Strangers
Visitors
Blog Keywords Social Publishing
As noted above, it’s no longer about “spraying” with ads and email lists followed by “praying” for the leads to show up. It’s about building and sharing content that attracts users to you and your products/ services. As the chart shows, inbound marketing attracts strangers through superb content including blogs, social media, and downloads like this eBook. Once on your website to see your content, it’s your opportunity to convert visitors into leads. That conversion happens through calls-toaction that entice visitors to tell you more about themselves, beginning with the contact information. The more valuable your content is, the more information visitors will provide in exchange.
The New Sales Playbook
CONVERT
CLOSE
Leads
DELIGHT
Customers
Promoters
Forms
CRM
Surveys
Calls-to-Action
Smart Content
Landing Pages
Workflows
Social Monitoring
Balanced by finding the right customers and growing that business through providing the right products and services. Once you have contact information it’s time to move to the close stage by nurturing that lead with the information they need to make a purchase decision as well as your efforts at building a trusting relationship. That moves them from leads to customers. Of course, the savvy organization recognizes that the customer’s value grows with each new sale over their full lifetime. Plus, their recommendations of your products and services carry far more credibility than any of your own marketing efforts. That’s why the delight
stage results in promoters for you and your organization. It’s just like navigating a hole in golf. It begins with driver, then short iron, perhaps a wedge around the green, and finally your trusty putter. It’s all about using the right tools and approaches to accomplishing the task at hand. If it was the old ABC approach, you’d probably only need a driver in your bag.
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Buyer Personas and the Buyer’s Journey— Key Tools in Your Sales Effort The big key for inbound marketing is to find those strangers who would be interested in your product/services if only they knew about them, and then attract them to your website. That takes a keen insight into your buyers. The best way to consolidate that information is to create buyer personas.
A buyer persona is a detailed portrait of your ideal customer. It is based on market research and detailed data on your existing customers. It includes demographics, needs, desires, pain points, influencers, and as much else as you can capture.
It gives you a full understanding of your customers, which allows you to target your marketing and sales efforts with pinpoint accuracy. As a result, you can better tailor your messages, your content, your pitches, and so much more. Buyer personas are developed through in-depth interviews with your current and potential customers. In fact, interviewing potential customers who said “no” can provide exceptional insight. Those interviews are typically based on asking questions about each part of the buyer’s journey: 1. What triggered the buyer’s search? 2. What outcomes are they expecting? 3. What factors would prevent their purchase? 4. What factors do they use to compare purchase options? Once you have this information, it becomes a key tool in building relationships and generating sales.
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The Buyer’s Journey Awareness Stage
Prospect is experiencing and expressing symptoms of a problem or opportunity. Is doing educational research to more clearly understand, frame, and give name to their problem.
Consideration Stage
Prospect has now clearly defined and given a name to their problem or opportunity. Is committed to researching and understanding all of the available approaches and/or methods to solving the defined problem or opportunity.
From your buyer persona research, you can also define the buyer’s journey. This gives you the needed insight to determine first where the buyer is in their decisionmaking/buying process and second how you can help them take those next steps on that journey.
There are three stages in the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision.
Decision Stage
Prospect has now decided on their solution strategy, method, or approach. Is compiling a long list of all available vendors and products in their given solution strategy. Is researching to whittle the long list down to a short list and ultimately make a final purchase decision.
In the awareness stage the buyer is becoming aware of a problem or need. They are doing research to understand their problem. In the consideration stage, they now have a definition of their problem and are researching the solution options. In the decision stage, they have identified the option they want to pursue and are evaluating vendors and products. Knowing where the buyer is on their journey helps you engage with the buyer around their current efforts and provide that buyer with information and insight that will prove helpful to furthering their journey.
The New Sales Playbook All this is just like consulting a yardage book on the golf course or a GPS screen of the hole as you stand on the tee. It points out the desired path for your tee shot and your approach shot, the hazards to avoid, and even where you should place your ball on the green. Without that information, just as with a buyer persona profile and understanding of the buyer’s journey, you’re just guessing and you’re liable to end up with a bogey or much worse without that essential insight and guidance. As you know, the sales playbook defines the methodology and tactics for your sales team with clear objectives, metrics for evaluating your progress toward those objectives, along with defining the approach for closing sales. Given that, it is the guide for your sales team that spells out the framework for engagement with current and prospective clients. It spells out how you engage, when you engage, and the best way to increase sale for your organization. It serves to onboard new sales staff and guides everyone along a sales process that generates repeatable and predictable sales. It also serves to capture best practices and, as a result, will transform the way you reach customers, build relationships, and delight customers through your organization’s products and solutions.
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What’s in the Sales Playbook? Your sales playbook defines exactly how you’ll approach every stage of the buyer’s journey. Ideally, it will follow the nearby diagram of the inbound sales methodology in moving prospects from strangers, to leads, to qualified leads, to opportunities, and finally to customers. It will define how you approach the sales steps of identifying leads, connecting with those leads, exploring opportunities, and advising them in their decision making process. Here are the key sections required in any sales playbook.
Introduction to the Organization You’ll need to provide the groundwork
for your new sales staff along with a touchstone for longtime staff members. This should include mission, vision, strategy, office protocol/rules, and organization chart.
Competitive Analysis ou know your organization and its Y products/services. But where does it stand within the context of the competition? What does it offer that others don’t? What are your weak points and how do you overcome them with prospective clients? Or, better yet, what clients value both your strengths and weaknesses and feel that they meet their requirement perfectly.
Get this down in writing to guide your team in working with customers within the overall marketplace.
