3 Sales Playbook Must-Haves

We’re halfway through the year and it’s time for a check-in. Is your sales team making quota?

It can be a challenge to keep your team agile and energized when today’s intelligent buyers are making a decision in minutes. Reaching an increasingly diverse group of leaders and stakeholders requires defined, repeatable sales processes. 

Sales playbooks are designed to compile these sales processes as well as the content, tools, messages, and strategies your team needs. The best playbooks are a collection of proven actions based on previous sales engagements. They take an overwhelming amount of product information and marketing content and distill them into a series of logical steps.

Successful sales playbooks shorten sales cycles, increase win rates, and ramp up sales teams. To help optimize your overall performance, here are three sales playbook must-haves.

Key Account Management Strategy

No two customers are the same, so no two solutions should be the same. As the old adage goes, 20 percent of your customers produce 80 percent of your sales. It can be tempting to try to please all your customers, but it’s far wiser to focus on the most lucrative ones.

Key account planning helps sales teams do just this. It enables teams to focus on the accounts key to your organization’s growth and success. Key account planning is necessary for closing complex deals. 

Empower your sales reps to sell more with less administration. Download this free sales playbook.

It’s important that your playbook has a process for defining and identifying the right accounts. Key accounts should synchronize around your established sales processes.

Below are some criteria to help outline accounts: 

• The history of the account
• Goals your customer hopes to achieve
• Your customer’s perception of your company
• Your customer’s available budge 

Furthermore, a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) helps identify the strongest accounts, minimize threats, and take advantage of available opportunities. This helps identify where your team has a competitive advantage, what your team needs to guard against, where opportunities exist, and what could potentially cause a rift with the client.

Technology Processes

When sales team members are on the road, they depend on mobile devices and digital tools to access information and close deals. Your playbook needs to establish clear guidelines on how tools are to be used, and it should explicitly outline training procedures to set your reps up for success.

Your playbook should leverage sales enablement technology to empower your team to sell, in any location, and on any device. Technology requires strong senior sales leadership to champion the project and front-line sales management to ensure compliance.

 Successful CRM implementation often depends on your ability to not only understand tools but to effectively utilize them. The technology you have in place should be working for you and your end users. As a sales leader, it’s important to make sure that your technology processes, including your CRM system, are helping your reps sell more. 

Content Compliance Strategy 

If your content is not discoverable, then it’s essentially useless. However, if it’s out-of-date or, even worse, non-compliant, it’s potentially harmful. Your playbook must outline a content compliance strategy that helps users gauge when it’s the right time to send approved content and what content is appropriate at that time. It must also track updates in real-time so that sales teams know what content to leverage.

Digital tools help ensure that sales reps are providing customers with customized, compliant information. Intuitive technology enhances sales engagements with discoverable, branded, trackable, and compliant content. These tools enable teams to find, send, and share compliant sales and marketing materials—and understand the ways that salespeople search for the information. Mobile content libraries enable reps to access the content that they need when they need it, without having to navigate through multiple systems.

Maintaining consistency and effectiveness in regulated industries is a challenge. Paired with the right tools and technology, sales playbooks work to reduce the complexity of the med device industry by aligning sales and marketing efforts. Sales enablement software unlocks the value in your organization’s CRM and provides an end-to-end system to manage compliant content development and drive account-based sales.

Create a playbook for the unique demands of your sales team. Download this free playbook and drive results today.