Target Buyer— Qualification Process This is where everything starts. Use the buyer personas that you’ve developed through interviews and detailed analysis to establish the target buyer. That’s the person and business that needs your products/services to satisfy their wants and needs. This also sets up the qualification process. Who, exactly, needs your products/services and who does not. Spend your time with those more likely to covert to customers. And use that qualification process in your search for leads.
The Buyer’s Journey— Defined Along the path of awareness, consideration, and decision identify the conditions or events that trigger each of those stages. With this information you’re prepared to help the buyer take the next steps and eventually end up buying your solution.
Your Value Proposition— Defined for Your Prospective Buyer What do you offer that is distinctive from your competition and specifically meets your buyer’s needs? Define that here and do so not from your perspective but from the perspective of your buyer. What makes you stand apart and offer the buyer the best option?
The New Sales Playbook
IDENTIFY
Strangers
CONNECT
Visitors
AWARENESS
EXPLORE
Leads
CONSIDERATION
ADVISE
Customers
DECISION
Promoters
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Pre-call Research Approach and Insight
CRM and Other Sales Tools
Develop a checklist with the necessary information you should have about your prospect before you make that first call. What will help you make a connection with that buyer and their challenges? How can you help the buyer make their next steps? Who are the key decision makers?
This is not only a how-to guide but a document that defines what’s expected in developing everything around the new prospect and the overall sales process. This includes what needs to be entered in your CRM, when it needs to be entered, and how best to leverage all that information. It sets the standards for the management of your sales team’s efforts.
Conversation Guide The pre-call checklist you’ve developed
above will serve as the perfect launching point for developing your conversation guide. This guide can help you connect and engage with the prospect as well as discover where they are in the purchasing process and what will help them in their journey. It shouldn’t be thought of as a rigid script but rather a framework for developing the conversation.
Discovery Process he pre-call research and conversation T guide are leading to this section where you’ll want to outline all the aspects of entering and exiting sales opportunities. It includes guidelines for assessing where the customer is in the buying process and ways to help them gain improved perspective on their situation and guide them on next steps.
Decision Point It all comes down to helping our customer reach the decision point. It’s about guiding them through their buying journey and helping them with the information and support they need along the way. In your sales playbook, outline the anticipated issues that may arise along the journey and especially at the decision point. Document how to overcome objections and ways to approach this opportunity.
Measuring Results
Establish in your sales playbook how you’re going to measure results and assess progress toward your sales goals. This, in turn, will drive the efforts of not only your sales team but also your entire organization. They are all asking how their performance will be evaluated and how organizational success will be measured. Tell them. As in golf, playing without a scorecard might be fun and certainly nonthreatening, but it isn’t golf. And how would you know if you’re progressing or not in your pursuit of improving your performance? Measuring closes the loop on all your efforts.
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Revise Your Sales Playbook Continuously That’s the opening argument for what should be in your sales playbook. Of course, your organization might have a different perspective on what’s vital and what’s nice to have. Or even what should be in an appendix as reference information but not necessarily in the heart of the playbook.
Codifying Best Practices he very act of pulling together your T sales playbook will document your best practices and even better communicate those best practices to everyone.
Capture What Works and What Doesn’t f course, once you’ve documented O
your best practices they will come under scrutiny. Do they actually work? Is this really how we’re doing things? Or, is it how we wish we were doing things? This type of questioning and review then needs to be captured and documented.
The New Sales Playbook
Systematically Record Your Ongoing Improvements Now that you’ve got everything on paper, start revising it. As you learn what works and what doesn’t, make the changes in your playbook. It is also a good place to document each of the changes you make along the way to show your progress. Or, in the case you’ve made a change that doesn’t quite work, you can see the path to return to what does work.
Revise, Revise, Revise Building your playbook is just the start. You need to continuously revise it as you learn, grow, and change in response to both internal and external events. This document is not something that you check off on your checklist, place on the shelf, and then go back to the old way of doing things—or worse, doing things by making it up along the way. It’s the source of guidance on building customer delight and growing revenue. It’s a living, breathing document that should be at the heart of driving all your efforts.
Certify Your Sales Team Once you’ve built our sales playbook, it’s time to put it to use. Presenting it in a one-time meeting and making it assigned reading for your team is a good start. But, it is only a start. Instead, every aspect of it needs to be integrated into everything you do. In order for that to happen you need to build a training program, a testing program to certify that everyone understands the training, followed by a coaching program that observes each person and provides the feedback necessary to fully and successfully implement the playbook. It’s similar to golf. You can’t read Ben Hogan’s book Five Lessons and expect to directly apply it on the golf course. Instead, it takes practice on the range along with direct observation and feedback from a qualified golf instructor.
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It’s All About Building Relationships We started this off by pointing out that the old approach to sales, ABC–Always Be Closing, along with cold calling is dead. In its place are customers actually searching for you through their buyer’s journey. Your role is to find them and help them in that journey. That takes a relationship built on knowledge of one another (buyer personas along with your content), outreach and providing assistance along the buyers journey, and helping them take the decision that is best for their requirements. And, it doesn’t stop there. You need to continue to work with that customer to ensure that they become promoters for your products/services and that they continue to be delighted in every aspect of your on-going relationship. That’s when you know that your sales playbook is working.
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Why Digital Marketing Direction is Your Best Choice We are experts in inbound sales and marketing strategies and implementation. We specifically help generate and nurture quality leads for specialized and innovative small businesses. And, true to the new approach to sales, we do this by creating remarkable content online. Our team is passionate about helping businesses grow because we believe you should have control of the future of your business and your life. We partner with a diverse and select group of talent to offer our clients the best quality creative for their needs. We have the organization, the team, and the approach to help drive your sales to new levels.
Give us a call at 214-937-9521.